FROM OPEN CALL 2023

Review Panel:
Soyoung Shin and Dominika Ksel.
Anthony Bodlović & Soyoung Shin: Hold Please
Dominika Ksel: (SEA)NCE

The Panel selected one solo show for 2023 and 4 hot picks.

HOTPICKS:

Theater of Collaborative Survival

Elizabeth Hénaff, Heather Parrish, Léonard Roussel, Seth Wenger

“Our collective aims to highlight and question the relative concepts of contamination, collaboration, culture, and exploitation, and how this relativity manifests itself in the context of complex assemblages of nature, culture, and more-than-human agents. The story told by this genetic research is one of collaborative survival in altered nature. The proposed installation is a human-scale bioreactor featuring video imagery and live, growing sediment inhabited by the Gowanus Canal’s remarkable microbiome at its core. The reactor consists of a semi-circular translucent scrim structure composed of several floating panels, on which moving images are projected in 180 degrees.”

SUMMARY OF PROPOSAL:
Theater of Collaborative Survival

What would the future hold if we were to de-center the human when envisioning
its promise and considering risks and responsibilities? The environment of the
Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn is emblematic of many post-industrial Superfund sites
across the country: a once important center for manufacturing industries that have
left a material, economic, and social legacy of toxicity. Metagenomic sequencing used
in research by Dr. Hénaff revealed that the toxic sediment of the canal harbors
communities of microorganisms that, in response, have evolved to actively degrade
the toxic compounds in this seemingly uninhabitable industrial environment.

Lexy Ho-Tai

Lexy Ho-Tai’s multi-disciplinary art and teaching practice explores imaginative and tangible world-building through craft and play. Working in a range of mediums, her collaborative and participatory work employs humor, imagination, and absurdity to invite viewers to contemplate pressing social and environmental issues. She believes that joy is an act of resistance, and that play forges a powerful space for audiences to envision and work towards alternative futures. Residencies include the Watermill Center, Flux Factory, ARoS Museum, Everglades National Park, Museum of Arts and Design, Art Farm and Elsewhere Museum. Her work can be viewed at lexymakesthings.com or @lexymakesthings.

SUMMARY OF PROPOSAL:
Kookerville

“At Open Source Gallery, I will create an immersive, otherworldly environment that features wearables, soft sculptures, textiles, and new video and installation work. I use wearables and monsters to explore self, identity and otherness. I would like to bring all my creatures – my Kookers and shadow monsters – together, displayed as guardians for the space. The creatures explore spectrums of pleasure and grief, escapism and presence, shadow and light – all held together through tending to our inner-child. Lately, I’ve been interested in the question: How can we create a culture of imagination? Imagination is key for envisioning an equitable future unrooted from all the systemic ‘isms’ we’ve inherited. What would we like to see in the world? What do we dream of? Imagined worlds and creatures have the power to subvert the norm, creating a playful and generative space for participants to envision different possibilities.”

Melanie Windl

Born in Schwandorf, Bavaria and based in Saarbruecken, Germany, artist Melanie Windl creates site-specific, large-scale installations that incorporate expressions of spatiality with sound, light, interaction, and object. Working at the intersection of analog and digital art, Melanie Windl’s projects are equally informed by the investigation of new technologies and materials. The multimodality of her work accumulates in vivid environments with notions of the interrelationship between humans, their artificial surroundings and nature. Windl has collaborated with numerous artist residencies and international art fairs internationally, Artist Association Upper Valais, Switzerland; Schleswig-Holsteinisches Kuenstlerhaus Eckernfoerde, Germany; Kunststation Delden, Netherlands; Biennale for Arts and Technology, Norway; Kunstverein Akku Uster, Switzerland; Lademoen Kunstnerverkstaeder, Norway, Tokyo Experimental Festival, Japan; Arte Artist Association Turku, Finland; Foundation Kuenstlerdorf Schoeppingen, Germany, among others.

SUMMARY OF PROPOSAL:
BIOPOLYMEER

“With the use of self-made, biodegradable, water-soluble, plant-based, non-toxic, and thus even edible plastic, which is biomorphically shaped into forms of sea-tang on ship-line, the project BIOPOLYMEER addresses the effects of the usage of petrochemicals over the past 180 years. My artistic research on the project is scientifically informed. I studied the taxonomy of sea weed and its potential for biopolymer production in the face of large-scale problems risen by petrochemicals. It led to the development of a biopolymer-based structure that resembles tang growing on ship line. The colour scale of the algae- shaped elements ranges from shades of sepia and umber, which are attached to beige, black and blue anchor ropes. The arrangement of the objects is based on submarine live studies of floating tang in the sea and, on a formal level, connects with the interactive spatial movement of sound which is integrated in each object.”

Constanza Hermosilla

Constanza Hermosilla is a Chilean visual artist. She has a degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad de Con cepción. She has specialized in visual anthropology and sociology of the image in Argentina and Bolivia. She is currently studying for a master’s degree in Arte, Pensamiento y Cultura Latinoamericanos at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Usach. Throughout her career she has alternated her artistic production and research with teaching, giving classes both in Chile and Argentina. Her artistic research addresses the phenomenon of the neoliberal city from a feminist perspective, studying through artistic practice the patriarchal structure of contemporary cities. Her work, which encompasses techniques such as painting, installation and textile art, proposes a particular crossover between art, architecture and urbanism. Her work has been exhibited in art galleries in Chile and abroad. During the last few years, she is investigating the public space as a platform for exhibition, learning and exchange.

SUMMARY OF PROPOSAL:
How to Make A City Softer

“For the exhibition at Open Source Gallery, I would like to bring my project How to make a city softer (details below), a series of inflatable and habitable interventions installed in different points of the city of Santiago de Chile. These ephemeral architectures are activated by the remaining air from the subway’s vents and invite passersby to turn their way and stop, look, enter and play. The main idea is to set a dialogue between the Gallery and the public space (the streets of Brooklyn and the streets of Santiago) in order to problematize the way we live in these cities through artistic experience.”

Featured image: Part of Elizabeth Hénaff’s proposal: Scope – Theater of Collaborative Survival. Installation with Gowanus Canal sediment jars, photoreactive prints, laser microscope, loudspeaker array (15ft x 12ft), Detroit Science Gallery, 2019