Kathleen McDermott: Repair Shop
Repair Shop | Press Release | Collaborator Schedule | Kids Press Release | Installation View
April 12 – May 25, 2025
Reception: April 17, 7-9pm
Repair Shop Hours with Artists Present: View the Schedule
Additional Viewing Hours: Thurs + Fri: 4-6pm, Sat + Sun: 2-6pm
Open Source Gallery is pleased to present Repair Shop, an exhibition by Kathleen McDermott.
Repair Shop turns the gallery into an experimental space for considering the lifespan of objects and when they are assigned “value,” especially in the context of work. Encouraging audience engagement and collaboration, Repair Shop will evolve over the period of the exhibition.
One side of the gallery is set-up as a showroom, featuring appliances from McDermott’s home that can no longer perform their original functions––a sewing machine that doesn’t sew well, a blender that leaks motor fluid––but that still have some working parts. Using techniques from puppetry and animatronics, McDermott has made strange, campy attachments for the “broken” machines, expanding on the parts that do work, and giving them new use. The bright pink showroom borrows from 1950’s advertising tropes of domestic appliances, where machines were described in terms of gender labor, and sold with a promise of domestic productivity.
The other side of the gallery is set-up as an absurdist repair shop. Community members are invited to donate formerly precious electronic objects and other heirlooms for “repair.” If an object is accepted, the owners will be asked to acknowledge that the form and function of the object will be significantly altered. In advance of, and over the course of the exhibition, McDermott and a rotating list of invited artist-collaborators, including Kayla DesPortes, Liza Stark, Van Tran Nguyen and Monica Duncan, will rework found and submitted objects, combining them with paint, fabric, motors, and inflation, to produce a cast of object “characters,” that will dialogue around questions of work, value, and the labor of repair.
Kathleen McDermott is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in installation and sculpture. She combines her knowledge of fabrication with open source code and hardware to build a language of absurdity that merges new media, design, performance, and video. She is interested in technologies that extend and highlight embodied knowledge, and that challenge narrow conceptions of use, waste and productivity. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, The Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Maine, the Wende Museum in LA, and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria; and has been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Fast Company, and Dezeen. She is currently an Industry Assistant Professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, in the Integrated Design & Media Program.
Collaborators:
Kayla DesPortes
Liza Stark
Van Tran Nguyen
Monica Duncan
Divya Gadangi
Ilana Harris-Babou
Edward Yujoong Kim
Scott Fitzgerald
Lorca Yu
Jess Zepeda
About the Collaborators:
Liza Stark is a transdisciplinary designer, artist, and educator based in NYC. Her creative practice combines traditional textiles and conductive fabrics with circuits and code to produce unexpected interactions at a human scale. Designed to augment and deepen partial cultural narratives, these include memorial quilts made of fabric speakers, data exchanging wedding garments, DIY open source sensor construction, wearable experiments, and more.
As an educator, Liza builds physical and conceptual toolkits through swatches, zines, games, and other systems to co-create spaces of critical exploration with students. She applies all of the above in my role as Director of Curriculum at Girls Who Code and part time faculty in the Design + Technology program at Parsons. She is a founding organizer of electronic textile camp and has presented work at CultureHub, the Center for Craft, The Mill at Prairie Ronde, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, the Wassaic Project, ISWC, TEI, GDC, and more.
Van Tran Nguyen (she/her) is a Vietnamese American artist-scholar, practicing filmmaker, curator, and multimedia artist. In 2017, Tran Nguyen earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the State University of New York, at Buffalo. Then in 2021, she earned her doctorate in the Philosophy of Electronic Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.
Her research investigates Asian American performance and mediations of the diaspora. Her first short film, ERIE COUNTY SMILE, was released in 2021 and is available for public access via the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Her first full-length feature film, THE MOTHERLOAD, premiered at the Hawaii International Film Festival with support from the Vilcek Foundation’s New American Perspectives and garnered a Special Jury Mention for Best Southern Feature from the New Orleans Film Society.
In 2021 she was appointed the Maya Brin Institute for New Performance and Technology Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a 2024-2025 Early Career Fellow at the UCLA Center on Race & Digital Justice. In the fall of 2024, she joined the Department of Performing Arts at Georgetown University as the Assistant Professor of Performance and Media. Dr. Tran Nguyen teaches courses across theory and practice including performance, digital filmmaking, and film & media history.
Kayla DesPortes’ work transforms computing technology, learning opportunities, and the underlying exclusionary practices of computing to support self-empowerment of marginalized individuals and communities to create a more equitable society. She is a collaborative, community-centered researcher, designer, and engineer, focused on understanding how learning environments and computing technologies can be created to integrate the knowledge and assets of communities and individuals. She combines and contributes scholarship across the learning sciences and human-computer interaction fields. Her work focuses on how computing, engineering, and data literacy can intertwine with artistic practices to engage learners in personally meaningful, creative expression as they explore their cultures and identities, and the social and political dimensions of society. She works within community and educational organizations grounded in social justice, literary arts, dance, visual arts, and computing. Applying participatory research methods, Kayla develops long-term collaborations with community leaders, community members, youth learners, artists, researchers, and educators.
Ilana Harris-Babou (b. 1991) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her practice is interdisciplinary, spanning sculpture, installation, and video. She speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor to digest painful realities. Her work mines the expectations of the American Dream; the ever-unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom. Her work explores the messy moments when individuals cannot fully conform to these systems—when their bodies feel unwieldy or are forced to rest, break down, or quit altogether. She investigates how these systems might be misused in generative ways.
She has had solo exhibitions throughout the US and Europe, including recent exhibitions Needy Machines at Candice Madey and Under My Feet at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. In May 2023, Harris-Babou’s work Liquid Gold took over the screens of TimesSquare for the Midnight Moment program. She has been included in the Istanbul Design Biennial (2020) and The Whitney Biennial (2019). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
Divya Gadangi (b. 1990, Birmingham, UK) is a NYC-based Indian American multidisciplinary artist. She is interested in picking apart funny feelings and through art-making connecting the dots with herself, and with others. Her practice includes video, prints, objects, new media, and food. Her latest print, You Live Forever, With Me was part of Fjord Gallery’s group show Spectral Feel, in Philadelphia. Her digital, explorable environment, Please Maintain Your Original Indian Beauty, was supported by the Excellence in the Arts grant from Staten Island Arts, and was most recently shown in Praise Shadows’ group show, Punchline, at Jane Lombard Gallery in NYC. She has held interactive performances with The Cultivist at Fotografiska, as well as with the Children’s Museum of the Arts in New York. She curated the group show “What is Asia?” with Happy Family Night Market.
Scott Fitzgerald is an artist and educator whose work examines the interdependence of culture and technology. He is an Industry Associate Professor and Director of the Integrated Design & Media program at NYU Tandon and a PhD candidate in the Department of Media Study, University at Buffalo. Materially, Scott works with code, electronics, networks, visual and aural media. His work has been exhibited in the United States, Middle East, China, Hong Kong, and throughout Europe. He has installed site-specific work at the University of Oslo and in New York City’s Times Square. Scott was a researcher with the audio art group Locus Sonus, the head of documentation for the open source Arduino platform, and a partner with Lightband Studios. He has lived in France, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, and is based in Brooklyn, NY. He would like more cats in his life and fewer cars in the world.
Edward Yujoong Kim is a Korean architect and graphic artist living in Brooklyn. He has collaborated with McDermott on large-scale installations and experimental product designs across two continents for over 15 years.
Lorca Yu is a multimedia artist and fabricator currently based in Brooklyn, and a current student in Integrated Design & Media program at New York University. With a background in French Literature and Design, their practice examines the intersections of environment, technology, and human society, critically addressing how artificial systems shape contemporary landscapes. Centering on the concept of “artificial nature,” their work explores how technology intervenes in and redefines the relationship between individuals, communities, and the natural or urban environments they inhabit. Through physical computing, computational art, and conceptual storytelling, they merge the tangible with the digital to engage audiences in dialogues on social, political, and ecological transformation.
Jessica Zepeda is a designer and technologist based in Brooklyn, where she explores the connections between art, technology, and human interaction. With a focus on digital prototyping, physical fabrication, and tactile design, Jessica creates immersive experiences that blend the physical and digital worlds. Her work often revolves around worldbuilding and playful storytelling, crafting spaces and objects that spark curiosity and foster connection. Currently, she is pursuing a Master’s in Integrated Design and Media at NYU, building on her professional experiences at Google and Walt Disney World. Through her work, Jessica combines emerging technologies with a hands-on, human-centered approach to reimagine how we engage with the world around us.
