Lot Artist in Residence 2024
We’re thrilled to introduce Christiana Laine as our artist in residence at the KoKo Lot this spring!
Christiana is working on a “living” room at the Lot, complete with earthen benches for plants to grow from, a small pizza oven, and a rocket stove. They are sourcing all their materials as locally as possible, such as clay dug out from a basement on Staten island and sand from Brooklyn, and they’re planting lots of native plants. Want to learn more, meet Christiana, and support our Artist in Residence program? Join us for an event at the Lot!
Save the date for Christiana’s closing pizza extravaganza at the Lot, the evening of Sunday, June 16th! Doors at 5pm, Pizza at 6pm.
Join us Sunday June 16th for brick oven pizza and other garden treats with friends in the new outdoor room and native plant garden at Koko! Doors open at 5pm, pizza at 6. For added enjoyment, bring a favorite pizza topping or beverage to share! Dough, sauce, cheese and veggie sides provided.
Lately home to me feels less and less like four walls and a roof, and much more like space where needs can be met, peace can be felt, and one can host or commune with others. A place of care and rest. The “Living” Room at Koko lot has been a further experiment with the notions of “home” and “becoming indigenous to place.” Combining human trash and organic waste materials to make furniture and functional sculpture – a cob pizza oven and brick rocket stove – feels like putting down roots that don’t mean “stuck” and instead mean foundations for growth, pathways for nourishment, and investment in life that will continue with or without me there.
About their work, Christiana writes:
I am a self-taught “artist” working in many mediums out of necessity. My art centers around interconnectedness and responsibility to the more-than-human world, queerness (as in “desiring differently”) and healing familial/ancestral wounds by returning to Right Relationship and empowering sustainable life in the commons. For me, these themes are interwoven and often used in tandem. I see climate change and our human conditions of depression, isolation and obsession with capitalism as a sickness of the spirit with a sordid history of violence against Indigenous people, animals, plants, land, water and ourselves. Because of this, much of my work is either driven by grief, or the ever-intensifying desire to give myself back to the Earth and decompose. My personal artistic work tends to arise from months or years of writing, experimentation, careful thought and conversations, each new work a growth and expansion upon similar themes. I aim to move people emotionally and tangibly, towards one another and deeper into the natural world we are all a part of.
