Image courtesy of Mamoun Nukumanu Friedrich Grosvenor
NARS Satellite Residency
Artist Talk:
Play as Research/Research as Play
July 24, 12-1pm
Governors Island, Nolan Park 5B
In this artist talk moderated by NARS Curatorial Fellow Jessica Duby, NARS Foundation Satellite Residents Tielin Ding, Mary Evangeline Guadalupe Rubi, and Mamoun Nukumanu Friedrich-Grosvenor will discuss the ways that play is a serious part of their creative processes. They’ll reflect on the residency’s working environment--on Governor’s Island in the NARS house where Lois Lowry, author of the Giver grew up--as a refuge for focused experimentation. And they’ll share their perspectives on the importance of playful individual expression as a social and cultural good, tying the conversation to one of the key themes in Lowry’s The Giver.
Tielin Ding is a flâneur, observer and interdisciplinary artist based in NYC whose diverse practice involves working with playful objects, indeterminate traces and movements to create performative actions. His application of the methodology of “Mapping” and “Walking” gives him more opportunity to reflect on invisible systems within urban and natural spaces. Under the practice of way-finding, mark-making and game-changing, he has been very interested in drifting in the field of language and space, risking getting lost from point A to point B.
Mamoun Nukumanu Friedrich-Grosvenor is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of regenerative architecture, landscape art, music, and performance, as myth making. His work explores art as a symbiotic process, through which bodies, landscapes, and molecules are entangled in the exploration of possible futures. Through a process of ‘becoming-with’ multi-species ecologies, Nukumanu seeks pathways towards combined human and environmental health. His work involves the growth of plants and fungi as well as 3D modeling, woodworking, and earthworks.
Mary Evangeline Guadalupe Rubi artistic practice is a meditation on memory: the stories we have inherited and the stories we create to remember. Drawing inspiration from the First Nations tradition of the sacredness of the color red, Latin folklore, and the desire to reclaim an Indigenous narrative, her pieces embrace botany and the natural world as a source of healing and reconciliation. Using the mediums of fiber, clay, and wood, the viewer is invited to connect to nature. Mammal skulls, feminine craft studies and textiles are at the center of her work and a manifestation of a journey to find home and create a narrative focused on reclaiming blood memory.
Jessica Duby is an independent curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Many of her curatorial collaborations so far have focused on the values of ritual, gathering, and healing. She recently curated the group show Bodies We Inhabit, presented online by Latela Curatorial in 2021 and slated to be exhibited at NARS Foundation in 2023, and is currently working on an exhibition of contemporary artists redefining altars, The Art of Offering. Jessica holds a master’s degree in Arts Politics from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and an undergraduate degree in Art History from the University of Central Florida.
