NARS Satellite Open Studios

Nolan Park 6B, in Governors Island

Saturday, July 17 | 12-5 pm

Sunday, July 18 | 12-5 pm

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Saturday, July 24 | 12-5 pm

Sunday, July 25 | 12-5 pm

Featuring NARS Satellite residency artists:

Jia Sung | Becs Epstein | Miriam Parker | Tania Khouri | Jemila MacEwan

NARS Satellite Open Studios, a 2 weekend exhibition of international contemporary art, showcases the Satellite residency artists working at Nolan Park 6B, in Governors Island. This Open Studio Event invites the public to experience the artistic process and the diverse range of artistic mediums presented in the intimacy of the studio environment.

Jia Sung

Jia Sung uses the familiar visual language of folklore to examine and subvert parameters set around the humanity of women, queer people, and those considered ‘other.’ As a Singaporean Chinese queer woman born in Minnesota, raised in Singapore, and now based in Brooklyn, her experiences of transplantation and coming-of-age in the west have pushed her to question what it means to reconnect to inherited stories without reenacting dynamics of fetishization and orientalism. Drawing on motifs from Chinese mythology and Buddhist iconography, she decenters the cisheteronormative values embedded within these archives by reinterpreting them through a queer feminist lens. Her recent work spans paintings, zines & artist books, poetry, and tapestries incorporating embroidery and beadwork — meditative fragments encrusted on a surface that serve as love letters to handcrafts and feminized labor.

Becs Epstein

Becs’ ongoing work is titled Institute of Plant Motivation (IPM). She uses the language of bureaucracy, combined with clean corporate aesthetics and the magnetism of cults, to create propaganda about the environment. This pseudo-organization’s mission is to advocate for the formation of intimate consensual bonds between plants and humans. This mimicry of bureaucracy confronts the way humans have caused devastation to the plant world. Her art mimics the look of large-scale industrial production while making visible the handmade quality. Working trans-disciplinarily in sculpture, performance, video, painting, and installation, she imagines her art as earnest world creation. Becs creates art objects and educational environments to engage communities, while using bureaucratic and self-help language to slither her plant propaganda into everyday life.

Miriam Parker

Miriam Parker is an interdisciplinary artist who uses movement, paint, video and installation to refine her understanding of existence and challenge beliefs about identity and the accepted systems we live under. Parker’s work lives in liminal spaces, activating installations through performance full of archetypal bodies. These figures inhabit new narratives and new conceptual and ethical dialogues with the audience: What is the truth of what we perceive? What is it to be looked at when you belong to a minority, to expose one’s body as an offering to the perception of estranged viewers? Parker uses her practice to find new freedom outside of institutional structures and languages, through collaborative creation with artists equally concerned with experimental performance and time-based practice.

Tania Khouri

Tania works with sculpture, video, and installation to embody and assemble evidence of her fragmented origin story. Drawing on Lebanese rituals, such as life readings with coffee grinds, soap making, and baking bread, she investigates the loss of information in the act of translation and passing down knowledge within a diaspora. As she works to recreate and relearn the authentic objects and rituals, the resulting “failures” become the work and speak to attempts to recreate home within displacement. In the coffee reading ritual, the cup represents a portal between different histories and locations. Soap making signifies an alchemical process she connects to her experience of merging familial knowledge and new environments. Baking bread speaks to the embodied knowledge transferred generationally.

Jemila MacEwan

Jemila MacEwan creates intimately interwoven earthworks, film, sculptures and performances within existing landscapes. Their large-scale works offer space to feel into acute emotional states experienced when confronting anthropogenic extinction and climate change such as shame, grief, fear, loneliness, and hope. MacEwan treats the landscapes as animate collaborators who carry their own valid subjectivities, histories and messages. To meet the challenges of climate change and anthropogenic extinction, MacEwan asserts that our understanding of ‘we’ needs to extend beyond the human, by recognizing our role as co-collaborators in the story of life on Earth. Shedding the layers of denial that separate humans from nature reveals the more-than-human-world as a diverse network of powerful and animated forces deserving our attention and trust.