To Spread a Table Fuller
Opening: Friday, July 21, 6:30 – 8:30
Exhibition: Friday, July 21 – Wednesday, July 26 (11 – 6)
“Work goes into a body, happens on a body. The fact that I can be taken up by others with such ease indicates a certain gravity to my body that I am forced to reckon with.”
“I drink my 한의학. I imagine the sourness dampening the lining of the gastric mucosa and breaking up that year’s build up of white toxicity. Why is that my identity is hinged on immiscibility, like oil and water never assimilating?”
“CLICK…CLICK… I hold you in my hand. I fumble and mend only to bend over and have to do it again.”
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Jaclyn Jaconetta (b. 1993) is a Brooklyn based artist working with found imagery to question naturalized ideas of gender and the disembodiment of labor. She investigates invisible labor - both within the highly constructed yet seemingly magical user-interface systems and digital spaces, and in the transcendent status attained by commodities when the labor of their making is unapparent.
Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin (b. 1993) is a Canadian-Korean-American artist interested in deconstructing colonialized bodies and the inherited legacy of orientalism in America. Shin uses Taoist indigenous knowledge to explore the porousness of bodily boundaries and the ceaseless movement of living processes, like fermentation, echoing the history of colonialism. Shin is interested in entangling the history of conquest and the literal digestion of material - herbs, medicine, and food - into a new system of relations that emerge from a complicated history of entanglement.
Alexandra Wilson (b.1993) is a New York-based artist. From her perspective as a clothing maker, she unfolds and explores facets of gendered labor within the domestic sphere. Intrigued by workspace tools such as the iron, she scrutinizes these everyday objects and shines light on them, their shapes, their dimensions and their historical context.
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Three female artists confront the systemic erasure of gendered and racialized bodies within an infinite cycle of marketing exchange, domestic services, and cultural imperialism. Through the continuous erasure of the human experience, context of production labor, and cultural legacy, the collector is able to exclude the body in the agency of representation. The bodies-made-objects are then reduced to a replica, stereotype, or an artifact, detaining the body as a ghost in the uncanny valley.
During the exhibition, three artists organize programming - workshops, roundtable discussion, writing, and video screening - to highlight bodies and perspectives that often face erasure or are detained in the uncanny valley.
Saturday, July 22, 4:00-6:00PM - To Spread a Table Fuller: Taehee Whang
In this workshop, Taehee Whang will discuss how we can decolonialize and decenter whiteness in our studio practice and institutions. Tiffany Shin will be speaking about the rise of technoorientalism and anime aesthetics in contemporary art as direct legacies of supremacy/ colonialism of thought.
Taehee Whang is a Korean American artist and educator who works in participatory video, drawing, and performance to recover the othered bodies that have been long remixed across time and space. She has collaborated with various institutions and nonprofit groups such as Eyebeam, Studio REV-, RISD Museum, BUFU, Children’s Museum of the Arts (CMANY), and New York Arts Practicum (NYAP).
(Organized by Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin)
Sunday, July 23, 1:00-3:00PM - To Spread a Table Fuller: Yasmin Majeed and Nadia Q. Ahmad
How can writers of color combat the erasure of difference and bear witness to it in writing? In this collaborative workshop we will explore this question through readings, discussion, and generative writing prompts. Through the work of womxn writers of color––including Trinh T. Minh Ha, Solmaz Sharif, Audre Lorde, and others––we will reimagine our role as marginalized subjects and writers in the context of white-centrist literature.
Nadia Q. Ahmad is a writer, based in her hometown of Queens. Her work has been published in Newtown Literary, SpliceLit, AAWW Open City, and The Margins. She most recently worked as Program Associate at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is a VONA/Voices alum. Yasmin Majeed is the Editorial Assistant for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where she helps edit their literary magazine, The Margins. She has written for the Coalition Zine, Elastic Mag, and the Ploughshares blog. She lives in New York.
(Organized by Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin)
Monday, July 24, 8:30-10:00PM - To Spread the Table Fuller: Screening
The screening showcases subjects in ceaseless oscillations between visibility/ invisibility to highlight bodies and perspectives that face erasure or are detained in the uncanny valley.
Video artists include: Ilana Babou Harris, Jiwon Choi, Nicholas Fernandez, David Lee, Natalia Blanco, Kyung Won Moon, Tzuhuan Lin, Carla Gannis, Vijayaraghavan Srinivasan, Parissah Lin, Amy Khoshbin, Jeong Lee, Disorientalism Collective
(Organized by Jaclyn Jaconetta and Alexandra Wilson)
Tuesday, July 25, 7:00-9:00PM - To Spread the Table Fuller: Hawa Arsala
This workshop will act as a conversational dialogue between South Asians on the topic of selferasure. What cultural tropes exist that contribute to our personal self-erasure in order to survive as first generation South Asians in the US? How do we navigate systems of control, empowerment, heritage, family, chosen family, and double lives? Through transparent dialogue, we hope to explore these themes and create a space for attendees to share their stories as well.
Hawa Arsala is the co-founder of Browntourage, a media agency spanning curatorial projects, experiments in interactive media, brand collaborations and platform for media and design moments that are forward thinking and socially conscious. Browntourage is committed to diversity in aesthetics, supporting the work of diverse culture makers, and developing conscious processes of cultural consumption and production. Based in NYC, Hawa is a freelance creative director and content strategist working primarily in fashion, tech, and the arts. She has served on several panels about being a first generation creative, South Asian, and working at the intersection of media representation and fashion.
(Organized by Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin)
