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ANGEL CHEN

Artificial Peace. An installation and performance by Angel Chen.

"Nature and culture, life and death, light and shadow --

these are a few of the prevailing themes explored in my work. For "Artificial Peace",
Siamese Fighting Fish are placed in self-contained vessels of glass and water. 
These vessels are placed on top of reflective mirror, transposing light -- 
reflecting and refracting it onto the walls.

Symbolized architectural separation brings about subtle tension
as the resplendent natural born killers swim silently amongst themselves in artificial peace,
where they would naturally fight to the death. There is a performative element where I feed the fish worms.

The act of consumption is dramatized by the light and shadows,
as predator eats prey."

MARION SPENCER AND ELLERY BURTON

"how did I get here?” 

A dance piece performed by Marion Spencer and Ellery Burton, choreographed for The Nature of Now.

This performance is about direction and finding one's way. 
It is a journey wrestling with control over one's fate, amidst an environment that is disorienting you, 
disorienting us all perhaps. The piece invites us to consider our own individual paths and how much
agency we have within our lives.


Photo: Claire Bangser

ANNE SENSTAD

The Swamp + The Sugarcane Labyrinth by Anne Senstad 

 

(photo Anne Senstad)

The Swamp, by Anne Senstad

A short film created for the Nature of Now exhibition and shown with

The Sugarcane Labyrinth, an immersive architectural installation.

Music composed and performed by JG Thirlwell www.foetus.org

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Anne Katrine Senstad is a multidisciplinary Norwegian artist who lives and works in New York. She works in the intersection of installation art, photography, video, site and time specific work, and land art, bordering the definition of architecture, sculpture and spatial relations. She was educated at Parsons School of Design and The New School for Social Research in New York. Senstad has exhibited at The Venice Biennale 2013, Zendai MOMA in Shanghai, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Stiftelsen 3,14 , SALT and Utsikten Kunstsenter in Norway. She is a commissioned artist for ISEA Dubai 2014 and the inaugural Bruges Triennial in Belgium, 2015.

SHANA ROBBINS

(digital maquette courtesy of the artist)

Monstrous Feminine in Mexico

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Many contemporary artists like myself are attempting to stabilize new hybrid forms of identities based on technological developments and new indigenous earth cosmologies that transform time, space, human identity and the repercussions of that. Modern day rituals and mythologies are an attempt to create new horizons of meaning around all of this, while still affirming and recoding former rituals. We continue to explore methods of movement and storytelling that pull from ancient narratives of birth, death, identity and transformation—in a novel co-creation with the cultural, ecological, and social formations of our current environment.

 Drawing on my experience over the past several years with shamanic ceremonies that link the body with the Earth and engage roles of conduit and healer, I perform durational ritualized gestures in unique landscapes and earth installations. My work is a layered conversation between experiential and visual art media--the works on paper serving as oracular blueprints for labor-intensive installations and live and video performances in Iceland, Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Florida, and rural Georgia. These pieces explore the tension between meditatively slow and sensual/erotic movements—a communing with and bodying forth of natural phenomena in an ancestral dance with visible and invisible allies. We too are indigenous to the planet.