Harvestworks is pleased to partner with The MFA students from the department of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University for A Nice Place to Live, an exhibition of recent installations and performances. Participating artists include muthi reed in collaboration with Luce Capco Lincoln/QTPOC Visions, Bella Kubo, Chad Mundie, Kaitlyn Paston, Lindsey Arturo and Samson Stilwell. The students are working under the faculty mentorship of Stephen Vitiello and visiting artists Melody Loveless and Marcus Fischer.
The Kinetic Imaging program was recently ranked the #5 MFA program by US News and World Report in the category of Time Based/New Media.
Exhibition open to the public on Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 11 am – 5 pm
Performances by KUBO: Friday May 6th 2022, @ 3 pm, Saturday May 7th 2022, @ 3 pm, Sunday May 8th 2022 (duet with Kaitlyn Paston): @ 3 pm
LOCATION:
Harvestworks Art and Technology Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island
Participating Artists
Samson Stilwell, February
In February of 2021 I took a photo out of my window every day of the weather. I used the photos of the weather to create a series of laws and conditions that govern a board game in which different characters go to work everyday in the month of February. Next to the board game are a series of drawings in the style of New Yorker cartoons, a coffee machine that is programmed to make coffee every morning at 8am and a tinfoil bird with a music box that plays Here Comes The Sun by The Beatles inside of it.
Lindsey Arturo, K-Pods
In the twilight hour of the Hollywood movie stars’ status as king of image and the literal largest visual cultural icon, the internet and consumer-grade media making equipment collide, shrink, and spawn a new kind of creepy small screen image/icon that rapidly replicates and spreads by the hamfisted force of corporate capital through your pockets by way of your phone screen and social media. Your body now becomes the site and your hand a new kind of host for the corporate image making cultural machine f.k.a. hollywood.
KUBO, jidoka (じどうか )KUBO’s performance, jidoka (じどうか ), is an extension of an installation at The Anderson Gallery in Richmond Virginia that explores the sentiment of intelligent automation. KUBO maps elements of place, memory, and mechanics into a desolate cadence.
muthi reed and QTPOC Visions, untitled unfinished devotion. This project is made up of many [#] voices who all walk by the water, searching for protection, play, freedom. We migrate trying to find each other across time through indigenous land, through ancestral stories and through the possibilities of creative collaboration. We bring this untitled unfinished devotion to this kitchen located on Lenape land formerly known as Paggank, Nut Island, to be in a conversation, speaking alongside each other to occupy space with a grief practice inspired by hwadu writing.
Chad Mundie, but the the wind still blows over
but the wind still blows is a dive into the collision of flesh, fixture, and the mundane, exploring the connection between the home, inhabitants, and objects within. By allowing these connections and boundaries to blur, forms begin to morph and mutate together. Body and spirit become one with the home and we are audience to all stages of this process. Fresco-painted plaster cast appendages found objects exist as fragments of memory, some animated by a series of small motors.
Kaitlyn Paston I am that which moves through. I’m working with lived-in spaces, accumulation, transformation, embodiment and resonance in bodies and objects. It is an exploration of presence in the play of small figures interacting with their surroundings. The Nolan Park houses were built for the families of high-ranking men and brought to life by the women and children who lived. There. Now reinvigorated by arts, I am thinking about the women and artists’ relationships to material lineages and creation of value.
BIOS
Samson Stilwell (b. 1993) is currently based in Richmond, VA where he is pursuing an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. He received a BA from The Johnston Center for Integrative Studies in 2015. Recent solo and group presentations include: Revival, Mole End, New York; My Wind Chime of One Hair and One Brown String, Gern en Regalia, New York; American Pickers, Triest, New York; The Gernsback Continuum, Prometheus Projects, Montreal.
Lindsey Arturo aka LNZ aka margaritaville39 aka cloudface aka 2phones aka peacedude aka lazyArtu aka harvey aka accidentalpizza is an internet artist b.1990. She is currently a 2023 MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University and has screened films at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Athens International Video & Film Festival, San Diego Underground, AcreTV, aCinema, Zeegotopia, and Small File Media Festival.
Chad Mundie was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1996, and raised in a three-bedroom, one story house in Louisa, Virginia. He received his BA at the University of Mary Washington in 2018, and his MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2022. His work has been exhibited at Cherry, Candela, Tuesday, and Rump Galleries in Richmond, VA
KUBO is a third generation Japanese American artist born in Oshawa, Ontario (Haudenosaunee Land) in 1996. KUBO received a Bachelors in Studio Art from Oakland University in 2018. KUBO has exhibited work at The Anderson Gallery, Candela Gallery, Grace Street Theater, Sechrest Art Gallery, Detroit Artists Market, Anton Art Center, and Ann Arbor Film Festival. KUBO received a Masters of Fine Arts in Kinetic Imaging from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2022.
Kaitlyn Paston is an expanded media artist and first year MFA candidate in Kinetic Imaging at VCU. She earned a BA in German and BFA from Tufts and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been shown at Convention#1: Sounding Gender in Aarhus, Denmark, Flow Philadelphia, Artship Olympia, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Finesse Gallery in Sofia Bulgaria, Stedman Gallery, Safe Harbor’s Gallery and Rowan University.
muthi reed is a member of the Black Nation from central Alabama and Virginia kinfolk, born in First Nation Anishinaabe, Ojibwe, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot ancestral land, Detroit, Michigan, and raised in First Nation Lenape, Delaware, Susquehannock, Shawnee, and Iroquois ancestral lands, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Their work is an aesthetic practice in ritual and sound.
Luce Capco Lincoln is a filmmaker, curator and cultural worker currently located on Lenapehoking, by way of Potano and Timucua land now known as Gainesville, FL. As a queer trans pilipinx, Lincoln’s art work transverses time, connecting historical stories to present day to imagine the future. These works take the form as personal documentaries, experimental found footage films and imagined legacies through hand drawn animations.
QTPOC Visions is a project dedicated to art that explores, experiences, and expands on our diasporic journeys, in whatever form, as BIPOC queer, trans, and non-binary artists. We strive to remember and retell a forgotten history, an ancestral practice, or a pathway to resilience. We create to envision a different world, a liberated spirit, a self-determined body.
LInks:
KUBO: ig: @bellakubo website: www.bellakubo.com
Lindsey Arturo: instagram @lnzmusic_glowcats Website: www.lnzmusic.video
Samson: ig: @1naughty_1nice Website: mole-end.online/revival
muthi reed @everydayumuthi https://www.houseoflux.info/we-us-ours
QTPOC Visions @qtpocvisions
Kaitlyn Paston www.kaitlynpaston.com @kp_zzzzzz
Chad Mundie www.chadmundie.com @chadmundie
https://arts.vcu.edu/academics/departments/kinetic-imaging/ @vcuartskineticimaging/