Becoming Otherwise

ALTER

PIE root al “beyond” suffix ter “other”  intransitive sense “ to become otherwise”

STATE

Sta- “to stand, make or be firm”

Julia Santoli’s Sunday Service, entitled Becoming Otherwise, explores unfixed territories and altered states featuring five artists whose work enacts and conjures transformative spaces of energetic exchange through inner/outer intentions, sculptural relations, and virtual play. Over the course of the evening, the artists will employ tools and tactics that rove through movement, task-based performance, sculpture, sound, and VR.

About the Curator

Julia Santoli is a multi-media artist and experimental musician. Creating immersive and precarious environments with voice, feedback, electronics, and installation, her work deals with intergenerational hauntings and reclamation through the body. She has presented solo and collaborative works at various sites such as Queens Museum, Drawing Center, ISSUE Project Room, New York Live Arts, Judson Memorial Church, LUMP, Widow Jane Mine cave, Panoply Performance Laboratory; as well as presented and taught workshops during a 5-month residency in Spinnerei, Leipzig, DE. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Issue Project Room, and a 2019 Asian Cultural Council Fellow.

About the Artists

Kaia Gilje is a movement artist, working improvisationally and with task based actions.  She has worked as a solo artist, a dancer for choreographers, and as a part of many groups and collectives including Panoply Performance Laboratory, Feminist Art Group, and Undoing and Doing.

Sarah Viviana Valdez is an artist previously based out of Sarasota, FL and recently moved to Brooklyn, NY. Her practice spans across different disciplines of visual arts, video, wearable technology, performance, and sound. Under the moniker i_like_dog_face, Valdez uses live performances combining sound and visuals to explore the malleability of environments, both spatially and on the level of human interaction (the audience-performer relationship). A primary focus as of late has been the use of digital processes in conjunction with microbial substance, under the loose guise of fashion. She has been working with unconventional materials that biodegrade in order to merge biology with technology. She received a B.F.A from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2010. Valdez has exhibited and performed artworks nationally and internationally at venues such as ICA Miami, Elastic Arts, Art in Odd Places Orlando, INDEX Festival, Casa Quien and John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.

Jung Hee Mun is a multimedia video artist based in NYC. Mun earned her MFA from School of Visual Arts in NYC and BFA in printmaking installation from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Mun currently teaches at School of Visual Arts and BMCC. Mun’s work addresses the increasing tension between an idea of what it truly means to be “human”, if such a thing exists, and the contemporary technologies that threaten this notion under the guise of “enriching” it. Is it possible to be more in touch with ourselves, by means which actually take us further away from ourselves? Means which seemingly allow us ultimate control of ourselves, while technically rendering our control useless? Through this lens, With inherently performative aspects of  VR / AR technology, she investigates identity politics, relationships (internal and external), history, and the future – all classical thematics in an increasingly less-than-classical contemporary state. Mung has had solo exhibitions at the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Southwest School of Art; group exhibitions at the McNay Museum of Art, BlueStar Contemporary Art Museum, School of Visual Arts, Women, Their Work in Texas and various venues in NYC including Microscope Gallery, Lesley Heller Workspace Gallery, Union City Museum. Her work is included in the collection of the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Raki Malhotra is an interdisciplinary artist from Toronto currently living in Brooklyn. Since 2013 her work has addressed ideas and topics related to self-psychology, pop culture, consumerism, location, and ‘issues of identity and social positioning’. Malhotra most often uses the performative process to deliver non-linear discourse and composition in the forms of live performance, social practice, installation, and video. She is currently completing her MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice at The City College of New York.

Kathie Halfin is an interdisciplinary and performance artist. She works in variety of mediums including performance, textile, sound, installation. Kathie was born in Ukraine and lived in Israel. She has an MFA from School Of Visual Arts in New York. Kathie exhibited and performed at the Bronx Museum, AIR Gallery, El Museo De Los Sures and NARS Foundation, The Clemente among others. She received fellowships and residencies at School Of Visual Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Bronx Museum AIM Program and Wassaic Project. Kathie’s work involves collaborative dialogical process and a research-based practice. Her work seeks to subvert and reimagine existing dysfunctional narratives and create a new visual language that spans in between speculation and fiction. In her performances Kathie seeks for the moments that break of the routines, anxieties, human-centric worlds and propose possibilities for the body to be an alien, mortal, organic shape shifter.

Jean Carla Rodea is an interdisciplinary artist with a research based practice. She is originally from Mexico City and currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She works across disciplines such as music, sound, performance, photography, video, and sculpture. Her practice is informed by memory, identity, immigration, ritual, performance, and improvisation. Rodea’s work questions critical socio-political issues such as: the politics of the body, gender, and the asymmetry of human relations. She has performed and shown work at Roulette, Carnegie Hall, BRIC, Judson Church, Panoply Lab, Danspace Project, Center for Performance Research, Rio ll Gallery, The Clemente, El Museo de Los Sures, to mention a few. She received her MFA from City College’s DIAP where she received the First-Place Graduate M. F. A. Studio Award and two Connor Study Abroad Fellowships for archival research and studio practice in Mexico City. This past summer Rodea was a resident and education fellow at The Wassaic Project.

About Sunday Service

Taking place the first Sunday of each month, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of cross-disciplinary performances and presentations that brings together a multiplicity of views around a singular prompt, such as a question, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service centers works in progress, interdisciplinary endeavors, and diversity in format showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster the testing of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.

Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center’s Director of Exhibitions and Live Art.

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Image by Kathy Halfin and Jean Carla Rodea “Matter in Flux” at Wassaic Project 2018, photo by Marisa Adesman

Phase Shift

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Recent findings in neuroscience challenge the prevailing notion of a centralized self persisting throughout one’s lifetime. Expanding upon Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, a seminal science fiction novel where Gethenian humanoids cycle between sexes through their lives, Phase Shift hopes to offer artists an opportunity to explore the shifting landscapes of their own identities. Much like the circu-lunar hormonal cycles in the human body, so too does our self-concept fluctuate and meander, moving in and out of moments of transformation without apotheosis.

From the enduring metaphor of the werewolf to the transformative powers of girls in shoujo anime, artists have long explored cyclicality of the subconscious self. Phase Shift provides a space for six artists, writers, and musicians to embrace the hidden or contradictory sides of themselves in order to realize previously unexplored terrains. By performing new personas or exploring methodologies outside or adjacent to their current art practice, performances offer a new lens into their interiority.

About the Curator
Pamela Liou is an artist and technologist living in Brooklyn, NY. Incorporating immersive technology, analog video circuits, and custom hardware, her work examines creative efficacy and ornamentation as tools for self-actualization and the negotiation of the self in spaces both physical and virtual. Liou was a keynote speaker at 2017’s Open Source Hardware Summit where she debuted her invention DOTI, a programmable desktop jacquard-style loom. She was a resident at Eyebeam, Museum of Arts and Design, and DBRS labs and recently performed live visuals for choreographer Jonathan Gonzalez’s piece Obeah at La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. She currently teaches creative technology at School for Poetic Computation and Parsons School of Design. She studied at the Dramatic Writing Department and Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts.

About the Artists
Devin Curry is an interdisciplinary artist, music producer, and DJ based in Brooklyn, NY. Curry hosted his solo art exhibition of “Working Rhythms” at REVERSE gallery, New York City, in 2016; this installation consisted of an interactive music sculpture, multi-channel audio, accompanied by a series of the artist’s ink drawings and digital prints. He has also presented his work at the Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), NYC Media Lab Summit, and IAC Building (NYC) and received press from outlets such as Forbes.com, Make Magazine, Greenpointers, and Synthtopia. Under the recording alias Grand Atrium, Curry has released electronic music on labels Maison Kitsuné and Secretly Canadian and received press from Nylon and numerous music blogs. He has partnered with composer Brett Parnell to create the score for the Shaker Museum’s audio tour app, The Water & The Word. Curry received his Master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and his BA in Cinematic Arts Production from the University of Southern California. He has served on the faculty of Fordham University’s Communication and Media Studies program and Queens College’s School of Art & Design, and currently works in multimedia education at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Originally hailing from Los Angeles, Kristen Garris is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and video editor. She has created video content for companies such as Google, Vogue, Nylon Magazine, Vice Media, and Style.com that have garnered over 2,000,000+ views collectively worldwide. She also writes and directs narrative short films and edits branded commercial content. She holds a B.F.A in Film and TV Production from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and recently graduated from Brooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema with an MFA in Film Directing.

Fei Liu 刘斐 is a New York-based Chinese designer, artist, writer, and DJ exploring digital intimacy and the narrative potential of interfaces. She is an adjunct professor at Parsons MFA Design and Technology and previously a Researcher in Residence at NEW INC, and a Digital Solitude fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. She has mid-to-average combined student debt from an undergraduate as well as a master’s degree, with no health insurance, car, or house.

Katrina Reid is a performing artist based in Queens, NY. She’s had the pleasure to collaborate and perform in works by David Thomson, Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Jonathan Gonzalez, Third Rail Projects, and Megan Byrne. A 2016-17 Dancing While Black Fellow, her own work has been presented as part of AUNTS, the Current Sessions, Gibney Dance Double Plus series, Cocoon Theatre, Studio 26 Gallery, and BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center.

Hellyn Teng is a musician, wearable technologist, and a Co-Founder and Creative Director at the fashion technology design studio, Wearable Media. She is a graduate from NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), and currently a Member at NEW INC, the New Museum’s Cultural Incubator, supporting projects at the intersections of art, design, and technology. Her work explores ways we can engage with sound as an interactive media and through computational fashion technology. Her music projects are inspired by industrial soundscapes, discordant spaces, and metaphysical experiences, performed with analog and digital synthesis. The music is driven by ambient industrial sounds, layered with heavy melodic synths, and cavernous electronic drum patterns. Influenced by early 80s industrial and post punk music movements. She recently performed at the Basilica 24 Hour Drone festival under her solo project, The Less Effectives.

Madeline Wilcox was raised in flagstaff, arizona before relocating to brooklyn in 2011. she has identified as a dancer since the age of 9, and has spent her professional career consciously and subconsciously questioning her relationship to dance, to live performance, and to the assumed hierarchy of a director-performer dynamic. she is interested in living inside the role of director for the first time in an effort to expand her viewpoint, personally navigate her own uncharted performance mediums, and unpack past experiences. she is in her first year at hunter college working towards a masters in social work. she thanks the incomparable Pamela Liou for trusting her.

About Sunday Service
Taking place the first Sunday of each month, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of cross-disciplinary performances and presentations that brings together a multiplicity of views around a singular prompt, such as a question, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service centers works in progress, interdisciplinary endeavors, and diversity in format showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster the testing of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.

Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center’s Director of Exhibitions and Live Art.