Susannah Ray
The intersection of city and water is at the heart of Susannah Ray’s photography and extends her early interest in landscape photography, which she uses as a form of visual geography, rendering the complex interrelationships of place, people, history, and ideology. During her June residency in the Project Space, Susannah Ray showed large scale photographs from her series “Down For the Day,” a long-term look at urban beach use in Rockaway Beach, Queens. Her previous project, “A Further Shore,” was exhibited at The Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2017-2018 and was published in 2017 by Hoxton Mini Press, East London, UK as New York Waterways. Susannah Ray has also had solo exhibitions at Bonni Benrubi Gallery and Albright College and been in numerous group exhibitions, notably at The Museum of the City of New York and The Queens Museum. Her photographs have been widely featured and reviewed in publications including: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The British Journal of Photography, The Surfer’s Journal, The Independent UK, and The Wall Street Journal
Nicki Pombier Berger
Leah Harper
Leah Harper is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in art, architecture, and design. Influenced by organic forms and ecosystems, she creates sculptures and installations that explore the balance between nature and the built environment. Her interest in water art and environmental issues developed from her experiences growing up in South Florida. Having witnessed disappearing marine life, rising water levels, and intensifying hurricanes, she uses art to give physical form and presence to the effects of climate change. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Willa Carroll
In residence October 2019
Willa Carroll is a writer and performer. Her first book, Nerve Chorus, was one of Entropy Magazine’s Best Poetry Books of 2018. A finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize, she won Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize and Narrative Magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Rumpus, Tin House, and many other publications. She received her MFA from Bennington College. Her videos have been featured in Narrative Outloud, Tuesday; An Art Project, Writers Resist, and elsewhere. Carroll has collaborated and performed with numerous artists, including text-based projects with her filmmaker husband. She lives in NYC. willacarroll.com
Sto Len
Sto Len is creating a pirate radio station called WoW Radio that will be archiving water-themed music, field recordings, conversations, stories and impromptu interviews. He will also be making Gyotaku prints using detritus found along the shores of Governors Island.
Clarinda Mac Low
Clarinda Mac Low will be working on the next version of Sunk Shore, a speculative, experiential tour of our climate changed future that takes place along specific shorelines, created in collaboration with Carolyn Hall (in residence in September). The tour is based in a deep dive into climate change data, and is built to make the facts more physically tangible. This is the second year that the tour will be happening on Governors Island and Mac Low wants to know--what is YOUR vision of the future? You can sign up for a visit and conversation here--bring your expertise into the picture. Also, objects from the future may appear in studio.
Clarinda Mac Low began in dance and molecular biology and now creates participatory events investigating social constructs and corporeal experience. She is Executive of Culture Push, an organization linking artistic practice and civic engagement, and one of the co-founders and core team members of Works on Water. Mac Low’s recent work includes: “Sunk Shore,” a speculative tour of the future; “Incredible Witness,” game-based investigation of the sensory origins of empathy; “Free the Orphans,” spiritual and intellectual implications of intellectual property in a digital age; and "Cyborg Nation," public conversation on the technological body and intimacy. Residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, and Mount Tremper Arts. Grants/Honors: BAX Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant and Franklin Furnace grant. She has received BA Dance and Molecular Biology (Wesleyan University) and and MFA in Digital Interdisciplinary Arts Practice (CCNY-CUNY).
Meredith Drum
In Project Spacre July 2019
Meredith Drum will be working on People of the Desert 122° F
A meditation on the past and future of this city: here the Ancestral Sonoran Desert People constructed the largest Pre-Columbia irrigation system in North America, history obliterated by the colonial construction that became contemporary Phoenix. Now over 150 people die each summer from heat-related trauma, and with a record high of 122° F what happens at 129° - adaptation or abandonment?
Nathan Kensinger + Nate Dorr
In Project Space July 2019
Shoreline Change: New Films by Nathan Kensinger & Nate Dorr
Shoreline Change is a collection of recent films created by Nathan Kensinger and Nate Dorr, who have been collaboratively documenting the waterfront of New York City for the past 13 years. These works investigate the rapidly changing coastline of the city, where frequently flooded neighborhoods are now being demolished to make way for either new wetlands or new residential towers. As New York City contemplates how to best address the existential threat of sea level rise, these works excavate its complicated history of polluted landfills and degraded wetlands, while considering visions of a multi-species future shaped by water.
Rejin Leys + Mary Giamo
In residence July 2019
David Andree
In residence July 2019
David Andree is working on two related bodies of work investigating the fluctuating landscape of water around Governors Island through observational painting and transitory sculpture. Processes include submerging paintings in water to study the effects on color, as well as creating wax castings of water current that are being used as subjects to create perceptually driven abstract paintings.
Jean Carla Rodea
In residence July 2019
Jean Carla Rodea is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Mexico City and currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work involves a variety of disciplines and mediums such as music, sound, performance, movement, photography, video, and sculpture.
Her artistic practice deals with spaces and instances where socio-political and cultural constructs are rendered visible through multi-media installations and performance.
Rodea is invested in understanding how time is insistently constructed through memory and how these memories whether embodied or recorded in spaces are documented and re/constructed. Archival research – whether it takes place in an institution or her personal archive – often leads her to draw from fiction and speculative history around documents, physical traces, and spaces. Rodea has performed extensively and shown work at Roulette, Carnegie Hall, BRIC, Knockdown Center, Judson Church, Danspace, Center for Performance Research, Panoply Lab, Rio ll Gallery, The Clemente, El Museo de Los Sures, to mention a few.
Vered Engelhard
In residence August 2019
Vered Engelhard (they/them) is at home in the open ocean ~writing, sounding, moving to calibrate frequencies with the floating, the sinking, and the swimming in between.
Sherese Francis
In residence August 2019
Sherese Francis is a southeast Queens-based poet, literary artist, workshop facilitator, and literary curator of the mobile library project, J. Expressions. She has published work in journals and anthologies including Cosmonauts Avenue, No Dear, Apex Magazine, La Pluma Y La Tinta's New Voices Anthology, The Pierian Literary Review, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, Newtown Literary, Blackberry Magazine, Kalyani Magazine, and Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Arts Inspired by Octavia Butler. Additionally, she has published two chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls and Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling. Currently, she is the co-editor and board member of the small press, Harlequin Creature, and a core member of the Southeast Queens Artist Alliance. To find out more about her work, visit futuristicallyancient.com.
Sarah Nicholls
In residence June 2019
Sarah Nicholls is an artist, printmaker, and writer whose work combines language, image, visual narrative, and time. She publishes an ongoing series of letterpress pamphlets on climate change, urban ecology, and the history of science and technology, and organizes a range of walks and programs around the series. Her work has received support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Brooklyn Arts Council and the Puffin Foundation, and she has taught letterpress and book arts at Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, and University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
Melissa F. Clarke
In Residence June 2019
Melissa F. Clarke is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist whose work employs data and generative self-programmed compositional environments. She creates multimedia installations, generative video and sound sculptures, performances, and printed images. Her work often explores bathymetry data that describes the landscapes beneath glacier carved waterways, including the Hudson River and seas around Antarctica and Greenland. For her residency with Works on Water and Underwater New York, Clarke will be looking towards the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers, where the Upper NY Bay begins, and revisit her process of using Bathymetric Data to create a time based experiential installation.
Supriya Wheat
In residence July 2019
Supriya Wheat is a writer and educator who has been involved in the field of education for ten + years. She was a 2007 Teach for America Corps Member, a New York Hall of Science Design Fellow & Master Teacher, a New York Public Library Cullman Fellow in Creative Writing, and currently teaches a life science course at the School at Columbia University. In 2017, Fund for Teachers awarded her a grant to document youth-led initiatives to curb climate change in the island nations of the Maldives and Zanzibar. Her more recent work centers around exploring human interactions with the environment. Lately, she finds herself preoccupied with how bodies of water in and around New York City might serve both as a medium for change and constancy.