Curatorial Work
New Voices: Ritual (2024)
Organized by Olivia Shao, with Robin Siddall
Drawing attention to everyday objects, concerted repetition, and a focus on process, this exhibition considers the fundamental but often unrecognized role that ritual plays in our everyday lives. Through the transformation of materials and the enactment of processes in one’s practice, what are ways that ritual intersects with art-making, performance, and life? In an uncertain and ever-shifting cultural landscape, how can ritual ground us and help us make sense of the world around us? This is the second iteration of Print Center New York’s New Voices program.
Presentation at Print Center New York organized by Jenn Bratovich and Robin Siddall
Marie Watt is a member of the Seneca Nation (one of six that comprise the Haudenosaunee Confederacy) with German-Scot ancestry. Her work is a site of twinned language between the present and the past, drawing from Native and non-Native traditions such as Greco-Roman myth, pop culture, and Indigenous oral narratives. She is known, increasingly, for assembling material drawn from community sewing circle events or open calls, and for her central use of reclaimed textiles as humble, everyday materials that carry intimate meanings and memories. Storywork is the artist’s first traveling retrospective and the first to reflect on the role of printmaking in her ambitious interdisciplinary work. Featuring over 50 works, it presents Watt’s etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts alongside a selection of her monumentally-scaled sculptures and textile works.
Curated by Carmen Hermo, with Robin Siddall
For the pilot year of New Voices, Hermo encouraged applicants to consider their work in terms of transformation. This could reference a perspective or expectation, a social or political reality, a traditional process or medium, or knowledge of the self, encouraging an open-ended reading. As reflections on and within these contexts, the works of the artists in On Transformation represent thresholds: spaces where materials and techniques meet up with inquiries about accepted truths and realities, with what the artist is to do about it. This threshold can be a boundary of understanding and recognition that perforates preconceptions and biases. On this verge, on this tipping point, the paths and decisions of the past meet the next steps of the future; the was conjoins the now for a moment, while we see and ponder the what will come next.