Opening Reception: Friday, December 9
With water as a shared theme, Amy Blondell, Génesis de Las Olas, Leslie Horwitz, Numpie, and Jingtian Zong will present works that track and register fluid experiences of moving across boundaries and creating cross-boundary relations.
Amy Blondell is an urban visual anthropologist by training who works at the intersection of the social sciences, geography, and the documentary arts. Her last major project, the Youth Trek Project, was a two-year collaboration with unhoused traveling youth. The work offers commentary on independence and interdependence, on sexuality and gender, and on the development of kinship bonds among groups of traveling youth (Road Dawgz) and their companion animals. Blondell has co-produced and co-curated exhibitions with young people and she has published in Geographies of Children and Young People and has presented the work in many US and UK locations, in Cyprus and in Ireland.
Amy collaborates with Thea Frizzell (they/them), who is a trans queer dingus, dog groomer, former performance clown, currently a spiritual clown, artist of many mediums, including doll making, and an aspiring tattooer, as well as a survival traveler. At one point travel & photographing their homeless experience was their main focus but they have become interested in stability, self care as an act of resistance, processing trauma thru art, specifically tattooing themselves. Struggle, pain & escaping poverty became something that enveloped their entire life. After taking a few years to focus on health, sobriety & rest, honing in on their career as a dog groomer, they are finally coming out the other end inspired by growth, looking inward, truth and survival. With no formal education, being a high school drop out, everything has been self taught, or learned thru community.
Drawing and printmaking house the visual practice of Génesis de Las Olas. After receiving her BFA in Illustration from Maryland Institute College of Art, life became an endless road-trip between West Philadelphia, Queer underground Bay Area, Middle Tennessee and New Orleans. In Philadelphia she was a shop monitor for Second State Press, Interned with Philadelphia Printworks and had a 2-year artist residency with 40th Street AIR. Since 2018 she’s had been a collective member of Idyll Dandy Arts (IDA), an artist-led queer land project in Middle Tennessee. Years of living in New Orleans and the Southeast lead to cultivating queer community among a rapidly changing social and environmental climate. In 2022 she completed a Clean Water Certification in Green Infrastructure with Louisiana Green Corps. Using landscaping techniques to manage urban stormwater along with coastal restoration rerouted the artist social practice. Recently, she’s taken on cultural practices of Radical Remediation, through printmaking, conservational wetland research and cultivating the importance of Queer and Trans Land Projects.
Leslie Horwitz is a traveler on an odyssey through the intersecting realms of our climate crisis, from policy, to technology, to land-regeneration. Her past experience includes advising presidential candidates, launching climate start-ups, and getting her hands dirty with land projects across Northern California and Southern Oregon. Drawing on these experiences, her artistic practice works to engage unlikely alliances and germinate new seeds out of narratives of damnation.
NUMPIE is an academic cartoonist, drawing on the fields of sociocultural anthropology, folklore, and American Studies to make comics and visual projects based on ethnographic research. Collaborative works highlight stories of agriculture in California – from the sustainable to the surprising. Numpie is currently preoccupied by multi-species approaches to wildfire evacuation and management. In other incarnations, Numpie has served as a community-supported kitchen worker-owner, a university academic advisor, and a 4-H Club President (not in that order).
Jingtian Zong is a multimedia artist interested in art’s power as resistance and social mediation. In the forms of interactive installations, interventions, videos, and adapted objects, her recent work discusses surveillance, collective memories, immigration displacement, and manipulated history in and beyond the contemporary People’s Republic of China.