Michael Asbill and Derek Stroup, Sketch for "Sacred Hearts," Mixed Media, 2020
Join us via Zoom Thursday, September 24 at 8pm EST for Art for Non-Humans, a panel discussion featuring five artists exhibiting pieces at "Owning Earth," opening Spring 2021 in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts.
Our panel will feature artists Eleanor King, Lucy Pullen, Michael Asbill, Derek Stroup, and Sarah Max Beck. They will discuss the ways their pieces for Owning Earth seek to expand aesthetic practices and notions of kinship by engaging non-human audiences with human-made artworks. The panel will be introduced and moderated by Tal Beery.
About Owning Earth
Owning Earth is an ambitious, two-year outdoor exhibition in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts. It will help bring critical attention to an emerging movement of creative practitioners undertaking outdoor installations and land-based projects that problematize notions of control, confront systems of domination, and prepare the soil for futures guided by mutuality and reverence.
More info:https://www.unisonarts.org/owning-earth
About the Panelists
Eleanor King
Eleanor King is an interdisciplinary artist working in installation art that responds to our physical, social, and economic landscape. Her works have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Nuit Blanche, Franklin Street Works, Spring/Break Art Show, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and Diaz Contemporary, among others. She attended residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, SOMA Mexico, the Banff Centre, and A.I.R. Gallery. Her work has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Art in America. Eleanor is a Fulbright fellow, and received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Nova Scotia. Eleanor holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA form Purchase College, SUNY, where she works in the School of Art+Design.
Lucy Pullen
Lucy Pullen is a Canadian artist based in New York. Her work was the subject of exhibitions at The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver; Art Metropole in Toronto; and survey exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Tate Modern in London England among others. Current site- specific installations include The University of Victoria, North in Kitchener and The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. In 2019 she formed Level Foundation, a platform for public art in Brooklyn, with a large-scale work by Eleanor King.
Michael Asbill
Michael Asbill weaves arts advocacy, community engagement, environmentalism, and curatorial endeavor into his installation and public art practice. His work has been experienced in venues such as Sporobole and Galerie Zybaldone (Sherbrooke, QC), Flux Factory (Long Island City, NY), The Oregon City Elevator, and the Poughkeepsie Train Station. As a core collaborator with Habitat for Artists, Michael contributed to eco and social engagement projects for Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Arts Brookfield (New York, NY), Washington DC’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Michael is the founder and director of CHRCH Project Space (Rosendale, NY), a residency for the development of pioneering, community-based, participatory artworks. Michael is a visiting lecturer, and currently head of the sculpture program, at the State University of New York in New Paltz.
Derek Stroup
Derek Stroup is an artist based in New York. He studied with Helen Harrison and Eleanor Antin, and was an assistant to Robert Irwin. In addition to sculptural and photographic projects, he is the author of six artist books and was co editor of Field magazine, a print-only magazine of contemporary art. Publications include photographs in Kalle Lasn’s Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics, and Various Small Books (Referencing the Work Of Ed Ruscha) by the MIT press.
Sarah Max Beck
Sarah Max Beck’s body of work builds on symbiotic, closed-loop human nutrient systems; redefining waste as resource; and comments, often wryly and self-consciously, on the parallels of current elective human influence on the planet and a parasitic infection of a host. A background in agriculture became tangled up with a sculpture degree until a creative practice with compost, resource recovery, fermentation, permaculture, and post-consumer plastics all amalgamated into bioart. Beck is co-founder of studioHydrostatic, a collaborative bioart lab in NYC.