LAURA STINGER | "Here is my eyes aren't"

28 Julho 2021 16h00

Zaratan AIR | Open Studio
LAURA STINGER | Here is my eyes aren't
 
OPEN | 28-29-30 Julho, 2021
SCHEDULE | Wed-Sat, 16:00-20:00
PERFORMANCE | 28 Julho, 18:00
ENTRY | Free*
SUPPORT | República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes
INFO | residencies@zaratan.pt
 
We are pleased to invite you to “Here is my eyes aren't”, a flash exhibition by Laura Stinger, artist-in-residency at Zaratan AIR, who is presenting the work composed - and decomposed - during their time in Lisbon.
After looking at a mountain some time ago in a mining town and seeing the black, blue, green, red striations, Laura turned their inquiry to the clay and the ceramic process, breaking it down into its material parts and asking about the story of the minerals, oxides, pieces of earth.
Kathyrn Yusoff and Lucy Lippard informed this practice greatly, helping to think through how geology isn’t neutral and in fact has a part in shaping our subjectivities, on a spectrum of extractive resource to human resource. At Zaratan, Laura expanded this intersection of materiality and subjectivities, pushing the western notion of the boundary of human as it is challenged by indigenous relationships to land, by bacteria, and by artificial intelligence. All three are demanding we question the enlightenment belief that man is an individual entity, separate from nature.
For the past month the artist has been engaging in a collaboration between organic materials (kombucha scoby, agar, mycelium, raw clay, salt crystals, cobalt, iron oxide); artificial intelligence (training a bot to create a contemporary improvisational score); and themself, to compose a sculpture with no one author, a sculpture which will begin decomposing as soon as it is composed, in fact, even before.
Ideas of weeds, bacteria crossing borders, energetic sculpture, non-rational data sets, the unseen, have been present.
In “Here is my eyes aren't” the sculpture holds the place of a fluid monument, one that is not memorializing a moment in history but rather is the imprint, the record of an event, a performance. its goal is fluidity and decay; becoming immediately abject and illegible.
The live performance (July 28, 18:00) will engage with the AI generated score as an improvisational exploration into dance scores, technology, translation, and glitch.
 
BIO: LAURA STINGER is a North American transdisciplinary artist. Laura works in sculpture, performance, collaboration, and research. Their practice coalesces around relationship to nature and the other, seeking to queer/disrupt this binary. Laura's most recent work, "Disturbed Landscapes," (with M Rasmussen) brought together living mycelium sculptures, research, and sound and movement artists to create a shifting installation. The interspecies collaboration imagined an interdependent way of life amidst capitalist induced climate chaos. The work drew from decentralized organizational strategies in nature, such as fungi, to structure the process; each artist added or subtracted to the installation as they wished over one week with no hierarchy determining the creative output. Currently they are continuing work on their decomposing sculptures series which explores the possibility of a monument as a site of constant change instead of history in stasis. The monuments are built from organic materials through a series of scores dictated by a machine learning bot, where the durational flux creates an illegible, non-rational object.
https://www.laurastinger.com/
 
* [In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, to access the exhibition the use of sanitary mask is mandatory and entry is subject to maximum capacity, in compliance with hygiene and safety standards.]