Assembly

Utilizing a variety of media including gardens, quilts and textiles, bibliographies, found objects, local soil or clays, and people, this group exhibition explores the act of collaborative creation. In doing so, these artists actively reflect, represent, and embrace the abundance of experimental artistry that has sustained SPACE’s visual art program for 20 years.

Emily Carris-Duncan is an artist and co-founder of The Art Dept Collective and High Pastures, a new nonprofit interdisciplinary studio and retreat space dedicated to supporting  the work of marginalized creative practitioners in Vermont. Her/Their work explores the materiality of trauma primarily using textile techniques like natural dyeing, quilting, knitting, yarn spinning and embroidery. Inspired by the work of artists like Alison Saar, Kara Walker,  Lorna Simpson,  Rosie Lee Tompkins, and the Quilters of Gee’s Bend, Carris-Duncan links the personal and cultural legacy of slavery while mulling the question of where trauma lives after the act. Their work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including at the Cooper Union in New York, Islington Art Factory in London, The Colored Girls Museum, Past Present Projects, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, as well as EFA Project Space in New York  Most recently they were a visiting fellow at The Center For Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2021 Resident Artist in Natural Dye at Stone Barnes and member of the Smithsonian African American Craft Initiative. They currently live and work in Vermont and Philadelphia.

E. Saffronia Downing (b. 1992, Baltimore) makes site-specific ceramic sculpture to explore entanglements between the built and natural worlds. She received her BA in Studio Art from Hampshire College and her MFA in Ceramics from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Downing is the recipient of awards and residencies such as the Lunder Institute of American Art, Oxbow School of Art Fellowship, ACRE Residency, and Salem Art Works Studio Artist Residency. She is currently a teaching fellow in Arts & Design at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.

MCXT is a creative partnership between Monica Canilao and Xara Thustra, born from a joint desire to communicate care and empowerment. MCXT collaborations have emphasis on celebration, self worth, and BIPOC, Femme, Trans, Queer, differently-abled bodies, Economic community, and self determination resulting in murals, performance, happenings, installation, painting, and film in both traditional and non-traditional spaces. “We celebrate! we ask/beg for nothing.” Canilao is a Bay Area native with a deep investment in home, community, and the passage of time. A new narrative is spun as Canilao weaves her experiences with physical remnants of past lives. 
Thustra’s hand provided many of the signature visual images of the anti-displacement and anti-war struggles of the 1990s. Inseparable from resistance and queer community in San Francisco California, their work first appeared as graffiti during the height of the first dot-com boom displacing 10s of thousands of working class people. This led to artistic collaboration with and in support of neighborhood organizations such as the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, and the Coalition on Homelessness. Together as MCXT, Canilao and Thustra’s combined histories and futures are devoutly dedicated to centering and uplifting the most vulnerable people in society first. They support these and our communities with mutual aid generated through their creative practices using combined talents, resources, and networks to promote understanding of community care. Through their act of creating illuminated immersive art, MCXT upholds a narrative of both change and joy.

Landon Newton is an artist and gardener whose research driven practice explores the participatory relationship between plants and people. Newton is known for her project, The Abortion Herb Garden. Her work has been included in Frieze New York with A.I.R. Gallery, WIENWOCHE 2021, Vienna, Austria, CICA Museum, South Korea, EcoFutures: Deep Trash, London, UK, and Open Engagement at the Queens Museum, Queens, NY. Recent awards include an Emergency Artist Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and On Our Radar 2021, Creative Capital. She has received fellowships and residencies from Denniston Hill, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Studios at MASS MoCA, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has a BA in History from Smith College and an MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She works and gardens in Brooklyn, NY.

olivier is a research-based artist+writer temporarily based in Chicago. They hold an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They also attended the Academy of Visual Arts in Hong Kong Baptist University and Maine College of Art. They have lectured, performed, exhibited and published works in artist-run spaces, online platforms, libraries, galleries and institutions in London, Hong Kong, New England, New York, and Chicago. They are the founder of an institutional critique project, The Museum (2016-2022), and a speculative UFO archive project, The UFO Lobby (2021-). For the past ten years, their time-machine has been stuck in this dimension. So it goes.

Erin Woodbrey is a New England-based artist, raised in Maine, whose body of interdisciplinary work utilizes sculpture, printmaking, photography, and time-based media. Woodbrey’s work seeks to parse the fused and knotted qualities of the current global environmental crisis as examined through objects, the landscape, and the relationships between bodies and architectures. Presented, piece by piece, as a study of fabricated and naturally occurring units of space and time, Woodbrey’s gaze wide in scope and is trained on the interrelated qualities of process, time, material, nature, the body, and architecture. Using sometimes insubstantial materials to depict what seems simultaneously indestructible and delicate, Woodbrey explores the tension between permanence and transience, growth and decay. Often involving a dialog on contemporary ecological discourse and new materialisms, Woodbrey’s work asks essential questions about how the functions of objects and space inform, mirror, and tend to the human condition and more broadly, conditions of being.