Ornaphonism
October 18-31st 2023
Colonels Row 404A
Governors Island
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Sunday
1-5:30pm
Ornaphonism is an international group art exhibition broadly exploring the relationship between sound, sculpture, and space held at Flux Factory’s house on Governors Island.
Featuring artists from many different time zones and occupied lands including what are now known as Canada, China, France, Kazakhstan, and USA.
Opening Celebration and Performance Series:
Saturday October 21st, 2023, 12-5pm
Featuring Performances by:
He-myong Woo
Yo Vinyl Richie and Choir
Sylvain Soulkaye
GUSHS
Eugene Lew + Grace Villamil
Sliding Scale Tickets for the performances to support artists:
Featured Artists:
Amir Badawi
BB FTTH
Chenxi Shao
Emily Elliott
Eugene Lew
gushes
Grace Villamil
He-myong Woo
Kathryn Lien
Kimberly Lyle
Kite
Ren Mahon
Rosa Valado
Sylvain Souklaye
Yo Vinyl Richie
Zach Hill
Emily Elliott is an artist and arts worker living in Philadelphia. Originally from Kissimmee, Florida, she has undergraduate degrees from Southern Illinois University and a graduate degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Affected by a sense of quiet vastness and sublime associations of the celestial and terrestrial, she works in between sculpture and printmaking to mimic conditions of atmospheric spectacle bonded with emotional response.
@emily.elliottb
Kathryn Lien is an artist and sculptor living in Philadelphia, PA. She received an MFA from the Sculpture + Extended Media program at Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Washington in Seattle. Kate’s studio practice builds narrative installations circling around themes of preservation and transformation – within group dynamics, material objects, and their corporeal relationships. She is currently the Associate Director of Undergraduate Fine Arts & Design at University of Pennsylvania.
@katekatekatekatelawrence
Kimberly Lyle’s practice explores the implications of technology on our relationships with each other and the more than human world. Many of her projects challenge the social values historically embedded within these tools by misusing or subverting their conventional systems of language and logic. She has participated in exhibitions and symposiums at ISEA (Gwangju, Korea); International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art (Berlin, Germany); Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference (Tempe, AZ); Tucson Museum of Art, and the Phoenix Art Museum. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies at Sculpture Space, Mildred’s Lane, Elsewhere Museum, Signal Culture, and the Vermont Studio Center. She received an MFA in Intermedia from Arizona State University and a BA in Psychology. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture & Technology at the University of Georgia.
@kimber.lyle
Rosa Valado is a multi-media installation artist creating socially engaging environments for interior and exterior spaces. Her social practice weaves together sectors of community and provides a platform for connection, dialogue, and activism leading to social change. (www.rosavalado.com) Valado’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships – among them: Foundation for Contemporary Art (‘22), Queens Council on the Arts (‘22), The O’Halloran Foundation (‘07, ‘08, ‘09), The Pollock-Krasner Foundation (‘05), The George Sugarman Foundation (‘04), The Jerome Foundation (‘98), The Nancy H. Gray Foundation (‘98,’99), The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation (‘91-‘92), The Brooklyn Arts Council (‘94), The Bronx Council on the Arts MAPS (‘99), as well as numerous private foundations. She has received residencies and fellowships from The Camargo Foundation (‘05), The Abrams Art Center (‘01), Yaddo (‘91,’94), The Virginia Center for The Creative Arts (‘96,’97,’07,’09, 14), and Sculpture Space (‘92,’06). Rosa Valado’s public art projects include Gateway at King Manor Museum (‘22), The Flag Project at Rockefeller Center (‘22), Hope Street Public Art through Front Room Gallery (‘14); participation in Poles Apart Poles Together at the 51st Venice Biennale co-lateral projects (‘05); WTC Memorial at City Hall in Utica, NY (‘06); several architectural models and installations along the Williamsburg, Brooklyn Waterfront (‘98,’99) featured on Channel 2 news and funded by the Nancy H. Gray Foundation; a borders project sponsored by KNIE/Gallerie 5020 (Salzburg), “Shell & Shell” on the banks of the Salzaach River, involving communities in Austria & Germany, received extensive coverage on Austrian T.V., newspapers, and radio. In the Bronx, sponsored by the Jerome Foundation, The Shell Sanctuary at Drew Garden by the Bronx River served for several years as part of the West Farms Community and Drew Garden educational project and received wide coverage in the Sunday section of The New York Times.
@rosavalado
Ren Mahon (b. 1993, Los Angeles) is an artist based in Chicago. Their practice examines the dialectic between viewership and visuality. Charting relational connections between materials and their interactions, they unite practices of craft and assemblage to build an aesthetic logic of change and transformation. Mahon earned their MFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and Architecture and BA in Design Media Art from University of California Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include: Zach’s Crab Shack, Urban Glass, and Pilot Projects. Mahon works as a furniture builder, their primary expertise in wood and glass.
@renmahon
Zach Hill is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator working between sculpture, drawing, and moving image. He has been awarded the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship and Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship along with residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Bunker Projects, RAIR, Elsewhere Museum, and Stove Works. His work has been exhibited and screened at Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; Frontera Garibaldi, Mexico City; High Tide and Peep Projects, Philadelphia, PA; Skylab Gallery, Columbus, Ohio; Studio 10, Brooklyn, NY; Comfort Station, Chicago, IL; James Black, Vancouver; and VisArts, Rockville, MD. Hill holds a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently the Digital Arts & Sculpture Technician at Haverford College. He is the head chef and owner of Zach’s Crab Shack, a queer contemporary art gallery hiding within the facade of a campy, beach-side crab stand. Hill lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
@bottomaspirations
Sylvain Souklaye is a Brooklyn based French-Caribbean multi-modal artist. He is obsessed with sampling intimacies about people who don’t belong to a determinate identity, gender, class, colour or nationality. Sylvain Souklaye performances are a collage of individual memories which are relived for and via the audience. Self-taught, he began performing with vandalism in Lyon, and then intimate happenings, radio experimentation and action poetry. He later developed digital art installations using field recording techniques as a narrative layer while pursuing his writer’s path. Among his best known pieces are la blackline, a 5-year durational radio performance about socio-economic survival and urban absurdity, le déserteur a digital art installation dwelling on the notion of abandonment, TME a docudrama performance exploring self-inflicted amnesia and resilience and MIGRANT MARKET a remake of the slave market updated for the uber economy. Sylvain Souklaye methods characteristically involve intense physical acts as well as the use of unsettling intimacy.
@sylvain.souklaye
He-myong Woo is a New York City based interdisciplinary artist who weaves together fiber, sound, image, body and voice through improvisational gestures. His work contends with intergenerational memories of war, poverty, exile and modernity and investigates alchemies that unearths the ancestral wisdom we must carry forward amidst a future of monumental change.
@he_myong
Jennae Santos (she/they) is a story-oriented interdisciplinary music and performance artist born in the Bay Area, based in Brooklyn, with ancestral roots across the Philippines archipelago. Fed by Indigenous Filipino psychology and combat, the feminist occult, plant medicine, coastal ecologies, and animal architecture poeticized through the lens of genderqueer fluidity, decolonization, bloodlines, mythmaking, love songs, and pleasure autonomy, they produce spectral collaborative incarnations of performance spanning chamber prog rock band, movement cycle, tea ceremony, drone, ritualized theatre, video, installation, sound sculpture and other multimedia happenings under progressive art-rock project, gushes, and sensory installation partnership, Tree+Oyster. “Moon Drone II” is a devised piece by gushes featuring meta-groove drummer Ricky Petraglia, and researcher, improviser, and percussionist Jess Tsang, inspired by Tsang’s practice in tactile feedback instrumentation and the musical translation of how objects shape our lives.
@gushes__
Chenxi Shao (she/her/they/them) is an artist and designer originally from Beijing, China, now based in Philadelphia. Their work explores dynamic identity, humanism, and environmental ethics, bridging the realms of sculpture and animation. With a background in ecological research, Chenxi integrates ecological concerns into their art, addressing pressing societal and environmental issues. Their contributions have been showcased at various venues including the Galleries at Moore, Vox Populi Gallery, Yavapai College Art Gallery, Worthless Studios, Atelier, Galleries at Delaware County Community College, and Jianshexiang Gallery.
@chxshao
Kite (Dr. Suzanne Kite) is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition,and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and a Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Concordia University, Montreal. Kite’s scholarship and practice investigate contemporary Lakȟóta ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance, often working in collaboration with family and community members. Recently, Kite has been developing body interfaces for machine learning driven performance and sculptures generated by dreams, and experimental sound and video work. Kite is currently a distinguished Artist in Residence and Assistant Professor of American and Indigenous Studies, Bard College and a Research Associate and Residency Coordinator for the Abundant Intelligences (Indigenous AI) project.
@kitekitekitekitekite
Amir Badawi is a visual artist based in New York. He plays with materiality and methodology to explore the notion of what it means to be the human animal, how we create symbols, histories, and their corresponding physical objects.
@amir_h_badawi
Grace Villamil is a first-generation Filipino-American and multidisciplinary artist exploring interconnectivity between humans and nature through installation, video, and sound. She has performed live-video manipulations as an accompaniment to electronic and live instruments in venues such as Southbank London, Elbphilharmonie Kleiner Saal Hamburg, The Broad/Redcat Los Angeles, Issue Project Room NYC, and in Boston w/ ACT, an MIT media lab.
@viagracia
Eugene Lew @hungrymonsters
BB FTTH
My name is Sabina Fattakh, residing in Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan. I hold a degree in applied mathematics and a bachelor’s degree in pedagogy and psychology. My pursuits encompass teaching mathematics to children while also engaging as a techno club DJ. In my endeavors, I consistently contemplate the processes of cognitive thinking formation and the reinforcement of cognitive distortions. Furthermore, I am an integral part of a queer space team, comprising actors involved in artistic and performative practices within the realm of contemporary art and new literature. Our approach emphasizes a decolonial perspective and values local knowledge.
@bb.ftth
Richard “Yo! Vinyl Richie” Nathaniel is a Turntablist, composer, and performer who uses his experiences from Hip Hop to evolve as a sound partitioner. Throughout his travels, Yo! Vinyl has developed his skills as a DJ to be used more technical on his use of the turntable as an instrument. Inspired by various music genres and incidentals of performing, Richie is willing to follow the waves of the groove. While being an ambassador of the international Hip Hop collective, End of the Weak, he also creates as a member of the electronic music group Dotcrawl and the sound group Vinyl Quartet. His collaboration with Moko Fukuyama, American Recordings, was recently presented at The Kitchen (NYC).
@yovinyl
will owen originally from North Carolina, US is an artist, composer, and curator currently based in Philadelphia, PA. Owen has exhibited, taught, or performed internationally in China, Denmark, France, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iceland, Freetown Christiania, Wales, Pakistan, and pre-war Russia. Additionally, will has shown work extensively nationally at such institutions as The Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), Philadelphia Water Works Museum, Black Mountain College Museum, Governors Island, Smith College, Florida State University, University of Florida, University of Maryland, Independent Seaport Museum (Philadelphia) and Flux Factory (NYC).
Will has curated exhibitions in Denmark, On interstate buses, Governors Island, and Iceland in 2024 as a co-curator of INTO Festival, a traveling international arts festival, which began in Denmark in Fall 2023. Will was a curatorial member of Little Berlin Gallery in Philadelphia from 2013-2019.
@weeowie