Winter Workspace 2022: Open Studios

Caroline is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York and originally from Sydney, Australia, who works across a hybridized aesthetic of cross-cultural movement, embodied research and new media to center peripheral bodies and narratives. She traverses distinct and personal systems that encompass green screening, botany, robotics, poetry, ceramics and mixed realities (AR/VR) through a humorous, playful and at times, irreverent aesthetic.

Garcia continues her research on Indigenous Philippine botany, with a particular focus on the process of growing plants that have been historically used to make arrow poison. Prototyping an installation that interacts with these plants, Garcia’s sculptural forms reflect on the architectural structures and operational theories of the greenhouses on site at Wave Hill as possible apparatuses to exercise diasporic refusal and resistance in the face of colonial narratives at large.

Christopher Lin is a Brooklyn-based artist who visualizes the ecologies humans create and inhabit in the Anthropocene through surreal collaborations with nature. By combining elements of scientific investigation and material exploration, he makes performative sculptures and installations that incorporate familiar objects interacting in unfamiliar ways to encourage viewers to question the framework of the everyday world.

Lin continues an ongoing body of work, Future Fossils, using the studio as a site for a large, accumulated installation, investigating the processes of both fossilization and propagation. Reflecting on the passage of time, Lin propagates discarded cuttings from the compost pile at Wave Hill and studies fossil arrangements from the nearby Palisades along the Hudson. Additionally, Lin experiments with outdoor installations to create sites for collaboration with the larger ecologies present at Wave Hill.

Xavier Robles looks at Mexican migration to the United States and its connections to forms of placemaking that allow for brown and Latin neighborhoods to emerge as acts of resistance and cultural self-preservation. In talking about placemaking, he specifically focuses on practices of leisure as a counterpoint to exploitative systems of production challenging the ways we see specific bodies beyond their labor capacities.

Robles develops a type of collective memory, a dream-like cartography or counter map, through photographs that invite people to reflect on aspects of care, personal desires, introspection and leisure activities. Digging into his archive of images from gardens and green spaces he has visited, and researching the history of Wave Hill, Robles expands his research on pastimes in New York by photographing, collecting plants on the grounds and printing the collected and found imagery.

Informed by their upbringing as a trans-continental adoptee and their current gender-transition, 2022 New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow Deep Pool explores the open-ended possibilities of making meaning when one's own history and identity is in flux and undetermined. Through photographs of flowering plants and architectural interventions, Deep Pool stages these clichés in unexpected ways to reframe the ways they can be interpreted.

During the Winter Workspace, Deep Pool will explore content and themes related to their exhibition in the Sun Porch in the fall. They plan to experiment with processes of image making and methods of display that expand photography into a sculptural practice.

2022 New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow Amina Ross creates videos, sculptures, sound installations and situations that consider the body, place and self to reexamine systems of power and develop survival strategies for black, queer, trans and femme communities. Ross’s work involving facilitation and creation of spaces to exist and thrive in safety stems from their familial spiritual practice of Lucumí (Santeria), work in queer art collectives 3rd Language and F4F, and their time with the black solidarity economics working group Cooperation for Liberation. Investigating specific realms, Ross’s multisensory installations provide an embodied experience to process, exercise agency and flourish, drawing correlations with the natural world.

During the Winter Workspace program, Ross will continue to explore the intersections of their digital, performance, text and sound-based practice through daily movement work, writing exercises, sketching for film and animation, and meetings with collaborators. With an interest in “the underground” from their project Man’s Country about a former queer bathhouse, Ross will research hierbas amargas (bitter herbs), plants' root systems and soil onsite to investigate the preparation of spiritual baths, subterranean networks of communication, and emotively tending to the earth. Making these interconnections during the Workspace will inform their multimedia environment that they will create in the Sunroom in the fall.