KALISOLAITE ‘UHILA
Kalisolaite ‘Uhila is a New Zealnd-based performance artist, coming to New York City for Stardust Clusters: Meetings and Meangs
ASIA STEWART
Asia Stewart is a performance artist whose conceptual work centers her body as a living archive. Based in the United States, she devises rituals that reflect the way she weathers life in a deeply extractive society. Many of her performances unfold as social experiments that negotiate terms of agency and power with audiences. Stewart’s performances have been supported by organizations that include The Bronx Museum, The Shed, Franklin Furnace, A.I.R. Gallery, Marc Straus Gallery, Marble House Project, GALLIM, The Watermill Center, and the Brooklyn Arts Council.
Stewart routinely questions how live art can be documented and represented across multiple mediums. Her photographs and videos have been exhibited at venues across the United States, including the Mercury Store, Untitled Space, NARS Foundation, Goodyear Arts, A.I.R. Gallery, Kellen Gallery, and Anthology Film Archives. Her first series of prints is also held in the permanent collection of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC.
STARDUST CLUSTER: MEETINGS WITH MEANING
Co-Curators, Marita Isobel Solberg and Jill McDermid
Gathering forces, gathering knowledge, gathering wisdom, gathering hearts. Grace Exhibition Space now starts a series of local, national and international performance art evenings, dinners and talks delving into questions and reflections on our connections with Nature. In this can be culture, agriculture, embodied culture, connection to animals, plants, trees, bodies and the likes. Humans are part of the deep collaboration, but we have a long tradition of abusing, consuming and ruining our connection. How can we connect through our human way of living today? What changes can we make? What life rituals could be different? We gather performance artists with different backgrounds, a mix of indigenous, native, nature people and city dwellers, reflecting on their connection and belonging to the natural world, land and to each other.
The goal is to create soulful and self-searching performance art that blows our minds, conversations that can trigger our inner marrow and meetings that are deep and meaningful. Our mode of communication is Performance Art, a form that is in movement, space and time, that can involve all art forms, including actions and everyday objects, sharing complicated and deep thoughts and ideas.
We will revolve around the loss of the third wall, an imaginary boundary, allowing the artists and the audience-participants to create a direct dialogue between one another. We will be questioning the boundaries that separate us, how the natural world has no walls, while many of the societies that man has created are limiting. Building societies that are collaborative, but include destruction and violence, while emulating a cohesive order and balance. We are encouraging sharing communities that help one another through music, listening, healing, feeding and giving.
Grace Exhibition Space opened in 2006 as a home for International Performance Art. GES has hosted numerous performance artists, participating in multiple international festivals and art fairs. Our hope is to create the appropriate environment and means for collaborative research between the multicultural neighborhoods of metropolitan New York. We work to establish an environment that promotes our mission, as we seek to bring together local and international artists who will be interested in open exploration and collaboration with the members of our community.