Ways of Showing Up / Slow Your Roll, 2024
Epicenter NYC, a local media, arts and community organization, and Department of Transformation, an artist-organized group that prototypes new formats for togetherness and mutual learning, are thrilled to present Ways of Showing Up, a two day series of immersive art, workshops, and performances on July 9th and 10th, 2024, at the legendary Performing Garage in Soho. Centering the artistic process as a form of care for the self and others, the event gathers together artists, therapists, musicians, choreographers, and community practitioners. They will each share tools for collective learning and collaboration that participants can carry away with them. Ways of Showing Up offers new visions for the intersection of art, well-being, and community.
Organized by Epicenter NYC co-founder and visual artist Nitin Mukul, the first day of Ways of Showing Up: Slow Your Roll facilitates an immersive slow art viewing experience in conjunction with a series of experimental musical performances. The work encourages participants to momentarily disconnect from the spectacles of today’s digital media in order to connect with a more meditative and contemplative pace. Mukul’s Durational Paintings are a series that engage with particular micro-atmospheric conditions at the site of their production. These improvisational artworks begin by layering paint in sheets of ice, freezing each layer so it accumulates color and texture. The frozen form is placed outside on an easel and allowed to to melt according to natural weather conditions while it is filmed. The resulting pieces are records of slow transformation, offering a meditative glimpse into elapsing geologic time. Mukul’s intention is to create a space of collective healing, in which viewers can find space to build empathy with more-than-human forces. This slow, responsive work functions both as an empirical reflection of the site on which it is made—recording light, temperatures, time of day, location, and our climate-at-large—while also positing new paradigms for how abstract painting might function as a durational, borderless experience.
Organized by Prem Krishnamurthy and Sam Rauch of Department of Transformation, the second day of Ways of Showing Up: All Together Now? brings together creative practitioners including artists, musicians, teachers, writers, and therapists for a series of experimental workshops, performances, tours, meals, and talks which will collectively explore the questions: How can we design processes for engaging others through artistic action? What are the resources for creative care that exist within both our own close communities and everyday encounters? And what does it mean to participate fully in both life and art?
Participating artists:
Clarinda Mac Low: ElectroSpectrum LivinVisible: Surrender
Neel Murgai: Harmonic Infinity Loops
Ka Baird: Soundtracks for the Bardos
Payal Parekh: Blessed Rest
Aneta Stojnić: First Encounters
Katie Freeman: Storylines
Canal Street Research Association: Canal, Channel, Chanel
Prem Krishnamurthy: Ways of Graphic Design-ing
Oliver Herring: TASK
Andros Zins-Browne: The Chaos Opera
Daniel Pravit Fethke: Untitled Wooster Street (Salads)
Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere: Another Protest Song: Karaoke
