Artist collaborative Statement:.

By wrestling, laboring together, engaging with sculptural objects built to degrade, and organizing materials alongside one another's bodies, we resist corporeal vulnerabilities and reclaim our power/agency through performing of objectifications of our own design. In this way we look at the treatment of our self-objectification and otherness within everyday private and performative public spaces, creating distances between the maker/self as a mechanism of survival/resistance/self-preservation.  

We examine our daily embodied relationships with objects and materials. Working with raw building materials, mould making, welding, re-purposing and transforming found objects through whittling and manipulating we find the objects that can live as stand alone or become performative as our collaborators. 

It is important to us to source and build our own materials because we value the histories of our craft, rendering the entire process of production as performance. In this way we reject the culture of everyday readymades that are easily consumed and discarded. We cast essential tools, such as a hammer, out of plaster so that when we "use" it like a hammer; it shatters. This action playfully conflates ideas of productivity and inefficacy, and questions the functionality of work as we know it, what it is, and what it looks like.

Artist Individual Bios:..

Amanda Hunt: 

Amanda Hunt is a Brooklyn based performing artist, curator and object maker. Hunt has performed solo works at Judson Church, AUNTS, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Larkin Arts (Harrisonburg, VA), Segundo Piso (Puebla, MX), and Open Engagement at the Oakland Museum. Hunt has attended the Old Furnace Artist Residency (Harrisonburg, VA) and has worked with Kira Alker + Elke Luyten, Sam Kim, IV Castellanos, and De Facto Dance, and Kathy Westwater (2013 - present). They completed their BFA in at New York University and studied performance at the Headlong Performance Institute in Philadelphia. Current recipient of Franklin Furnace Award 2019.

IV Castellanos: 

IV Castellanos (one/ones, they/them) is a Brooklyn based abstract performance artist, curator, and sculptor. Castellanos has performed at the Queens Museum (New York), Railyard (Santa Fe), dfbrl8r (Chicago), Gruentaler9 (Berlin), and Grace Exhibition Space (Brooklyn), Institute for X (Aarhus, Denmark) to name a few. One has served as a core contributor to the Brooklyn performance art community, on the Artists of Color Council for Movement Research and have sat on the Brooklyn International Performance Art, Movement Research and Exponential Festival curatorial committee. One has an ongoing collaboration with Amanda Hunt and the Feminist Art Group. Recipient of Franklin Furnace Award 2019 and Castellanos is a Franklin Furnace 2022 Panelist.