Name: Second Sundays: August 2023
Start: 2023-08-13
End: 2023-08-13
Location: Pioneer Works

Second Sundays is our signature event series that engages Pioneer Works disciplines through live music, food, artists’ open studios, and programs. 

, our monthly open house featuring live music, food and workshops that activate our campus in partnership with artists-in-residents and community members in Red Hook.Join us August 13th for a special ode to summer in Red Hook featuring live music in the garden from Iceblink, Erin Durant, an automatic drawing performance in PW’s Main hall by Juan Miguel Marin and much more!

Food and drink by Dachi and Pioneer Works Bar.

is a collective of friends cooking food inspired by their upbringing and heritage in Japan, Korea, Cambodia, and India.

August's Second Sunday is made possible by Nissan.

Nissan

 brings together a selection of artist-in-residence alumni Xin Liu’s recent and ongoing projects. Comprising sculptures, video, virtual reality, and an outdoor installation, the presentation expands upon the artist’s explorations into themes that include space travel, vitality, mutation, and immortality.

As a way of examining humanity’s innate desire to sustain and to perpetuate its species, Xin has created a new series of mixed-media sculptures inspired by biological and medical innovations such as cryonics and egg freezing, each designed to interfere with natural life cycles. Embedded with a cooling mechanism that causes thin layers of frost to appear on its surface, the works also reference scientists’ research into subglacial lakes in Antarctica and ice-covered oceans deep beneath the surface of moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, where probing devices search for traces of life from ancient and unknown worlds.

(2019-2020), a three-part project comprising a performance conducted in outer space, a two-channel video installation, and a virtual reality experience. Partially realized during Xin’s residency at Pioneer Works, the series centers on the fantastical journey of her wisdom tooth, which traveled aboard the International Space Station before returning to Earth. Carried by a crystalline robotic sculpture engineered by the artist, the tooth metaphorically becomes a newborn entity as it enters an infinite darkness. While the video installation mixes documentary footage with dreamlike imagery of Xin’s performance, the virtual reality component allows viewers to experience the tooth’s journey from a first-hand perspective.

The artist, together with collaborator Lucia Monge, similarly sent potato seeds into Earth’s lower orbit in March 2020, initiating a series titled 

(2020-ongoing). Even though more than four thousand varieties of the root vegetable exist in the world, only eight types are grown commercially in the United States, and only one has been selected by the Chinese National Space Administration to be cultivated in miniature ecosystems sent to the moon. Conceived as a response to the rise of homogeneity both in agriculture and in politics, Xin and Monge’s project casts potatoes as subjects that call for a diversified imagination of what the future can look like, particularly for space exploration in non-colonial terms. A selection of these spacefaring potatoes will be grown and harvested in Pioneer Works’s garden, where the outdoor installation will give way to a dynamic host of educational programming.

Executive producers: Gershon Dublon, Justin Durazzo

Producer: Reese Donohue, Qinya (Jenny) Guo, Jacky Tran, slow immediate LLC

EBIFA Sculpture engineers: Ross McBee, Noah Feehan, Amy Lemaire, Dave Seidman

VR Executive producers: Qinya (Jenny) Guo

VR artists: Kyle Szostek, Nate Turley, Lily Fang

is supported in part by VIVE Arts, as well as public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

was created with support from MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, Sundance Institute New Frontier Story Lab, D-BOX Technologies, and Bose Corporation. It is additionally in the collection of X Museum and Kadist Foundation.

 (b. 1991, Xinjiang/China) is an artist, performer and engineer whose recent research and interests center on the verticality of space, extraterrestrial explorations and cosmic metabolism. She is the Arts Curator at MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, a member of the inaugural ONX Studio program founded by the New Museum’s NEW INC and Onassis USA, and also a current artist-in-residence in SETI Institute. Xin is recipient of numerous award, including Porches Chinese Young Artist of the Year 2021, 30 Under 30 Asia, X Museum Triennial Award and the Van Lier Fellowship from Museum of Arts and Design, and has been commissioned by institutions such as M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Ars Electronica (Austria), Rhizome (USA), Media Art Xploration Festival (USA), Onassis Foundation Enter Program (US) and Abandon Normal Devices Festival (UK). An advisor for the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, Xin graduated from MIT Media Lab with a master’s degree in Media Arts and Sciences, after receiving her M.F.A from Rhode Island School of Design and B.E. from Tsinghua University in Beijing.


 is a Peruvian artist whose work explores the ways humans position themselves within the natural world and relate to other living beings, especially plants. For the past 13 years, she has organized 

, a yearly “walking forest” performance that has led to the creation of green spaces in Lima, London, New York, and Paris. Other recent projects include exploring vulnerability through plant respiration, and a "fungi broadcast" about deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. Monge has shown her work internationally, including at the Queens Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art in Lima, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, Ars Electronica, and the Havana and OCAT (Shenzhen) biennales. Her work has been featured in publications such as MoMA’s Uneven Growth, Global Performance Studies, and Eco-Lógicas Latinas, among others. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from Universidad Católica del Perú, is a founding member of FIBRA collective, and Assistant Professor of Art at Amherst College.

 is supported in part by VIVE Arts, as well as public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Seedlings and Offsprings

Xin Liu: Seedlings and Offsprings

, the first institutional solo exhibition of artist Jenson Leonard, centers on a titular film that explores the velocity and momentum of Blackness as it relates to the philosophical concept of acceleration—the notion that the only way out of capitalism is through its intensification.

, a spectral Michael Jackson Halloween mask recites a surrealistic quarterly earnings reports. Building on a 2017 essay by artist Aria Dean titled “Notes on Blacceleration,” the short film centers on the ways in which the Black subject grapples with its commodified status within the labor market despite—or, resultant of—its own history as a commodity, stemming back to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Completed during Leonard’s residency at Pioneer Works in 2021, the video utilizes uncanny humor as a mechanism to expose the shared grammars inherent in Afro-pessimism and speculative finance.

Within the exhibition, the film repeats simultaneously across two grids of computer monitors situated on ergonomic desks that flank the gallery, mimicking the workstations that can be found ubiquitously across stock trading floors and financial institutions. Sculptures modeled after computer keyboards and mouses are displayed on the desks, each rendered inoperable by concentric riffs that symbolize the erratic transformations caused by the flows of capital. The appearance of Jackson represents a transmogrification of its own; whereas many have aligned the controversial pop icon’s bleached skin and surgical procedures with Black self-hatred, Leonard positions his bodily modifications as a radical rupture from racial paradigms of being.

In Leonard’s own words, “Workflow is defined as the sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion. My film seeks to disabuse notions of completion, whether it be completion of the human, the nation state, or civil society. As Dean notes, Blackness is ‘always already accelerationist’ via its incongruence with Western humanism, a wrench thrown into the locomotive gears of ‘capital and subjecthood.’ Her essay prompts us to look toward the way that the Black has been historically constructed outside of the human, as coterminous with the slave. Slavery therefore represents a kind of proto-automation, a mass forced coercion of labor, and the Blacks’ transition from object to subject calls for a reappraisal of accelerationist ideas about the (non)human entity and its revolutionary potential.”

The artist continues, “There is something about going to work—the repetition of it—that gets inscribed at an epigenetic level, as an everyday, embodied violence. From there, I thought about the panoptic workplace (open air plan, transparent yet closely surveilled, management that does not have to be in the room to be monitoring you), the fetish of efficiency (ergonomic mouse and keyboards so you can work longer), biometric data of a labor force (fingerprint and facial scans to help reduce repeat processing tasks). All of these methods to maximize profits and production can be traced back to methods worked out and perfected in the cotton and sugar cane fields hundreds of years prior.”


Drawn to ideas of flight, escape, and poetic blur, 

’s (b. 1990, Detroit, Michigan) work takes form out of the collapsed context of the internet—often critiquing its slippage of meaning and techno-capital excess more generally, while pointing out its attraction at the same time. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pratt Institute, and has completed residencies at Obracadobra (Oaxaca, Mexico), Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo, NY) and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY). His work has been featured in 

is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Workflow

Jenson Leonard: Workflow

Paloma Izquierdo and Kyle Richardson work together. She examines techno-sociality through infrastructures, object animism and disrupting social spaces. She is concerned with surveillance and its relation to sex, labor, and the feminized body. She merges design and sculpture, using the disarming perception of feminized objects to subvert expectations by applying technologies of control. She went to the Cooper Union and to the Yale School of Art.

Paloma Izquierdo and Kyle Richardson

Kenseth Armstead has created provocative conceptual art for three decades. Historic exhibitions that feature his work include: 

Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art

It’s Happening! Celebrating 50 Years of Public Art in NYC Parks

 in Central Park, NY, NY, presented by NYC Parks, Art in the Parks; 

 at the Studio Museum in Harlem (their first video exhibition in 2003); 

 at the Brooklyn Museum; and Modern Heroics, 

75 years of African American Expressionism

Kenseth Armstead has created provocative conceptual art for three decades. Historic exhibitions that feature his work include: Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art; It’s Happening! Celebrating 50 Years of Public Art in NYC Parks in Central Park, NY, NY, presented by NYC Parks, Art in the Parks; Race in Digital Space at the MIT List Visual Arts Center; Veni Vidi Video at the Studio Museum in Harlem (their first video exhibition in 2003); Open House: Working in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum; and Modern Heroics, 75 years of African American Expressionism at the Newark Museum.

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01_armstead_boulevard_of_african_monarchs - kenseth armstead

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08_armstead_boulevard_of_african_monarchs - kenseth armstead

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05_armstead_boulevard_of_african_monarchs - kenseth armstead

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06_armstead_boulevard_of_african_monarchs - kenseth armstead

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Kenseth Armstead

John Reynolds is a New York based artist. He has an MFA in painting from Brooklyn College CUNY, where he has taught 2-D design. Recently, John’s art practice has been influenced by emotional connections around issues of queerness and the global climate crisis. His paintings aim to reconcile the space between imagined futures of queer theory and futures in the era of global warming. His canvases represent a liminal space, where he contemplates human impermanence and landscapes that become less and less familiar.

Before completing his MFA in 2023, John worked in other creative fields in New York–including advertising and branding–and decided to fully devote himself to being a painter.

John Reynolds

Magdalena Dukiewicz is a Polish-born visual artist based in Brooklyn. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Complutense University in Madrid.
Dukiewicz’s work is grounded in her process and the materials used. She juxtaposes organic and bodily products (her own blood and hair, among others) with upcycled and repurposed industrial components. Each piece provokes visceral reactions while welcoming open-ended associations and ambiguities. Dukiewicz plays with those culturally and politically charged bodily products, exploring how their perceptions linked to the changing contexts. She presents the body as a revolutionary space of antagonism and freedom, expression and research, self-definition and power, identity, and gender.

Magdalena Dukiewicz's work is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Polish Cultural Institute New York

Magdalena Dukiewicz

Java Jones engages environmentally and virtually sensitive methods to sculpture, painting, and image making through an anti-disciplinary lens. Jones describes their process as an act of feeling and imagining innerwise, oscillating between figuration and abstraction. ‘Inner-’ here refers to irreducible spaces necessary for refusing, for living, for imagining beyond–tilling an autobiographical ground for discursive reflections and formations. The artist's practice traverses themes related to quiet photography and haptic memory, critical love and home buildin’, and abstraction and the burden of identity. Currently, Jones is working on their forthcoming monograph, “on the edge of a dream: one last dance with/in flesh.”

Java Jones

Utsa Hazarika is an artist and writer based in New York. Her research-based practice ranges across video, installation and sculpture, and explores how an interdisciplinary dialogue between art and social research can push us to think about power, memory and resistance. Her work has exhibited internationally, including at the Queens Museum (US), Cemeti Institute (Indonesia), and Museum of the City of New York (US). She has attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, and residencies in Asia and the United States, including MASS MoCA (US), Lijiang Studio (China), and Khoj (India). Her research has been published in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (UK), Trans Asia Photography Review (US) and The Caravan (India).

Utsa Hazarika

Vandana Jain is an artist and textile designer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work explores the intersections of pattern and symbol, and spirituality and consumerism. She uses a variety of materials, most notably sugar, shattered auto glass and artists tape.

Recently, she has started making weavings with things found in “free” piles around Brooklyn, used alongside more traditional weaving techniques and materials. Her compostions are improvised directly on the loom, inspired directly by the material on hand. She is interested in systems of value, such as how cheap it is to buy a mylar birthday banner, and how expensive it is to knit your own sweater.

Vandana Jain

Ryan Decker (b. 1997) was raised in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He received a BS from Appalachian State University in 2019. Primarily working digitally, Decker is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates animations, furniture, VR experiences, live projections, sculpture, and digital paintings. These works focus on the rapid oscillation between the digital and the physical that’s experienced in everyday life, blurring the line between what is real and virtual. Decker’s first solo show opened May 2022 at Superhouse Gallery in Manhattan, New York. He has also exhibited with Emma Scully Gallery (NY), Good Naked (NY), Jonald Dudd (NY), Superchief Gallery (FL/NY), and Nth Degree Gallery (NC). Decker lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Ryan Decker

徐冠宇 Guanyu Xu (b.1993 Beijing) is an artist currently based in Chicago and a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the recipient of the Chicago DCASE Artist Grant (2022), CENTER Development Grant (2021), Hyéres International Festival Prize (2020), PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai Exposure Award (2020), Philadelphia Photo Arts Center Annual Competition (2019), Lensculture Emerging Talent Award (2019), and Kodak Film Photo Award (2019). He has received artist residencies including ACRE (Chicago, IL), Light Work (Syracuse, NY), and Latitude (Chicago, IL). His works have been exhibited and screened internationally including the Aperture Foundation, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New Orlean Museum of Art, New Orleans; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wesleyan University, Middletown; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Mint Museum, Charlotte; 36th Kasseler Dokfest, Germany, and others. His work can be found in public collections including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, and New Orleans Museum of Art. His works have been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, ArtAsiaPacific, The New Yorker, W Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Dazed, and China Photographic Publishing House.

Guanyu Xu

Issei Herr uses the vast sound-world of the cello to expose openness, vulnerability, and a sense of wonder in her intricately looped and layered compositions. On her debut album 

, released in Spring 2023 on NNA Tapes, Issei distills her musical memories as a classically-trained performer and weaves together bold new narratives, centered on themes of possibility, becoming, and transformation. Upon its release, the album received critical praise and attention from platforms such as Bandcamp Daily (as Album of the Day), Stereogum, Our Culture, New Sounds, I Care If You Listen, Foxy Digitalis, and Them, and landed in the Top 10 of the Billboard Classical Crossover charts. Her live performance highlights include opening for Geotic at Public Records in NYC, and shows in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Boston.

Trained as a classical cellist at Juilliard, Issei began her performance career as a collaborator - featuring as a solo cellist in live performances of Rachika Nayar’s 

, and premiering a solo cello work by Nico Muhly, amongst many other collaborations.

Issei Herr

Join ceramics artist and former Pioneer Works resident, Sage Vouse, to imagine the future of cars with clay using AI. Participants will input their futuristic car descriptions into DALL-E for a 2-D rendering that will inspire their 3-D clay model designs using arts and craft materials, legos and more! 
 
August’s Second Sunday is made possible by Nissan. Together, we’re creatively exploring the future of cars.

IMAGINING THE FUTURE OF CARS

Condensed Matters is an audiovisual series and archive of complex scientific ideas made small. Big ideas are condensed into their most essential form by scientists and experts who exist intimately beside them, think about them and devote their life to their analysis. These were created by Nadja Oertelt for Scientific Controversies, one of the signature series from the science studios at Pioneer Works.

Condensed Matters Screening

Join the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York at the sidewalk across from the Pioneer Works entrance for solar viewing. Telescopes will be provided between 1:00 and 4:00 pm. *Weather permitting*

SOLARGAZING WITH THE AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK

Get your bike fixed by staff mechanics and volunteers, who will provide free direct repairs, maintenance, and diagnostic services.


POP-UP BIKE REPAIRS WITH MECHANICAL GARDENS BIKE COOP

Come by the Science Studios to explore the red planet with us. This leads up to our next Scientific Controversies talk on Mars with Christopher Mason and Janna Levin.

Mars Exploration

Stock up on Summer reading books with Brooklyn Book Bodega! Then, join New York Times Best Selling Illustrator and author of Pizza My Heart, Steph Stilwell, for a fun drawing workshop at 3 pm. It’s sure to pack a PUNch!

BROOKLYN BOOK BODEGA

Iceblink is a side project of Lynn Avery, exploring the sounds of bedroom new-age, warbly folk, and Italian film score. Often featuring duets of classical guitar and saxophone, Avery's songwriting creates inviting worlds that invite the imagination. 2020 saw the release of Carpet Cocoon, via Moon Glyph, familiarizing listeners with her unique combination of new age idiosyncrasies, medeival-esque guitar, and bubbly sample manipulation. Lynn Avery also performs as a duo with Cole Pulice, and in experimental music trio Signal Quest. 
 
For this special performance in the PW Garden, Avery will be joined by fellow sound artists Mari Rubio (More Eaze) and Jeff Tobias (Sunwatchers) to offer idyllic reprieve from the summer heat. 
 
“In Lynn Avery’s hands, the cosmos feels like it could fit in your pocket.” - Pitchfork 
 
https://iceblink.bandcamp.com/

Music: Iceblink

Drawing Under the Influence (Bajo la influencia) is a body of large-scale Automatic Drawings and Drawing Performances. In this on-going series, the artist is constantly swayed by a meditative environmental soundscape composed with site-specific sound signifiers, diaristic field-recordings, and anecdotal artifacts 
 
Juan Miguel Marin is an Ecuadorian multidisciplinary artist, based in Brooklyn, NY (Canarsie Ancestral Lands). 
 
Marin’s art practice is an exploration of the relationship between memory, sound, and emotion. It is also an ongoing meditation on his own journey as an immigrant; a constant search for home within the self. 
 
Marin's work has been performed, installed and exhibited in both cultural and public spaces in New York City, San Francisco, Milan, Amsterdam, Quito, Lima, Buenos Aires, Cannes, and San José, Costa Rica.

Drawing Under the Influence (Bajo la influencia) by Juan Miguel Marin

Maya Binyam joins PW Director of Publishing Joshua Jelly-Schapiro to discuss her acclaimed debut novel, Hangman (FSG).  

PW BROADCAST RADIO HOUR

Rethinking Residencies is a working group of sixteen New York-based artist residency programs. Initiated in March 2014, its members share knowledge and resources, while cultivating critical thinking and discourse about residencies. In December 2021, Rethinking Residencies organized a three-day online symposium on visual art residencies. Video documentation of this symposium is here. Join us to celebrate the reader launch as its contributors discuss major themes introduced in the text.

RETHINKING RESIDENCIES READER LAUNCH

Erin Durant is a musician and songwriter, working in New York and California, originally from New Orleans. Her songs incorporate landscape, autobiography, and symbolic imagery to convey whimsical and heartfelt stories. Her musical style has drawn comparisons to For The Roses-era Joni Mitchell, Joanna Newsom, Regina Spektor, and garnered praise from Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Pitchfork, and NPR. https://erindurant.bandcamp.com/music


Music: Erin Durant

The.Espresso is an NYC based DJ and filmmaker. His sonic explorations include Hip-Hop, Amapiano, Dancehall and Afrohouse, weaving the varied textures and sounds within and outside of the Afro-diaspora. The fusion of these musical stylings is meant to tell the groove of a collective whole. 
 
He’s part of the DJ ensemble Fourplay, which hosts monthly dance parties at Jade Bar. He has also spun at Ponyboy, Rebecca’s, Jade Bar, Jupiter Disco, and more. 
 
Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/ZKm3suKZANpHGu8k7