Name: Second Sundays: May 2017
Start: 2017-05-14
End: 2017-05-14
Location: Pioneer Works

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Just Announced: Pioneer Works Names Mara Manus Chief Executive Officer

The Board of Directors of Pioneer Works is pleased to announce that Mara Manus, former Executive Director for New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), has been appointed as the organization’s new Chief Executive Officer. 

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We're pleased to announce the first major renovation of Pioneer Works! To accommodate the first phase of our construction, we're temporarily relocating to 133 Imlay Street opening in Spring 2022.

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Due to programming, Pioneer Works will be closed to the public on Wednesday, May 10. We will be open from Thursday through Sunday for the remainder of the week. Learn more and plan your visit 

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Pioneer Works will be closed on 11/28 - 11/29 in observance of Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage Day.

This May, Second Sundays will highlight works by past and current technologists-in-residence offering a variety of immersive environments, virtual and augmented reality experiences, performances and moments of reflection on the interventions made by technology in our lives.

Food and Beverage by Burma Noodle Bar, Salty Road (taffy), Pintail Coffee and PW Bar.

Second Sundays

This May, Second Sundays will highlight works by past and current technologists-in-residence offering a variety of immersive environments, virtual and augmented reality experiences, performances and moments of reflection on the interventions made by technology in our lives.
Food and Beverage by Burma Noodle Bar, Salty Road (taffy), Pintail Coffee and PW Bar.

Working across photography and digital mediums, Brooklyn-based artist Tahir Karmali’s interests lie in narrating outlier communities: groups who live away from mainstream society, but whose existences are indelibly shaped by economic, geopolitical, and social infrastructures. He draws from his own experiences as a well-traveled Kenyan citizen to structure narratives around migratory identity, specifically as it pertains to Indian migration of East Africa during the 1890s—prior to Kenya’s independence in 1963—and its contemporary implications.

More specifically, Karmali is drawn to paper or “papers,” documents key to legitimizing travel between borders. For PAPER/work, the artist has literally used his own passport as a basis for this new, site-specific installation of undulating, pulp-infused mesh screens and handmade paper sculptures. These documents’ embedded fibers, imagery, and textual details have been broken down and reconstituted as almost topographical, map-like abstractions. In interrogating paper’s material significance, Karmali utilizes papermaking—a process dealing in a filtration of sorts—as a tool to rethink notions of nationality, borders, and colonial history in personal terms.

PAPER/work is presented in conjunction with 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, as a 1:54 Special Project. Karmali will be a Pioneer Works artist-in-residence in Fall 2017.

Tahir Karmali received his Masters of Digital Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York. His work has been shown at Brassage Photographique, Villers-la-Ville, Belgium; Biennial Fotografica Bogota 2017, Bogota, Colombia; Art Africa Fair, Cape Town, South Africa; Photobastei, Zurich, Switzerland; Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands; Vitra Design Museum, Weil Am Rhein, Germany; and the Guggenheim, Bilbao, among other venues. Residencies include MacDowell Visual Artist Residency, BRIC, and Pioneer Works. Born and raised in Kenya, Karmali currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Tahir Karmali: PAPER/work

Pioneer Works is pleased to present Mollie McKinley’s Salt Priestess, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the United States. Comprised of photographs and salt and glass sculptures, the exhibition presents alchemical transmutations as a feminist clarion call, one in which female archetypes—situated in and around supernatural landscapes—hover in a strange, symbolic space of ritual and unknowable, primal drama.

Made with a wooden 4x5 camera, McKinley’s photographic tableaux typically portray “priestesses” inhabiting surreal American landscapes, such as desert dunes, abandoned parking lots, glacial lakes, and weathered wood cabins. Sometimes these settings stand in for themselves, as places of ritualized regeneration and resilience. At other times these locales become cinematic backdrops for the artist’s heroines, who are equal parts Barbarella and The Crucible, part playful camp fantasy and dark, puritanical allegory. Wearing ceremonial wigs, bathrobes, fur scraps, rags, and fishing nets, they present offerings of pineapples, snakeskins, and other objects to the mystic forces of nature. Relationships between the femme body and the inherent vacuity of capitalist objects are activated.

The salt sculptures—or monoliths, as McKinley calls them—symbolize time, existential phenomenology, and nature’s processes on physical material. They’re deconstructed from fifty-pound salt licks used for livestock supplements. Rigid and compact in their factory state, McKinley uses a hammer and chisel to geometrically work away at the salt in patterns before further eroding them with pressurized water. This erosion process is violent and intense. The finished works allude to textures of weathered stone canyons in the American West, of exaggerated bone marrow, and of glacial surfaces. If the photographs represent these natural forces, McKinley’s salt monoliths dramatically actuate them, in bodily form. Taken together, Salt Priestess twins this bodily preoccupation with the natural landscape; one functions as foil for the other.

Mollie McKinley studied photography at Bard College. Her work has also been shown at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts; Field Projects, New York; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Anthology Film Archives; the MoMA Pop Rally; the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 presented by Independent Curators International and Limited Time Only; four Brucennials; the Index Art Center, Newark; the Wassaic Project Exhibition; SPRING/BREAK Art Show curated by Natalie Kovacs; Anna Kustera Gallery curated by Natalie Kovacs; Dimensions Variable Gallery, Miami; the Art Director's Club of New York; the Humble Arts Foundation; the Fringe Arts Festival in Philadelphia; One Mile Gallery, Kingston; KUBE, Beacon, NY; Matteawan Gallery, Beacon, NY; the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, and a host of others.

Mollie McKinley: Salt Priestess

Jemila MacEwan is a New York-based artist who utilizes disparate media—performance, photography, video, painting, and sculpture—to define internal states of becoming as physical transformations. It Holds Us All, an installation of seven sculptures inspired by her recent research in volcanoes and active geothermal activity, will be presented on the third floor of Pioneer Works from April 9 through May 14, 2017.

MacEwan returns clay to the form of its geological origin by harnessing organic materials such as wood-fired stoneware, porcelain, Icelandic volcanic ash, wood, and cement. Moreover, the series contemplates geological states of becoming as reflections of the erotic experience, resisting the moral, pornographic, and possessive meanings that have been ascribed to it. It Holds Us All offers an alternative approach to engaging with landscape through a personal encounter with the sensual, bodily qualities of geological flux. By avoiding direct depictions of the body, the work seeks to express the erotic beyond the confines of gender and identity.

Jemila MacEwan: It Holds Us All

Founded by artists Jill Pangallo and Alex P White, SKOTE is a performance collaboration dedicated to the movement arts, and the politic of otherness. SKOTE are directors, choreographers, designers and performers. Their work is a hybrid of dance for camera and video installation with a distinct style rooted in the queer history of camp, mime, clowns and 70’s pedestrian movement practices. SKOTE believes speaking through an/other's voice is the contemporary condition and that we are all media constructions - recorded, reordered, coded and decoded, duplicated ad nauseam - a type of decay they appreciate and study. Based in New York City, SKOTE has performed, shown and screened internationally in galleries, nightclubs, public spaces and theaters since 2006. SKOTE most recently performed at Socrates Sculpture Park, Judson Church with Movement Research, Bodega Gallery, Participant Inc., and La MaMaGalleria. And solo shows at Regina Rex, Brooklyn; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Their video work has been screened at the MIX NYC film festival, Vox Populi, NoMinino, Ecuador; and The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon.

SKOTE (Jill Pangallo & Alex P. White)

Pascual Sisto is an artist and filmmaker currently based in New York. Sisto’s work primarily focuses on video installation and sculpture. Sisto is the recipient of a BFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, and an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles. Sisto also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. Sisto is the recipient of the 2012 California Community Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship and a 2011 ARC Durfee Foundation grant. Recent exhibitions include 5 Car Garage (Los Angeles), Brand New Gallery (Milan), Smart Objects (Los Angeles), China Art Objects (Los Angeles) and Favorite Goods (Los Angeles).

Pascual Sisto

Jes Fan is a Brooklyn based artist from Hong Kong, China. Fan's trans-disciplinary practice is based on a material inquiry into otherness as it relates to identity politics. They received a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design. They are the recipient of various fellowships and residencies, such as the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fellowship at Museum of Arts and Design, CCGA Fellowship at Wheaton Arts, and John A. Chironna Memorial Award at RISD. Fan has exhibited in the United States and internationally. Selected exhibitions include Whereabouts at Glazenhuis Museum (Belgium), Material Location at Agnes Varis Gallery (New York), Ot(her) at Brown University’s Sarah Doyle Gallery (Providence), and Remembering Something without a Name, Chrysler Museum of Art (Virginia). Fan's solo show, "No Clearance in Niche" opens at MAD's project space in March.

Jes Fan

Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere are multidisciplinary collaborators who have been working together since 2001 (2001-2008 under the collaborative name neuroTransmitter). Their projects and research investigate contemporary music and sound, the electromagnetic spectrum, dissent, and public fora. Their interests lie in the formation of itinerant, performative, and discursive based social spaces with works that move between the spatial simultaneity of performance and enunciation, reflecting upon political agency through lyrics, audio, and transmission. Nevarez (b. Mexico City, Mexico) is an artist, musician, and faculty member in the MFA Fine Arts Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Tevere (b. Chicago, IL. USA) is an artist and Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island / City University of New York (CSI/CUNY). Their fellowships include a 2009 Creative Capital Fellowship, a 2009 Art Matters Grant, and a 2006 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Art in Public Places Grant. Both Nevarez and Tevere were Studio Fellows at The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program and artists-in-residence at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS), Stockholm, SE. The first US survey of Nevarez and Tevere’s work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2016.

Angel Nevarez/Valerie Tevere

Evelyn Donnelly is a New York and Seattle based artist whose work examines performance and social exchanges in institutions, casual contexts, and unauthorized spaces.  Her work investigates play in relation to formal, social, and technological structures. Donnelly constructs wearable works, sets, and soundscapes that contribute to collaborative performances. Her lectures are instances of repetition and spontaneous word plays. Donnelly received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Donnelly has acted as an agent of The Bureau for the Future of Choreography since its inception in 2011. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including a 2014 residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Process Space, and a 2014 Dinning &amp; Main Fellowship, Confuse the Cat, Banff Center for the Arts.

Evelyn Donnelly

Kenya (Robinson) is a community-taught artist from Gainesville, FL. A past resident of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s WorkSpace Program, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and the Triangle Arts Foundation, she begins her residency at Pioneer Works in May 2017. A member of the 2014 class for the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, she currently hosts #ST4NKLOV3, a live stream radio show produced by Clocktower Productions. In addition, her sculptural work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the 60 Wall Street Gallery of Deutsche Bank. Her sculpture, Commemorative Headdress of Her Journey Beyond Heaven, was acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture for their permanent collection in 2014. She has presented performance work at Sid Gold’s Request Room; MoMA PS1; JACK; The Kitchen; Thomas Hunter Project Space; The Museum of Modern Art. And, in 2011, her durational project, The Inflatable Mattress, was featured in the Home Section of The New York Times. (Robinson) has been a contributor to The Huffington Post and Intercourse Magazine. Most recently, she was included in the October/November 2016 issue of Modern Painters with her essay, “The Fate of Excellence”, and was the inaugural resident for Recess Arts’ online residency ANALOG. An iteration of her Creative Capital funded project, CHEEKY LaSHAE: Karaoke Universal, will be included in the Out of Line Series for the High Line during the Summer of 2017.

Kenya (Robinson)

Battle of Santiago

Toronto-based, The Battle of Santiago, combines classic Afro-Cuban rhythms and vocals with a distinctly Canadian post-rock spirit and sensibility. The result is a singular sound that tells a universal 21st Century story, transcending borders while staying rooted in one city’s immigrant experience.
The Battle of Santiago&#8217;s Revolucion Perpetua multimedia show, developed with chilean-born artist, designer Patricio Davila, integrates digital visual art, live musical performance and audience interaction. The result is a one-of-a-kind organic audio and visual installation. Their new album, La Migra, will be out in March of 2017.

Found Poetry is the practice of isolating words or phrases from preexisting lines of text to create a new meaning. &lt;Cmnd+F&gt; applies this practice to lines HTML. With just a highlighter and a sheet of paper, anyone can make a poem.

<Cmnd+F> Poetry

Interactive Neuroscience is a hands-on exploration into the neurobiology that underlies our everyday experiences. Participants will have the opportunity to wear EEG headsets while engaging in interactive experiences and visualizing their own brain responses.

Interactive Neuroscience

Alex Nathanson is an artist, curator, organizer, and educator whose work spans video, sound, performance, and interaction design. He collaborates regularly with composer Dylan Neely, performing under the name Fan Letters. His work has been featured at the Museum of the Moving Image, La MaMa, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, PS122 Gallery, Dome of Visions (Denmark), and the Art Prospect Festival (Russia). He was one of the long-term artists in residence at Flux Factory, in Queens, NY from 2012 to 2016. Most recently, he was awarded a residency at The Watermill Center to develop an full length opera, titled Autocomplete, in collaboration with Fan Letters. As an educator, he works with students as young as 7 to post-graduates, teaching skills related to sound, light, mechanics, and electronics through creative projects. He has worked extensively as an electronic and media art specialist for many of NY’s art institutions and artists. He has been hyperbolically described as a “video effects guru” and poorly described as “difficult to describe.”www.alexnathanson.com

Alex Nathanson

Learn how to build your own solar-powered noise maker!

Solar Powered Noise Maker

Siebren Versteeg

Meet artist Siebran Versteeg, featured in Pioneer Works magazine newest issue and interact with Versteeg’s sculpture from his Reflection Eternal series.

Pioneer Works Magazine with Siebren Versteeg

Sam Lavigne

Francis Tseng

Brian Cliffton

White Collar Crime Risk Zones is a machine learning system that predicts where white collar crimes will happen throughout the US.

White Collar Crime Risk Zones

Matt Romein

Meat Puppet Arcade is an ongoing series of small installations in which the artist manipulates digital copies of his body in odd and unsettling ways.

Meat Puppet Arcade

Rachel White

As hardware components become smaller, our dystopian future dreams come closer to reality. What would modern cybernetic augmentations look like, and how would we program them?

Human Cybernetics

Caroline Sinders

Mani Nilchiani

Dark Patterns is a VR game that explores the future of fascism and surveillance in product design.

Dark Patterns

Ross Goodwin

Francis Tsung

The Weight of the Meaning is a collection of physical sculptures representing data visualizations that explore ways to articulate the gravity of data.

The Weight of the Meaning

Ziv (ZEEVE) Schneider is an Israeli multi-media artist based in NY.

She works at the intersection of documentary, video games and volumetric photography and combines various design practices to explore how new technologies enrich narratives with spatialization and interaction. Since creating The Museum of Stolen Art in 2014, she’s been working primarily in virtual reality and has created several museum experiences, including the first virtual reality experience released by the Economist, RecoVR:Mosul, a virtual tour of the reconstructed Mosul Museum in Iraq. She holds a masters from NYU’s ITP program (’15), where she spent a year as a research fellow.

Ziv (ZEEVE) Schneider

Caitlin Robinson

WATERTIGHT, a documentary portrait series, muses on the tension between the desire for freedom and mobility and the need for security in uncertain times.

WATERTIGHT

Alex Berke

Color on the walls, interact with mathematical animations, and learn more about the beauty of math.

Group Theory Coloring Book

Tamiko Thiel

Gardens of the Anthropocene posits a &#8220;climate-fiction&#8221; future inspired by actual toxic algae around Long Island and New York Harbor.

Gardens of the Anthropocene

Guided Meditation offers a moment to reflect on late capitalism.

Guided Meditation

Haoyan of America

Jellyfishing in America is a video series exploring the ever-shifting landscapes of technological conditioning and what it means to be human in the 21st century.

Jellyfishing in America

Nancy Nowacek

Nancy Nowacek presents a new work that widens the potential scope of gestural input, scripting movement in the world through a series of suggested devices.

Untitled (Device)

Chino Kim

Operator is a musical interface inspired by old telephone switchboards that reverses the role of the operator and allows for the sampling and manipulation of live phone calls.

Operator

Sam Sadtler

As a society, we are always interacting with technology, but what happens when technology starts to interact with itself?

Retrograde

Oleg Pashkovsky

Dots is a series of real-time sketches made with code.

Dots

The Virtual Environments (VR) Lab at Pioneer Works will present Presence Caster, a networked multiplayer cyber creation story.

Presence Caster

Tune in for a live-stream of Second Sunday programs and events at www.clocktower.org

Clocktower Radio: Second Sunday Program

<a href="http://danieltemkin.com/">Daniel Temkin</a> makes images, programming languages, and interactive pieces exploring our inherently broken patterns of thought and the clash between human and algorithmic thinking. Daniel has spoken widely to both art and hacker audiences, at Media Art History (Liverpool 2011 and Riga 2013), CAA, GLI.TC/H conference in 2010 and 2012 (where he led a three-day session on Glitch and Oulipo), Notacon, and Hackers on Planet Earth, among others. He appeared on PBS’s OffBook episode on Glitch Art. His writing has been published in academic journals such as World Picture and Media-N Journal and has been taught at Bard College, Penn State, and Clark University.

Daniel received his MFA from International Center of Photography/Bard College in 2012. His work has been featured at American University Museum, Christopher Henry Gallery, Higher Pictures and Carroll/Fletcher.

Daniel Temkin

Daniel Temkin will read excerpts from Internet Directory, a list of all 115 million .COM domain names in alphabetical order.

Internet Directory

Anaïs Maviel

Anaïs Maviel is a vocalist and multi-instrumentist. As a fearless improviser, composer, and performer, she expresses hybrid forms by reinventing her French-Haitian origins and invoking ancestral and cyborg streams. Creatively involved with William Parker, Larkin Grimm, Mara Rosenbloom, Matt Lavelle, Michael Bisio, Jen Baker, the Commons Choir and more free-spirited fellows. She is dedicated to substantial creations from solo to cross-disciplinary ensembles, and to expanding the power of music as a healing act.

She Resonates Performance Showcase

Kids Take PW is a tour designed for families and kids (5-12 years old) including short visits and a hands-on activity with selected artists. Please bring your parent or guardian.

Kids Take PW

Amelia Winger-Bearskin

Cassie Tarakajian

Eamon O’Connor

Lullabies for AI (Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Cassie Tarakajian, Eamon O’Connor) is a musical project that creates music to soothe and educate our future AI overlords who need some psychic chill as much as the next neural net.

Lullabies for AI

Aether

Aether is a live Motion Capture dance performance designed and choreographed with sacred geometry and the embodied four elements: water, fire, earth and wind.

AETHER

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Working across photography and digital mediums, Brooklyn-based artist Tahir Karmali’s interests lie in narrating outlier communities: groups who live away from mainstream society, but whose existences are indelibly shaped by economic, geopolitical, and social infrastructures. He draws from his own experiences as a well-traveled Kenyan citizen to structure narratives around migratory identity, specifically as it pertains to Indian migration of East Africa during the 1890s—prior to Kenya’s independence in 1963—and its contemporary implications.

More specifically, Karmali is drawn to paper or “papers,” documents key to legitimizing travel between borders. For 

, the artist has literally used his own passport as a basis for this new, site-specific installation of undulating, pulp-infused mesh screens and handmade paper sculptures. These documents’ embedded fibers, imagery, and textual details have been broken down and reconstituted as almost topographical, map-like abstractions. In interrogating paper’s material significance, Karmali utilizes papermaking—a process dealing in a filtration of sorts—as a tool to rethink notions of nationality, borders, and colonial history in personal terms.

 is presented in conjunction with 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, as a 1:54 Special Project. Karmali will be a Pioneer Works artist-in-residence in Fall 2017.

 received his Masters of Digital Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York. His work has been shown at Brassage Photographique, Villers-la-Ville, Belgium; Biennial Fotografica Bogota 2017, Bogota, Colombia; Art Africa Fair, Cape Town, South Africa; Photobastei, Zurich, Switzerland; Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands; Vitra Design Museum, Weil Am Rhein, Germany; and the Guggenheim, Bilbao, among other venues. Residencies include MacDowell Visual Artist Residency, BRIC, and Pioneer Works. Born and raised in Kenya, Karmali currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

PAPER/work

Working across photography and digital mediums, Brooklyn-based artist Tahir Karmali’s interests lie in narrating outlier communities: groups who live away from mainstream society, but whose existences are indelibly shaped by economic, geopolitical, and social infrastructures. He draws from his own experiences as a well-traveled Kenyan citizen to structure narratives around migratory identity, specifically as it pertains to Indian migration of East Africa during the 1890s—prior to Kenya’s independence in 1963—and its contemporary implications.
More specifically, Karmali is drawn to paper or “papers,” documents key to legitimizing travel between borders. For PAPER/work, the artist has literally used his own passport as a basis for this new, site-specific installation of undulating, pulp-infused mesh screens and handmade paper sculptures. These documents’ embedded fibers, imagery, and textual details have been broken down and reconstituted as almost topographical, map-like abstractions. In interrogating paper’s material significance, Karmali utilizes papermaking—a process dealing in a filtration of sorts—as a tool to rethink notions of nationality, borders, and colonial history in personal terms.
PAPER/work is presented in conjunction with 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, as a 1:54 Special Project. Karmali will be a Pioneer Works artist-in-residence in Fall 2017.
Tahir Karmali received his Masters of Digital Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York. His work has been shown at Brassage Photographique, Villers-la-Ville, Belgium; Biennial Fotografica Bogota 2017, Bogota, Colombia; Art Africa Fair, Cape Town, South Africa; Photobastei, Zurich, Switzerland; Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands; Vitra Design Museum, Weil Am Rhein, Germany; and the Guggenheim, Bilbao, among other venues. Residencies include MacDowell Visual Artist Residency, BRIC, and Pioneer Works. Born and raised in Kenya, Karmali currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Tahir Karmali

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Pioneer Works is pleased to present Mollie McKinley’s 

, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the United States. Comprised of photographs and salt and glass sculptures, the exhibition presents alchemical transmutations as a feminist clarion call, one in which female archetypes—situated in and around supernatural landscapes—hover in a strange, symbolic space of ritual and unknowable, primal drama.

Made with a wooden 4×5 camera, McKinley’s photographic tableaux typically portray “priestesses” inhabiting surreal American landscapes, such as desert dunes, abandoned parking lots, glacial lakes, and weathered wood cabins. Sometimes these settings stand in for themselves, as places of ritualized regeneration and resilience. At other times these locales become cinematic backdrops for the artist’s heroines, who are equal parts 

, part playful camp fantasy and dark, puritanical allegory. Wearing ceremonial wigs, bathrobes, fur scraps, rags, and fishing nets, they present offerings of pineapples, snakeskins, and other objects to the mystic forces of nature. Relationships between the femme body and the inherent vacuity of capitalist objects are activated.

The salt sculptures—or monoliths, as McKinley calls them—symbolize time, existential phenomenology, and nature’s processes on physical material. They’re deconstructed from fifty-pound salt licks used for livestock supplements. Rigid and compact in their factory state, McKinley uses a hammer and chisel to geometrically work away at the salt in patterns before further eroding them with pressurized water. This erosion process is violent and intense. The finished works allude to textures of weathered stone canyons in the American West, of exaggerated bone marrow, and of glacial surfaces. If the photographs represent these natural forces, McKinley’s salt monoliths dramatically actuate them, in bodily form. Taken together, 

 twins this bodily preoccupation with the natural landscape; one functions as foil for the other.

 studied photography at Bard College. Her work has also been shown at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts; Field Projects, New York; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Anthology Film Archives; the MoMA Pop Rally; the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 presented by Independent Curators International and Limited Time Only; four Brucennials; the Index Art Center, Newark; the Wassaic Project Exhibition; SPRING/BREAK Art Show curated by Natalie Kovacs; Anna Kustera Gallery curated by Natalie Kovacs; Dimensions Variable Gallery, Miami; the Art Director’s Club of New York; the Humble Arts Foundation; the Fringe Arts Festival in Philadelphia; One Mile Gallery, Kingston; KUBE, Beacon, NY; Matteawan Gallery, Beacon, NY; the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, and a host of others.

Salt Priestess

Pioneer Works is pleased to present Mollie McKinley’s Salt Priestess, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the United States. Comprised of photographs and salt and glass sculptures, the exhibition presents alchemical transmutations as a feminist clarion call, one in which female archetypes—situated in and around supernatural landscapes—hover in a strange, symbolic space of ritual and unknowable, primal drama.
Made with a wooden 4&#215;5 camera, McKinley’s photographic tableaux typically portray “priestesses” inhabiting surreal American landscapes, such as desert dunes, abandoned parking lots, glacial lakes, and weathered wood cabins. Sometimes these settings stand in for themselves, as places of ritualized regeneration and resilience. At other times these locales become cinematic backdrops for the artist’s heroines, who are equal parts Barbarella and The Crucible, part playful camp fantasy and dark, puritanical allegory. Wearing ceremonial wigs, bathrobes, fur scraps, rags, and fishing nets, they present offerings of pineapples, snakeskins, and other objects to the mystic forces of nature. Relationships between the femme body and the inherent vacuity of capitalist objects are activated.
The salt sculptures—or monoliths, as McKinley calls them—symbolize time, existential phenomenology, and nature’s processes on physical material. They’re deconstructed from fifty-pound salt licks used for livestock supplements. Rigid and compact in their factory state, McKinley uses a hammer and chisel to geometrically work away at the salt in patterns before further eroding them with pressurized water. This erosion process is violent and intense. The finished works allude to textures of weathered stone canyons in the American West, of exaggerated bone marrow, and of glacial surfaces. If the photographs represent these natural forces, McKinley’s salt monoliths dramatically actuate them, in bodily form. Taken together, Salt Priestess twins this bodily preoccupation with the natural landscape; one functions as foil for the other.
Mollie McKinley studied photography at Bard College. Her work has also been shown at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts; Field Projects, New York; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Anthology Film Archives; the MoMA Pop Rally; the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 presented by Independent Curators International and Limited Time Only; four Brucennials; the Index Art Center, Newark; the Wassaic Project Exhibition; SPRING/BREAK Art Show curated by Natalie Kovacs; Anna Kustera Gallery curated by Natalie Kovacs; Dimensions Variable Gallery, Miami; the Art Director&#8217;s Club of New York; the Humble Arts Foundation; the Fringe Arts Festival in Philadelphia; One Mile Gallery, Kingston; KUBE, Beacon, NY; Matteawan Gallery, Beacon, NY; the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, and a host of others.