BROOKLYN: Saya Woolfalk

Image via smackmellon.org.

ChimaTEK Beta Launch

September 27 – November 9, 2014

Opening reception: Saturday, September 27, 2014, 5-8pm

SMACK MELLON

92 Plymouth Street @ Washington

Brooklyn, NY

Saya Woolfalk statement on smackmellon.org:

“ChimaTEK Beta Launch” is the historic launch of ChimaTEK, a corporation owned by the Empathics. The Empathics are a fictional community of women I have been exploring for the past 7 years of my practice. The Empathics blend racial and ethnic identities as they transform, taking on characteristics of humans and plants. Through their non-profit research society, the Institute of Empathy, the Empathics study the condition of their hybridity and actively manipulate their genetic information. ChimaTEK’s patented technology makes Empathic interspecies and intersubjective hybridization available for purchase.  The exhibition will demonstrate the corporation’s production and marketing techniques through a combination of digital and interactive video and sculpture. Saisha Grayson, assistant curator at the Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, has helped generate the corporation's advertising copy, which will be available at the exhibition and is excerpted below: When used as a comprehensive system for self-transformation, ChimaTEK technologies offer clients access to a chimeric virtual existence. Users can choose, manipulate and enhance identity components and inhabit various combinations of cognitive, cultural consciousness mapping. Exploding physical limits, blurring psycho-cultural boundaries, ChimaTEK’s tools prepare individuals and organizations to more empathetically engage with the post-humanist, hybridized populace of our networked, globalized age.”

SayaWoolfalk (Japan, 1979) is a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. She has exhibited at PS1/MoMA; Deitch Projects; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Frist Center for the Visual Arts; The Yerba Buena Center; The Newark Museum; Third Streaming; MCA San Diego; MoCA Taipei; and Performa 09; and has been written about in The New Yorker, Sculpture Magazine, Artforum, Artforum.com, ARTNews, The New York Times, Huffington Post and on Art21’s blog.  Her first solo museum show The Empathics was on view at the Montclair Art Museum in the Fall of 2012.

Exhibit Link