Ground Floor: A Living Project will explore artists who explore selfhood, identity, and performance through world building, spatiality, and objecthood. Through a multi-layered approach to understanding oneself, one’s surroundings, and the world at large, these artists utilize themselves, their interiors, and the imagined spaces in between to look inward and outward at how our interactions with self, others, found objects, and the abstraction of identity offer insight into living space. 

Through a series of workshops, performances and talks on February 11th, we will present a panel discussion, A Perception of Selfhood to explore how the practice of identity manifests in the larger context of society and others, a series of workshops, Poetry and Domesticity Workshop with Emilie Plunkett, and Looking, Feeling and Trying Materials with Sofía Fernández Díaz that will explore the objects and words that ground us and how interiority contributes to world building and space. On March 2, save the date for the final program, The Body in Practice, where we will explore performance and persona. 

Register to Attend Here

Schedule

1-2pm Poetry and Domesticity Workshop with Emilie Plunkett 

2-3:30pm The Perception of Selfhood Panel with Natasha Moustache, Scott Vincent Campbell, and Payton Harris Woodard

3:30-4:30pm Looking, Feeling and Trying Materials with Sofía Fernández Díaz

Poetry and Domesticity Workshop with Emilie Plunkett 

1-2PM

Poetry and Domesticity is a one hour workshop that focuses on the relationship between an individual and their intimate space, through language. Using poetic language to express the sensation of being inside a domestic space. We will look at other writers who’s practices focus on the mundane home-space and create a poetic piece to discuss as a group. The workshop will be lead by Emilie Plunkett, who’s personal art practice focuses on the intimacy and discomfort of the domestic space.

About Emilie Plunkett:

Emilie Plunkett is a poet and photographer based in Chicago, their practice focuses on the domestic space and the mess, comfort and materiality of that intimate environment. They enjoy long walks by the lake, Alice Austen’s photographs and plums

A Perception of Selfhood:  A Panel Discussion 

2-330pm 

Ground Floor Artists, Natasha Moustache, Scott Vincent Campbell, and Payton Harris Woodard, will discuss how they explore facets of their identity through their artwork and practice. The artists represented here utilize their own personal narratives and imagery, familial found or repurposed objects, or domestic interiors to examine the complexities of self, race, and society.  

About Natasha Moustache:

Natasha Moustache is a photographic artist currently based in Chicago, Il. Moustache’s photography reflects their experience as a first-generation, Seychellois-American and explores the relationships between Black Diasporic communities within colonized spaces, centralizing Black women. Their work regularly engages strangers as long-term collaborator-participants. Moustache uses photography as a way to bring the human community into a conversation with itself that transcends difference and emphasizes commonality. 

Their work has been shown at the Houston Center for Photography, the International Center for Photography, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock where they were an Artist in Residence (2005). They recently received their MFA from Columbia College Chicago where they were awarded the Stuart Abelson Travel Fellowship (2019)

About Scott Vincent Campbell:

Scott Vincent Campbell (b. 1983) is a visual artist and curator originally from New York. He earned a BA in Fine Art from Haverford College in 2005, and currently lives and works in Chicago, IL, where he recently completed his MFA at The University of Chicago. Campbell’s work has been exhibited across the US at institutions such as the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI; Library Street Collective in Detroit, MI; Big Medium in Austin, TX; and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts and Pierogi Gallery in New York, NY. Campbell was a resident at Red Bull Arts Detroit in 2016, and in 2017 was the first Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. 

About Payton Harris Woodard:

Payton Harris-Woodard (born 1996, Chicago) is a painter, writer, and artist investigating the emotional and psychological complexities of inhabiting a Black female body.  Recent exhibitions include “Generations” at Woman Made Gallery, Chicago; “Exit Counseling” at Green Gallery in Milwaukee; “Paredolia” at Patient Info, Chicago; and, “Ultra Local” at Van Der Plas Gallery, New York. Her writing and artwork have been published in F Newsmagazine and Stellium Literary magazine. Awards include the Black Writers Fellowship with Hand Papermaking magazine; New Artist Society Award at School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts Fellowship. Harris-Woodard graduated in 2022 with her master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Looking, Feeling and Trying Materials with Sofía Fernández Díaz

3:30-4:30pm

Looking, Feeling and Trying Materials is an hour-long workshop led by Sofía Fernández Díaz. Diaz will invite people to experiment with an array of materials and tools like beads, pigments, wax, fibers, binders, mortar and pestle, brushes, paper, textiles, string, to look, feel and try for themselves.  

About Sofía Fernández Díaz: 

Sofia is an interdisciplinary artist from Mexico City, based in Chicago.  Her work is composed primarily about process and experimentation, about accentuating the unperceivable by amplifying the sensorial. Constantly looking for new tactilities through materials like beeswax, natural fibers, found objects, and glass (to name a few).

She completed her undergraduate studies at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, CA with a double major in Painting and Printmaking.  In 2014 she won the Rufino Tamayo Painting Biennial and began teaching art to children through sensorial material interactions. In 2016, she was invited to Casa Wabi, an artistic residency on the coast of Oaxaca, she led a papermaking workshop handbuilding all equipment out of refurbished materials and imparted workshops of paper making out of local materials (bamboo and algodon coyuchi) to surrounding communities. In the same year, she lived with the community of woman weavers Jiñi Ñuu of San Juan Colorado in the Oaxaca Mixteca where she documented their process and daily rituals while investigating Zapotec roots. In 2019 she returned to Mexico City from Oaxaca where she imparted workshops on natural dyeing, natural pigments and exploring the body through materials. At the same time she acquired a degree in Art Anthropology at CIESAS, a field of research and production, in which the transdisciplinary and collaborative aspects of artistic processes are developed.

Sofia currently finished an M.F.A. in the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a recipient of the Joan Livingstone Scholarship award. Shortly after graduating she got a Spark grant from Chicago Artist Coalition and was nominated to be part of the Ground Floor Exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center. 

Sofia is currently project manager at Davis Street Drawing Room, an experimental art project by artist and mentor Anne Wilson.  Sofía’s work has been exhibited, published and collected nationally and internationally.

Join us for our Ground Floor Performance Night as well in March. Learn more here.