Nicolas Baird. Photo by Juan Luis Matos.
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CPR Programs Manager Anna Muselmann curates OPEN STUDIOS with artists whose work engages ecosensuality and erotics, micro- and macro-ecologies, and mutualistic relationships. The practices of artists Nicolas Baird, A.L. Steiner, cy x (as hell hooks), and agustine zegers each require deep and intimate material research, and examine the strange desires, adaptations, and interdependencies of our ‘more-than-human’ nature. Through learning behaviors, structures, and survival tactics beyond our human imagination, Money Ruined the World begins to conceive of an interspecial collaborative future that is not only more sustainable, but more sensual, pleasurable, and playful.
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.
PROGRAM
Nicolas Baird: In the beginning…
We move through deep time in a prose poem. This story is a meditation on endings-as-beginnings, a reflection on climate change and heartache, and an excavation of ecosystems, memory, and loss.
A.L. Steiner: Schwierige Gendanken/Difficult Thoughts.v3
No storage space reasonable. No cloud supple enough. No scrapbook sweet enough. No media responsible enough. No book complete enough to mold these contents.
cy x as hell hooks: GARDEN OF HELL
It's your lucky day. hell hooks will give you a super exclusive tour of their private garden of supersensual delights! Listen carefully, pay attention, and prepare to open all your holes.
agustine zegers: corriente etérica
corriente etérica is a guided, somatic practice incorporating olfactory elements. We will follow the currents pulsating through our bodies as channels of inter- and intra-habitat connections leading us from our own holobiont to that of the submarine cables that host our telecommunications along the ocean floor, encountering aqueous and plastified kinship through them.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Nicolas Baird is an artist, evolutionary biologist, writer, and dancer interested in the relationships between bodies and their landscapes. He makes art and science that frame more-than-human life as a diverse network of strange kin. In art, he uses poetry, performance, and photography to explore mutability and adaptation in a multispecies world. In science, he studies the evolution of mammals in the context of long-term climate change. Since 2017 he has woven these practices together as co-director of the Institute of Queer Ecology, an ever-evolving, collaborative organism producing interdisciplinary art as a tool for critical optimism and queer futurity in the face of vanishing “nature”. He is studying for a doctorate in earth and environmental science.
A.L. Steiner is an artist and educator based in New York. She utilizes constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance, writing, and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a skeptical queer ecofeminist androgyne. Steiner is co-curator of Ridykeulous, co-founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) and collaborates with numerous writers, performers, designers, activists and artists. She is Faculty and Director at Yale University's School of Art. Upcoming projects include Ridykes' Cavern of Fine Inverted WInes and Deviant Videos with MIT Press and Detroit's 2024 Queer Biennial: I'll be Your Mirror.
cy x (hell hooks) is a demon and a dreamer moved by tremendous desire and obsession with glory holes, sex cinemas, erotic horror, queer archives, and money. They study the way that erotics and space co-construct each other and the objects produced from such encounters and utilize their findings to create ritualized encounters through writing, sound, video, and performance. Their work has been shown in the Center for Art Research and Alliances, Culture Hub, Pioneer Works, Rewire Festival, and other spaces, both digital and physical.
agustine zegers is a Chilean olfactory artist and writer. Their work studies molecular biopolitics and anthropocene atmospherics, attending to the complex nodes of interdependence we share as inhabitants of Earth. By way of queer and microbial methodologies, zegers deploys care practices that reach microscopic dimensions by incorporating bacterial communities, aromatic molecules, and food absorption in their artistic projects, creating tools to reflect on ecocide, interspecies and intrahuman belonging, and care itself. Their work has been exhibited and published internationally at venues such as the Venice Biennale, Galería Jaqueline Martins, Sharjah Art Foundation, Olfactory Art Keller, and DIS Magazine.
Anna Muselmann (curator) is a visual and performing artist, curator, producer, and stylist from Tulsa, OK. In addition to assisting visual and performance artists in Providence, Berlin, San Francisco, and NYC, Muselmann has worked for SIGNAL Gallery, Regina Rex, the WYE (Berlin), Otion Front Studio, Performance Space New York, and Danspace Project, and is currently the Programs Manager at CPR – Center for Performance Research. Her own performance work investigates social and relational dynamics through research in personal daily gestures and habits, more-than-human behaviors, durational group shaking, and group play; and she has performed and shown work at galleries, museums, and venues in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Tulsa, and NYC. In 2021, she organized and co-curated Clouds Gathering, a 5-day performance residency-retreat for 85 multidisciplinary artists in New Lebanon, NY; and in 2023 she initiated Play Practice, a weekly group meeting of queer and trans artists that explores the relationships between play and games, rules and freedom, leading and following, desire and consent, and power and authority. Muselmann has a BA in Visual Arts and Modern Culture + Media from Brown University.
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