Artist Statements

Felicity Palma

Felicity Palma is an image-based artist and curator whose research considers human mobility and stasis, place, and myth-making through the intersections of documentary, performance, and experimental time-based practices. She is predominantly concerned with the social construction and fluidity of borders, tourism as performance, notions of belonging, embodiment, alienation, and the senses.

Kate Robinson

A constant scavenger of material treats, Robinson collects combinations of reusable and discarded objects. Through largely low-tech gestures of strapping, wrapping, binding, stitching, etc. she calls upon innate human ingenuity on a small scale to build teetering systems. In building these systems she is examining the complexity of both natural ecosystems, man-made ones and their deep connections. Playing with ideas of excess, glamour and sorting through life in the Anthropocene she enacts methods of building that reflect the tenuousness and destructiveness of our time as a way to better understand our place in these interconnected systems and what it means actively care for the places we belong to.

Peat Szilagyi

Amidst blindfolded children solving Rubik's cubes, I recently presented my work to European academics and Chinese energetic practitioners at the 3rd annual Parapsychology Forum and MindSport Competition in tropical Ha Long, Vietnam. Parapsychology is the study of mental phenomena inexplicable by conventional scientific psychology, including psychic abilities and altered states of consciousness. I spoke about the aesthetics of revelatory experiences, how environments and objects can facilitate a spiritual experience. I explained my practice as an artist, creating environments and objects designed to synthesize science, anthropology, psychology and spirituality toward a post-colonial understanding of consciousness.

My interest in this field stems from inexplicable events which might be categorized as ‘psychic’ that I encountered while traveling in Africa, Asia and the US investigating spiritual traditions. I was driven by a desire for experiences outside the colonial Western scientific framework where quantifiable matter is the standard for reality. Exploring Buddhism, Nigerian Ifa, Hindu Vedic Astrology, and Olmec agriculture, extremely nuanced technologies based upon millenia of observing immaterial aspects of the body and its surroundings, I wonder how the world might differ were these systems able to flourish more widely. 

Imagining scenarios where materialist science can coexist with animism, spiritualism, and technologies of the body and mind, I create carnivalesque environments where people of all ages and spiritual orientations are empowered to try psychic communication, prayer or solving a Rubik's cube blindfolded.