Saya Woolfalk
Saya Woolfalk, No Place: A Ritual of the Empathics, 2009
No Place is a fictional future constructed for the investigation of human possibilities and impossibilities: configurations of biology, sociality, race, class, sexuality, and the environment designed as reflections on human life and its future. The name of the place is derived from the English word, “utopia,” coined by Thomas More from the Greek “no” (ou) and “place” (topos)–literally, no place.The people of this future eat, sleep, live in complex family structures, and die. Part plant and part human, they live in an empathetic relationship with their environment and can transform their gender and color at particular moments in their life cycle.
With support from Franklin Furnace, The Puffin Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the piece Woolfalk developed with UB Art Gallery, No Place: A Ritual of the Empathics, will travel to New York City in the fall of 2009.
Born in 1979 in Gifu, Japan, Saya Woolfalk lives and works in New York, New York. Woolfalk holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BA from Brown University, and she completed the Whitney ISP. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at PS1/MoMA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Momenta Art. Woolfalk received an ArtMatters grant for research in Japan, a NYFA Fellowship for performance, a Fulbright for research in Brazil, and Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Fellowship. Woolfalk has also been an artist in residence at Skowhegan, Yaddo, Sculpture Space, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Hi Saya,
Thank you for posting. I’m excited about your work. I’d love to hear a bit more about No Place. How did you arrive at the insignia for the Empathics? I also wonder how the utopian concept figures in your work vis-a-vis more popular associations of “utopia” as an exotic, edenic or futuristic locale to which one escapes from the banality and oppression of everyday life?
cheers,
Susan
Hello Susan,
Thanks so much for asking. The insignia for the Empathics comes from a combination of elements: a neoclassical column, a Japanese inro, and a Sankofa.
As for popular associations of utopia, I will respond in my next post.
Best,
Saya
In terms of the word utopia’s popular connotations as an exotic, edenic or a local for escape, I came to create this project in part because of a chain of logic investigating these themes.
A piece I made in 2005 was my first foray into this subject matter. Winter Garden: Hybrid Love Objects, pertains to the use of the glasshouses as a repository for objects, landscape and at times people brought back by “old world” travelers from their expeditions to the “new world.” (Actually, Noelle Mason was one of two performers in this piece!) These winter gardens helped construct some of the groundwork for eurocentric fantasies, for better and for worse, of people from other places. I thought what better than attempt to re-imagine the interior logic of such a fraught, powerful and beautiful human narrative building space.
At first I attempted to make explicit some of the problematic underlying logics of these spaces. I then began to project into our future.
No Place is the project with which I produce, in collaboration with others, an amalgamated future. Although it appears to be a futuristic escape, this project intends to be quotidian. All of the materials are domestic and the subject matter (family, death, reproduction) are at an everyday scale. It is my hope that this project is not an escape from reality but a conduit to an other reality already embedded in our own.
Saya