Mel Chin’s TWO ME invites the public to elevate and pose as living monuments. Two Me was originally commissioned for the courtyard in front of Philadelphia’s City Hall in 2017. The site-specific installation will find a temporary new home on the front terrace of the Toledo Museum of Art where it will be on display from Sept. 22 through Nov. 11, 2018. Chin’s artwork balances the longing for individualism and foundational spirit of coexistence embedded within American culture.

SOFT THRONES: SITES OF POWER

What does it mean to hold and sit with power?

To wield a weapon, a tool, a body. With power.

To subvert masculine weapon, tool and body. To create a new landscape of power.

a  Soft Throne.

Soft Thrones is a series within the Sites of Power body of work produced by artist Jova Lynne.

In January 2018, the artist Jova Lynne traveled to her familial home of Kingston, Jamaica to collaborate on a series of workshops with queer identified-female spectrum Jamaicans. Workshop participants reflected on the ways in which one cultivates relationship to power and what it means to distill power through body and tool. These conversations as well as the artists own reflections on identity and family have informed the portraits and objects presented in Soft Thrones.

FROM THE OTHER SIDE

Curated by New York based arts writer and critic, Saul Ostrow, IGNITING CHANGE

showcases the work of 22 artists who are  pursuing Social Practice through a variety of mediums.

 In OIL + WATER,  Kate Levy and Shanna Merola combine their photographic work to examine connections between the oil and gas industry, privatization of water, and heightened militarization of local police agencies. Through an investigation on the cause and effect of disaster economies, the work explores post-industrial landscapes marked by environmental collapse, political unrest and the resistance work of frontline communities. Together and separately, Levy and Merola  have documented the water struggle in Detroit and Flint, Standing Rock, the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, New Orleans post Katrina and the Bakken Shale fracking boom in North Dakota.

LINEATIONS

Erin Garber-Pearson uses sculpture, video, and live tightwire performance to embody place- based identity.  Her work invites encounters with the foreign, the unmediated, and casual public space as content for reimagining our everyday routine and social awareness.   

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