Watermill alumni, multidisciplinary artist duo Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya share their reflections on “the power of rising” as approached in their collaborative artistic practice and through the lenses of their ongoing project Correspondences.
Correspondences is a performance-based, public art installation and a catalyst for new relationalities. The work was first conceived at the artist’s studio in Brooklyn, with members of their company, the LEIMAY Ensemble; further developed at the Watermill Center and most recently presented socially-distanced in Manhattan’s Astor Place during the COVID-19 global pandemic; through a partnership between the Obie-winning HERE and their arts organization LEIMAY, which is envisioned to travel to each New York City borough and beyond through multiple partnerships during 2021-2022.
Viewpoints is The Watermill Center’s year-round conversation series, granting artists and art enthusiasts the opportunity to gather and discuss creative themes vital to the contemporary moment. The winter series of Viewpoints is free and will continue each Wednesday in January in the spirit of past Nights @ The Round Table intimate gatherings and presentations by community fellows, staff members, esteemed alumni, and friends.
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Due to COVID-19, this Viewpoints presentation will take place online. All registered attendees will receive an email with a Zoom link the morning of the event.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Colombian-born Ximena Garnica and Japan native Shige Moriya are a multidisciplinary duo creating collaborative works ranging from sculptural, video, light, social and mixed-media installation art to contemporary performances, publications, and research projects. Since 2001, Garnica and Moriya’s works have been presented at leading arts venues such as BAM, HERE, The Brooklyn Museum, Japan Society, The Czech Center New York, The New Museum, The Watermill Center, The Asian Museum of San Francisco, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California Riverside; and in large and small public spaces such as Times Square, NYRP Community Gardens, and NYC streets, among many other spaces in the US and abroad in Japan, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Mexico and Colombia. Their work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Theater Drama Review (TDR), The New Yorker, Art News, and Hyperallergic, among others. Shige has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Rest Artis, and Scope Art New York. Ximena received the Van Lier Fellowship for extraordinary stage directors, and was recently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California Riverside and they have been nominated for the USA Artists Fellowship and the Herb Alpert Award.
Garnica and Moriya are based in Brooklyn at their live-work space, CAVE, where they founded LEIMAY and the LEIMAY Ensemble. The word LEIMAY is a Japanese term symbolizing the changing moment between darkness and the light of dawn or the change between one era to another. As an organization, LEIMAY stimulates dialogue between performing, visual, and live arts and offers a plethora of art programs that attract, provoke, and support exchange and generative confrontation among culturally diverse audiences and artists.
The LEIMAY Ensemble is a group of national and international dancers and performers who work regularly throughout the year creating body-rooted works and developing the LEIMAY LUDUS practice, which explores methods to physically condition the body of the performers and develop a sensitivity to the “in-between space.” Since LEIMAY’s origins at CAVE, one of the pioneer art spaces of Brooklyn’s underground gallery scene in the mid-90’s, through the founding and producing of international and local performance festivals, residencies, fellowships, and educational projects, LEIMAY transverses artistic praxes and continues to be an incubator for the work of Ximena, Shige, the LEIMAY Ensemble, and a rotating group of artists. LEIMAY is constantly transforming as a living organism open to new challenges, constantly re-shaping in response to internal and external dynamics.
Garnica and Moriya’s practice is rooted in what they called “the entanglement”, their values are centered on practicing harmony in the circulations of powers and through the act of creation they are constantly rediscovering their standing point. Through their projects and works, they offer the spectator multiple entry points to engage with questions of being, interdependence, and coexistence.
photo copyright Jonas Hildago
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