Interview
Caroline Cox
Caroline Cox creates process oriented installations and drawings. The installations evolve through an improvisational process that explores how materials interact with light, gravity and space. Through experimenting with materials that are optically interactive, pliable, and light weight she develops shapeshifting overlays and optical mutations. These coalesce into ambiguous environments that can range from the microscopic to outer space. Cox’s interactive installations contemplate the intricacies and poetic mutability of perception.
Cox has shown at the Yale University School of Art, Wake Forest University, Old Dominion University, Pierogi, Lesley Heller, Smack Melon, Sculpture Center, White Columns, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, Outpost, Governor’s Island, The Kitchen and had solo shows at Studio10, Long Island University Bklyn, FiveMyles, Another Year in LA, Sarah Bowen, Big & Small Casual, Het Apollohuis. She has completed residencies at Edward Albee’s, The Barn, The Clocktower and Het Apollohuis, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Cox has received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, The Tree of Life Foundation, and Artist Space. Her work has been reviewed online at Hyperallergic, Art in America, Art Critical, Artweek, and in print in Sculpture Magazine, the New York Times, Time Out, The Village Voice and published in Alternative Histories, New York Art Spaces,1960-2010, MIT Press, Found Object, a quarterly journal published by the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at the Graduate School of the CUNY
Cox is from California and while living in San Francisco she was part of the women’s artist cooperative, Amargi, a live/work space for artists. After moving to NYC she played in the noise band, The Chairs, that performed at Roulette. While living in Brooklyn Caroline co-founded and ran Flipside, an alternative exhibition space, with Tim Spelios. Caroline has also curated shows at The Outpost, Sarah Bowen Gallery, Schroeder Romero Gallery, Century29, The Police Building (through OIA) the show traveled to William Patterson College.
Perdita Finn
Perdita Finn is the co-founder of The Way of the Rose, an inclusive fellowship of rosary friends dedicated to the Earth and to the Lady “by any name we wish to call Her.”
A former public high school teacher, she has written many chapter books for children including the Time Flyers series (Scholastic.) She lives with her family in the Catskill Mountains.
Patrick Dougher
Born and raised in Brooklyn New York, Patrick Dougher is a self-taught fine artist, musician, poet and actor.
Patrick has performed and recorded with Sade, the Grammy award winning Dan Zanes and many others. He has played drums with many notable reggae artists such as Black Uhuru’s Michael Rose and Steel Pulses’ David Hinds and Hip Hop star Chuck D of Public Enemy. Patrick also played drums on “The Dub Side of the Moon” one of the bestselling reggae LPs of all time.
He has performed his poetry for the WNET Open Mic series as well as BRIC TV and venues around NYC. Patrick was a lead actor in the Ping Chong 651 Arts theatre production “Brooklyn 63” which toured in 2014.
Patrick worked as an art therapist with HIV positive children at Kings County Hospital, a co-curator at the Museum of African Art, a youth counselor and teaching artist at Project Reach and Studio in a School and most recently as the Program Director of Groundswell, NYC’s premier community mural arts organization where he oversaw and directed over 300 public mural projects throughout the city. He is currently working as he Interim Director of Education for BRIC Arts Media and as a freelance consultant with The Center for Court Innovations. For over 20 years Patrick has used the arts to empower and support the socio-emotional growth of at-risk and disenfranchised youth of the city.
Patrick’s art reflects his life’s mission to inspire and empower by honestly and fearlessly holding up a mirror to society’s inequity and injustices. Through his art he seeks to celebrate the noble beauty and divine spiritual nature of people of African descent and to connect urban African-American culture to its roots in sacred African art and ceremony.
Matthew D Garcia
Matt Garcia’s artistic practice investigates ecology, its relationship to knowledge systems and how media can connect communities to a reclaiming or re-imagining of lost epistemology. Matthew Garcia is an assistant professor of Art and Design at Dominican University of California located in the San Francisco Bay Area and the founder of the interdisciplinary collective Desert ArtLAB. In 2010, Garcia established Desert ArtLAb to explore how a connection to desert ecology and art can foster a sense of belonging, empowerment, and self-determination.
Garcia’s work has been presented nationally and internationally at: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Paris, France), Museum of Contemporary Native Art – MoCNA (Santa Fe,NM), Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara ,The International Symposium on Electronic Art (2012,2015), Balance-Unbalance Festival (Noose, Australia) and HASTAC (Lima, Peru). Garcia is a 2016 Creative Capital awardee in Emerging Fields.
Garcia’s current project, The Desertification Cookbook, visually re-brands the concept of deserts not as a post-apocalyptic growth of wasteland, but as a culinary and ecological opportunity. The cookbook is a collection of bilingual community driven recipes, statements, strategies and actions for exploring, surviving, and belonging in the desert borderlands.
The book mentioned in the interview is Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience by Enrique Salmón.