Coming Together is the Beginning features the work of Fall 2023 Artists-in-Residence Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo, May Parlar, and creative teams RodriguezRemor (Denis Rodriguez and Leonardo Remor) and Monique Luck and Jaki Shelton Green and explores the immeasurable creative power of collaboration.
Artists RodriguezRemor’s (they/him) main gallery installation Caxixi is created in partnership with the Charlotte community. Interested in tradition and clay craft, this piece is named after the regional designation for miniature pottery and crockery in Bahia, Brazil for over 300 years. Their participatory installation invites the visitor to produce small, clay vessels which will be fired for installation in November.
Lens-based media (photography and video) and performance artist May Parlar (she/her) also invites the community to participate in a series of interactive installations during her tenure at McColl Center. May, born in Turkey and living in both Berlin and New York, builds links between time, place, memory and the self. Her performances explore the human condition and the nomadic experience of ‘being’ that are constructed and deconstructed by movement.
Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo (she/her) uses sculpture, installation, textiles, and drawing to explore the ideas of hybridity and respond to a troubled present in the wake of humanity’s destructive path. Drawing upon Latin-American mythology and environmental urgency, her artwork challenge our traditional binary thinking - human and non-human, animate and inanimate, and living and dead - and examine the social consequences of failing to operate collaboratively and in honor of the world around us. The work, which often includes bone, shell, fiber, and other natural materials challenges our assumptions of human hierarchy.
North Carolina Poet Laureate Jackie Shelton Green (she/her) and collage-based artist Monique Luck explore the experience of women through their individual and now work. Reimagining tradition, symbolism & representation at the intersection of the black female body politic, their new, collaborative work will serve as primary sources to invite female audiences to share the stories of generational white dress culture while serving as living documents that manifests the Afrofuture through art.
