Terrarium Exhibition in-person performance art event by Susan Luss and Theo Trotter.

Susan Luss’s Things I Leave Behind and Theo Trotter’s Exuvia deal with the pain and beauty of change. Both artists create works that exist as vulnerable bodies in flux. Luss’s canvas and Trotter’s lace installations represent what remains after a difficult period of growth, a process that can both heal and threaten the body. Luss’s work was created in preparation to leave the studio for a major surgery, while Trotter’s references his experience with medical transition.

Convective Currents are defined as “a process that involves the movement of energy from one place to another." Intervening simultaneously in each other's installations, Luss and Trotter represent the cycles of growth and transformation, and the precarious emergence of new forms. Involving their own bodies in the process, the human body as well as the permeable skins and bodies of the works themselves enter a new cycle of life.

Video & Photography by Isaac Rivera.

Susan Luss, (b. 1959, El Paso, TX) is an interdisciplinary artist living in New York City, maintaining a studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Luss received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts (2016), New York, and her BFA in Studio Arts Painting from Pratt Institute (2013), Brooklyn. Luss has exhibited her work at various venues in the New York area, including Museum of Art and Culture, New Rochelle, NY, Lowe Mill A&E in Huntsville, AL, Chashama in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition, The Knockdown Center, and Sideshow Gallery in Brooklyn, The Hole in NYC, Haverstraw RiverArts in Haverstraw, NY, Garner Arts Center in Garner, NY, Westbeth Gallery and The Painting Center in NYC, among others. Luss has curated exhibitions at Pratt Institute, Westbeth Gallery, and Aaron Davis Hall, City College of New York. Luss’s work is held in public and private collections including Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and LaTable des Artists, Paris.

Theo Trotter is an artist working in a variety of media including latex and fibers. His work references the trans body as a palimpsest, through the marks of transformation and trauma that manifest on it. It deals with the idea of transformation as a necessary and transcendent, but simultaneously painful experience by utilizing the tension between beautiful and disgusting visual elements. This conflict between attraction and repulsion also represents injury and healing. He addresses visceral bodily experiences at the point where language begins to fail, dealing with, among other things, physical harm to the body, and the injury of forced femininity.

Terrarium Exhibition panel discussion featuring Sibley Barlow, Lindsy Davis, Kayo Shido, and Sarah Valeri about memory/intuition, sensory experiences stored in the subconscious, environments familiar and strange, and the act of finding.

This event will be held virtually on Zoom. RSVP below to receive the event invite link.

Sibley Barlow explores ideas surrounding time, identity, labor, and repetition particularly as they relate to the body, as well as intersections between civilization and the natural environment. Their work privileges process and seeks to consolidate performance with the object. Sibley works across mediums and crafts, grouping work as widely varied individual projects. The expansive subject matter Sibley explores is unified by repetition: a serial of paintings, or a single work built on hundreds of smaller pieces. They work primarily in painting, drawing, and installation. Sibley was born in Atlanta, Georgia and received their BFA from Ball State University. They currently live and work in Mamaroneck, New York.

Lindsy Davis makes large-scale paintings and sculptures that challenge the viewers’ perception of experience through Gestaltism. Gestaltism is a psychological theory postulating that the individual pieces of the visual puzzle of our reality have their own connotations, but together with all the other pieces make up what we consume and how we dictate meaning from our reality. By making works that are both on and off the wall she creates a composition that moves as you move through it. The individual works have subtleties that can only be experienced through the natural and almost dogmatic urge we have to walk through the space, but in doing so it changes how you perceive the space and the works within it. She received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University. She was raised adjacent to New York and currently lives in Nashville Tennessee.

Kayo Shido is fascinated with self-expression through art, she focuses on landscape-inspired abstract mixed media pieces heavily combined with drawing on surface called Mylar. Her bold but elegant use of color creates compositions that are intuitive, translucent and complex. With strong interest in Carl Jung's psychology, she takes references from nature, and memories perceived and stored in unconscious, extracts and transforms them in abstract form. She expands her paintings into murals, 3D objects and installations. She was born in Hyogo, Japan, works and lives in New York.

Within the non-gravitational fields of color and light of painting, Sarah Valeri explores temporal forms and landscapes in states of change. Elements and beings in her imagery try to find more adaptable forms of strength or power: regeneration, evolution, brightness, vitality. Sarah has exhibited internationally and throughout the metropolitan area in curated and independent exhibitions. She also works as an art therapist in Brooklyn, NY. 

Terrarium Exhibition panel discussion featuring Amanda L. Andrei, Steven Baboun, Natalie Jauregui-Ortiz, and Jumana Mograbi, about growth as it relates to the individual within a community, and what roles comfort and support both play in that relationship.

This event will be held virtually on Zoom. RSVP below to receive the event invite link.

Amanda L. Andrei is an award-winning Filipina Romanian American playwright residing in Los Angeles by way of Washington D.C./Virginia. Her plays and visual art seeks to center the concealed, wounded places of history and societies from the perspectives of diasporic Filipina women. She takes inspiration from her parents’ stories of their homelands, wanderings, and exile to explore and celebrate liminality, hybridity, ancestral healing, and rendering the invisible visible. She holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from the University of Southern California and an MA in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University.

Steven Baboun is a queer Haitian-Syrian artist from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and based in New York City. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Film and Media Arts as well as a minor in Education Studies from American University and graduated from Parsons School of Design with a Master of Fine Arts in Photography. Baboun is a multimedia artist creating through photography, video, performance, and installation. His work confronts social and political topics in Haiti-- from polarizing and controversial issues to elevating the importance of Haitian culture, family history, and immigration. The phenomena he explores in his work range from the Haitian queer experience, multiculturalism and Haitian identity, toxic social structures such as classicism, discrimination, and political corruption, the lack of acceptance of religions other than Catholicism such as Vodou and Islam to the Haitian gaze, Haitian history and culture, Haitian pride, Haitian beauty and more.

Natalie Jauregui-Ortiz (b. Hayward, CA) is a Mexican-American artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BA from the University of California – Santa Cruz. She has exhibited work at Southern Exposure, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Sesnon Underground, AlterWork Studios, and Glass Gallery at Mana Contemporary. Residencies include at the New York Academy of Art and at arts, letters, and numbers. Her paintings explore themes of isolation and belonging, collaging together images and memories that echo. Her work employs an intimate vocabulary and documentation of otherness.

Jumana Mograbi is a Syrian Bulgarian photographer currently living and working in New York. Within her practice she documents moments experienced between our public and private world. In 2021 she received her BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design in New York City. Through a diaristic approach rooted in still documentary photography, she explores themes of the home and rituals of domestication while focusing on aspects of memory, identity, and the self.

Terrarium Exhibition panel discussion featuring Ruth Jeyaveeran, Patricia Miranda, Tavia Sanza, and Manju Shandler. The artists will discuss marks that are left through history, objects that are passed-down through generations, and the interlacing of craft and humankind’s trajectory.

This event will be held virtually on Zoom. RSVP below to receive the event invite link.

Ruth Jeyaveeran is an artist, designer and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited at various galleries throughout New York and she’s been awarded residencies at La Napoule Art Foundation, PADA Studios, the Jentel Foundation and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Currently she's an Assistant Professor of Textile Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She has also taught courses textiles and fibers at Parsons School of Design.

Patricia Miranda is an artist, curator, and founder of The Crit Lab and MAPSpace. She has been awarded residencies at I-Park, Weir Farm, Vermont Studio Center, and JV Printmaking Studio, and grants from Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, Anonymous Was a Woman, two ArtsWestchester grants, and a year-long NEA grant working with homeless youth. Her work has been exhibited at ODETTA Gallery, ABC No Rio, and Wave Hill, NYC; The Gallery at UConn Avery Point; the Newport Museum of Art, RI; and the Belvedere Museum, Austria. Her solo exhibition at Garrison Art Center, Garrison NY, in fall 2021 was featured in the Brooklyn Rail.

Tavia Sanza's frenetic use of embroidery explores concepts related to memory and loss. Utilizing a series of traumas and reconstructions the embroidered pieces she creates are consumed by the process of growing larger and more complex. As the layers accumulate the original “era” is buried and can only be seen in pockets of preservation. This constant accretion creates strata that are visible when the pieces are cut. The striations show how each new “era” is built upon the past.

Manju Shandler has had solo shows at The Pelham Art Center, Corte Dell’Arte in Venice Italy, Brown University's Sarah Doyle Gallery, The Hammond Museum, The Honfleur Gallery, The Governor’s Island Art Fair, The Bergdorf Goodman Store Windows and multiple group shows throughout the US, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tel Aviv and Hong Kong. She regularly shows in her community of Brooklyn, NY. The National September 11th Memorial & Museum exhibited 850 paintings from Shandler's 3,000-piece painting installation, GESTURE, in an exhibition honoring the 15th anniversary of this tragedy. She has a B.A. in Performing Visual Art from Bennington College (1995).

Terrarium Exhibition panel discussion featuring Nicki Cherry, Allison Panzironi and Lilian Shtereva, about belonging, vulnerability, and the "tenacity" of nature.

This event will be held virtually on Zoom.

Nicki Cherry is an artist based in Queens, New York. They received their MFA from Yale School of Art in 2019 and their BA from The University of Chicago in 2014. Through pairing gestural fiberglass forms with found and fabricated objects, Cherry creates sculptures that blur distinctions between human, animal, plant, mineral, and other matter. Each sculpture acts as a conduit to navigate the enormous range of feelings our bodies bring about—failure, fragility, discomfort, emboldenment, awkwardness, and aspiration. 

Allison Panzironi is an emerging artist whose work explores mental health, sexuality and their relationship to domesticity. She works with a variety of flexible materials like fabrics, foam, yarn and ceramic. She is drawn to the visual effects of fibers, which are so soft and gentle, being combined with a violent stitch. Similarly with ceramics, something that was once flexible transforms and becomes structured/rigid. It’s a concept that Allison identifies with and expresses in her work. Appearing externally soft and flexible but being held together by such harsh lines. A lot of the artist's practices started as coping mechanisms, finding comfort in the repeating lines and shapes which later evolved into their own bodies of work. She is curious about and inclined to analyze how to take care of people and what feels like home.

Lilian Shtereva, born and raised in Haskovo, Bulgaria is a New York City-based artist. Her work investigates the simultaneous impermanence and tenacity of the natural world, while referencing her personal history and interest in process-based painting. The artist's tools include bone and rabbit-skin glue, poppy seed oil, natural hand-made pigments, chalk, marble, botanical matter, organic dyes, and dry and oil pastel. The surface of the works vary between natural rice and mulberry paper, linen, duck cotton, muslin, chiffon and more. In 2019 Lilian received the Define American Immigrant Artist Fellowship, and the Soze Foundation Artist+Activist grant (2020).