The Art/Life Institute
KINGSTON, NY 185 Abeel Street
A Performance Art Residency, Gallery and Project Space
JAMIE EMERSON
Dedicated to making people smile for over a Quarter century.
I was born in 1991 to a family of professional artists. I began painting and sculpting in clay earlier than I can remember, and took intro college art classes before moving to New York at the age of 19. With $60 to my name I enrolled at the Art Students League of New York where I studied traditional drawing and painting from life, as well as advanced mixed media under Bruce Dorfman. While at the League, I was involved in a number of group shows both at the school and throughout NYC. My work has appeared in At the Edge Magazine, Untapped Cities, and the Westside Rag. In 2016 my public sculpture Bridge was installed in Riverside Park South in Manhattan, and my work is also in the permanent collection of the Art Students League. Most recently I have been living on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, documenting the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota tribes involved in the #NoDAPL opposition. I currently work and reside in NY.
My name is Alejandro Chellet and I was born in Mexico City. Performance art has been always a part of my life. I experienced it as an early age spectator, influenced by my parents who are also artists. I grew to become a young multidisciplinary artist and a social practitioner on cultural and permacultural networks. My focus is creating artwork related to the misplaced core principles of coexistence, the loss of connection with Nature cycles, and the political and environmental context of urban societies. Working with: the audience, public space, architecture and performance.
I work to create and share art globally and through my efforts have successfully performed and participated in residencies around the world. In 2013 I presented an urban intervention for 8th Encuentro of the Hemispheric in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My piece addressed the themes of: love, altruism, community living/support and informality. We made an interactive space to explore, listen and learn.
The following year I performed in a Mexican performance show at Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, New York, curated by Pancho Lopez and Jill McDermid. Through connections I made at this performance, I became involved in designing and implementing an artist residency in Rosendale, New York, based on the principles of permaculture.
In 2015 I was awarded the Adidas-Border grant for emerging artists and produced Actualiza Arte a collaborative urban intervention in Mexico City. I built DIY mobile bamboo trailers and bamboo bikes which I filled with items to give to people, and foldable bamboo geodesic dome with canvases, which I invited other artists to paint. I also built a solar powered sound system on a bike and invited people to share words with the public. This project was exhibited at Museo Universitario del Chopo during a collective show with other artists who were also awarded this grant.
In 2016, I scavenged industrial amounts of food waste in the streets of Brooklyn and used it for my performance Buried by Broccoli curated by Jill Mcdermid at the Art/Life Institute in Kingston, NY. The artwork was also exhibited at collective show Practicas de Campo in Museum Casa del Lago, UNAM, curated by Felipe Zuñiga and Tania Ragasol in Mexico City.
I was accepted into a residence in Catalunya, Spain at Alt Emporda in the summer of 2016. The residency was focused on Art Nature and Landscape. My work was The House of Fire. It consisted of a pavilion made from bamboo that represented the human being and its settler power paying homage to the greater spirit of Fire. In NYC I performed for: LiVEART.US, curated by Hector Canonge at the Queens Museum; The Food Show curated by Leili Huzaibah at Local Project Gallery in Long Island City; Animamus Art Salon curated by Ventiko at Chinatown Soup Gallery in Manhattan, Wild Embeddings and Pulsar curated by Ian Deleon and Tif Robinette in Brooklyn.