Waste Time: Breakdown, Decay, and Regeneration at Freshkills Park:
Panel Discussion with Audrey Snyder, Joe Riley, Antonio Serna,
and Mariel Villeré, moderated by Dylan Gauthier
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
6-8pm
Audrey Snyder and Joe Riley, Sketch for Waste-streaming installation at Freshkills Park, 2017-18. [Image Description: A photo of a waste-streaming facility in front a mostly clear, blue sky has 20 gray flags with flag poles superimposed and scattered throughout the image.]
Mariel Villeré and Dylan Gauthier were joined by artists Audrey Snyder, Joe Riley, and Antonio Serna from Freshkills Park’s Field R/D residency program. The artists shared their findings from the first year of this experimental art-research project and reflected on how art, science, and public policy are intrinsic to the future of the Freshkills Park site.
Bios
Dylan Gauthier is a Brooklyn-based artist and curator who works through a research-based and collaborative practice centered on experiences of urban ecology, architecture, landscape, and social change. Gauthier is a founder of the boat-building and publishing collective Mare Liberum (www.thefreeseas.org), and of the Sunview Luncheonette (www.thesunview.org), a co-op for art, politics, and communalism in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He is co-organizer, with Mariel Villeré, of Freshkills Field R/D, an artist-research residency based at NYC's largest former landfill site. Gauthier's individual and collective projects have been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, the Parrish Art Museum, CCVA at Harvard University, the 2016 Biennial de Paris (Beirut), the Center for Architecture, The International Studio and Curatorial Program, the Chimney, the Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase, Columbus College of Art and Design, the Walker Art Center, EFA Project Space, and other venues in the US and abroad. His writings about art and public space have been published by Contemporary Art Stavanger, Parrish Art Museum, Urban Omnibus, Art in Odd Places, and Routledge/Public Art Dialogue, among others. In 2015 he was the NEA-supported Ecological Artist-in-Residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP); in 2016 he was a Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellow (NY); and in 2017/18 he was the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at the Brandywine River Conservancy and Museum of Art. In 2018, he is a resident at the Shandaken Project at Storm King and was a visiting artist at NYU Abu Dhabi. Gauthier received his MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College, CUNY (‘12), and teaches courses on emerging media and expanded cinema in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, and ecological design at the School of Design Studies at Parsons/The New School.
Joe Riley & Audrey Snyder are collaborators with one another and the artist collective Futurefarmers. Their art combines the poetic, political, and practical as a point of entry to explore urban and rural concourses. The work is site-specific and collaborative in nature, emphasizing anti-disciplinary practice and the of mastery of non-mastery. Joe and Audrey's current work through the Freshkills Field R/D Program considers the visibility and dispersal of NYC's waste-export network in the wake of the 2001 closing of Freshkills landfill; a navigation of the waste-stream. Their concurrent project Into the ground at Socrates Sculpture Park reflects on how urban ecologies uptake and transform contaminants, and collective bodies realize agency through ground-up organizing.
Originally from San Antonio Texas, Antonio Serna is a Mexican-American artist based in New York City. He is currently focused on two main projects, The Same Sun, a chrono-geological narrative video series, and Documents of Resistance, an artistic-research project based on the art and activism of artists of color. Antonio Serna holds a Masters in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Art. His projects have been workshops have been featured at the Queens Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Common Field Convening, Eyebeam, Smack Mellon, and Museo Tamayo. Antonio Serna has taught at Brooklyn College and Parsons School of Design.
His current project Documents of Resistance has recently been included in a new book Art As Social Action, edited by Gregory Sholette, Chloe Bass, and Queens Social Practice (Allworth Press). An upcoming exhibition of Documents of Resistance: Our Time is planned for The Loisaida Center in New York City later this year.
Mariel Villeré is the Manager for Programs, Arts and Grants for Freshkills Park, where she develops new programming and manages the public art program as part of the site’s transition from landfill to park. She holds a BA in Architecture from Barnard College and earned her Masters of Architecture Studies in the History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture and Art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 2013, where she also acted as Director of Exhibitions and Publications for the Department of Architecture. Mariel has held her current position with NYC Parks since January 2014 and continues independent projects at the intersection of architecture, art and urban studies as a researcher and designer.