Each month, artists will delve into their own texts, or will read from texts that have had a major influence on their practice. Combining both live and virtual presentations, each event will feature a set of readings followed by a discussion with the audience.

This month's program, "Deepening Dams, Hungry Coasts" looks at how artists investigate, through their writings and their practice, the cumulative power that language has on material reality; where the act of naming is at once an act of creativity and an act of violence. The evening will feature readings by Gordon Hall, Cole Lu, Nancy Lupo (Skype reading), and Joseph Buckley reading Ajay Kurian, as well as his own writing.

The series takes place at Wendy’s Subway, a non-profit reading room, writing space, and independent publisher, with a unique and versatile platform for expanding modes of reading, writing, and publishing.

Living Content is an online curatorial platform that features interviews with artists, exhibition recommendations, as well as collaborative limited editions. LC operates from New York, and it occasionally organizes discursive events and exhibitions.

Speakers

‍Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York who makes sculptures and performances. Hall has had solo presentations at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Renaissance Society, EMPAC, and Temple Contemporary, and has been in group exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Hessel Museum, Art in General, White Columns, Socrates Sculpture Park, among many other venues. Hall’s writing and interviews have been published widely including in Art Journal, Artforum, Art in America, and Bomb, as well as in Walker Art Center's Artist Op-Ed Series, What About Power? Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture (published by SculptureCenter), Documents of Contemporary Art: Queer (published by Whitechapel and MIT Press,), and Theorizing Visual Studies (Routledge). A volume of Hall’s collected essays, interviews, and performance scripts was published by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in 2019. Gordon Hall is a 2019-2020 Provost Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sculpture at RISD and will be 2020 resident faculty at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Cole Lu is an artist and writer based in New York. Lu's practice implies various literary devices that result in sculpture, installation, text, and video. Through rewriting classical mythology and allegorical science fiction, Lu's work reflects the collective unconscious and comments on the motif of othering through colonial viewpoints. Each body of work is developed from anecdotal evidence, to question the capacity of historical realism and is part of a lifelong series of the artist’s ‘real fiction’ on contemporary values and belief systems. Lu's work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum and Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis; the Institute of Contemporary Art and Vox Populi, Philadelphia; 55 Walker and American Medium, New York, POPPOSITIONS, Brussels, The Wrong Biennale, Deli Gallery, New York, LACE, Los Angeles, Anthology Film Archives, New York, I Never Read, Basel, FILE, São Paulo, and Arcade, London. Lu's publication Smells Like Content (Endless Editions) is in the artists' book collection of the MoMA Library, New York. Lu's upcoming solo exhibition at AALA Gallery, Los Angeles, opens on March 28, 2020.

Nancy Lupo’s work addresses the ways in which we move through spaces as if following latent scripts that punctuate and dictate the rituals and rhythms that shape our daily lives. Lupo investigates the psychological, practical, and symbolic relationships among food, currency, and metabolism. Lupo's complex installations often incorporate organic elements, such as quinoa, foil-covered chocolates, and fruit, as well as banal items, including dental floss, dog bowls, and folding chairs, in various states of rot or use. Lupo works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union, and her MFA from Yale University. She has had solo exhibitions at Visual Art Center, University of Texas at Austin, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Antenna Space, Shanghai; Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles; Swiss Institute, New York; 1857, Oslo; WALLSPACE, New York; and LAXART, Los Angeles, among others. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Fountainhead Fellowship.

Joseph Buckley is an artist from England based in New York. Recent shows include Traitor Muscle, Brotherhood Tapestry, Days of Madness and of Learning, and The Demon of Regret.

Ajay Kurian currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has had solo exhibitions at 47 Canal, New York; Sies+Höke, Düsseldorf; White Flag Projects, St. Louis, MO; Artspeak, Vancouver; Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, and Audio Visual Arts, New York. He has exhibited work in group exhibitions at K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; 2017 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Øregaard Museum, Copenhagen; Art Commissions GI on Governor’s Island, New York, NY; MoMA PS1, New York, and the Fridericianum, Kassel. His work is included in public collections including the Aïshti Foundation Collection, Beiruit, Lebanon and The Whitney Museum of American Art. He has an upcoming institutional solo exhibition at The Silber Gallery at Goucher College, Maryland.

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