Frank Heath is an American artist who lives and works in New York. Heath’s works are poetic interventions into systems of communication, information and understanding, which expose moments of disjuncture and ultimately crack open perceived reality to reveal a more compromised construction. These idiosyncratic, existential riffs, situated in the space between perception and reality in everyday life, are made approachable through his casual style and his frequent use of absurdity. In this way, Heath appeals to the viewer’s sense of humor while simultaneously effecting change to the way they see the world around them, leaving them with a sense of ambiguous tensions to grapple with.
In many of Heath’s works he incorporates the voices of unsuspecting individuals into the work in a compassionate but subversive way. By co-opting mundane social exchanges and infusing them with an unexpected narrative, Heath’s mediation exist simultaneously in both private and public spheres. In more recent work, the artist has held a sustained investigation into questions concerning the end of the world, and in particular the various ways that humans imagine and prepare for it.
Jason Wee (b. 1979, Singapore) is an artist, writer and curator working between contemporary art, architecture, poetry and photography. His art practice contends sources of singular authority by exposing alternative readings that favour polyphony and difference. In this way he transforms histories and spaces that have been viewed through a single lens into visual and written materials that expose their secrets and their futures, their idealisms and their conundrums.
Particularly interested in Asia and Southeast Asia, Wee has recently spent time investigating the cycle of redevelopment - demolition, clearance, and destruction triggered by urban renewals and the underlying sets of laws, policies, procedures and technologies that facilitate this - that has become endemic to the life of Asian global cities, and the complex ways in which this affects our understanding of ecology, urban planning, memory, and architecture.
Mike HJ Chang is a Taiwanese American artist and educator in fine arts. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, both in the USA. Chang currently resides and works in Singapore.
Autobiographical information always serves as the basis for narrative exploration in Chang’s work. Recent projects such as Arrival Reception, and Welcome Door Mat, shows the way he idiosyncratically combines architecture, furniture, and text to focus on the notion of transient identity in a space where the public and the private intersect, such as a place between his bedroom door. Collectively, though, his work examines the interplay and relationship between ‘The Clean’, which is a quiet, orderly state, and ‘The Generic’, which is an empty state that is devoid of ego and memory.
“The only difference between science and art, really, is how one is trained. The ideas of the field, observation and recording are used in science, but also in art…Whether you are a scientist or an artist, you have to be able to imagine questions and follow your intuition.” – Rohini Devasher; Indian Express, Of Earth and Beyond, Sept 2016
Devasher works in a variety of media including, video, prints and large site-specific drawings. Situated between the empirical and the imagined, Devasher’s works are full of invented, constructed biological forms that reflect her fascination with systematic exploration and representations of the physical world around us. Her work is often the result of observing, recording, fictionalizing, and reimagining objects and the spaces of interpretation and inversion that exist at the interface between science, nature and culture, perception and production. Her investigations and experiments often draw the familiar into the unfamiliar, her attention to detail and her naturalistic suggesting realistic reflection before pivoting into uncanny territory.
Cynthia Daignault is an American artist, born in Baltimore, Maryland and currently based in New York and Los Angeles. Daignalut works mostly in series, and almost always in the format of small-scale painting, which come together to form a single larger work that visually reflects a lived experience. Whether it is clouds, land, the sunset, a still life or a found image, Daignault’s works record transitory moments creating a poetic interplay between creation of a work through the dissolution of a moment that is at once seen, experienced, remembered and imagined; a moment that can be universal, but which for each person can also be intensely personal.
Daignault takes great pride in working with the traditional materials of oil on lead primed linen with a traditional palate in an age where the painting tradition is becoming increasingly obsolete and has said ‘I find it incredibly moving that I may be among the last generation of painters to even have the option of working in the same materials as Velazques, Courbet, Goya, Manet, Titian or Tiepolo.
Lulù Nuti (b.1988) is a French-Italian artist that is based between Rome and Paris. She attended Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, Atelier Elsa Cayo. Nuti has been included in a number of exhibitions recently including Systems, Roman Houses of Celio, Rome (2015-2016), Fail Better, Revue Composition, Galerie OFR, Paris (2016), A LINEA, Site-specific project at Courbevoie, France (2016), Rob à Robe, Nouvelle Collection Paris, DOC, Paris, France (2016), FRAGILE, Galerie Mansart, Paris, France (2016) as well as Metamorphosis Garden, Biwako Biennale, Japan (2012). She was a finalist in the Prix Dauphine pour l'Art Contemporain, Université Paris-Dauphine, Paris, France (2015), and received the special jury prize at the Prix de la june creation, Saint Remy (2013). - April, 2017
Benedetto Pietromarchi was invited to be the inaugural artist in residence for The Owners Cabin. Pietromarchi boarded a vessel in July 2015 and remained in residence for approximately one month, during which time he produced a body of work related to his time, thoughts and investigations on board.
Fundamental to Benedetto Pietromarchi’s practice is the investigation into the relationships between nature and artifice, biology and construction, and how these notions are experienced and perceived within the context of our varied cultures, histories and present realities. While the conclusion of Pietromarchi’s work takes the form of the physical artistic object – sculpture, film, collage, drawing – the study, research, journey and active experience of discovery that leads up to these works is central to the final understanding of and approach to the artwork. For Pietromarchi, art should exist in and of itself, but rather it is a mode through which to relay collected information - a vehicle for communication, reflection and revelation.
