Saya Woolfalk
Saya Woolfalk
Workspace Program Resident 2012
My work considers the idea that symbolic and ideological systems can be activated and re-imagined through collaboration, imaginative play and masquerade. To effect this re-imagining objects, bodies, and landscapes are constructed to immerse us in the logic of another place.
My current project, The Institute of Empathy is a mixed media installation that explores the work of a fictional group of women called Empathics. I use this science-fiction inspired project to undermine stable conceptions of identity and examine how hybrid identities emerge and transform through different kinds of biological and cultural contact. The Empathics strive for a condition of permanent and ongoing hybridization and the Institute is their research hub. Through it, they seek to transform their biology, social organization, and knowledge. My project relies on the blending of fiction and fact and the results of real collaboration are captured and displayed as the material culture of this fictional institute.
The work I produced for my first solo museum exhibition – The Empathics at Montclair Art Museum – was created during my Workspace residency at Dieu Donné. The Empathics would look completely different had I not been an artist-in-residence. As I began to experiment in the wet studio, I tried to translate what I do with fabric into paper. Amy Jacobs helped me play as we transformed flat sheets of abaca into translucent skins. Like a mad scientist, I mixed pigments and pulp, and pulp painted the skins with pigmented linen. The wet abaca sheets were then laminate cast onto human forms and bones. Dieu Donné gave me the opportunity to work spontaneously in ways that textiles and painting do not allow. It has been an incredible experience.
— Saya Woolfalk, 2012
In the Studio
About the Artist
Saya Woolfalk (b. 1979, Gifu City, Japan) is a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. With the multi year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK, Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.
She has exhibited at museums, galleries, and alternative spaces throughout Asia, Europe and the United States including solo exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ (2012); the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2014); the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (2014); SCAD Museum, Savannah, GA (2016); Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY (2016); Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE (2016); the Mead Museum of Art, Amherst, MA (2017) and group shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA., the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among many others.
Works by the artist are in the collections of major institutions including, among others, the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Mead Art Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum; the Newark Museum; the Chrysler Museum of Art; and the Seattle Art Museum where her major multi-media installation, commissioned and acquired by the Museum, is on extended view. Solo exhibitions of works by Saya Woolfalk are also currently on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO (through September 1, 2019) and the Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI (through August 18, 2019).
Woolfalk is the recipient of numerous honors, awards, and commissions. She has delivered numerous public lectures at museums and universities throughout the United States including a recent TED X Talk. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York and teaches in MFA program at Yale School of Art as well as in the BFA and MFA programs at Parsons: The New School for Design. (Source: Artist’s Website)
For more information, please visit their website: http://www.sayawoolfalk.com/