JAMES PROSEK
Names and Nature, Word and World
Limited seating
Read James Prosek’s article in the New York Times.
Social Saturday, June 10, 2017
James Prosek will talk about how he uses taxidermy in his art to engage ideas about hybridity, mythology and the general friction between the real and imagined. One of Prosek's research interests involves how and why we name and order nature; how we make sense of nature through language – what changes in the mind when we join words to the world. Collecting specimens, preserving them, (i.e. through killing an organism, preparing the tissue in alcohol and stuffing the skin with cotton, as in the case of birds,) is the first step in naming a creature. According to many codes of zoological nomenclature, you must still collect an individual for it to be named a new species.
5:00 Tour (by reservation only)
6:00 Cocktails by Laura Silverman
6:30 Lecture by James Prosek
7:30 Digestion Choreography with Athena Kokoronis
9:00 Fire Project #6 by Amy Yoes and Company
Music throughout the evening by Stovetop
With Jason Merrill, Vibes, Nick Desouza, and Gabby Borges
Limited seating
Request your invitation here
James Prosek is showing his work at
The Mildred Complex(ity)
37b Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY,
May 27 through July 2, 2017
Summer Hours: Thursday through Sunday, 12:00 – 6:00
There will be a reception for the Artist, free and open to the public on
Friday, June 9th, 6:00-8:00
James Prosek is an artist, writer and naturalist who has exhibited his work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the North Carolina Museum of Art among others. He is the author of eleven books including Eels, which was a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice. Prosek has written for the New York Times and National Geographic among other publications and is a co-founder of the conservation group World Trout with Patagonia clothing company. His documentary on the 17th-century angler Izaak Walton won a Peabody Award. He is working on a book with Bloomsbury Publishers about how and why we name and order nature.
Contributing Creative Practitioner Bios
Athena Kokoronis, a long- time involvement at Mildred's Lane, is an artist who incorporates food, cloth, dance and fungi into her collaborative art practice. Her current work, Domestic Performance Agency takes the simultaneous form of an artist-run space, a persona, and an ongoing performance. The Domestic Performance Agency is a hub in Brooklyn; A home-economics hub that looks to motherhood and artisthood in pursuit to create economy based on domestic labor, love, desire, and performance. www.domesticperformanceagency.com
Laura Silverman is a writer, cook, naturalist, forager and wildcrafter who lives in Sullivan County, NY. She believes that fun with flora and fauna is transformative. On her blog, Glutton for Life, and as a contributor to Edible magazine, The River Reporter and WJFF Radio Catskill, she encourages people to experience the healing powers of nature by venturing into the wild and eating mindfully from farm, forest and field.
Amy Yoes and Company: Fire Project #6
The Fire Projects are structures built in the landscape, architectural follies constructed out of scavenged materials. Amy Yoes choreographs their burning by calibrating the burn rates of the wood, cardboard, and paper. These are ephemeral pieces, with a very condensed lifespan; yet the cycle is carried forward, through the drawing charcoal collected from the smoldering ruins.
Amy Yoes was born in 1959 and grew up in Houston, Texas. She has lived in Chicago, San Francisco and, since 1998, in New York. She works in a multi-faceted way, alternately employing installation, photography, video, painting, and sculpture. An interest in decorative language and architectural space permeates all of her work. She responds to formal topologies of ornament and style that have reverberated through time, informing our mutually constructed visual and cultural memory.