Artist talks & Closing | Friday, February 7, 7 pm
Free and open to the public

Join us for the closing event of Punctures with artist talks by Charlie Best and Jodi Lynn Maracle. Best will speak about their window installation We Interrupt this Program, made as “an invitation for confusion and joy, full of noise, for trans people.” Jodi Lynn Maracle will share her video work A Song to the Water from a Loving Child which explores generational relationships to and for lands and waters. The artists will be joined by curator Ekrem Serdar for a conversation and Q&A following their presentations.

Charlie Best is an artist and seamstrix living and working in what is currently known as buffalo, ny. Picking and choosing between fiber and textiles, video, collage, performance, and sculpture, Charlie’s work interrupts transmissions of the gender binary, lack of imagination, capitalism, and other ills lurking in common cultural forms. Richard Scarry illustrations, men’s shirts, catholic mass, and network television are just some of what awaits the cut of the scissors. Charlie is committed to the joys, lessons, fears, and aesthetics of nonbinary imagination practices. They received a bfa in sculpture and expanded media from alfred university’s school of art and design (2018), and were the recipient of a fellowship to the cite internationale des arts, paris, france. They have exhibited locally and nationally, most recently at sugar city (buffalo, ny) with “something from the basement”. The current interests of their practice include the application of anarchist tactics/thoughts/dreams and children’s stories to garment and accessory design, and the history of VHS. Charlie and collaborator Jaz Palermo are in pre production for their first film, titled st. tilapia’s school for gayward girls, which they both hope gets banned somewhere.

Born and raised in what is currently considered Buffalo, NY, Jodi Lynn Maracle is a Kanien’keha:ka mother, artist, teacher and language learner. Jodi utilizes Haudenosaunee material language and techniques, such as hand tanning deer hides, and corn husk twining, in conversation with sound scapes, projections, video, and performance to interrogate questions of place, power, erasure, story making, and responsibility to the land. She has shown her work throughout Dish With One Spoon Territory in site specific installation performances such as the Mush Hole Project at the defunct Mohawk Institute Residential School (home of the Woodland Cultural Centre) in Brantford, ON, as well as the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, ON, Artpark in Lewiston, NY, and Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center, in Buffalo, NY. Her research as a PhD student at the University at Buffalo focuses on Haudenosaunee material culture, language, land and birth practices. Of her accomplishments, she is most proud to hear her son speak his Mohawk language each day.

This exhibition is part of Punctures: Textiles in Digital and Material Time. Consisting of three exhibitions and public programs that weave into each other, Punctures features artists who are invested in the intersections and history of textile practices, media art, and critical and liberatory politics, including trans fashion and domesticity; gendered and immigrant labor under global racial capitalism; Gelede women’s commemoration, protest and power as represented in textile work; speculative future-casting through Oglala Lakota knowledge systems, and more. The exhibition features installations by Betty Yu, Cecilia Vicuña, Charlie Best, Eniola Dawodu, Kite, and Sabrina Gschwandtner, performances by Charlie Best, Jodi Lynn Maracle, and Kite, and screenings of work by Jodie Mack, Pat Ferrero, Sabrina Gschwandtner, and Wang Bing. Punctures design by Kelly Walters.

Image: Jodi Lynn Maracle, A Song to the Water from a Loving Child (2020)