Interdisciplinary Weekend at the Watermill Center
In Process @ the Watermill Center, a series that encourages engagement between the center’s resident artists and the community, will feature presentations by artists working in four different disciplines on Saturday afternoon between 2 and 4. A tour of the center’s facilities and grounds will be offered between 1 and 2.
Jayoung Chung is a Korean multimedia artist whose work embraces performance, film, computer graphics, sound, and movement. During her residency she is developing “Empathy,” a dance-performance that illustrates the story based on Martin Buber’s philosophy of engaging with each other and the world.
Using a literal definition of empathy — putting oneself in someone else’s shoes — the piece will end with an open-structured scene during which the audience will be encouraged to physically interact with the primary performer.
Molly Joyce is an American composer and performer who will develop her first full-length album, “Breaking and Entering,” while at the center. The music will be performed entirely on a vintage toy organ that she bought on eBay.
The instrument has become a primary focus in her work not only because of its unique sound and tuning, but also because it fits her physically impaired left hand. With the organ and the music she composes for it, Ms. Joyce aims to engage and challenge her impairment.
A 2018 Inga Maren Otto Fellow, the Japanese visual artist Masako Miki has shown her immersive installations and detailed works on paper throughout the Bay Area and Japan. While at the center she will prepare a new body of work including a large ink drawing and sculptural pieces for a 2019 site-specific installation at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Hugh Ryan, an American writer, historian, and curator, is writing a queer history of the Brooklyn waterfront, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press next year, and developing an accompanying exhibition for the Brooklyn Historical Society.
His work sheds light on the poets, sailors, undercover cops dressed as sailors, brothels, sideshows, communes, rough trade, Nazi spies, trans men, dancers, machinists, and many more who thrived in Brooklyn until being systematically erased by conservative forces in the 1950s and 1960s.
Film Trilogy
Lotte Nielsen, a former Watermill Center resident, will present three short films on Sunday afternoon at 3 at the Southampton Arts Center. “YAOI Copenhagen” was filmed in an abandoned movie theater on the outskirts of Copenhagen, “YAOI Istanbul” was shot in a dilapidated wooden house in Istanbul, and “YAOI Long Island” was created at the Watermill Center. All films include fictional elements in an otherwise true-to-life narrative, whose participants were culled from local LGBT organizations in the three cities.
All the above programs and the tour are free, but registration is required through the center’s website.