With practices spanning video, drawing, painting, and installation, the annual Visual Artist AIRspace Residency exhibition features work by the 2021–22 cohort: artists Amina Ross, Jordan Strafer, Dhaynne Torres, and Red Canary Song. This exhibition explores the tension between labor and rest as tied to understandings of self, community and our built environment.
Walk-ins are welcome.
Amina Ross (b. 1993, New York, NY) is an artist, educator, and life-long learner. Amina makes videos, sculptures, sounds, and situations that consider feeling, body-knowledge, and intimacy as technologies of survival for black queer trans and femme people. Amina is currently a critic in the Department of Film, Animation, and Video at Rhode Island School of Design. Amina received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and their MFA from the Yale School of Art. Amina is currently a Visual Artist in Residence at Abrons Art Center (New York, NY), A Technology Immersion Program participant at Harvestworks (New York, NY) and a 2022 NYC Community Trust Van Lier Fellow at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY). Summer 2022 Amina will participate in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture’s residency.
Jordan Strafer (b. 1990, Miami, FL) is an artist working primarily in video based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from The New School in 2016 and her MFA from Bard College in 2019. She has participated in group exhibitions at Red Tracy, Copenhagen, (2020-21); Housing, New York (2020); SculptureCenter, New York (2020); The New Museum, New York (2021); and Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin (2021). In 2022 she had her first solo exhibition PUNCHLINE at Participant Inc centering her film, PEAK HEAVEN LOVE FOREVER (2022).
Dhaynne Torres (b. 1997, Queens, NY) focuses on drawing and painting. She earned a BFA in Fine Arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2019. The artist works with oil pastels, graphite, charcoal, and oil paint. Her work mainly explores loss within Filipino families, the history of a family, the fleeting moments in between, and her present life in New York. The Visual Artist AIRspace Residency at the Abrons Arts Center was her first residency program. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Red Canary Song is a grassroots massage worker coalition in the United States. They initially began as a project to provide legal and financial support for the family of Yang Song, a Flushing massage worker killed during a police raid in November 2017. They also organize with Asian sex workers across the diaspora in Toronto, Paris, and Hong Kong.