CPR Programs Manager Anna Muselmann curates OPEN STUDIOS with artists whose work engages ecosensuality and erotics, micro- and macro-ecologies, and mutualistic relationships. The practices of artists Nicolas Baird, A.L. Steiner, cy x (as hell hooks), and agustine zegers each require deep and intimate material research, and examine the strange desires, adaptations, and interdependencies of our ‘more-than-human’ nature. Through learning behaviors, structures, and survival tactics beyond our human imagination, Money Ruined the World begins to conceive of an interspecial collaborative future that is not only more sustainable, but more sensual, pleasurable, and playful.
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Nicolas Baird is an artist, evolutionary biologist, writer, and dancer. He makes art and science that frame more-than-human life as a diverse network of strange kin. His creative practice uses performance, photography, and poetry to explore mutability and adaptation in a multispecies world. His scientific research brings extinct mammals to life, examining diversity, morphology, and the relationships between bodies and their landscapes. Since 2017 he has tied these themes together as co-director of the Institute of Queer Ecology, an ever-evolving collaborative organism producing interdisciplinary art as a tool of critical optimism and queer futurity in the face of vanishing “nature”. He lives in New York City, where he is studying for a doctorate in earth and environmental science.
A.L. Steiner is an artist and educator based in New York. She utilizes constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance, writing, and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a skeptical queer ecofeminist androgyne. Steiner is co-curator of Ridykeulous, co-founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) and collaborates with numerous writers, performers, designers, activists and artists. She is Faculty and Director at Yale University's School of Art.
cy x (as hell hooks) is a demon and a dreamer moved by tremendous desire and obsession with glory holes, sex cinemas, erotic horror, queer archives, and money. They study the way that erotics and space co-construct each other and the objects produced from such encounters and utilize their findings to create ritualized encounters through writing, sound, video, and performance. Their work has been shown in the Center for Art Research and Alliances, Culture Hub, Pioneer Works, Rewire Festival, and other spaces, both digital and physical.
agustine zegers is a Chilean olfactory artist and writer. Their work studies molecular biopolitics and anthropocene atmospherics, attending to the complex nodes of interdependence we share as inhabitants of Earth. By way of queer and microbial methodologies, zegers deploys care practices that reach microscopic dimensions by incorporating bacterial communities, aromatic molecules, and food absorption in their artistic projects, creating tools to reflect on ecocide, interspecies and intrahuman belonging, and care itself. Their work has been exhibited and published internationally at venues such as the Venice Biennale, Galería Jaqueline Martins, Sharjah Art Foundation, Olfactory Art Keller, and DIS Magazine.
Anna Muselmann (curator) is a visual and performing artist, curator, producer, and stylist from Tulsa, OK. In addition to assisting visual and performance artists in Providence, Berlin, San Francisco, and NYC, Muselmann has worked for SIGNAL Gallery, Regina Rex, the WYE (Berlin), Otion Front Studio, Performance Space New York, and Danspace Project, and is currently the Programs Manager at CPR – Center for Performance Research. Her own performance work investigates social and relational dynamics through research in personal daily gestures and habits, more-than-human behaviors, durational group shaking, and group play; and she has performed and shown work at galleries, museums, and venues in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Tulsa, and NYC. In 2021, she organized and co-curated Clouds Gathering, a 5-day performance residency-retreat for 85 multidisciplinary artists in New Lebanon, NY; and in 2023 she initiated Play Practice, a weekly group meeting of queer and trans artists that explores the relationships between play and games, rules and freedom, leading and following, desire and consent, and power and authority. Muselmann has a BA in Visual Arts and Modern Culture + Media from Brown University.
