Meet September’s Artists-in-Residence
Allan Pichardo, Joiri Minaya, and Seung-Min Lee
Joining us in September 2022, Allan, Joiri and Seung-Min are part of Fountainhead Residency's September residency.
Allan Pichardo
Allan is a digital artist that finds the hidden things that modern technology obfuscates about ourselves, and uses code to expose them in their naked form through ‘speculative software,’ or repurposed and hacked applications meant to subvert the original intention of the technology. Presented as interactive installations, net art, video games, and hacked software, his work intends to upend the relationship between consumers of technology and the power structures that exploit them for data.
His work questions what public data says about him as an individual before turning the lens on what it says about society collectively. The answers to these questions guide his approach as he dissects the mechanics of social media to transform mundane interactions into reflective experiences. His background in computer science allows him to engage deeply with the raw materials of computational media—code, electronics, and big data—to extrapolate alternate futures where users have ultimate agency over their personal data. Allan’s work has been exhibited in venues in Ohio, Montreal, Chicago and Portland, where he is currently based.
Joiri Minaya
Joiri Minaya’s current body of work focuses on the construction of the female subject in relation to nature and landscape in a “tropical” context, shaped by a foreign Gaze that demands leisure and pleasure. Like nature, femininity has been imagined and represented throughout history as idealized, tamed, conquered / colonized and exoticized; she is currently revising existing cultural products that engage in this form of representation and challenging them through her work. Growing up in the Dominican Republic — though born in the United States— how she navigates the global North and South informs her recent work, which expands her initial preoccupations around the body, domesticity and gender roles into the landscape to unlearn, decolonize and exorcise larger systems.
Her process is an ongoing exploration across media: a painting or a sculpture might be a departing point for a video or a performance, and they might all merge into a final piece or develop independently. The constant in her work is the presence of the body and the interest in creating distinct power positions with it, often contradictory but operating simultaneously. She studied art at the ENAV (DR), the Chavón School of Design, and Parsons and has exhibited across the Caribbean, the U.S. and internationally. She recently received a Jerome Hill Fellowship, a NY Artadia award and the BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize. She is based in New York.
Seung-Min Lee
Every project Seung-Min Lee begin starts with thoroughly trying to find the sources of a feeling of alienation she experience in the daily, mundane experience of being in the world. Rage, disappointment, resignation, submission: these are the internal phase changes that alert her to a rift in acclimatization to the "best-fit" diagram of a world that assumes a white body as its subject/customer/end-user. In her performance work, she attempts to inhabit this Other, white, space fully, in an effort to almost empathize with the oppressor, and allow herself to be fully consumed by its seductive power. By allowing her body to be vulnerable and open to this possession in public space, she seeks to create a meaningful tension that can disrupt the supposedly natural order of things. By targeting the materials of everyday life, e.g. the news, food, consumer goods, celebrity, and pop culture, she attempts to defamiliarize the viewer with their assumptions of the distribution of power and meaning, so that they in turn seek to challenge the same.
Seung-Min has performed at Essex Flowers, International Waters, Hauser and Wirth, Luxembourg and Dayan, Museum of Chinese in America, Artists Space, The Kitchen, Performance Space NY, MoMA PS1, The Shanghai Biennial, Human Resources LA, NADA NY, The Museum of The Chinese in New York. She has been reviewed and published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Interview, dismagazine, The Guardian UK, Artnews, and e-flux's Art-Agenda. She is currently based in New York.
