THREE PHASE
CENTER FOR COLLABORATIVE ART RESEARCH AND BUILDING IN STONE RIDGE, NY
DOCUMENTING PROCESS
DOCUMENTING PROCESS is a video series that aims to build dialogue around the value of process as a way to challenge the institutional methodologies that typically exploit and restrict artwork and processes that are difficult to quantify and commodify. The series tracks the approach and value of process-based conceptual artists who are compelled to work in responsive, intuitive, reflexive and instinctive ways that inhabit social, financial, and institutional peripheries. The series intends to collect data that can be used to identify, differentiate, and authenticate the essential value of these subtle structures of process and approach to problem solving with materials, actions, and non-linear language that artists engage with.
The documentary format tracks the artist's process as they evaluate potential outcomes, problems, and utilities of the project. The artists will identify the unexpected and expand upon any new directions their work might take. Upon completion, the artist discloses their findings, illuminating what new information emerged and how this work might inform their next project or how it may be useful in other ways.
LINDA MARY MONTANO is a central figure in contemporary feminist performance art and her work since the mid 1960s has been critical in the development of video by, for, and about women. Attempting to dissolve the boundaries between art and life, Montano continues to actively explore her art/life through shared experience, role adoption, and intricate life altering ceremonies, some of which last for seven or more years. Her artwork is starkly autobiographical and often concerned with personal and spiritual transformation. Montano’s influence is wide ranging – she has been featured at museums including The New Museum in New York, MOCA San Francisco and the ICA in London.
SHOLA COLE / PIRATE JENNY
SHOLA COLE (She/They) is a queer Afro-Caribbean/UK born immigrant and NYC based performance artist. Cole uses radio, movement, and a time traveling tool wearing alter ego called Pirate Jenny to explore historical contexts within a personal legacy as a Black GNC Lesbian and former classically trained/traumatized musician. Ongoing works include Biographie of Service, a process where Cole combines narrative and figure modeling in a process that invites viewer participation to critique her selfless contortions, and Hung- another participatory piece that examines the social perception of hand washing garments. Cole graduated from UConn with a Bachelor of General Studies minoring in Women's Studies and is an alumni of
EmergeNYC and Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She facilitates her own Body Vocality! Improv Workshops © and enjoys travel, low-to-no-social media, art, food, and foreign language dabbling. She is also obsessed with rescue pit bulls, HBCU Marching bands and RPDR.
JOSH BABU
As part of DOCUMENTING PROCESS Josh Babu installed a series of interactive sculptures at Three Phase Center in August 2019. Tucked into vignettes of lumber, steel pipe, worn out cranks, old rims, busted helmets, and other textural elements, layers of monitors depict video loops of glowing bicycles circling through blacked-out spaces. What starts as an inquiry into gesture, speed, light, rhythm and form, dives quickly into questions of perception and responsiveness in relation to materials, environments, and endeavors. Art Writer Lea Springstead compares Josh's Installations at Three Phase Center to Yoko Ono’s “Remembering the Future” on view
concurrently at The Everson Museum in Syracuse saying [Drawing on compositional elements of presence from his work as a videographer, Babu inverts the narrative of his day job to create a conceptual installation as a way to gain control over what he observes. His work draws a parallel to the welcomed observer in Yoko’s work, whose vision of a self-actualized collective built upon the action of the individual is prophetically becoming a reality, piece by piece as demonstrated by Josh Babu’s work at Three Phase Center in Stone Ridge, NY] JOSH BABU is a video artist working with gesture, speed, line, texture, and rhythm. He received a BA in Art from Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and works as a freelance videographer for both fringe and mainstream communities and is a team rider for Bone Deth.
Cai & Le Xi - sibling artists
Cai Xi presented an interactive performance in the larger front space of Three Phase Center - inspired by her mother's words "leaving my body, changing my bones" while her brother Li presented a video installation in the blacked out back space of the building.
Cai's work connects the body with the Earth and air through regenerative movement and Le uses cameras and sketches to record the material edges of urban environments searching for elusive qualities. While both reference shared processes of life and art, Cai uses her body to draw circles
around herself, making marks wherever her body can reach, revealing cycles of growth and decomposition, and Le continues his search using machines, lenses, light, space, and physical objects saying "No matter how I explain its meaning, I have never caught it exactly. I just keep trying, never interrupted." However it goes, the pair's combination of technology and the spiritual hints at the potential of repetitive motions to generate perpetual states of nothingness and letting go.
Cai is a painter, chef, educator and Taiji master who has been practicing for over thirty years. Cai's extensive painting practice (including landscape, portraiture and abstraction) extends to the kitchen where, as a chef she uses the Chinese Five Element theory as a lens for understanding the relationships between the body and its environments, including the weather, emotions, and the health of the inner organs. Cai's colorful and tasty foods blend her artistic instinct and approach to healthy living as a way to create community around her.
Cai is part of the experimental contemporary art scene forging new solutions with each work in process. At the same time, she has a connection to and transforms traditional classical Chinese art through calligraphy and the principles of ‘brush’ (using the common mop, broom, and mason’s trowel), ‘ink’ (as oil or enamel paint), and, what has been known for centuries in China as the ‘bone’ of compositional structure. Much of her connection to traditional Chinese painting is espoused in the 17th century treatise, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting: “The great unifying aim has been to express Tao, the way – the basic Chinese belief in an order and harmony in nature” , “the close relationship between painting and calligraphy” and “the traditional view that painting is not a profession but an extension of the art of living.” Cai relates to the Tao as a mystical groundedness. Cai received her M.F.A. from Vermont College of Fine Arts and her B.F.A. from Shanghai Theatre Institute. https://caixiart.com/
Le Xi was born during China’s Cultural Revolution and grew up during a period of contemporary Chinese history and globalization. His work has appeared in group exhibitions in China as part of the contemporary Chinese art scene. In 2002 Xi moved to New York and in 2009 his work was included in the group exhibition “Mary’s Choice” curated by Mary Heilmann at the 303 Gallery. Later he was part of “Drawing itself: A Survey of Contemporary Practice” curated by Mara Williams at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in Vermont. In 2010 he received The Alumni Scholarship Award and got his MFA in fine art from The School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2013, he was part of the 55th Venice Biennale as part of the Chinese parallel “independent voice” exhibition and teaches at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Le explains his work process: “I have experimented with technology. I contemplate the transition from the mechanical to the biological. I have seen the unbroken procession from day to night, the cycle between sunlight and the world of electricity. During the day I follow the structure of the world as defined by shadows. At night, I conceive more power over the shadow by controlling illumination. I am interested in the space between the object and shadow, in which, I believe, art exists. A dramatic relationship is between structure and sensibility created by repetition, change, shifts, and the fluidity of action. By doing this, there is a disregard for the boundaries between substance and shadow, and time and space.” http://www.lexistudio.com/statement.html
Center Valerie Sharp engaged in a writing practice as a way to explore her process of angling information accessed from the stream-of-consciousness. Working with processes she describes as "bringing form to the formless," The Architecture of a Stream reels metaphors across literal lands in a way that seems to materialize the ethereal in catching ways.
VALERIE SHARP is a visual and performance artist in Stone Ridge, New York originally from Oklahoma City with a BFA in Acting (2014) and BA in Studio Art (2015) from Oklahoma City University. She creates expressionist paintings reflecting her inner world, and performance art using a combination of durational actions, costume, and installation in order to transform personal experiences into universal symbols. Through her work, she investigates the perception of time, our relationship to nature as a mirror to ourselves, and the wonderful, mysterious forest that is our mind. Most recently, she is delving into the psyche of fairytales. During her residency at Three Phase
VALERIE SHARP
BRIAN McCORKLE
Conceptual Composer Brian McCorkle (from Panoply Performance Laboratory, Varispeed Collective, Robert Ashley Ensemble) is obsessed with the ethics of art-making, and is currently developing an approach to musical composition called "Decomposition" which displaces traditional ideas of composer as landowner (and performers as renters - see Jacques Attali's "Noise" from 1985 for metaphorical exploration.) Brian McCorkle is a composer, performer, digital artist and is a founding member of the composer's collective Varispeed.