Show # 113

A gate // A veil // A vessel 

Chiara No

Krystal DiFronzo 

Jacquelyn Marie Shannon

Opening Reception: Thurs, January 9th, 2-4 pm

Dates:  Jan 7 - Feb 13, 2020

Hours: Thurs-Sat, 12-6 pm

In collaboration with HOME Gallery 291 Grand Street NYC

In an exhibition combining ritual, art and magic, Field Projects is pleased to present A gate//A veil//A vessel.

Traversing betwixt two spaces–– Field Projects and Home Gallery–– the exhibition will feature the art of three witches, including such items as a woven summoning rug, dyed, translucent veils, performance documentation and a Ghostly Practice based ritual movement workshop. 

Art and witchcraft are mediums of conjuring. Witches and artists bring things into being and connect (or perhaps collapse) the present with the past. Each of the artists in this exhibition creates work deeply tied to history through a combination of ritual practice and research centered on their ancestors, feminist icons, ghosts, reclaimed demons or revived women.

Jacquelyn Marie Shannon uses her body as a vehicle for engaging with spirit through ‘Ghostly Practice,’ a ritual art drawing from nearly fifteen years of training in Japanese butoh, expressionist dance, and physical theatre. She investigates spectrality and liminality, memory and haunting, affect, and alternative temporalities. Krystal DiFronzo works on pharmakon and the grey areas between medicine, poison, desire, illness, and its effect on femme bodies and labor through exploitation and myth.  This produces natural dye-painted banners that tell spectral narratives with an alchemical unpredictability. Chiara No creates sigil carpets and rugbeaters, works that conjure herstory through the play of naming. “Naming is a process of creation, bestowing life or soul upon in a human, object or idea.” No looks to the demon(ized) of history–– the heretic, the midwife, the hermit, the foreigner–– as ancestral comrades.

In combining art and witchcraft, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Krystal DiFronzo, and Chiara No produce bodies of independent feminist ritual works living in the betwixt: from earth to salt, necromancy to spectrality, and alternative temporalities. 

Works Available

Krystal DiFronzo (b.1989, Chicago IL) is an artist and educator based in Ridgewood, Queens. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 and MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2020. 

Soaking through their cloth or paper skins, like a night sweat, my figures strain against the boundaries of their bodies and the flora and fauna with which they engage. I am concerned with the idea of the pharmakon and the grey areas between medicine, poison, desire, illness, and its effect on femme bodies and labor through exploitation and myth. Utilizing the transparent quality of silk as well as the unpredictable alchemy of naturally sourced dyes, my current practice takes the form of painted banners that tell spectral narratives through layering of image in space. I see my continuous study of natural dye processes as a direct link to histories of herbalism, looking to plants to aid the body and serve as tools in ritual. 

Jacquelyn Marie Shannon is a ritual artist who uses her body as a vehicle for engaging with spirit through ‘Ghostly Practice,’ a constellation of techniques for investigating spectrality and liminality, memory and haunting, affect, and alternative temporalities, drawn from nearly fifteen years of training in Japanese butoh, expressionist dance, and physical theatre. 

She has produced and performed both solo and ensemble-based work across the United States and beyond, dealing in and with notions and practices of hauntology, spiritualism, mediumship, seance, spirit work, ancestor veneration and necromancy, ritual magic, witchcraft, and the occult. She is intrigued by how performance conjures, making the invisible visible, apprehendable, or encounterable, and how people make meaning within the sometimes blurred line between stage magic and ritual magic, stagecraft and witchcraft. Her most recent collaborations with artist Omer Gal investigate forces and thresholds between materiality and immateriality, duration and sacrifice, stillness and animation through film, putting art objects and Stop Motion Animation in dialogue with her live body in dance - materializing and compressing the slow movement of her Butoh-based performance even further into film constructs of time 30 frames per second. 

Jacquelyn is currently a PhD student in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY where her research focuses on the hidden, unseen, or unspeakable, investigating instances in theatre and performance in which the evocation and/or invocation of unseen or supernatural forces do transformative social, cultural, and political work. She holds a graduate degree from Indiana University in Communication and Culture where she studied expressive modalities through theories of affect, performance, and visual and embodied rhetoric, as well as a graduate degree from NYU in Educational Theatre where she researched process-oriented and affect-informed theatre education. Her essay “Butoh Beyond the Body” was recently published in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2019). She teaches theatre at Brooklyn College and continues to facilitate monthly Ghostly Practice based ritual movement workshops for adults.

 Chiara No

Naming is a process of creation, bestowing life or soul upon in a human, object or idea. A name gives purpose as well as calls claim to a lineage or possession. On the other hand, a name that was meant to be a secret, if spoken aloud or in the wrong context, a name spoken in uncertainty or with doubtfulness in it's truth, a rumor, and can be dangerous to the speaker, the one named, or both. Each carpet beater is a sigil of a demon who will not be named albeit the name is in plain sight. The name–whether it be the secret, the truth, the rumor, the demon–is activated by the slaps of the beater onto the casting rug and the calling of its name and purpose.

Chiara No has been an exhibiting artist for over 10 years. She has shown with EXILE, Berlin, Germany; Bible, in New York City, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA; H18 Gallery in Brussels, Belgium; The Institute for American Art, Portland, ME; Johalla Projects, Chicago, IL TranzModern and Current Space, Baltimore, MD. Her work has been featured on the Slutist.com, Exhibitions on the Cusp, and Baltimore’s City Paper. In 2015, No received the Silverstein Travel Grant through the University of Pennsylvania allowing her to travel to Berlin to interview women in the Metal music scene in Germany. Cassandra Press published her screenplay, MU/TH/UR 6000, an experimental genderless horror screenplay, in 2017. The screenplay is currently sold at Printed Matter in New York City.  Her work is in the collection of the Whitney's Special Collection and The Chicago Institute of Art's Joan Flasch Artists' Book Library.

No studied at the Glasgow School of Art, American University in Rome, Towson University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received her MFA at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 2015. She has been on faculty at SAIC and an instructor at University of Pennsylvania. Chiara No currently advises LowRes MFA students at Maine College of Art in Portland, ME and currently lives Johnson, VT.