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Saya Woolfalk

Saya Woolfalk

United States

SAYA WOOLFALK (Japan, 1979) is a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. With the multi-year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK, Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.

She has exhibited at museums, galleries, and alternative spaces throughout Asia, Europe and the United States including solo exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ (2012); the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2014); the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (2014); SCAD Museum, Savannah, GA (2016); Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY (2016); Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE (2016); the Mead Museum of Art, Amherst, MA (2017) and group shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA., the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among many others.

Works by the artist are in the collections of major institutions including, among others, the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Mead Art Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum; the Newark Museum; the Chrysler Museum of Art; and the Seattle Art Museum where her major multi-media installation, commissioned and acquired by the Museum, is on extended view. Solo exhibitions of works by Saya Woolfalk are also currently on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO (through September 1, 2019) and the Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI (through August 18, 2019).

Woolfalk is the recipient of numerous honors, awards, and commissions. She has delivered numerous public lectures at museums and universities throughout the United States including a recent TED X Talk. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York and teaches in MFA program at Yale School of Art as well as in the BFA and MFA programs at Parsons: The New School for Design.

http://www.sayawoolfalk.com/

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Aya (from the Empathic Universe, portrait of the artists daughter)

2022

infinity loop HD video projection

This piece is from a series of mixed media artworks in which members of a fictional group of women called the Empathics can alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. An enduring theme in my multi-year science fiction inspired project, is the exploration of the interconnected relationships among humans and the natural world.

In this particular work, I was inspired by the name of my daughter Aya, which means multi-colored in Japanese. This video portrait of Aya was shot during the pandemic in my home studio. We were living in the woods of Upstate NY and I wanted to depict her embedded in a surreal landscape, appearing to merge with and be constituted by the landscape she is inhabiting.