Jinze is a video shoot in October 2018 in China. We meet Johny Ripato, woman looking but robot inside. Director of a robot factory, JRipato Corp. located in Brussels, she came to meet new clients in China. When she arrived in the place, she discovers this old industrial place where the Untitled Residency used to be located in Jinze at that time. Reinvested by nature, Johny goes to meet it and communicates with the plants. Connected with nature, this robot as a sensibility and share with the plants energy and feelings. Without making a noise, by touching them, she understands their lives and stories. On the sound of a Guqin, we follow this slow meeting like a journey in a suspended time and space in this Jinze place.
Henrietta MacPhee uses sculpture and painting to create an entertaining trompe l’oeil illusion and a sense of complexity that traverses the border between 2D and 3D. Here, a leopard and a tiger climb a tree to escape from rising water, their natural instinct. With snarling faces and heads turned towards the viewer these wildcats express two opposing emotions, fear, and fierceness. Two entrance columns showing the transformation of weakness to strength in one stance. MacPhee’s work is a reflection of experience interwoven with imagination. She portrays scenes of poetic tenderness and humor, interweaving metaphors for embracing life’s diversity of peoples and their cultures. Her work is playful, representing an innocent yet thought-provoking relationship with the material form.
This body of work follows the reflection on my time spent here in Zhujiajiao focusing on identity and belonging. Using a variety of mediums, I document both the mundane and also the elation that comes with being in both an unfamiliar yet intimate place. An image of a bridge is used throughout the work as a representation of Zhujiajiao, but also to indicate a connection between two separate places of attachment, something I have been thinking about as an Asian American.