Dwelling, Grief & LosS BY Maya CiarRocchi

March 26 - April 5, 2020 | Artist: Maya Ciarrocchi

During the holiday of Passover, ZAZ10TS presents Maya Ciarrocchi’s project as part of the national Dwelling in a Time of Plagues, Grief and Loss plague by Canvas in collaboration with the Jewish Street Art Festival Passover 2021 edition commissioned by LABA: A Global Laboratory for Jewish Culture and the 14th Street Y New York. This includes showcasing This Place Has a Body on the ZAZ Corner Billboard and video installation of Site: Yizkor at ZAZ10TS Gallery.

This Place Has a Body, 2021 | Video Installation, multiple 15 seconds excerpts
On ZAZ Corner LED Billboard, South East corner of 7th Avenue and 41st Street
New York City is a city in constant flux and a place of ghosts. We live in apartments that housed countless generations of individuals and families, new buildings rise on top of the foundations of what came before, and long-familiar businesses open and close overnight. Now during the COVID-19 pandemic this flux is more rapid and the scale of loss so immense we barely have time to comprehend its breadth. Combining decorative details that adorned the walls and ceilings of now vanished wooden synagogues with her dancing body, Maya’s Ciarrocchi’s video installation This Place Has a Body, creates new fantastical spaces out of the residue of loss.

Site: Yizkor, 2019 | Single Channel Sound/Video Installation, TRT: 9:04
Projection on ZAZ10TS Gallery Wall, 10 Times Square Lobby
Site: Yizkor is an interdisciplinary project created by Maya Ciarrocchi with music by Andrew Conklin that explores the physical and emotional manifestation of loss through text, drawing, video, and music. Its source material includes architectural renderings of demolished buildings, memory maps of vanished places, and prose remembrances obtained from extant Yizkor* books and from project participants.

*Memorial books written by survivors to commemorate people and places destroyed during the Holocaust.

Site: Yizkor Full Credit Click HERE

COLLABORATIONS

Jewish Street Art Festival Passover 2021 - Contemporary Plagues & 14th Street Y in New York
The festival is produced by Asylum Arts and Hillel Smith, in collaboration with LABA, and made possible with the generous support of CANVAS. Murals have been created in New York City, Charlotte and Toronto. In Toronto, Bareket Kezwer’s mural at the Miles Nadal JCC engage with the plague of binary thinking, and is in partnership with the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. Mike Wirth’s mural in Charlotte at the Queens University of Charlotte in partnership with the Stan Greenspon Center for Peace and Social Justice at Queens University of Charlotte, makes visible the plague of housing insecurity. Hillel Smith’s paired murals in New York City, at JCC Harlem and Repair the World NYC, engage with food insecurity. Maya Ciarrocchi’s mural at the 14th Street Y in New York and the video installations at ZAZ10TS explores the plague of grief and loss.

Dwelling in a Time of Plagues by CANVAS
The project is also part of the national project Dwelling presented by CANVAS during the holiday of Passover and is commissioned by LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture. Seven Jewish artists have created original pieces that represent a current plague of our time, echoing the plagues of Passover: COVID, Food Insecurity, Darkness, Housing Insecurity, Single Use Plastic, Grief & Loss and Binary Thinking. This ambitious, multi layered powerful series will open on March 26th.

This is a huge project, with sweeping meaning and impact, that will culminate in seven different installations around the country, each looking at the Plagues of our time in original, creative and thought-provoking ways, and remind us of the plagues of the past.  

Dwelling is a collaboration of Jewish arts and culture networks Reboot, Asylum Arts, LABA, the Council of American Jewish Museums, and the Jewish Book Council. The five are grantees of CANVAS, a Jewish Funders Network-incubated philanthropic collaborative dedicated to elevating the field of Jewish arts and culture. Other Dwelling partners include Modern Loss and Repair the World. CANVAS-commissioned works will be displayed online at www.plaguedwelling.com and at museums and sites throughout North America, including in Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Detroit, New York and Toronto. They will also be featured in a downloadable PDF designed to spark conversation and reflection at seder tables and beyond.

PRESS

EVENTS

Music composed by Andrew Conklin with excerpts of an improvised piece by Andrew Conklin, Eli Crews, Matt Nelson, and Sam Ospovat, recorded by Michael Coleman at Figure 8 Studios (Brooklyn, NY).  

Drawing, animation and editing by Maya Ciarrocchi | Text written by anonymous writers and Maya Ciarrocchi | Readings performed by Haley Boehning, Ari Brand, Maya Ciarrocchi, Andrea Kleine and Deb Travis.  

Movement sequences performed by Maya Ciarrocchi, Jason Cortlund, Lisa Sanaye Dring, Julia Halperin, Andrew Ondrejcak, Isabel Sandoval, and Jessica Shi.