Serena Caffrey

Serena Caffrey (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist working across live performance, installation, analogue film, print, and the written word. Their performance scores dictate quotidian, task-based gestures that repeat or endure for long periods of time, frequentlyinaccordance with significant lunar and solar events, and investigate time, longing, and land-body relationality. In standing, sitting, drawing, or walking for whole days, Caffrey embodies and thereby critiques the seemingly never-ending cycles of labor that capitalist calendars of production dictate. Teetering on the fulcrum of ritual, dance, and endurance training, their performances ultimately propose a practice of radical witnessing via failure—slowing to stillness in order to learn the time scales of beyond-human kin. Caffrey received their BA in Studio Arts from Bard College where their thesis performance, TheAnxiety of Being Wrong, gained numerous honors including the John Bard Prize in the arts. She has been an artist-in-residence at ArtFarm Nebraska and Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, NY. Her drawing and print work has been exhibited internationally in Milan and Kyoto, and their performances have premiered at the Gowanus Ballroom in Brooklyn, The Mortuary LosAngeles, and The Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles. Caffrey is currently pursuing their MFA inPrintmaking at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, located in their hometown.

Body Of Statement

The Body Of series is a collection of monotypes that explores land-body relationality through abstraction. Made in the studio after long, solitary mountain treks, the images attempt totransmute elemental bodies (water, fire, wind, stone) and the gravitational and atmospheric forces of earthly erosion. This attention is not one of analysis or advocacy. It asks, rather, how ismy body an extension of this body the Earth? What is our felt encounter?