Ching-In Chen & Cassie Mira

Artist Statement: Cassie Mira

Cassie Mira's work analyzes transitional spaces by exploring human interaction through transitional experiences and investigating upheaval. Informed by research in LGBTQIA+ history and the development of modern computing, she investigates adaptive responses of individuals and communities. Her work incorporates field recordings, assemblage, installation, performance and ritual.

Artist Statement: Ching-In Chen

I am a cross-genre writer with a community organizing background, specifically in Asian American communities in coalition with other communities of color and LGBTQIA* communities. My creative work arises from my community investments and is grounded in the framework of speculative poetics. In developing collective imagination, the central question I ask is – what is our relationship and responsibility to each other through time and history? What do we want, dream it to be? As a maker, my work incorporates multivocality and juxtaposition.and values improvisation (using what’s in the room) within a social space to create meaningful work for participants and gathered community. I honor simultaneous truths and lived experiences within the same space by foregrounding poetry's compositional strategies incorporating silence, rupture, collage and repetition.

postcard image for breathing in a time of disaster project, two sound wave forms of breath collide to form a stitched lung on a multicolored fabri

Bios

Cassie Mira is an artist, curator, and archivist based in Seattle, WA. Her interdisciplinary practice is based in new media, poetry, and performance, plays with human interaction and denatures gendered experience. She was an artist-in-residence at The Seattle Residency Project in 2020.

Ching-In Chen is descended from ocean dwellers and author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems and recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They teach at University of Washington Bothell. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice.

https://www.cassiemira.com

www.chinginchen.com