Featuring ingestible biomaterial sculptures by Gwenyth Chao, the (re)imagined bodies and worlds in her work are situated in depleted sites across our exhausted planet in a time after the age of capitalist extraction. Chao’s experiments speculate that the materials – for sustenance, building, creative endeavors – of our near futures will be made of reconstituted debris. She transmutes food refuse into artmaking materials like gels, clays, composites, plastics and paper. Her process explores the possibilities for a necessarily emergent practice to be informed by an ecological awareness. Chao transplants thinking processes, misuses making techniques and retrofits tools from different knowledge bodies to ask: what possibilities can emerge through transdisciplinary practices?
/stāj/ 2.2 is an active making space that drives the work and research of Gwenyth Chao’s materially-responsive experimental practice. Behind the sculptures and installations, Chao’s transdisciplinary proce