the smoky bouquets of flower mountain
The workshop is a collaboration between Recess artist in residence, Marcela Torres, and artist D Rosen.
Together Rosen and Session artist Marcela Torres combine their interests in olfactory sensoria. the smoky bouquets of flower mountain arose from the artists’ shared interests in the cultural multiplicity of scent, smoke, sacred plants, and more than human worlds.
The workshop runs concurrently with Torres’ show at Recess, Petición for Exorcism, which draws inspiration from Flower Mountain and Mesoamerican smoke rituals. Torres and Rosen designed an incense making kit that participants can pick up from Recess or receive via mail. The kits can be made into incense following the online video produced by Torres and Rosen.
D Rosen is an interdisciplinary artist who exhibits and publishes nationally and internationally. They operate from the position that questions of animality are not binary, but rather a tangle of ecologies and richly complicated identities, framed by culture. Rosen attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018, received an MFA from the University of Chicago in 2013, and a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2011. In 2020, Rosen is exhibiting in an echo, she is curated by Ruslana Lichtizer at Chicago Manual Style with Soo Shin and Catherine Sullivan (Chicago, IL), created a collaborative web object with grant support from the Nordic Summer University (Aalborg, Denmark), exhibited at The Green Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), and will publish an essay on interspecies scent rituals in Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance edited by Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr for Routledge (New York + London). More information about their sculptural collaborations with non-human animals and ever-mutating scent research can be found at: d-rosen.com + heavylavender.com.
Marcela Torres (b. Salt Lake City, Utah) is an artist who brings performance, objects, workshops, organizing, and sound installations into an experiential interrogation of our state of interpellation. They unpack themes of diaspora, violence and rituals using their Latinx Queer bodies as the mechanism. Torres received a BA in Sculpture Intermedia and a BFA in Art History from the University of Utah in 2015. They received an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute Chicago in 2017. Torres has performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL), Performances is Alive (Miami, FL), Fringe Festival (Detroit, MI), Experimental Actions (Houston, TX), and Time Based Arts (Portland, Oregon). Torres has exhibited work at the Green Gallery at Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT), Tropical Contemporary (Eugene, OR), Petzel Gallery (NYC, NY). In 2020, Torres will be a resident at Recess in Brooklyn, NYC and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE.
