#8 Shay Salehi, Henrik Nordahl and Grace Mervin
STUDIO PROGRAM 2023
Recently graduated from Parson’s 2023 MFA program, Shay Salehi, Henrik Nordahl and Grace Mervin are 99 Canal’s new resident artists that will be using STUDIO 2 to conceptualise and produce work for their upcoming show at the Brooklyn Army Terminal this fall.
Henrik Nordahl is a Norwegian artist who’s sculptural practice exposes found hardware to natural processes such as decay, heat, moisture and growth. These are referred to by the artist as ‘material collaborations’ as a means to transcend these seemingly prosaic objects, elevating them towards a conversation surrounding culture, nature and future. At a crossroad between mythology and natural formations, Nordahl’s sculptures take a stance of their own, creating a tension between material and form.
Interested in the dissection of our current social structures, Shay Salehi’s work is concerned with ecologies, and how globalization has negatively impacted our understanding of these realms. Approaching this broad topic through sculpture, her practice often juxtaposes the organic with the technological, building a tension surrounding interspecies dominance and our capitalisation of non-human bodies.
Grace Mervin’s work makes use of found objects and biomaterials as a means to reflect their discarded past use, and furthermore explore their creative potential as technofossils. With a background in design, Mervin’s experimental practice is one of accumulation, pairing these salvaged materials with natural binders in order to build a new archive of waste, playful in the form of mobile-pieces, soft sculptures and transparent file sheets.
99 CANAL
99 Canal is a non-profit artist-run initiative, that aims to preserve the artistic exchange of ideas, opinions, and perspectives in Chinatown, New York City. While providing affordable work studio spaces and residencies to International artists, it also runs a public program which provides an experimental platform to the expanded downtown artist community to propose new ideas and exhibit critical work. For more information about the program please address to 99canalstreet@gmail.com.