Andrea Ray

Taking up research into the New York City harbor islands — including the nearby Roosevelt Island (formerly Welfare Island) —  as former sites for the quarantined, incarcerated, and inferm, Andrea Ray creates Rest Cure, an audio and sculpture installation that invites visitors to recline and listen. A sound text airs our related sense of alienation under COVID but transforms it to an expanded network of care. The project asks, can the withdrawal from society that the pandemic caused have created a new political subjectivity, one that acknowledges our entangled nature with all others?

AUDIO CREDITS
Solo Bass: Dan Loomis
Audio Actor: Robin Miles
Song: Quiet Star by Josh Werner

An Excerpt

Rest Cure audio component excerpt including voice actor Robin Miles and Josh Werner’s song, Quiet Star.

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About the Artist

Andrea Ray’s interdisciplinary artworks embody both visual and aural approaches to the subjects of kinship, attachment, and care, attempting to repair an alienated subjectivity through what Ray terms “”expanded affinities””. Focusing on the possibility of creating folds in time through affective contact between history and people, the work aims to produce a space of unknowing to disrupt the “normative” and to create an open position from which a subject is placed in the possibility of dreaming—dreaming of a fresh ground of resistance from how we think we must relate. Ray’s recent work approaches gender studies through the lens of invention where time and belonging are reconfigured beyond the constraints of tradition, custom, and law. Feminist and queer forms of affinity are central to this research and artistic work.

Ray’s work has been exhibited at the Inter Arts Center in Malmö; Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery in Connecticut; Sculpture Center, Apex Art, P.S.1 Clocktower Gallery, and White Columns in New York; Skissernas Museum and Wanås Foundation in Sweden, as well as venues in Dublin, Brussels, and Turin. Ray is an Art Matters Fellow and a two-time recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Residency awards include P.S. 1 MoMA, MacDowell Colony, and Cité des Arts, Paris. Ray’s work has been included in Art Forum, Bomb Magazine, Zing Magazine, New York Times, and Art News. Ray completed the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and received a PhD in Fine Art from the Malmö Art Academy in 2018. Andrea Ray lives and works in New York.

Website: andrearay.net

Instagram: @aray5

Audio Guide

Click below to listen to the artist speak about their work.

Audio transcript available upon request.