Socrates x Recess Field Guide: Memories Through Smell; followed by Gather

About the Workshop

Saturday, October 23  •  11am–2pm  •  Pre-Registration Required  •  All Ages Welcome  •  Free!

In Memories Through Smell, artists and poets Smita Sen, Anaïs Duplan, and D Rosen will lead participants through a series of simple exercises to explore the associations between memory, scent, celebration, and grieving. We will individually and collectively examine scent as a form of embodied memory by bringing our own scented materials or finding items in the park’s ecology.Together we will follow the poetics of the senses using movement, poetry, and journaling as tools to explore the ineffable experiences that scent conjures. 

For the final event, Gather: Multiplicity of the Season Ritual, we offer a culmination of our work with gratitude, music, movement, sculptures, food, scent, and meditation. Harvest is a moment of gratitude and natural cultivation.  During harvest season, many cultures celebrate and convene with their ancestors in praise. Celebrating the abundance of harvest while honoring the end of summer, Gather: Multiplicity of the Season Ritual creates a space for all to engage in the abundance of Autumn –a season of harvest, change, and transformation. Gather is limited to 50 participants.

Artists

D Rosen

D Rosen is an interdisciplinary artist who currently lives and works on the unceded lands of the Odawa, Ojibwe, Myaamia, Peoria, Kickapoo, Kaskaskia, and Potawatomi nations, commonly known as Chicago, IL. 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 & Design in 2011. Upcoming shows include Exgirlfriend (Berlin, Germany), Roots & Culture (Chicago, IL), and UNCC Rowe Galleries (Charlotte, NC). In 2021, Rosen’s essay on interspecies scent rituals was published 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). Rosen operates from the position that questions of animality are not binary but rather a tangle of ecologies and richly complicated identities, framed by culture.
www.d-rosen.com

Marcela Torres

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, living in transit between Chicago and Brooklyn.. Torres received a BA in Sculpture Intermedia and a BFA in Art History from the University of Utah, continuing their studies in MFA in Performance form School of the Art Institute Chicago. Torres has performed at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE), The Momentary (Bentonville, AK), Fringe Festival (Detroit, MI), Experimental Actions (Houston, TX) and Time Based Arts (Portland, Oregon). Torres has exhibited work at Recess (Brooklyn, NY), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL) UW-Parkside University (Kenosha, WI), Tropical Contemporary (Eugene, OR), Petzel Gallery (NYC, NY) In 2021 Torres will be a resident at Creative Exchange Lab at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts.
http://marcelaetorres.com/

Smita Sen

Smita Sen is an artist working with sculpture, dance-based performance, and advanced technology to research how the body internalizes its environment and significant life events. With installations, Sen attempts to reimagine sites of care and creates environments for the body to enter states of meditative healing. Sen’s work has been shown at venues like Recess (Brooklyn, NY), Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), Flux Factory (Long Island City, NY), Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY), and the Knockdown Center (Queens, NY). Sen was in-residence at Recess (2021), Mildred’s Lane (2018), and received the Instigator Fellowship from NYU ITP Camp (2018). She has served as a Visiting Artist at the Bard College Disturbance Lab and has given talks and workshops at Columbia University, Bard College, NYU ITP Camp, and LRLX NY. Sen is a graduate of Columbia University. An educator, she is currently teaching and designing the Emerging Media program at Choate Rosemary Hall.
www.smitasen.com

Headshot: Ally Caple