Welcome Inscape Artists-in-Residence Ching-In Chen and Sabella Flagg
Please join us in welcoming our new Fall-Winter 2023 Inscape Artists-in-Residence Ching-In Chen and Sabella Flagg!
This image was created by collaborator Cassie Mira for Breathing in a Time of Disaster. The image is two sound wave forms of breath colliding to form a stitched lungs on a multicolored fabric.
Ching-In Chen is a cross-genre writer and performance artist with a community organizing background, specifically in Asian American communities in coalition with other communities of color and LGBTQIA* communities. For the last nineteen years, they’ve created work in dialogue with writers involved in organizations such as Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA), Kundiman, Lambda and Macondo writing communities, and are currently a core member with Massage Parlor Outreach Project and Hugo House’s Poet-in-Residence.
Ching-In is currently collaborating with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a hybrid project incorporating performance, installation and speculative writing to explore the unit of breath through the intersection of meditation, health and environmental justice. This work draws upon their own experience since childhood struggling with breathing due to asthma, living and working in a community recovering from the public health impacts of disasters like Hurricane Harvey in Houston. As an Artist-in-Residence, Ching-In plans to create a series of improvisational activations of the “Emergent Broadcast System,” where breaths of performers and audience members would be recorded and shared as a breathing chorus transmission during installations alongside community rituals and stories, and also create a communal Breaths archive which highlights creative strategies of survival for BIPOC and trans/nonbinary/intersex/gendercreative communities.
A Tufted Release - Sabella Flagg
Sabella Flagg is an artist, designer, and writer from Chicago now living in Seattle. She creates under the moniker “the monarq” which is a multidisciplinary art practice comprising collage, pattern making, analog photography, and portraiture. Sabella holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Drake University with minors in Lithographic Printmaking and Creative Writing. A principal theme in her work is capturing the relationship between the environment and the journey towards self-discovery and broadening representations of Black Women in media. She finds distortion through patterns, generated by hand or through other mediums, to be perfect for reflecting the cadences, chaos, and beauty of finding your place in an ever-changing world.
During her Residency, Sabella plans to create a series of paintings memorializing her great-grandmother’s decaying Chicago home, utilizing the photographs and other artifacts she brought back from a visit documenting the house for a reconstruction loan. She’ll be exploring grief, loss of home, and the process of rebuilding, not only a place to call home but a state of being at home.
