Art on Art Series: A Conversation with Ellie Irons | EPA

Topic: Art On Art: Conversation with Ellie Irons – Environmental Performance Agency
Time: May 7, 2020 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Welcome to the Art on Art series from HPAC LIVE FROM HOME where artists interview artists in their studios and chat about their work, process and life during the Covid 19 pandemic. This week Tal Beery will visit Ellie Irons.  Join us each week for another Art on Art series.

Ellie Irons is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn and Troy, New York. She works in a variety of media, from watercolor to re-wilding experiments, to reveal how human and more-than-human lives intertwine with other earth systems. Her recent work focuses on plants, people and urban ecosystems in the so-called Anthropocene. She is a cofounder of the Next Epoch Seed Library and the Environmental Performance Agency. She has participated in recent exhibitions on environmental art and activism, like The Department of Human and Natural Services at NURTUREArt, Ecological Consciousness: Artist as Instigator at Wave Hill, and Unsettled Nature at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Museum.

Her work has been covered by publications ranging from Art in America to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Irons received her BA from Scripps College in Los Angeles and her MFA from Hunter College, CUNY in New York. She is currently a PhD candidate in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she is researching the intersection of socially engaged art and urban ecology as a means for envisioning and enacting multispecies solidarity in the face of climate chaos.

The Environmental Performance Agency (EPA)

EPA is an artist collective founded in 2017 and named in response to the ongoing rollback of Federal environmental policy at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Appropriating the acronym EPA, the collective’s primary goal is to shift thinking around the terms environment, performance, and agency – using artistic, social, and embodied practices to advocate for the agency of all living performers co-creating our environment, specifically through the lens of spontaneous urban plants, native or migrant.

In addition to the streets, sidewalks, and feral landscapes of New York City and beyond, EPA projects, installations, interventions, and workshops have been featured at institutions and galleries like NURTUREArt (Brooklyn, NY), Wave Hill (The Bronx, NY), Open Engagement at The New York Hall of Science, Transformer Gallery (Washington D.C.), Swale (Brooklyn, NY), and The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. Current EPA Agents include Catherine Grau, an artist and Public Programs Coordinator at the Queens Museum, Andrea Haenggi, an artist/choreographer and faculty at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, Ellie Irons, an artist and PhD Candidate in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Christopher Kennedy, an artist and Assistant Director of the Urban Systems Lab at the New School University, and spontaneous urban plants.

https://www.environmentalperformanceagency.com/

Multispecies Care Survey