nikki juen

Brick x Brick is a public art performance that builds human “walls” against misogyny. During the wall performances, participants wear brick-patterned jumpsuits adorned with colorful brick patches bearing statements of misogynistic violence made by The President of the United States. Placing divisive words on the jumpsuits is a symbol of our resistance and determination to maintain control over our bodies. Linking hands to form community walls of individuals further blocks and subverts the harmful messages that subjugate women.

We resist patriarchal, heteronormative, discriminatory and oppressive systems and structures of power. We stand in solidarity with an intersection of voices from all socio-economic, geographic, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including indigenous communities, people of color, people with disabilities and LGBTQIA communities. We acknowledge the strides women have made historically; we are continuing the work of those who have stood in resistance before us.

Campaign Media Highlights

July 14, 2017

THE NEW YORKER: The Activists Who Are Staging Acts of Protest Inside Trump Tower

HYPERALLERGIC: Artists Stage Protest Performances in Trump Tower

THE INDYPENDENT: A New Hotbed of The Resistance: Trump Tower’s Fifth Floor

CRAIN'S NEW YORK BUSINESS: For The President's Birthday, New Yorkers Protest Funding Cuts

January 21, 2017

THE NEW YORKER: Scenes From the Women’s March on Washington

NBC NEWS [at :52]: Women's March on Washington Highlights

HUFFINGTON POST: What We Saw at The Women's March

Thirteens is a series of 300 drawings that explore systems theories and visually respond to cosmologic energy flows and the interaction between the corporeal body and the body of the universe. All images in this series are 13 x 13 inches square, rendered in ink on cotton paper.

'Chakra Stack' is live performance with video that seeks the reparative in the mundane and the deplorable. The performance investigates challenges of our culture and society attempting at the same time to see them as a balm that offers a third, more complex and encapsulating vision beyond a healing or hurting duality.

Chakra Stack Tabloid is printed in a signed, dated, and hand-numbered edition of 100 copies. 16 pages, newsprint, 15 × 11.5 inches.

Purchase at Draw Down Books.

This performance video wonders about consumption, the disposable nature of contemporary life and isolation. The image is both overwhelming and beautiful as the walls fall and are built again and again.

Multi-channel Video Installation, 2016, Dimensions variable, 14 minutes

This work presents a reclamation of the sutured, modified, and mediated American female body. A body altered by technology, borders, racism, and war. Through the cuts, ruptures, pain, and the darkness of living with violence and a biologic finitude, emerges the individual experience in conversation with the environment.

The Cyborg Matr [b. 2013] sees things differently.

This installation offers possibilities for a way to be in this world; seeking to know what humans might become based on assembled relationships and unfixed boundaries. By reclaiming this body now, I offer a singular experience as visual conversation aimed towards understanding a human future. The imagery of this installation moves between the registers of this terror and this luminous space of living.

Seeking to evoke a functional position of the sensate realm, this video installation is interested in the evolution of the body as technology, in our own lifetimes. This functional position can be described as a pre-cognitive movement of conjunctive feeling and matter — both a reception and an emanation — that faces post-humanism and asks: how might we live well, now?

These seemingly disparate images affix, join, and validate multiplicities, recognizing a constant evolution of the domestic maternal that holds the power to move between the immaterial and the material to collaborate, feed, nurture and educate.

The Cyborg Matr [b.2013] is a movement towards.

Thesis document submitted to fulfill the requirements of the Master in Fine Arts in Visual Art from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, Vermont, 2016.

excerpt:
"This body is a site of trauma and foreign material woven from the experience of being a human. With an already tenuous grip on this body, a woman’s body, my final eviction via illness was complete in 1987. In places, made up of manufactured polymers by substances refined from fossil fuels — extracted from the earth — my reclaimed eyesight starts to resemble a buttress inhabiting the biology. I wouldn’t be here without the forces of technology, science, and western medecine on my body. The questions were cast as the skin knit itself back together: how will I inhabit this invaded, occupied, objectified, fallible body? And how will this body inhabit an increasingly inhospitable biosphere?"

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." -John Muir

With the body as drawing instrument this series of 9 x 12 foot drawings explores the space between the human body and Laniakea Supercluster that houses the Milky Way Galaxy. With the extension of hands as spirograph these pieces explore the performativity of the body in relationship to space.

A handful of images from various lectures, workshops and studio teaching. Some recent highlights are a lecture on color theory and the body which was taught as a movement class on the stage of the RISD Auditorium. A Fall semester lecture on the Shiva Nataraja Murti in the collection of RISD Museum and a 'Future Forms of Language' workshop for 40 students with Nicholas Benson as visiting artist and critic.

This video performance arranges my mother, my daughter and myself in a call and response style critique of the forces, both tangible and unseen, that affect women's bodies and experience in the world.

In 2015 the world lost two artists that have had a great effect on my current thinking and approach to video and cinematic installation work. Filmmaker Chantal Akerman died from depression and curator and artist Susan O'Malley died suddenly with her twin daughters in-utero. I see daily through my memory of their work that I try to resolve: the realities of living, domesticity and duration [for Akerman], and well-being, connectedness and reparation [for O'Malley].

When words fail, this work asks can the language of ink, hands, and bodies in motion become a new choreography of communication? These drawings from 2014 sought to combine aphorisms on mothering, mutually agreed upon repetitive marks, and the agreement that we would move towards each other with our hands. Sitting across a table we learned to draw ourselves closer together. All pieces in this series are 24 x 36 inches on cotton paper. Participant: Joann Juen

When a government chooses to initiate a war that it has no business fighting, this project asks, 'who are the terrorists?' The military force of the American Government during the 2000's inspired this 'hack' to the ubiquitous yellow 'Support our Troops' magnet. Placing this sentiment of support on the petroleum fueled vehicles driven in the United States is little comfort to the men and women who put their lives in harms way in the Middle East and elsewhere. 'Support Our Fears' functioned as blind mailing campaign of hacked magnet kits sent to individuals across the country in a effort to intervene in passive American consumer cycles.

'Letrabet' is a series of 26 impressions on the surface of a single sheet of paper that investigate how the origin of alphabetic literacy fundamentally reconfigured the human brain bringing about profound changes to humanity. 'Letrabet' seeks to obliterate the standard function of the alphabet by additive means, subsequently writing a new language of form. 13 x 13 inches, Letraset on cotton paper.

Asked to give the convocation speech in 2013 for the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Graphic Design, I wanted to send the graduates away with exactly what we had all experienced during our studies together — a love of learning, a love of recognizing ourselves in the practice of making, and a love of collaborative teaching environments. With each node of love represented by a sticker, 'Sticking with Love' is a social practice fueled by Instagram and the hashtag #vcfalove. 'Sticking with Love' has walked the Appalachian Trail, been seen in Japan, and is currently used by other graduate programs at VCFA in their social media posts; making these small pink stickers a physical constellation of our human connections.