Meet the Artists: Melanie Brewster and Noormah Jamal

Join us for a Meet the Artist program with exhibiting artists Melanie Brewster and Noormah Jamal. At 2PM, Brewster will be in conversation with Curator of Visual Arts, Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, to discuss her Sunroom project, A Metaphysical Quest for the Deepest Backbend. This exhibition constructs a metafictional world in which a woman’s yoga practice has become so extreme that she transforms into an ouroboros: a serpent consuming its own tail, a symbol of cyclical time and eternal return. The exhibition takes place in the aftermath of this transformation, and Brewster aims to reflect on extreme wellness practices, the limits of enlightenment, and questions of access within contemporary wellness industries. At 3PM, Jamal will discuss her outdoor installation, Blooms, and activate the site with a collaborative poetry reading with NYU professor and poet Sonya Posmentier. In Blooms, flowering ceramic heads emerge from an arid landscape. These heads represent the resilience of a people through times of hardship, paying specific homage to Jamal's home of Peshawar, Pakistan. Once known as “City of Flowers,” over the years, Peshawar has become dry, mountainous city, and the people and landscape have both endured the effects of climate change and war.