Darlene Charneco
Symbiosome Schoolhouse Parrish Road Show 2021

For the 2021 Parrish Road Show, the Parrish Art Museum has invited Darlene Charneco (American, b. 1971) to create a site-specific exhibition, Symbiosome Schoolhouse, at Oysterponds Historical Society in Orient, NY. She is currently artist-in-residence at the William Steeple Davis Trust studying, living, and working in the artist’s former house and studio in Orient.

Darlene Charneco is an East End-based, Latinx artist who creates mixed-media mappings to explore and navigate the layered spaces we live in, both in the real and virtual world. She examines human settlements, forms of interaction, and evolution through a biological lens and as part of a larger organism. Developing her own tactile language—such as painstakingly hammering nails into wooden panels—the artist builds large-scale, three-dimensional, patterned Touchmaps for viewers to experience a world that continually shifts and changes through our expanded communication networks.

Charneco’s Parrish Road Show will take place both inside the Oysterponds Schoolhouse and outside on its lawn. The indoor exhibition will feature several of her ongoing wall sculpture weaves and Touchmaps, each created in a meditative process of “renewing determination and hammering out positive hopes for humanity;” a grouping of mixed-media works on paper; and a video loop depicting collaborations in philanthropy and learning that took place in shared spaces that she created with other avatars in the virtual world of Second Life. Charneco has been a member of Second Life for several years; the online platform, which launched in 2003, is used by millions of people and has its own registered currency, Tilia.

Darlene Charneco: Symbiosome Schoolhouse. Collaborators TelePortal, 2021. 3:14 video.

The exhibition explores layers of time and space, and its title, Symbiosome Schoolhouse, refers on the one hand to the spaces of learning, both the “real world” Schoolhouse and the virtual ones in Second Life; as well as the artist’s immersion in symbiosis studies, a combination of observations in nature and academic readings about symbiosis in evolution, where she began to see our species adapt, adjust, and shift spaces (symbiosomes) as individuals and groups, learning ways to better connect and support each other across distance.

“The precious time and space of the Orient residency during the current global pandemic and challenges to solidarity is allowing me a deep-dive into slower-paced contemplation of this phase in humanity’s history within longer planetary time-cycles,” says Charneco who will present works inspired by a “continuously unfolding dream vision of co-evolution.”

The artwork in this exhibition is an ongoing contemplation of symbiosis, self-assembly, evolution, and “Symmathesy,” which is a new term for “learning together,” recently coined by writer and educator Nora Bateson. According to Charneco, it reflects a great hope that within our current phase of collective learning is emerging the individual, national, and planetary resolve for a more harmonious future.

Parrish Road Show 2021 | Darlene Charneco: Symbiosome Schoolhouse is organized by Corinne Erni, Senior Curator of ArtsReach and Special Projects.

ABOUT DARLENE CHARNECO

Darlene Charneco (b. 1971, New York City) attended Stony Brook University for MFA Studies and Long Island University Southampton for her BFA. Exhibiting throughout the U.S. and globally, she participated in PINTA Fair London and the Korean International Art Fair. Charneco’s work is part of Guild Hall Museum’s permanent collection, and was featured in the Princeton Architectural Press book The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography by Katherine Harmon, and How Architecture Learned to Speculate by Mihall & Serbest through the University of Stuttgart. Charneco was awarded the 2017 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

ABOUT PARRISH ROAD SHOW

Now in its tenth year, Parrish Road Show is the Museum’s off-site project designed to encourage engagement and interaction between artists and the communities outside the Museum’s walls. Each year, selected artists work with the Parrish and partner venues to create new work and to provide unique opportunities for visitors to see and experience art in unexpected places, from public parks and highways to historical sites and community centers.

ABOUT OYSTERPONDS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The Oysterponds Historical Society (OHS) brings people together to share and celebrate the unique history and culture of Orient and East Marion. OHS was started in 1944 to preserve the historical significance of Orient and East Marion communities that was still largely populated by direct descendants of the European settlers three centuries before. OHS founding members were concerned about the gradual disappearance of Native American artifacts, documents, family records, tools, art, and other surviving evidence of the maritime, agricultural, cultural, and religious life of the early residents of this area.

EXHIBITION SUPPORT

Parrish Road Show 2021 | Darlene Charneco: Symbiosome Schoolhouse, is made possible, in part, by the generous support of Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder; and Jane Wesman and Donald Savelson. Public funding is provided by Suffolk County.

PUBLIC HOURS

Friday: 2 pm—5 pm | Saturday: 11 am—5 pm | Sunday: 2 pm—5 pm

Old Point Schoolhouse at Oysterponds Historical Society
1555 Village Lane, Orient, NY 11957