Otherness with Santana Dempsey

Join LA-based artist Nicole Rademacher and her guests for a series of storytelling workshops and an evolving exhibition in the summer of 2017, originally designed to empower adopted and fostered people - but now extended to artists who feel marginalized - to create and record their unique histories.

Otherness with Santana Dempsey

This workshop will focus on the concept of Otherness as it relates to Santana’s experience as mixed-race adoptee and foster alum. Participants create stories in groups. Then individually they will each create visuals by drawing, tracing, collaging, etc. that illustrates something from the collective story, i.e. a character, the plot, the resolution, a problem along the way. The artworks created will be exhibited throughout the duration of the exhibition, and decks of divination cards to be used with future iterations of the workshops will be produced. Please RSVP, space is limited.

ABOUT ORIGIN STORIES

As a Los Angeles-based transracial Mexican-American adoptee artist Nicole Rademacher considers material such as gesture, space, and object as cultural artifacts in her largely image-based practice. Lately, Rademacher has begun to facilitate workshops with the adoptee community. She builds works collaboratively creating space to discuss meanings and examine the relationships between the bits and pieces as a way of describing alienation, belonging, intimacy, and identity.

The series of 90-minute Origin Stories Workshops consists of participants collaboratively creating a story using visual prompts. Using the story as inspiration, each participant creates at least one card (by drawing, tracing, collaging) that visually illustrates something from the collective story, i.e. a character, the plot, the resolution, a problem along the way. The series of workshops therefore creates sets of cards reflecting not only imagined past stories, but also future stories and remembered stories; stories that have been passed down in their families. The cards are exhibited, and in this way the exhibition progressively builds through the workshops. Learn more about Nicole at http://nicolerademacher.com