Tiare Ribeaux + Qianqian Ye. Juried Artist
Constellations
Artist Statement
Kai-Hai: 塑 Plastia is a video installation (stills above) that explores The Great Pacific Garbage Patch which contains approximately 80,000 tons of plastic over a 1.6 million-square-kilometer region of ocean linking East Asia to Hawai‘i. Linking these geographies and the deities they have worshiped – from Mazu, goddess of seafarers lost in the ocean; to Haumea, who birthed the Hawaiian islands and is continuously reborn in her offspring – this new work in Kai 海 Hai realizes a Goddexx formed from the need to remediate microplastics from the ocean. She continually gives birth to new children and is reborn each time within them, in order to restore the ocean to its natural state. As plastics threaten our ocean health and all species in the ocean, Plastia is a response to cleansing our ancestral waters, rebirthing new elements of renewal, delivering a new lineage of creation to heal our oceans.
Kai 海 Hai (a hybrid of ‘Ocean’ in ʻŌlelo Hawai’i and Mandarin) is an ongoing series of virtual and augmented reality installations that utilize transpacific folklore while remixing ancestral, personal, and speculative narratives from Polynesia to East Asia to explore environmental issues, indigenous and immigrant stories, and diaspora across the Pacific Ocean. In collaboration with Qianqian Ye
About the artists
Tiare Ribeaux is a Kānaka ‘Ōiwi filmmaker, artist, and creative producer based in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Her films disrupt conventional storytelling methods by employing magical realist explorations of spirituality, labor, and the environment to critique both social and ecological imbalances. Her work uses components of speculative fiction and fantasy to reimagine both our present realities and future trajectories of healing, queerness, lineage, and belonging. Ribeaux’s work traverses between the mundane and dreamworlds – creating stories around transformation and how our bodies are inextricably linked to land and water systems. She integrates immersion within community, personal/ancestral narratives, and Hawaiian cosmology into her films. Her work often combines with installation elements to create immersive and expanded media experiences. She has shown work both nationally and internationally, and has won numerous grants and awards for her artistic leadership including the Creative Capital Award, the NDN Radical Imagination Grant, the Native Lab Fellowship and Indigenous Film Fund from Sundance, among others.
Qianqian (Q) Ye (she/they) is a Chinese artist, creative technologist and educator based in Los Angeles (Gabrielino-Tongva Land). Trained as an architect, she creates digital, physical, and social spaces exploring issues around gender, immigrant, power, and technology. Their most recent collaborative project, The Future of Memory, was a recipient of the Mozilla Creative Media Award. At the Processing Foundation, Qianqian is the Lead of p5.js, an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code, with over 1.5 million users. She currently teaches creative coding as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at USC Media Arts + Practice and 3D Arts at Parsons School of Design. For 2022-2023, Qianqian is a Civic Media Fellow at USC Annenberg Innovation Lab.
Credits: Tiare Ribeaux + Qianqian Ye