“Artists and Writers, Thinking Out Loud”

“Artists and Writers, Thinking Out Loud”
With Josiah Bania, Hari Kunzru & Lucy Kim

Friday, May 14, 6 p.m.

Hermitage Artist Retreat Beach, 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood, FL 34223

Actor Josiah Bania explores the words and works of Shakespeare. Visual and multidisciplinary artist Lucy Kim will discuss her transition from traditional painting and photography to her less vison-centric, more visceral, three-dimensional work. Novelist Hari Kunzru will introduce and read from Blue Ruin, his third novel in a trilogy about music, literature, and visual art. Listen to the thinking that went into their work and join them in a Q&A afterward.

Registration ($5 per person) is required.

Capacity is limited to accommodate safe social distancing. Early reservations are recommended. Masks required at registration, and the Hermitage requests that masks be worn for all live programs, including outdoor events.Audience members are invited to bring their own beach chairs and blankets.

Josiah Bania is an actor, educator, and playwright. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, his work has been seen at theaters across the country, including Mark Taper Forum, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Geffen Playhouse, American Repertory Theater, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Yale Repertory Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Dorset Theatre Festival, Artists Repertory Theater, among others. His plays have been workshopped at The Lark and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. As an educator, he has taught at the Yale Summer Conservatory, Williams College, New York Conservatory for the Dramatic Arts, Western Oregon University, as well as many years of private coaching. He lives in New York City.

Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, and White Tears, as well as a short story collection, Noise, and a novella, Memory Palace. His new novel Red Pill was published in September 2020. He is an honorary fellow of Wadham College Oxford and has received fellowships from the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. He is the host of the podcast Into The Zone and lives in New York City.

Lucy Kim is a visual artist working in sculpture, painting, and biological media. Her work is grounded in the mechanics of visual representation through sculptural paintings that combine casting with oil painting. Since 2019, her work has expanded into the biology lab, where she is developing a project (Melanin Images Via Genetically Modified E. coli) using bacteria. In her sculptural paintings, Kim uses oil painting both for its plasticity as a material, as well as its history as an image technology prior to photography, both of which have to do with its illusionistic capability. Her use of mold-making and casting stems from an interest in photography as a form of indexical documentation, but through touch. While a photograph records the light reflecting off the surfaces within its frame, a cast, being a direct imprint, records the surface terrain. It still retains the authority of a record, but it does so in a very material, visceral, and less vision-centric way.