“Meet the Artist”
Mercy Kelly and Jake Robbins
March 23, 2023
5:30 – 7:30 pm
474 Broadway, Kingston, NY
On Thursday, March 23, we welcome past Eureka residents Mercy Kelly and Jake Robbins to “Meet the Artist” night at CPW. Each artist will discuss their past and ongoing projects, as well as lead individual dialogues surrounding it’s contents. This event will be live-streamed on CPW’s Facebook page just before the start time.
Join us every Thursday evening at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 474 Broadway in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served. “Meet the Artist” is made possible by a generous grant from the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation.
Mercy is a Brooklyn-based Black trans visual artist, model, and advocate who isn’t here to be your teachable moment. Mercy’s work focuses on the beauty of fat, femme body performance as liberation.
Mercy is passionate about expanding narratives and understandings of what it means to be trans, moving towards re-idealizing the notion of what it means to have a body. Mercy is interested in the ways we map desire, paying particular attention to how hue, color, size, and shape form our deepest longings.
Jake Robbins is a Brooklyn-based audio and visual artist. He has worked primarily in film production and video editing for the last decade, but has expanded his focus to photography and archival practices with the formation of community design lab and creative agency Public Assistants, established during the uprisings of June 2020. He uses image making and record keeping as practical means to combat the systemic erasure of Black, brown and queer legacies and build libraries of source material for later reference and application.
In October 2022, Jake was the artist-in-residence at Eureka! House in Kingston, NY where he learned the cyanotype process. In collaboration with The D.R.A.W, Jake and fellow Public Assistants worked with burgeoning artists to research the legacy of Ben Wigfall, Communications Village, and cultivate their own art exhibition, Material Heritage.Jake’s photography has been featured in Paper Mag, Interview Magazine, and NY1. His video work has been on PBS, BBC, Afropunk, Fader, and Pitchfork. Jake creates music as Long Lost Friend, an ongoing project that uses samples, synths and field recordings to evoke the fragmentary nature of memory.
Left Photo © Jake Robbins, Memory Flag #00002 – Aunt Weslia, Aunt Susan, Cousin Claude, Summer 1961, Montclair NJ Cyanotype on Muslin
Right Photo © Mercy Kelly