Innerworld Ecologies

New work by Singha Hon
July 19th through August 15th
Opening Reception Friday, July 19th 6-8pm

Statement: 

The wellspring for my work comes from nature, dreams, and mythology. Through painting and drawing, I create pieces inspired by plants, animals, and emotions. Many of my pieces feature chimeric figures– people transforming into plants or animals or simply becoming subsumed into nature. 

Innerworld Ecologies is an exploration of the connections/disconnections that exist between our bodies and our emotions, an examination of the relationships we have to our surroundings, each other, and our own inner worlds. They are inspired by folk tales and my own curiosity about the natural world through the lens of queer ecology and the practice of childhood joyfulness.

I look to folk tales and the natural world as a pathway to explore complex emotions–tenderness,  safety, despair, desire, love, anger and hope. Through my paintings, I hope to visualize a way to return to some deeper, wilder self, one that is more easily at home in the winding river of our mythologies and planet.

Bio:

Singha is a visual and teaching artist from New York City. Through painting, drawing, and sculpture, her work is about creating visual stories inspired by plants, animals, and emotions, set in dreamlike places somewhere between reality and an imagined one bursting with chimeras and megafauna.

As an artist and illustrator, she is dedicated to using visual mediums to tell stories that highlight the beautiful and nuanced mythologies of our lives, foster hope, and nurture dreaming. She has created artwork for organizations such as the ACLU, The Museum of Modern Art, The People Paper’s Co-Op, and Womanly Magazine. She joined The W.O.W. Project–an arts and activism nonprofit in NYC’s Chinatown as their 4th Artist in Residence in 2019 and has most recently finished up a two year teaching artist residency at W.O.W. through the Creatives Rebuild New York Artist Employment Program. As a teaching artist, she has taught workshops across mediums, including ceramics, sculpture, cyanotype, drawing, and painting.

She has recently worked with O+ Positive in Kingston to create two murals, one which lives on the side of Lite Brite Neon, and one indoors at The Unicorn.

https://www.singhahon.com
https://www.instagram.com/singha.hon/#

Making NOISE: O+ Announces 2024 Festival Lineup

Headliners include Neko Case, Kate Pierson of the B-52’s and The Blair Witch Project 25th Anniversary Screening

Kingston, NY – The O+ Festival returns to the streets of Kingston October 11-13th, 2024 for its 14th Annual celebration of art, music, and wellness. The three day schedule features over 55 live music performances, dozens of visual and performance art activations, spoken word, a BlO+ck Party filled with vendors and a variety of health and wellness workshops open to the public. 

Headlining the 2024 O+ Festival is Neko Case, whose layered lyrical choices, genre bending sound and clarion vocals have brought us over twenty years of powerful music with collaborators The New Pornographers and Case/Lang/Veirs and her critically acclaimed solo work including Fox Confessor Brings The Flood and 2022’s Wild Creatures. Case takes the stage at The Old Dutch Church Friday night of the festival with Hannah Cohen opening the evening. 

Other music headliners for this year include local legend Kate Pierson of The B-52’s, Beech Creeps (with members of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Guided By Voices), Rhett Miller of Old 97’s, Milagro Verde Cumbia, Eric Redd and Tall Juan with more than 45 other music acts filling the weekend with a genre-spanning lineup. 

This year’s theme NOISE is explored in an art and WO+rd lineup that features explorations of sound, chaos, and silence with work about the loudness of chronic pain or the din of electoral politics in balance with the connection that comes through shared communication. 

Dance sits in the spotlight of this year’s art lineup bringing inventiveness, lyricism, storytelling, and informed, divergent movement vocabularies to explorations of the human experience. International physical theater and dance company inkBoat, founded by Shinichi Iova-Koga and winner of 6 Isadora Duncan awards, researches the interplay of dance, Japanese performance and martial arts, improvisation, site specific installation and Daoist internal arts. Stephen Pelton Dance Theater (London/San Francisco) pulls movement and imagery out of the real world and combines it with virtuosic dance to create work that feels abstract and narrative, personal and universal all at once.  

While welcoming national and international acts to Kingston, more than 60% of this year’s eclectic, multifaceted lineup hails from the Hudson Valley, in keeping with O+ Festival’s commitment to celebrating and serving the local creative community. The full O+ 2024 music and art lineups will be announced @opositivefest and at opositivefestival.org the week of July 8th. 

The wellness ExpO+ street fair returns bigger and bolder than ever, rebranded as BlO+ck Party. ExplO+re, the public facing wellness workshops at O+, will populate the schedule with opportunities for attendees to deep dive into a range of topics and modalities throughout the weekend. This year’s ExplO+re Wellness lineup will follow later this month and is set to include sound healing, yoga, dance, presentations from health experts, hands-on activities for families and more. 

O+ will close the festival weekend this year with a 25th anniversary screening of The Blair Witch Project, one of the most profitable independent films ever made and, certainly, one of the most influential films of all time in the horror genre. Co-presented by Upstate Films and the Woodstock Film Festival, the 7pm screening on Sunday, October 13th in The Old Dutch Church will be followed by a panel discussion with original cast members including filmmaker, writer, actor and Hudson Valley resident Joshua Leonard. 

With its expansive programming and exchange for healthcare, the O+ Festival is unlike any other festival. At the heart and behind the scenes of O+ Festival is the Artists’ Clinic. All artists, musicians, and volunteers access a variety of healthcare services through this pop-up clinic in exchange for their contributions to the festival – everything from dental care to acupuncture, chiropractic, reiki, dermatology, nutrition counseling, physical exams, connection with mental health professionals and so much more. 

“To be able to come to the clinic and have acupuncture, speak to a nutritionist, to a naturopath, to have massage therapy… these things are very expensive on their own” said 2010/2023 alum Gail Ann Dorsey while in the Artists’ Clinic during the 2023 O+ Festival. “It’s just such a humane way to share with each other, to help each other. Having come back after playing the very first time,.. thirteen years later to play this festival (2023) has been very meaningful for me… I feel very blessed to be a part of this community so I am always here to do whatever I can to keep this kind of spirit alive .”

This exchange – the art of medicine for the medicine of art – is the core of O+’s mission. Our year round work is made possible through the support of attendees who have access to an overflowing schedule of arts and wellness programming by donating what they can for a festival wristband. At O+, we believe that everyone deserves access to healthcare and that everyone should have access to the healing power of the arts.

O+ Festival wristbands are on sale now! Every by-donation wristband sold goes directly back into the festival and helps fund our work of providing care to artists and musicians and building healthier, more resilient communities. 

We will see you in October!