Drawing a Line to the Sun with Smudge Studio

10am-10:30am (Limited spots. RSVP earlier.)

Drawing A Line to the Sun invites guests to re-establish awareness of our direct connection to the sun, which has fueled planetary systems on Earth for the past 4.6 billion years. Eight minutes ago, photons of sunlight that took thousands of years to migrate from the sun’s core left its surface and traveled towards Earth. As a result, everything we see is bathed in eight-minute-old light. Each particle/wave of sunlight is new and different from those that arrived on Earth micro-seconds before. The sunlight we experience as “given” or “stable” is constantly changing. This tea-based micro-production will create a context for experiencing these singular moments of change together.

Drawing A Line to the Sun is a continuation of smudge projects: Tea in the Dark and Sunworker. 

NOTES FROM smudge studio

During the past year, we activated tea within daily life rhythms that felt highly precarious. We used tea to deepen our capacities to respond to the context at hand. Much of what unfolds within daily life, especially within the Anthropocene, is grounded in uncertainty. Cultivating capacities to creatively co-exist with uncertainty is central to our work.

The preparation and consumption of tea is a responsive practice of hospitality. Making, sharing, and drinking tea within varied conditions and forms exposes us to sensory experiences of change. It also inserts pause and reflection in habits of mind, gesture, and pace.

Tea practice transmutes vast, seemingly ungraspable scales of cosmological force into humble, live-able human experience.

We experiment with tea as a means for projecting our imaginations into the cosmic scales of material realities of life on Earth—arguably, the only scales of materiality that human activity cannot alter.

ABOUT

smudge studio is a collaboration between Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse. Jamie Kruse is an artist, designer, and Assistant Professor at Parsons, The New School for Design (New York, NY). In 2005 she co-founded smudge, with Elizabeth Ellsworth, based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, The New School Green Fund; New York State Council for the Arts, and the Brooklyn Arts Council. She has exhibited and presented her work both nationally and internationally. She is the author of the Friends of the Pleistocene blog, and has co-edited a collection of essays with Elizabeth Ellsworth entitled, Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life (punctum books, 2012).