Saya Woolfalk: Chimera

Saya Woolfalk’s Chimera is focused on the meanings of different kinds of hybridity. In part, this project developed out of her own experience as a black, white, and Japanese-American woman, and from her broader interest in exploring how hybridities (of cultures, races, and ethnicities; humans and machines; etc.) are becoming more apparent, but also more fraught and confounding in American society.

Chimera is an ongoing science fiction inspired project about fictional humans who physically and culturally metamorphose as they merge identities and cross species, taking on characteristics of various cultures while becoming a fusion of animal and plant. The material culture and biology of these people are the synthesis of diverse sources. Woolfalk takes seemingly non-coherent combinations to create fantastical bodies that connect with real bodies, situate them in habitable new worlds, and activate them in performance and video.