Johannah Herr is a visual artist and storyteller who lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons in 2009 and has exhibited in New York, London and Berlin with recent shows at the L.E.S. gallery Envoy Enterprises and the DADApost Gallery in Berlin. She is a former member of the Berlin-based art collective GRUNTWORK and her work will be showcased in the upcoming Figment Sculpture Garden on Governer's Island and Chashama's Window space program. Her art revolves around the dissection of ritual, ornament, folklore and other forms of cultural artifact and most often manifests itself in ephemeral sculpture that lives between the act of creating it and its photo documentation.
Margaret Mary Downey is a writer and radio geek from Philadelphia. She is currently enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's MLA program in Anthropology. She is the former host and producer of the Lancaster Avenue Autonomous Zone's (a collective space for activists, journalists and artists) "Open Your Throat" featuring local poets, dramatists and essayists on Radio Volta, a project of the Philadelphia Independent Media center. In her writing (and reading) she looks to incorporate the ritualized ranges of conjure, repetition, myth, metaphor and speech act and to explore the encountered difference between what we mean and what we say. She is currently exploring the artistic possibilities of Microsoft PowerPoint (alternately treating speech as object and as organism, using the intersections of text and sound to create unexpected, emergent experiences) for an installation in conjunction with the Baltimore Annex Theater/Puppet Uprising at the OX Gallery in Philadelphia.The collaborative duo were born and raised in the fertile soil of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, whose abandoned barns, lurking Amishmen and shadowed country roads kindled an appreciation for all things backwood and folkloric in their impressionable hearts.
