Tanja Geis

Instagram: @geis.t

Website: http://www.tanjageis.com

Bio: Tanja Geis is a Hong Kong-born visual artist whose site-based work explores intimacy within human-disturbed ecosystems. She holds an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley, an MA in Marine Management from the University of Akureyri, Iceland, and a BA in Fine Art from Yale University. Geis has exhibited at venues including the FOR-SITE Foundation, Berkeley Art Museum, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco and galleries throughout Iceland, Scotland, England, Hong Kong, and Japan. Her artist residencies include the Headlands Center for the Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Blue Mountain Center, and Kala Art Institute. Geis is based in Oakland, California.

Statement: I create immersive, site-responsive drawings, installations, and sculptures that emerge from research into and intimate encounters with edge ecosystems and species disrupted by human activity. My work explores how queering, drawing close to, and engaging with the often overlooked or intentionally hidden impacts of humans on the liveliness of non-human entities might foster empathy and transform our perception of our place in, and responsibility toward, the ecological web. The unseen ocean and the coast as threshold consistently recur as potent spaces for this inquiry. My practice employs the repetitive accumulation of marks and/or objects to draw the viewer into a curious, unsettled, intimate seeing. Patterns emerge and retreat, seemingly in a state of continual transformation. My process is guided by the question: What new ways of seeing might help us live with grace in these mongrel ruins of our own creation?