POINT PLEASANT PUBLISHING
International Call for Artists: Arts Festival & Exhibition in Princeton
Point Pleasant Publishing proudly presents Crowns of Princeton, an experimental arts festival at The Solley Theatre at the Paul Robeson Center for the Arts in beautiful Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton is an affluent city and home to the world's leading academic institution, Princeton University.
The arts festival is open to all artists internationally working in any form of artistic practice, including performance and moving-image. This one-day arts festival will be promoted on EventBrite, ArtRabbit, LinkedIn, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and will take place on Saturday, February 20th, 2027 from 11am-4pm.
Additionally, there will be a detailed and comprehensive published catalogue documenting the Princeton Arts Festival, available in both print and digital. The extensive exhibition catalogue will contain human-authored curatorial statements / essays, thorough professional photography, and internationally registered with an ISBN. Participating artists will be given a free PDF copy of the exhibition catalogue for Crowns of Princeton. The catalogue will be available in both linen wrap hardcover and perfect bound paperback.
How to Apply:
There is a $24 application requirement which can be paid through this Donation Link. If the original link does not work for you, then try this alternative link instead.
No additional fees required beyond the $24 donation.
After you have made the donation, email your CV, 5 image samples or video-stills, and online portfolio to editor@pointpleasantpublishing.net
Write 'Crowns of Princeton' in the subject line of your email.
Curators of Crowns of Princeton Arts Festival & Exhibition:
Fina Ferrara - Moving-Image & Performance Artist
Michael Hanna - Editor of Point Pleasant Publishing, Interdisciplinary Lens-Based Artist
Specifications: Moving-Image projects will be presented on a professional large projection display. Two-dimensional works of art cannot exceed 36" x 36". Framing is not required but works must be presentable. Free-standing installations can be of any size, as long as the contents are not heavy. Live and documented performances are welcome. Three-dimensional works cannot exceed dimensions of 24" x 24" x 24" and cannot weigh more than 15 pounds. We offer printing options at reasonable costs for selected artists who would prefer not to ship their works. Artists keep 100% of sales and can optionally donate 10% of their sales to Point Pleasant Publishing.
Important Dates to Consider:
Deadline to Apply: January 1st, 2027
Notifications: Selected applicants will be notified of their selection no later than January 5th, 2027
Confirmation: Selected artists must confirm their participation by email no later than January 12th, 2027
Drop off / Pick up: Instructions will be given to artists for physical drop off / pick up. Artworks will be dropped off by appointment at least one week before the exhibition. Artworks can be picked up at the end of the exhibition or by appointment at a later date.
Shipping Instructions: Artworks must be received no later than February 12th, 2027. Artists must provide a return shipping label with their package.
Reception: The Solley Theatre at the Paul Robeson Center for the Arts
Saturday, February 20th, 2027 from 11am-4pm
102 Witherspoon Street
Princeton, New Jersey 08542
United States
textiles by Minyu Zhu
Use of this venue is provided on a standard rental basis at fair market value. The Arts Council of Pirnceton and its affiliated organizations do not endorse, support, or oppose any persons or organization renting our facility, and no such endorsement should be inferred.
background performance by Fina Ferrara
The Robert L. Solley Theatre at the Paul Robeson Center for the Arts
About:
Located in Downtown and just one block from Princeton University, The Solley Theatre at the Paul Robeson Center for the Arts will host Crowns of Princeton, an experimental arts festival by Point Pleasant Publishing. Crowns of Princeton is focused on surveying the status of experimental art as opposed to a fixed, generalized theme. Due to the unconventional nature of the show being held in a theatre with large windows, spanning one day, and incorporating moving-image, performance, and 2-D / 3-D visual art, Crowns of Princeton is more similar to an arts festival rather than a standard exhibition.
Download the Official Press Release for Crowns of Princeton Arts Festival & Exhibition
HEADLINE PERFORMANCE
F I N A F E R R A R A
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Born in 1983 in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, Fina Ferrara has transformed from a renowned classical ballet dancer into a bold, multidisciplinary performance and moving-image artist. By fusing rigorous training with radical forms of expression, her work explores movement, physical, emotional, and conceptual, through dance, theatre, video, and installation.
Fina Ferrara is a moving-image and performance artist who is internationally acclaimed and recognized as being one of the finest performance artists in the world. She has performed and exhibited in major cities across the globe including London, Paris, New York, Venice, Rome, Madrid, and Mumbai, as well as in numerous cities across Latin America. Recent venues she has performed and exhibited her video art include Vedica Arts Studios and Gallery in Paris and Mumbai, International Video Art Festival and UNDOXX Performance Festival in New York, multiple exhibitions at Casa LaCuraduria in Monterrey, Mexico, Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello in Venice, ARTEXPO and Gallery Artifact in New York, and Contemporary Art International Fair in Paris.
With an extensive background in classical ballet, theatre, and contemporary dance, Fina Ferrara turned her attention to performance art and performance-based experimental video productions which are noted for her graceful, enigmatic, and even erratic movements seemingly similar to the prowlings of a feline. Conceptually, the performances and videos explain the tension and mania behind contemporary forms of relationships as well as provoking the viewer to explore modes outside of comfort and familiarity. The audio in the performances and videos are usually exploratorily digitized and release sounds ranging from serene to disturbing, often containing distorted rhythms which somewhat resemble a harmonic keyboard playing or shrieks of terror. Ranging from interactions with installations and sculptures to costumed props, Fina Ferrara dances, ritualistically summons, and even transforms herself into expressions and entities which invoke a variety of emotions relating to contemporary identity. Examples would be how society treats certain classes of people, such as women, or the contradictions of self-image, through her movements and behaviors expressing sorrow, suffering, and a longing for escape.
Often, the viewer will find the artist engaging in a ritualistic dance, as if she is calling upon spirits or behaving in a reaction to a tragedy. Through angular distortion of her wired-framed figure, Fina Ferrara distorts and contorts herself into forms which behave as visual expressions of emotional impulses. With energy and mania, Fina appears to incorporate her own style of contemporary dance followed by lunges and gasps with various parts of her limbs and facial expressions which convey a hyper-sense of yearning and desire. These performances are not meant to be decorative, glamorous, or remotely commercial in any capacity, but rather to provoke thoughtful discourse on specific concepts relating to the power of perception, illusion, interconnectivity as well as social distance.
If the audience were to invest their time taking a deep dive into the extensive performance and video portfolio of Fina Ferrara, they will find themselves having chilling sensations which heightens awareness in regard to exploring peak investigative experimentations. In these mysterious works, the beauty and horror of Fina’s evocative motions and enhanced, stimulated dances seem to invoke a plane of consciousness from another realm or dimension. If embraced with an open mind, the viewer will find the performances to be not only thrilling but also passionate and hallucinogenic. Exemplifying a puristic essence of performance, the art of Fina Ferrara is meant to be savored in the moment, much like the concepts of breathing or mortality. The fluxus improvisation in her performances connect us with our sense of mindfulness and realities, engaging us to consider how motion and lucid interactions with environments, self, and props guide the audience to contemplate on our own finite existence and state of consciousness.
Written by Michael Hanna, Editor of Point Pleasant Publishing.
https://www.pointpleasantpublishing.net/shoreline-voice-fina-ferrara
HEADLINE 2-D / 3-D VISUAL ART
M I N Y U Z H U
Minyu Zhu is a textile and installation artist who has exhibited in major cities including London, Sydney, and Milan. Recent and notable exhibitions include Coalition Across Differences by Sijie and Meichen as well as Point One the Textiles Festival in London, Salon of the Rose + Cross in Sydney, Del Dente in Milan, RCA WIP Show and Safehouse in London. She is also a graduate from the Royal College of Art, widely considered to be the finest art school in the world.
The textile stand-alone works and installations with both galleries and natural environments seem to resemble forms of a cross between spider webs and cocoons. This intricate spatialized threading, often symmetrical in pattern but asymmetrical in form, represents female sensibilities and the experience of being a woman. Upon closer inspection, the viewer may notice the textile works may resemble certain configurations such as exotic fauna, dresses, furniture, household items, or ceramic wares. Although resembling these forms in a dilapidated state, there seems to be a sense of decay or severe distortion, as if these dispositions have been consumed by an outer essence, such as the interpretative mind of the beholder. Because the textile works may resemble biological form but also have the essence of inanimate entities, there is a conceptual connection, dichotomy, and study between everyday items and the body.
Some of the most interesting textile works are the pieces which resemble exotic fauna and foliage. These specific works have a vivid distortion of purity in form and color along with Minyu Zhu’s signature spatial web of intervals within the structure of the fiber works. These elastic pieces may sometimes resemble objects, such as bottles, turning into florals. The cell-like structure, elasticity, and asymmetrical form of the fauna are fantastical interpretations and represent an escape on a scale which can attributed to the works of writers such as Jules Verne. Other works contain these elements but also have attributes of basketry and cage-like, macabre connotations such as in the piece Weaving Protrusion. An ominous sense of unfamiliarity permeate throughout these works despite their basic structure based on subjects, revealing and provoking sensibilities to reimagine configuration as a realm of abstraction and distortion which blends reality, observation, and imagination. The textile works which resemble dresses seem to echo metallic sensibilities, also like a cage, and seem to slither and shrink in form much like a snake shedding their skin, which suggests metamorphosis, change, and personal growth. Fiber pieces which are integrated with environments, such as the pieces which somewhat resemble vessels, reveal a tapestry of life harvesting the surrounding environment, such as aqua to reflect and compliment the delicate forms of these structures.
Minyu Zhu is an artist in-tuned with her sensibilities and interpretative mind. She transforms the world around her into substances which seem to have been impacted by rapid states of erosion. These sensitive structures reflect her own sense of female identity in identifying spatial intervals between physical and metaphysical patterns. The psychological and ethereal aspects of these textile works represent a quiet narrative on how objects shape and mold our sense of personal identity in relation to change, growth, and emotional impulses.
Written by Michael Hanna, Editor of Point Pleasant Publishing.
https://www.pointpleasantpublishing.net/single-post/minyu-zhu
https://www.pointpleasantpublishing.net/single-post/why-textiles-matter-featuring-minyu-zhu
HEADLINE MOVING-IMAGE PROJECT
V I C T O R I A G O N G
Music video / moving-image project directed by Victoria Gong. Uncanny Valley - I'mmortal.
Essay in the Catalogue on Victoria Gong: Version 1
Victoria Gong in Point Pleasant Journal.
Victoria Gong is a London-based experimental moving-image artist / director who has been published by KALBLUT Magazine and NOWNESS ASIA as well as won awards with the Athens Fashion Film Festival and ASVOFF (A Shaded View of Fashion Film by Diane Pernet) in Paris. Victoria has screened her video productions at the Venice Biennale, Labelhood & Youtopia in Shanghai, and UBU Art Collective in Seoul.
Incorporating contemporary dance, fashion, experimental music, and dream-like sequences, the moving-image works of Victoria Gong are based on narrative shorts, fashion films, and music videos. Some of Victoria’s most notable moving-images includes experimental fashion film AMBERSTICHE and music video UNCANNY VALLEY - featuring music artist I’MMORTAL. In both of these works, there is a consistent theme of characters rising and engaging with the darkness. With high contrast and theatrical, focused lighting, Victoria Gong’s actors dance within the void of her expansive, dark compositions. The costumes in the videos are either dance-based, fantastical, revealing, primal, or sleek, depending on the character and contexts of the sequence. For example. in UNCANNY VALLEY, the character of I’MMORTAL is dressed in a plain white outfit (along with her clone) throughout most of the video except for when she enters the confines of a psychiatric hospital room, for which she wears a tight tan outfit and faux fur overcoat on her shoulders, perhaps indicating a sense of rockstar status.
In AMBERSTICHE, we are engaged in a lucid experience. Exotic dancers with tribalistic markings on their face and bodies dance upon poles or the cold floor seemingly prowling the area of the frame. Their dances are primal in nature, swallowed by the encompassing darkness and leading towards a prismatic character who ‘shines’ and ‘explodes’ into sparkled abstract constructs, which are analogue animated by three VFX animators working for Victoria. The light-based configurations flow with aquatic vigor followed by a luminous shine reminiscent of precious stones and fine jewelry. UNCANNY VALLEY has a more clear narrative base as I’MMORTAL seems to be struggling not only with herself (via a psychiatric hospital), but also with an intrusive android clone, which eventually breaks out into all out war between the two. In the final sequence, one of the two instances of I’MMORTAL shoots lasers from her hands finishing off the other. Is the deceased instance of I’MMORTAL or the clone? We will never know. The mysterious, indirect narratives in the experimental moving-image works of Victoria Gong compliment her rich visuals which are almost monochromatic in cool and neutral colors, followed by enchanted dance, engaging costumes, and performances which contain evocative motions which both haunt and challenge us to engage and question the sequences.
Victoria Gong represents some of the very finest the experimental moving-image arts has to offer. Her combinative techniques of engulfing and integrating her actors and dancers within the confines of her dark compositions to the backdrops of experimental audio, unfamiliar and narrative-based fashion / costume design, and evocative contemporary dance are in contemplative analysis. These works are best savored in the moment and with repeated watchings to unlock the mystery of her narratives based in the fawn-like movements and engagements of her actors. Victoria Gong consistently offers lucid experiences based in horror, confinement, mystery, and technological aesthetics which challenge the viewer to appreciate the unlimited potential of moving-image as well as her ability to orchestrate fine, hallucinogenic engaging sequences of infinite depth.
Written by Michael Hanna, Editor of Point Pleasant Publishing.
If you are a patron of the arts and would like to donate in order to fund this project as well as future endeavors, you may do so at the following Donation Link.
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