We are pleased to present Vessels of Mindfulness, a community-based project by Artshack member Mina Rafiee.

For her summer residence, Rafiee will take over the gallery space and make it her workspace, thus fusioning exhibition with residency. During this time, the artist will use Artshack's platform to have one-on-one meetings with members of the Bed Stuy community. In these encounters she will address gentrification and the sensation of seeing one’s neighborhood rapidly changing before one’s eyes. Mina’s goal for this project is to create accessible daily objects that bring moments of mindfulness and serenity to their users, watchers, or holders. Vessels of Mindfulness aims to create such moments for someone who is watching a flower arrangement being assembled in an ordinary vase, to someone touching and smelling grains of salt in a salt box, or a coffee drinker touching imperfections of their ordinary coffee pour overs.

Through short mindfulness exercises, participants will engage in a conversation with the artist: they will be asked about their favorite everyday object and the type of interactions, aesthetics, and form that they desire. Based on the outcome of these encounters, Mina will materialize these objects and at the end of the residency/show period participants will take their dream object home.

Vessels of mindfulness is about the relationship of the human body and mind with the now. As part of investigating this relationship along her mindfulness practice, Rafiee is interested in exploring care, craft, and new forms of relationships between daily objects and their use by humans. Focusing on the quality of the human experience that is created through the objects’ crafting process and their interactions in different space settings and atmospheres, members of the community become active agents to develop the quality and forms of such experiences.