By ANAYANSI FREILLA-WILLIAMS, age 11 and IndyKids staff
There are thousands of people in the world who love art. If you love art, wouldn’t you love a place to be able to make art?
Flux Factory is a nonprofit organization for artists. People apply to make and show art at the space. Flux Factory was started in 1994 in a former spice factory in Williamsburg by a group of artists who needed a space where they could make and share their art.
Over the years, Flux Factory has gone to many places, including Sunnyside, Queens, and Long Island City. Now Flux Factory has many locations, and one of them is on Governors Island. Flux Factory hosts events for artists to show their work, about 75 every year. Flux Factory is supported by donations, so the public doesn’t have to pay, but the artists still get paid for showing their art.
MaLo Sutra Fish is a resident at Flux Factory on Governors Island during the summer and fall of 2024. MaLo is a photographer, a writer, and makes films. MaLo likes to take things considered not beautiful or imperfect and make them beautiful in her artwork.
IndyKids visited MaLo’s PROCESS Exhibition on Governors Island and learned about analog photography, which is how photography was originally done before digital cameras and phones. Each photograph in the exhibit was individually developed and printed, which is done through a chemical process. MaLo’s photographs in the exhibit reflect the military history of Governors Island. One room of the exhibition is set up to look like a photography darkroom. MaLo shares the experience of the darkroom with visitors who may have never been in one before.
PROCESS also celebrates MaLo’s favorite part of analog photography: the grain. The grain of an image is a reaction to light on the film. MaLo loves playing with light in her art. Her photographs are black and white so she can play with light and shadow.
MaLo has photosensitive epilepsy. In an interview with IndyKids, she said that everyone always asked what it was like to have epilepsy, and she shows that through her art, in what she calls visual poems. She created The Epileptic Eye, an exhibition she thought about for a long time featuring epileptic women artists, about “how our epilepsy influenced our art practice, and how our practice became a way to transcend a lot of hardship that comes with this condition.”
Flux Factory is important because there might not be that many places for artists who are less known, so this is a place where they can start. MaLo says that she really likes her experience with Flux. When asked what matters to her about her art, MaLo replied, “It’s the sharing. Flux shares. It’s a space I like to share. When we’re artists, there is an initial need that it needs to be released, we have to make it. It’s not even to sell it, we have to just make it. But sharing it with other people is something incredible, because of the conversation that it builds.”
