Wassy Bats
by VL4E
Curated by Jacob Rhodes (Field Projects) and Candace Jensen (In Situ Polyculture)
Opening July 17, 6pm • On view July 17 – Aug 21, 2025
Featuring: VL4E (Mariana Parisca, Luis Vasquez La Roche, and bryan ortiz)
The exhibition titled Wassy Bats includes a selection of works made in collaboration by bryan ortiz, Mariana Parisca, and Luis Vazquez La Roche. Wassy Bats is a project inspired by Trinidadian Carnival. The three artists started working together making costumes, hosting workshops and creating performances using the covert, celebratory, and socially conscious tactics of carnival to respond to historical and current political events.
For this exhibition, the Wassy Bats are working with sound, video, painting, and drawing. By becoming bats, the group taps into their extrasensory perception, altered states of consciousness, a covert yet omnipresent existence, and extraordinary diversity. Through sound experimentation, and cross-cultural experiences, they abstract and expand on language in times of censorship. In video performances, the Wassy Bats perform rituals and acts of care, rest and joy to expand on the ontologies of liberation.
They seek to find answers to question: how do we create new ways to enact and embody the language and agency that is in danger of being lost?
Field Projects 526 W 26 Street, #807 NYC, NY 10001 [email protected]
About the Collective:
VL4E was formed in 2024 by artists Mariana Parisca, Luis Vasquez La Roche, and bryan ortiz. Longtime collaborators, the trio has previously worked together on curatorial projects, exhibitions, and zines that highlight art and writing rooted in diasporic experiences.
Mariana Parisca (she/they) is an interdisciplinary visual artist and educator from the USA and Venezuela, currently based in CDMX. Luis Vasquez La Roche (pronouns?) is a visual artist who resides between Trinidad and Tobago and Virginia. They are an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at George Mason University in Northern Virginia. Parisca and Vasquez La Roche both earned their MFAs from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, in 2020. bryan ortiz (pronouns?) is an artist based in Fayetteville, Arkansas with roots in Southern California and Central/ Southern Mexico. ortiz received his MFA from The Ohio State University in 2021 and most recently served as the Assistant Director of Visible Records, an artist-run space in Charlottesville, VA.
About the Open Call:
This is the first collaboration and beginning of a partnership between In Situ Polyculture Commons and Field Projects Gallery. Together, we have created a fellowship which includes a four week residency in Vermont at In Situ Polyculture Commons, a five week solo exhibition at Field Projects in NYC, and a stipend.
