Saya Woolfalk is a New York based artist whose work spans multiple media: from sculpture, installation, and painting, to performance and video. She holds an MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BA from Brown University, and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program. She has exhibited at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL; and recently participated in Performa 09. Woolfalk is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including an Art Matters grant to Japan and a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil. In 2008, Woolfalk was a resident artist at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she expanded her body of work that draws upon ethnographic, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory in order to unravel complex, otherworldly narratives of transformation.

What initially drew you to the language of comics? How would you characterize your particular approach to the form?

SW: I spent the summers of my childhood in Japan, and anime and manga played a major role in shaping my artistic approach. I love the way that a comic can address serious subject matter with a playful and approachable format.

The comic you made for this series fits into a complex mythology that you have been developing for some time, revolving around the idea of "No Place" and the tribe of the "Empathics." Can you describe these terms, how they came to be, and how you have slowly teased out their stories through your work?

SW: For two years I worked with anthropologist and filmmaker Rachel Lears to imagine and "document" a future, utopian world called No Place. The people of that place are called No Placeans and are part plant and part human, change gender and color, have an empathetic relationship with the environment, and transform our garbage into usable technology.

With this comic, I am teasing out the story of the Empathics. The Empathics are women in the present who come into contact with No Placean bones in the woods of upstate New York. The bones emit fireflies, which transmit a bit of No Placean DNA to the Empathics. The No Placean DNA fuses with their human DNA and the Empathics become biological chimeras. Their biological shift alters their sense of self and some of them choose to act and dream differently.

You combine elements of photography, sculpture, dance, performance, illustration, and text in your comic. What do you find challenging and advantageous about combining media in a single narrative?

SW: Our world is made in multi-media and I like to approach my work as poetic parallel to our world.

This comic is a prequel, in a way, to your performance at the Studio Museum for Performa 09, in that it sets the stage for the development (or you might say evolution or mutation) of the Empathics. What aspect of this story will you focus on next?

SW: Collaboration and collective imagining played an important part in choreographing Ritual of the Empathics. I worked with a group of dancers from University at Buffalo for six weeks to create the piece. For my next solo show at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT, I will continue to use this process of collaborative choreography to work with dancers from different cultural backgrounds.

The idea for the show emerges from the idea that the Empathics are biological chimeras, which in their case means the fusion of organisms from different kingdoms of the natural world. In mythology, a chimera is a monster that combines many creatures into a single body. I thought it would be interesting to create a chimera in dance as a representation of what a culture of Empathics could look like: people from different groups, forced together by a common biological mutation, and asked to interact as a single social body.

While your work is clearly rooted in a dreamlike, fictional universe, it also speaks to present concerns and ambiguities, such as: how we construct belief systems, how we struggle to understand our own psychology and dreams, the debates around genetic screening and bioengineering, utopianism, the human impact on the environment, and others. Can you speak about this relationship between folklore and reality in your work?

SW: I like to think that artists have the ability to engage ideas relevant to the world and, like authors, can create alternative spaces where we can bend rules, test them out, maybe even change the way people think about them. No Place was a pseudo-utopian folk tale about a perfect place-a place where Rachel Lears and I could cull the imaginations of the people around us to construct a new world.

The Empathics offer a different kind of space. With them, I consider what it could look like to try to become a vision of utopia: how a human body could genetically mutate, what kinds of choices a human would have to make to change culturally, and the various strategies they could use to know, understand, and represent that newly formed conception of the self and the social body to the world.

Your work has strong elements of masquerade and metamorphosis—in that figures and objects are often not what they appear to be on the surface and are in fact hybrid and constantly changing. I think one could draw a connection to the power of performativity in identity politics, as well as displays of shared cultural heritage. I'm curious if you could unpack what these themes mean to you, and how your own experience fits in.

SW: Identity politics helped form the foundation of my work. I am black, white, and Japanese and have always been acutely aware of my position in society as a woman. In college, I took the statement "the personal is political" to heart, and when it came to making art, I started making work based on what I knew best. I first made paintings and then started making sculpture, and this quickly turned into an interest in costumes. Costumes became a space for activating alternative bodies through performance. After two years in graduate school and two years in Brazil, I began to create No Place: an entire narrative system. Now, I am trying to create complex psychological portraits of human beings as they negotiate the world.

Your work also constitutes a kind of time-travel, taking place across the present, future, and future future. Yet there is a kind of timelessness to the childlike, Technicolor wonder of your imagery. Time-like many of the other elements in your work-becomes fluid. Can you discuss how temporality functions in your work, and perhaps its relation to narrative?

SW: When I started making work, I was interested in tapping into the in-utero baby world of pre-linguistic possibility. I tried to gather all of the symbols I could into that space and, in some of my earlier paintings, I mashed everything into a single image. I found this strategy conveyed a sense of timelessness-a place where many symbolic orders converge at once, where things become unclear and clear at the same moment.

These days, I build narrative in a similar way: creating multiple narratives at once and, by separating my work into narrative lines, I try to make it easier for people to understand my concerns.

What are the issues facing us today that you're most interested in, concerned about, or motivated by as an artist? What should we be paying attention to?

SW: What it means to be human in the world today, how to lead a good life, and where to eat an amazing meal.