SOFT SERVE: Genspace Artists in Residency Showcase
About this Event
What makes a place feel like home? In SOFT SERVE 2026 Artists in Residence, Jingyi Yang and Becca Rodriguez invite you to an evening of research sharing, protocol presenting, and play. Throughout their 6-month residency, the two artists have been working with algae-based material and urban pigment modification to honor rapidly changing places, from the puddles of Brooklyn to reinterpreted Inner Mongolian patterns. Jingyi and Becca have explored how foraged and momentary materials connect us to the places, memories, and communities we come from and interact with. Their artwork can be viewed both as research and a soft offering, memorializing both familial and microbial ancestry through process-oriented craftsmanship and sensitive time-based labwork.
Jingyi’s project explores the possibilities of algae-based biomaterials through a process-oriented practice rooted in memories of home. Working with collected algae, algae powders, and sodium alginate, she investigates how different ingredients, proportions, and processing methods shape textile-like materials. Alongside these experiments, she cultivates kombucha SCOBYs to produce cellulose sheets and explores a newfound interest in microbial pigments through silk dyeing, opening new possibilities for combining material and color. A central shift during the residency has been integrating scientific protocols, documentation, and comparison into her practice-led research, bringing systematic observation into dialogue with intuitive making. Through reinterpreted Mongolian patterns, laser-cut surfaces, and illuminated installations, these experiments connect to her memories of Inner Mongolia. Centering the process rather than the finished object, the project considers how growing, making, and allowing materials to transform can become ways of understanding home, impermanence, and belonging.
Becca’s project, Puddle Pigments, surveyed three puddles around the Gowanus Canal over five months, collecting water samples, documenting microscopy observations, tracking rainfall, and noticing/foraging for what grew around them: mugwort, mulberries, and serviceberries. Water quality tests were taken of each puddle, and this data was used to inform foraged pigment modification choices. These plant dyes were then transformed into more stable forms like lake pigments, pastels, watercolors, and bacterial cellulose. Navigating extreme weather, combined sewage overflow events, and construction chaos, Becca has been grieving rapidly changing spaces through memorialization and ritualistic protocol. These Puddle Pigments were made to share what goes away, remains, transitions, or resurrects. Becca’s residency with Genspace is in collaboration with smoke & mold, a digital literary journal invested in the possibilities trans lives bring to our changing nature-culture.
Through short films, presentations, material displays, and installations, the artists will share processes of collecting, growing, observing, and making.
Following presentations, there will be a brief Q&A with Genspace Lab Manager Serena Wessely and smoke & mold’s Wren Hanks, then visitors will be invited to explore installations and contribute to a shared artwork using prepared materials and foraged pigments. With a small collage, a word, or a memory, we can consider how different experiences of home can come together in one temporary space. No prior art or science experience is needed.
Meet the A.I.R.s!
Becca Rodriguez (they/them) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist and musician who grew up in Florida and Georgia. They explore evolutionary biology and multispecies relationships through experimental research and process-oriented craft. Working across ceramic sculpture, biomaterials, field work, and sound, Rodriguez has shared installations as living ecosystems in both gallery and outdoor public spaces. Often representing aquatic life while encouraging participation through interactive games and communal altars, Rodriguez’s practice works to honor living, lost, and threatened beings/culture through shared ritual, memorialization, and play. Microcosms of larger issues (like puddles as a microcosm of flooding) are presented as softer entries for difficult-to-process experiences.
IG: @armarierodriguez
Jingyi Yang is a New York–based textile and interdisciplinary artist from Inner Mongolia. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Genspace in Brooklyn, where she is developing experimental textiles through biofabrication and material research. Working across textiles, biomaterials, and installation, her practice explores migration, cultural memory, adaptation, and place attachment. Through diverse textile techniques and experimental material processes, Yang investigates the shifting relationships between landscape, identity, and belonging.
IG: @jingyiii_y
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