NYMPHS is a solo exhibition by hamsa fae, reclaiming the nude for negotiating transgendered otherness. Presenting as a three channel moving-image installation, the artist stages eco-performances between Big Island, Mount Shasta, and the Rio Serpis, all known to be earth’s nexuses for spiritual metamorphosis.

Within Greco-Roman mythology and later 19th century painting, the nymph often appeared as an erotic objectification of the landscape itself. The artist queers the framework of the nymph by meditating the feminized form alongside vulnerable environmental sites. Through natural prosthetics, she destabilizes biological legibility as an act of returning the body to land.  

hamsa fae (b. 1993, Los Angeles) is a Vietnamese American artist working across expanded performance and moving-image installation. As an internet-native rooted in a decade of land-based animist practice, she positions the body as a site of re-matriation. Through durational bodily transformation and self-documentation, she observes how gendered bodies are consumed and mediated within economies of feminized desire.

Emerging from the political and spiritual mundanity of trans womanhood, her work mobilizes nudity as an ancestral and digital technology of return. From natural landscapes in the Californias to livestreaming platforms, her site-responsive performances activate environments as co-performers. Audiences are invited to kneel, speak, recline, or gather in collective ritual acts that confront the historical erasure of third gender peoples while collapsing the distinction between witness, voyeur, and co-author. 

Her multimedia installations extend these performances into speculative altars and ecological afterlives. Combining organic materials and assembled GIFs, she constructs immersive environments that destabilize binaries between nature and interface. Her work reveals how networked systems reshape intimacy and spectacle while eroding embodied relationships to earth and one another.

Her work has been presented across experimental and institutional spaces throughout San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego. She has delivered talks at the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, the 2024 Paris Olympics, and the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Her writing has been published and featured in diaCritics, Transgender Law Center, and the Yale School of the Environment. She is the Founder and Director of the AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship in Southern California, supporting the development and visibility of queer AAPI artists

The Mendocino Art Center is thrilled to host Pride on the Coast again this June. LGBTQ+ and Two-Spirit artists are encouraged to submit up to
3 pieces of art to our open call by May 30th. 

Key Dates

Deadline to enter: May 30th

Artwork drop-off: June 6th-7th

Exhibition opens: June 13th

Photo credit:  Amanda Jasnowski Pascual, Photograph of Carmen Goodyear and her wife Laurie York, 2017.

Amie Potsic: To the Ends of the Earth –
Celestial Seas and Trees

A Solo Exhibition featuring Dance Performances

July 11 – August 2, 2026

Opening Reception and Dance Performances:  Saturday, July 11th 5 – 8pm

*Dance Performances at 5:30pm and 7:00pm 

Artist Talk:  Saturday, July 18, 2pm

Amie Potsic is a photographer and installation artist whose award-winning work explores cultural, personal, and natural phenomena through immersive, research-based projects.  Her work has been published and exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and public spaces.  Based in Philadelphia, she is host of the Art is the Answer Podcast and her work has been featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer and The San Francisco Chronicle and on 6abc television and National Public Radio (NPR). 

She will present the solo exhibition, To the Ends of the Earth – Celestial Seas and Trees at the Mendocino Art Center, which will include a large-scale immersive silk installation inspired by the Mendocino Coast.  With 400-linear-feet of silk imprinted with photographic imagery, Potsic creates an experience that highlights the majesty and dynamism of the coastal landscape to conjure emotional connections to the environment and encourage conservation.

The show will feature interactive dance performances with the installation by Potsic and the Mendocino Dance Project in garments inspired by the artwork designed by Pangea Kali Virga.