Opening reception: Wednesday, December 3, 2025 | 6:00 – 8:00 pm
On view: December 4 – 7, 2025
Hours: Dec 4 – 6: 12-6pm / Dec 7: 12-5pm
Location: Residency Unlimited, 360 Court Street (main green church doors), Brooklyn, NY 11231 (map)
“Dialog by Design” marks the first solo show of Scatter Practice, a design collaboration between RU artists Maya McGlynn and Ross Myren.
The exhibition is composed of work developed by Maya and Ross that spans their individual and shared practices and workshops conducted over the past two months at Residency Unlimited. As Scatter Practice, they explore the potential to shape discourse around community-driven design with respect to mutual aid in New York City.
Throughout the show, Maya and Ross synthesize formats of exchange across mediums and contexts, establishing conversations between their simultaneous investigations. This work underlies the idea that they (as artists and designers) are not separate from social practice, but rather interdependent.
“Dialog by Design” presents a full-scale prototype for a food distribution cart, titled “CART1”, designed for non-profit EVLovesNYC to help streamline their weekly food distribution and community exchange out of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. Inspired by everyday vending cart typologies that expand, unfold, illuminate, beckon and roll, speculative drawings of the cart in action highlight the potential of urban practice to directly reinforce existing systems of care across New York City. “CART1” was designed as a framework for future iterations that can adapt to crisis, celebration, and everywhere in-between.
During their studio residency at the RU House on Governors Island, the duo led four art & design workshops with new New Yorkers that explored making as a reflection of experience and identity in NYC. The participants worked across a range of 2D and 3D crafting techniques, from paper making with materials sourced at the GrowNYC Teaching Garden on Governors Island, to building chairs made with offcuts from a variety of reclaimed/sustainably harvested wood donated by Brooklyn-based workshop & millworks, Tri-Lox. The results of these workshops, funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, are layered into the exhibition as a whole.
About
Maya McGlynn is an artist and educator based in NYC with a background in architecture. Her work is focused on understanding the anatomy of organic matter in both its vital and inanimate phases by exploring the conditions and histories from which the materials originate and the visual impact of their formal manifestations. Maya maintains a parallel, yet intimately related, studio practice in drawing and sculpture, examining the overlap between networks of the physical body and the natural world. Systems of ecological interdependence and personal recollection often appear as themes informing her compositions. Working across a range of media she explores how foraged objects and their contextualized structures, both organic and manufactured, can be supported, connected, and re-imagined. In addition, Maya co-founded Scatter Practice (with her partner Ross Myren), an architecture & design/build studio based out of NYC.
Ross Myren is a NYC-based artist and design educator concentrated on addressing social precarity through exploring innovative approaches to resource use, ecological stewardship, and collaborative making. Myren’s work prioritizes what already exists; utilizing reclaimed materials to produce new assemblies that re-assert the value of mundane objects and their embodied histories. Exploring the structural properties of these connections informs his perspective about the built environment that urges a certain architectural restraint; how to do more with less, how to maintain and repair rather than destroy. Through spatial interventions and adaptive operations, Myren blends his desire for deep material understanding with new sensibilities around creative reuse for a planet in crisis.
Ross is one-half of Scatter Practice, a design collaborative founded with Maya McGlynn in 2023, which shares the belief that ones’ relationship to the built environment (and those who inhabit it) is a sensitive one. Through focused research, hand drawing, physical modeling, and experimental fabrication, seemingly disparate or scattered works reveal and question enmeshed networks of material flows, systems of care, and hyper-local conditions to create small-scale projects with the potential for broader social impact.
The 2025 Dialog by Design Residency Program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
