HOT DOUGHNUTS NOW is PERFORMING PEDAGOGY. 

The artist residency is a place for rethinking art practice—learning and unlearning. How can the exhibition go about things differently and rethink the gallery as a final destination, a home base? Can this newly thought open space instead become a precipice, provocateur, or an invitation to join, follow, or lead? 

Listen and speak? Reinvent practice? Work in new mediums, in secret, in the dark, then turn a light on.

AN EXQUISITE CORPSE

A LOOPING STRUCTURE

A BACKWARDS FORWARDS

LOOPING OUT OF 2020 and into 2021

Digital Extensions

Each time the HOT DOUGHNUTS NOW Hot Light™ sign is illuminated down the street at Krispy Kreme, the Stove Works’ Instagram account will be activated by resident artists. When the original neon sign was invented in Chattanooga, TN in 1982, sales increased immediately. Subsequently, profit-maximizing, time-triggered neon signs were adopted around the world. Businesses flourished. The “Now” was a call to liveness, immediacy. The sign becomes an outside-time signature giving structure to the days spent indoors and sweet tooths.

Hot Doughnuts Now is curated by Ash Smith.

First Loop

First Loop:

1: CC Calloway
2: Ana Meza
3: Lahana Palencia
4: io
5: Amanda Lechner
6: Sean Clark
7: CC Calloway

Second Loop:

1:
2: Victoria Sauer
3: Devin Balara
4: Bradley Marshall
5: Catherine Rush
6: Peyton and Laura McAdams
7:

Resident Bios (First Loop):

CC Calloway (Resident from Nov - Jan) is an artist and writer based in Austin, Texas. She was born and raised in Augusta, Georgia. CC has exhibited widely across the US, most notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. She has participated in multiple residencies and fellowships, having most recently finished a fellowship at Oxbow School of Art in the summer of 2019. Recently moving to Austin from Atlanta in 2018, CC was a resident at Atlanta Printmaker’s Studio in 2018 and a 2017-2018 WonderRoot Walthall Fellow. CC is also an arts writer, contributing to BURNAWAY, Number Inc, and other publications. She has a BFA in printmaking and book arts from the University of Georgia and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. She graduates in spring 2020. CC’s art practice is interdisciplinary, ranging from traditional printmaking processes, sculpture, and installation, to new media, sound, video, and web-based work. In her work and research, she considers technology’s impact on human communication, relationships, and spirituality. CC has written and self-published four books of poetry, including one book of photography, entitled My Favorite Word is Nothing.

Ana Meza (Resident in Dec) - Ana Meza is a sculpture artist born in Barranquilla, Colombia based in Atlanta. Her visual language is inspired by design, patterns, and structures like buildings, bridges, stairs, and ladders. Common themes in her artwork include immigration, social identity, political and personal power structures that symbolize an abstraction of her personal experiences.

Lahana Palencia (Residency in Dec) - Lahana Palencia is a printmaker and mixed media artist whose works focus mainly on the organic world, the mathematical language we apply to define it, and the concept of truth in an ever-changing and expanding universe. Born and raised in mid-Maine, Lahana moved to Portland Maine in as soon as she graduated in 2013 and began working on an associate’s degree at Southern Maine Community College while working and taking classes at Maine College of Art where she learned most of her printmaking skills. In 2018 she graduated with an associate’s degree in Liberal studies and became a member of the artist collective Running With Scissors where she worked on several printmaking and mixed media projects such as 33’s in Threes. Since then she’s moved out of Portland to pursue her love of traveling and to continue building her portfolio. So far she’s exhibited at The Frank Brockman Gallery in Brunswick Maine, Shoestring Studios in Brooklyn New York, and participated in two artist residencies at Green Olive Arts in Tetouan Morocco, and the S.T.A.R residency in Chattanooga TN. https://www.lahanapalencia.com/

io (Resident from Nov - Jan) - io is a multidisciplinary artist who is interested in the negotiation of play and the disruption of stable subject positions. io's drawings, photographs, toys, and sculptures rotate, flip, and swing, and flirt with utility. io received their BFA in Photography at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2009, and MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2013. io lives and works in Abiquiu, NM.

Amanda Lechner (Jan) - Amanda Lechner (she/her) is a visual artist born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Lechner's studio practice primarily revolves around drawing and painting. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States. Lechner studied painting at the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA) and at the Rhode Island School of Design (MFA). Upon completing her education, she moved to Brooklyn, NY, and has since 2014 resided in Santa Fe, New York, Iowa, Indiana, and Virginia. She currently holds the position of Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech’s School of Visual Art she has also taught at Indiana University - Bloomington, SUNY Purchase, and the University of Iowa. Lechner attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018 and has been an Artist in Residence at the Penland School of Crafts and the Wassaic Project in New York. As an independent curator, Lechner organized a group exhibition STATIONTOSTATION at IU in 2017, in 2012-13 Lechner co-organized a traveling exhibition “In Search Of…” that traveled to Rhodes College, University of Kansas, and TSA Gallery, Brooklyn. As a current NASA-JPL Solar System Ambassador Volunteer she has created programming that bridges Art and Solar System Science.

Sean Clark (Resident from Nov - Jan) - Sean Gerard Clark is a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee who has lived and worked in New Orleans for the past seven years. Sean graduated from Morehouse College with a Bachelor of Science in Biology with a concentration in Public Health and African-American Studies. Sean has always found art as a tool for navigating life throughout his work and academic career. He began his artistic practice as a landscape painter and over the years has transitioned into a variety of subjects that investigate the human condition. Sean is a self-taught artist who favors the use of palette knives, oil and acrylic paints, and collage materials. In 2019 Sean was a part of Louisiana Contemporary at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, followed by a 5-month residency at the Joan Mitchell Center. Sean’s mixed media piece, “Unresolved Grief” was featured in Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative as a part of the organization's efforts to increase emotional awareness of mental health issues. Coupled with his time as a health educator, he has led several art classes that focus on helping students find their own creative voice through journal and mask making. Sean has created works to reflect identity and history while sparking ideas in the minds of viewers.

Resident Bios (Second Loop):

Devin Balara (Resident from Dec - Feb) - Devin Balara (b. 1988) hails from the aggressively pastel suburbs of Tampa, FL. She received a BFA in sculpture from the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, FL, and an MFA in sculpture from Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. She is a recipient of the 2014 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center residency program, a residency at 8550 Ohio, and a curatorial assistantship with the Building department at Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, NC. National solo and group exhibitions include Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, FL, Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, OH, Project Space One in Iowa City, and the Indianapolis Art Center in Indiana.

Bradley Marshall (Residency Jan - March) - Bradley Marshall is an artist in residence here at Stove Works till the end of March. He received his master’s at East Tennessee University and along with art-making teaches photography Bradley is interested in sculpture that incorporates often photography and video and different ways of creating a narrative through artworks inspired by personal events in his life. After sitting down with him I've come to recognize that his work is very thoughtful and aims to allow space for the viewer to project their own understanding onto his work. He pulls from life experiences to create an object or collaborate objects that play with how we view objects and memory. He has a piece currently on view in our show Teachable Moment titled Console, Console (Diptych).

Victoria Sauer (Resident Fellow - Nov - 0ct 2) - Victoria Sauer graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with her BFA in Painting and Drawing in the spring of 2020. While still experimenting with many mediums, she often approaches her painting practice in a hyperrealistic manner—heavily influenced by photorealism and surrealism. Working from photographs she takes herself, Victoria uses oil paint to represent subjects that are familiar, yet slightly otherworldly, as she navigates the space between conscious and subconscious. Victoria’s work has been shown nationally from Colorado to Georgia, and she currently serves as the Resident Fellow at Chattanooga arts organization and residency, Stove Works.

Catherine Rush (March-May) - I spent my childhood scattered across army bases before my family settled in Columbus, GA. I attended UGA, hosting poetry and performance art nights and playing in various bands, and graduated with an English major and Gender Studies minor. After college, I continued to write and do performance art, making my way to Atlanta and doing various events-related jobs, writing art reviews, running an artist's work/live residency and collective, and talking my way into a boutique consulting firm. Themes in my work include madness, alienation, grief, trauma, healing, identity, and hazarding toward positive collective and individual alternatives with/in and against the atmosphere of oppressive machinery.

Peyton (Feb - March) - Peyton Sarah Peyton is an artist working mostly between sculpture and performance. She received her BFA from the University of Georgia with an emphasis in sculpture and has worked as an artist in residence in Iceland and Vermont Studio Center. In the fall of 2018, she will begin her MFA at Yale School of Art in Sculpture. Peyton creates articles of the human experience by exploring boundaries of the self. Frequently adopting the biological garment as her visual language, her studio practice confronts privacy, intimacy, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. She often uses time and repetition to accumulate presence, then allows the weighted absence to ferment upon vacancy. In other performances and experiments, she captures moments of vulnerability by approaching the boundaries that separate the individual from the other with trust.

Laura McAdams (Feb - March) - Laura McAdams is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a BFA in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2016. Laura has exhibited in Richmond, VA, Brooklyn, NY, Chicago, IL, and Nashville, TN. Her current work is a container of experience: it alludes to the bodily and embodied knowledge in the structures of contemporary life. The work is sponge-like; it mimics the way consumption, production, and experience blend informing life and its byproducts.

Curator’s Bio:

Ash Smith (Resident in December) - Ash Smith is a director, designer, and new media artist who grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina. Ash incorporates strategies of play and speculation to solve problems, re-imagine systems and build worlds—to create interactive stories, mixed reality experiences, simulations, and prototypes of the future. Data, science, and/or humor may be used to tell stories for film, stage, and improvisation that may blur the distinction between art & life, fact & fiction, and nature & technology—a liminal space—that considers how myth and history modulate a present reality while simultaneously engendering future dreams. Ash is interested in the dreaming collective and how these virtual shared spaces may bleed into the real and shape our co-existence. Ash also plays music in a few bands and loves to parallel park.