2023 RESIDENT BIOS
(Alphabetically)
(FEatured in EXTra)
Abby Banks
My expressions involve creative electricity, personal growth, and perception using the tools of art making.
I am interested in creative minds especially experiencing and participating in various forms of art in the community and the individual within the human family. I use my own style of long-form experimental documentary photography to learn and create work about artists.
My work has been published in books, in many mainstream magazines, and used in academia. I have exhibited my work in museums, galleries, and unconventional places nationally and internationally. I produce multi-media art shows and zines with friends and exceptional artists. I am a co-founder/member of the Tinderbox artists collective, Brattleboro, Vermont 2006-2010. I traveled nearly non-stop nationally and internationally with touring musicians as a professional roadie, tour manager, photographer and merch seller for over a decade. I currently have an active studio at the Minnesota St Project, San Francisco, CA. I am a lifelong daily art maker, community person and artist enthusiast.
I use multi-media art practices, including digital and film photography, darkroom photography, digital and film moving pictures, watercolor, acrylic paint, oil paint, and ink. I draw, paint, and make collages. I use a Risograph, a Xerox machine, and a variety of print-making techniques. I paint with beeswax encaustic and sculpt with clay.
https://www.abby-banks.net/
Amanda Banks
I create work to be a bridge or connection point between myself and other people. It is the translation of my feelings and experiences into something tangible, a way for others to literally feel my feelings. It is about the relationships I have with others and with myself, the physical impact of those relationships, the interactions, deeply felt or fleeting emotions, and resulting changes.
My work is fiber-based and employs the use of embroidery floss, second-hand yarn, hair, thrifted fabrics, recycled paper and plant matter, foraged animal bones, beads, sequins, mirrors, and other found objects. I allow the materials to guide me, and my work shifts depending on the materials and energy I available.
Each piece consumes substantial physical and emotional labor, which is transformed into the final object. This required energy exchange is a driving force for my interest in fiber-based materials and fuels my curiosity to explore a variety of techniques within the medium.
Andrew Scott Ross
Over the past twenty years, my creative research has focused on the language of museums. This language includes how culturally significant objects get displayed and what socio- and psycho-cultural constructions are embedded in those displays. Born to a family of artists and jewelry merchants in New York City, as a child, I was surrounded by the hegemony of art exhibitions at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, along with the city's Diamond District, where my family had their 45th street store.
My multi-disciplinary art practice reconsiders the distortions, corruption, and fantasies found in the system of display that impacted my youth. I make artwork that critiques these narratives and challenges other ways that art and culture are historicized.
Most often, the result of my research takes the form of large-scale installations that mimic the museological displays that I investigate. Original objects such as pottery and sculpture are replaced with drawn or sculpted representations that are easily manipulated, moved, or replaced. Finally, they are messy, layered, expressive, and stripped of the sleekness that typifies institutional presentations. My display does not promote the type of fixed historical narrative but one of uncertainty, self-reflection, and change.
I often directly embed these re-envisioned displays into museums, steps away from the artwork I reference. These pieces are never considered complete. They are exhibited multiple times in different institutions, continually exposing their evolution as elements are added or mutated and as parts are exchanged, sold, or eliminated.
https://www.andrewscottross.com
Brett Callero
“Stealing from one is plagiarism; stealing from many is research.” A century has passed since legendary screenwriter Wilson Mizner glibly voiced this now-famous remark. His words resonate in an even greater way today.
Most everyone will agree that research and influence are synonymous with creation. However, if this is so, all methods of making artwork are, at the very least, a highly diluted form of appropriation. This hypothesis is more frequently becoming reality. What is true originality? Does true originality exist? Mass communication and globalized networks strain to connect every image, sentence, and sound to one another. As this occurs, the amount of appropriated material increases at an exponential rate. The resulting tug-of-war between mediated generations of information spotlights our current disposable definition of originality.
The development of my work began many years ago primarily as a chronicle of personal experience. This is visually represented through hundreds of self-generated or found pieces of tangible information. All of which, are compulsively accumulated and saved for their conceptual potential. Ultimately, this working process is advanced into a perpetual cycle of recontextualization where self-appropriation becomes the constant creative component.
Within this process, the hypocrisy and contradiction of my actions and words, and those of contemporary culture, operate as the primary subject matter. First, the viewer is seduced by a colorful exterior, then transposed by the hidden agenda of the non sequitur. Consequently, multiple narratives are presented through the power of suggestion, which allows subsequent thoughts and interpretations to become self-fulfilling prophecies.
https://brettcalleroartist.com
Constant Gordon
Brin/Constant Gordon is an animator, dramaturg, and pataphysician whose work and thinking is communicable at the syzygy of genre, subjectivity, the body, and play. While their work doesn’t stand clearly in any specific disciplines, their individual work generally manifests as poetry, animated non-fiction films, and 2 dimensional works for the wall. These projects tend towards an interest in language and systems of knowledge, and how those things divide up the world into different forms of subjects, objects, and other things, perhaps. They are additionally the co-founder of Experience Cult Research Group,an organization primarily devoted to the production of intensive retreats in the lineage of Jerzy Grotowki’s paratheater. In these projects they focus on the ways in which we jam meaning making in our lives, and how we can constantly find new ways to resolve those contradictions. They hold an MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, and currently act as the Administrative Director at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California.
Bucky Miller
In his book The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher posits that “the weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely’ (even as its negation).” My photography grows out of a more traditional or “straight” photography background into something much, by Fisher’s definition, weirder. I make photographs of the world as I find it, often in suburban neighborhoods. Sometimes these pictures are teeming with cliches like sunsets or cats. I also photograph invented scenes, including cosmic dioramas made with garlic, loaves of bread animated by the fundamental properties of photography, and plywood cow marionettes. These two modes of picture making live alongside each other in montages, together probing for the limits of joy within the chaos of the present moment. In that search is revealed, over and over, that everything on earth is made of the same stuff.
Carrie Fonder
My sculpture, installation, video, and two-dimensional works explore issues of gender, power, and complicity, through the use of humor and kitsch. They highlight trade-offs, both willing and coerced, revealing our conflicted relationship to power. With a wide range of influences from art to gender politics, I use humor to explore culture.
For example, Little Laborers is a two-channel video on neighboring monitors. On one, two dogs are pulling an invisible (but suggested) cart through the Metropolitan Museum. While in the second, the load becomes an animated object in the museum space. The work asks who are the beasts of burden in art and who are the beneficiaries of their labor. From young artists making the work of established ones to established artists creating the product that fuels the overall system— the webs of power are complex and often obfuscated.
My two-dimensional works examine ideas of material drag, illusion, and twinning and are often grouped in associative vignettes. Some of these works reappear in videos and can be found animating the digital space, while others remain exclusively in the physical realm. Through this duplication, I invite viewers to reflect on how the sausage is made—both within my work and beyond.
Chase Angier
Angier Performance Works are large-scale performances for visual art and theatre venues as well as public sites. These intuitively driven works are created by D. Chase Angier in collaboration with dynamic artists across disciplines, and have been exhibited nationally and internationally (including Iceland, Japan, Czech Republic, Germany, Mexico, the United Kingdom).
D. Chase Angier along with Serge Von Arx, are Co-Curators for Formations, a showcase of site-responsive contemporary performance at the Prague Quadrennial in 2019. She is an elected member of the NYSCA/NYState DanceForce, and the curator of the Marlin Miller Dance Residency Program. As a tenured Professor of Dance at Alfred University, she has developed a unique program based on creative place making, site-specific choreography and interdisciplinary performance. Angier has received numerous awards for her artistry and teaching; she earned her MFA in choreography from The Ohio State University and a BA in dance from The University of California, Los Angeles. For more information, please see: angierperformanceworks.com, astheairmovesbackfromyou.com, lettertotheworldproject.com and Angier Performance Works on Facebook.
https://angierperformanceworks.com/bio/
Danni O'Brien
My interdisciplinary art practice is rooted in irreverence, haphazard play, and owned queerness. Interested in the intersection of sculpture, drawing, craft, and installation, I concoct work ripe with material, texture, and connotation. Central to my practice is the implementation of accessible processes, particularly those I learned from watching HGTV craft shows in my childhood, and accessible materials, such as found objects and craft supplies. Fascinated by societal and consumerist detritus and how and when we decide to collect and abandon stuff, I scavenge discarded objects and allow their raw forms to direct my practice, considering a dystopian future where these are my only accessible materials. Through tinkering, playing, and mending, I deconstruct the skeletons of household organizers, coat racks, lawn furniture, home exercise equipment, and other found domestic memorabilia, and graft them into cheeky, off kilter sculptures with kneaded paper pulp membranes. Alongside sculptural assemblages, I construct relief, tablet-like, relics. These objects are formed by carving foam and applying a mosaicked varnish of material to create a grout that situates and shelters a series of suspended, domestic, plastic objects. Pipe cleaners and glass beads find homes in the valleys of the carved lines. The subjects of these works are a range of subtracted, spliced, and decontextualized diagrams from an array of how-to manuals, DIY books, and outdated science texts. By transforming obsolete, once informative illustrations into an abstract network of undulating lines, the work maintains a sense of potential or instructional power and feels at once reassuring and misleading.
http://www.danielleobrienart.com/
Emery Tillman
Queer joy is sacred. Trans joy is sacred. Disabled joy is Sacred. Emery Kate Tillman ( They/Them) , a multi media object maker work focuses on queer culture and approaches desire and intimacy through joy and play.. Tillman utilizes abstract connected forms and text pieces to lead the viewer on the journey of exploring the highs and the lows and translating the visceral feeling of connecting with someone. Their work investigates the facets of queer life as well as being disabled and the nuances that come with it. Tillman uses materials that can often be associated with costumes and a notion of performances. They take on the history of growing up in New Orleans and Mardi Gras with their material choices. They also get inspiration from burlesque and sex worker community. Tillman often operates under the guidelines of more is better; that can be seen throughout their work. By not having a defined medium they are able to use what works best for the pieces. By using so many different mediums They create pieces that take back the performative action of the materials used and subvert preconceived notions of what the object can be, and create different forms that play to each other in terms of hardness and softness in a cohesive manner. Overall Tillman’s work encompasses a sense of acceptance and celebration. Their work leans into the absurdity of life with the realization that its better to be dancing even if the world is in flames around us.
https://www.emerykatetillman.com
Devin Balara
Devin Balara is an artist originally from Tampa, FL. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Indiana University in Bloomington, IN and a BFA from the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, FL. She has spent the last four summers managing the metal studio at Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI. Devin has been a resident artist at Monson Arts in Maine, the Wassaic Project in NY (Mary Ann Unger Fellowship recipient), Vermont Studio Center (full fellowship recipient), 8550 Ohio, and Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, NC. She was the recipient of a 2014 Outstanding Student Achievement award from Sculpture Magazine. Devin has had solo exhibitions at Comfort Station in Chicago, IL, William Thomas Gallery at The University of Georgia in Athens, GA, and Ortega y Gasset Projects Skirt Space in Brooklyn, NY. Group exhibition highlights include Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ, Spring Break Art Show in New York City, Torrance Shipman Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, Monaco Projects in St. Louis, MO, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, FL, Goldfinch Projects in Chicago, IL, and Alone Time Gallery in New Orleans, LA.
Heath Montgomery
For the past five years, I have adopted martyrs and cubic pyrite gemstones as inspiration for a series called "Fool's Gold." The series playfully explores reality through these characters and objects. My muse Laocoön was a trojan priest slain publicly by serpents. I feel like the sculpture has followed me throughout my artistic study and career. I think of his tormented face often. I did not know the whole story until recently. Athena sent the snakes because Laocoön warned his people about the giant wooden horse that mysteriously appeared overnight in the city. She did this only after blinding him. It makes it a little funnier that he was talking "save the people" crazy talk only to have him and his sons humiliated to death, literally, for trying to save the city's people. Ahhhh, the cost of unpopular insight!
The other facet of my inquiry is Pyrite gemstones. I was drawn to them initially because they look like something more valuable, gold. The contradiction of existence is amusing to me that something can be defined unapologetically by how not like something else it is. Tragically human, like the story of Laocoon, we (and our culture) negate the agency of something authentic because it fails to pretend well enough. Again, I laugh at the fragile rationalization and it's absurdity.
Heather Marie Scholl
I confront legacies of violence through the use of embroidery, sculpture, and writing. Through the intimate lens of my own life, my practice seeks to illuminate race and whiteness, gender and sexuality, trauma and abuse. Using the visual languages of religious iconography, folk art and fairy tales I explore how generational violence, both personal and national, is woven into our bodies, homes, rituals and daily lives. How these legacies can disappear into the background of our lives, even as it shapes the stories we tell about ourselves and each other. Materially, through the use of embroidery, craft and familiar objects, I explore how the intimacy of craft can aid in truth-telling. And ultimately how through truth-telling we can end cycles of violence.
https://www.heathermariescholl.com
Jennifer Seo
I make paper recreations of objects to better understand what we find important and why. Objects go from being simply a thing we interact with as utility to a thing that embodies a philosophy and culture. My current body of work focuses on objects I remember fondly, and objects I rediscover from old family photographs. The sculptures are small, fragile, and ghostly. I think of my work as a parallel to an archeological dig, instead of unearthing broken fragments I recreate shadows of forgotten objects.
The sculptures are made using a method of templating and patterning. Paper models are made to replicate something visually, reducing it to a manageable size, while also restricting the level of accuracy by being made of paper. The characteristics of paper emphasizes the replicated-ness of the realized object. I am interested in this preservation that deconstructs the original.
The ‘evidence of hand,’ such as repeatedly drawn lines and hand rolled clay rice, embodies a ritual of labor and time meant to carry the viewer beyond the immediate object to a thoughtful connecting point. These sculptures are silent radar pings waiting to receive viewers’ recognitions and projections, while they are a poetic exercise attempting to locate my lived Korean American perspective.
Jessica Wohl
Born from a sense of injustice and a lack of societal control, my work envisions what a matriarchal society might feel like. I attempt to capture an intense, complex, joyful and unapologetic feminine energy that might permeate an alternate reality where women hold the power.
In this imagined society, a more equitable system exists. Blackness is situated as the source of light and celebration, and suggests a change in how racial relations may exist within a matriarchal system. Thousands of black and pink stitches imply how certain social groups may be essential in keeping the “fabric of society” held together. Fabrics taken exclusively from hand-me-downs, thrift stores and yard sales across this country become stand-ins for their previous owners. When sewn together, they become a hopeful metaphor for how our country might one day become harmoniously unified with the help of female leadership.
Quilted entirely by hand, this work requires care, implies slowing down, and recalls a more restful state that undermines capitalist tenets– phenomena I believe would be reflected in systems created by women. Like social engagement and activism, the hand stitches in this work are small gestures, made over a long period of time, that culminate in a large result. These comfort-giving objects then make evident the pivotal role women’s work plays in the formation of societies, how systems created by them might be different, and provides a glimpse into a world where that work is joyous, celebrated, accumulated, valued and visible.
Jose Luis Benavides
Jose Luis Benavides is Latinx and queer experimental documentarian and video-artist. Their work combines collaborative, curatorial, moving image, photographic, research, and writing practices to queer media representations and institutional memory around race, class and gender. Working primarily with a range of personal archives, their work explore issues relating to migration, sexuality, and culture. Their work has screened at Cine Tonalá, MX (2022), Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival, US (2020), and other festivals around the world. He has held solo exhibitions and screenings at The Nightingale, Chicago US (2022) and Terremoto Magazine’s La Postal, Mexico City, MX (2018).
Their work has also screened at Full Spectrum Features' Chicago Cinema Exchange: Mexico City (2020), Onion City: Experimental Film and Video Festival, Chicago, US (2020), MSU Latinx Film Festival, Lansing, US (2020), Revolutions Per Minute Festival, University of Massachusetts Boston, US (2020), CinHomo - Muestra Internacional de Cine y Diversidad Sexual LGBTI, Valladolid, ES (2019), Cadence Video Poetry Festival, Seattle, US (2019), and HOMOGRAFÍA/HOMOGRAPHY, Brussels, BE (2019), and Qalandiya International, Ramallah, PS (2018).
Benavides founded the video-art screening program, Sin Cinta Previa: Latinx & Queer Archive Video Series, awarded a Hyde Park Arts Center - Artists Run Chicago 2.0 grant, (2021), a Propeller Fund grant (2019), and POWER Project grant from the Art Leaders of Color Network (2018).
https://joseluisbenavides.com/
Jules Jackson
My practice explores the elastic, transformative potential of the body in the context of rapid technological advancement. The contemporary human experience strikes an uneasy balance between the fragility of the human body, and the cold formidability of the computer, upon which we increasingly rely. Resulting from this is an unprecedented willingness to radically transform ourselves. My work reflects on the conflict between the vulnerable body, and the technological mind, as well as key issues of time, change, and metamorphosis.
Reflecting this duality, I explore both tactile materials and digital techniques. My work uses the elasticity of paint to explore the elasticity of the body, and I center time-based approaches such as animation and visual narrative to further explore transformative potential. My practice also includes film, video, writing, and sculpture.
My aim is to approach the relationship between people and technology with nuance and humor, acknowledging both the absurdities and the triumphs of digital life. My most recent series, "Discovery of Fire," explores coming of age on the Internet. Drawing from childhood experiences of scouting, this series juxtaposes the physical frontier of the wilderness with the virtual frontier of the Internet, comparing the joys, dangers, and limitless mystery of both.
Katya Grokhovsky
Grokhovsky works in installation, performance, sculpture, video, painting and drawing, exploring ideas of gender, identity construction, alienation, labor, history and the self. Through research and autobiographical experience, Grokhovsky builds worlds and characters, through which she examines and underscores stereotypes, assumptions, prejudices and injustice. She is interested in the histories of migration and displacement, whilst enacting the bodies of the historically oppressed, in relation to the preconceived social order. Many of her projects deal with protest and freedom through failure, via radical and humorous actions: reclaiming the body through pleasure, chaos and refusal, residing in the space of absurd grotesque and nostalgic kitsch. From writing, research, drawing, collage and painting, sourcing of found and discarded materials to sculptural sets, costumes and performances, Grokhovsky’s work occupies an interdisciplinary territory of making. The extensive process culminates in immersive mixed media site responsive installations, videoworks and performances, exploring politics of defiance to the prescribed ideals of normative existence.
https://www.katyagrokhovsky.net
Kim Coleman
Born N. Ireland, I am an artist working with lighting, expanded moving-image, and experimental photography to create live events and installations.
My moving images and light works consider affective dynamics. Often co-authored, they allow for examination of how multiple perspectives / subjective positions can be expressed and combine within individual artworks. I find meaning in queering video, lighting, and photographic technologies by employing cameras or 'intelligent' light fixtures in deviant or non-conforming ways.
My colour photograms and cyanotypes, made in the velvet obscurity of the darkroom or under the sun, index and expand upon their time-based counterparts. Some depict objects which stand in for my own body or many bodies and articulate experiences and feelings within and between them. Others are made on location and are used to examine structures and biases at significant cultural sites.
https://kimcolemanprojects.com
Kirby Miles
I excavate artifacts from queer spaces that require proof of their existence. The world in which I procure these glinting fragments is exclusively feminine; a sharp but soft space that is a distorted reality of natural processes. It is a magical real. Bright and ghostly, this expanse opens up like a moth born orchid, where you can always dip your toes, but rarely ever submerge.
Fragments brought from this place are celebratory wayfinders and harbingers of pain. Often too bright, too lustrous-confections that make your lungs ache; air from a different place. These morsels are often concerned with camouflaging themselves in what seems familiar to them. This concealment fails in that their recognizability is alien to their actual surroundings.
Surface application and exploration is a constant thread throughout the work. Degradation-Demolition-Restoration-Amplification. This work is not afraid to speak up. An effeminate glimpse into a glittering, dangerous place that offers itself up like a steamed mirror, hiding only to swiftly return-bleeding through-pervasive and sharp tongued.
Lauren Ruth
I am a mixed media sculptor who stretches the scale of human anatomies to explore our inborn vulnerabilities within the ever-creeping lurk of surveillance capitalism. I blend digitally printed media, slick sculptural forms, and organic materials to breathe new agency into familiar objects and thrust together concepts of autonomy and control, intimacy and alienation. Seductive but steely mirrored eyeballs surveil the gallery, playing on notions of seeing and being seen, while oversized tongues hang mute like the flags of feckless states. Dancing disembodied ears eavesdrop in the gallery, and giant smiles grin down on viewers in a gesture of both affirmation and contempt.
As hybrid absurdities, my work humorously inserts depersonalized bodies into celebratory situations and send-ups. Friendly and colorful grand gestures draw in the viewer and push against boundaries of privacy, speaking to illusions of choice and monolithic sameness. Through pomp, circumstance, and attention-grabbing clatter, my work rides the line between artifice and sincerity, a sneaky and playful foil to consumerist distractions that reinforce systems of power.
Louis Schmidt
I grew up in a very small town in rural Illinois, graduated high school in rural Pennsylvania, and lived subsequently in San Francisco, Florida, Boulder, Charleston, London, Boulder again, Madrid, Krakow, San Diego and now Los Angeles. An avid reader and drawer my whole life, I "discovered" art first through the creative subcultures within skateboarding and music. My very first time in an art museum (when I was 21), a Van Gogh "Sunflower" painting and other post-impressionists (at the Tate Britain) blew my mind and I decided to study art and art history. A couple years later I moved to Colorado, and a some years after that I earned a BA in Art History and a BFA in Studio Art. I went on to earn my MFA at UC San Diego in 2010. I’ve been drawing “seriously” for over 20 years, occasionally painting and shooting photographs, and self-publishing for over a decade. I work day jobs, installing art exhibitions at museums and galleries in Los Angeles, as well as art fairs around the world. I still ride skateboards. I read constantly and see live music regularly. With bits of my free time, I escape the studio and the city to go hiking and camping in the desert. I enjoy exploring national parks and national historic sites.
https://www.instagram.com/bridgethevoid/
Marianna Peragallo
My anthropomorphic sculptures playfully embody the cross-sections of love, labor, endurance, and support. I started thinking about love and the labor it requires because it is often misrepresented as being sentimental, passive, or, worse, manipulative. Much like queerness and femininity, love is often mischaracterized as being non-essential fluff. However, love is a radical act rooted in strength and mutual support. It is something that needs to be learned and taught. With this in mind, I draw from the aesthetics of children's books and childhood where we first (mis)learn about love. I also use colors and textures that I associate with Sao Paulo, Brazil, where I am from.
Through sculpture, I consider what love and support can look like. I make domestic objects that are intimate and often taken for granted. Initially, the objects were action-oriented. They were body-text-object hybrids that physically became a single loving gesture. More recently, I have been making sculptures of common household objects that have resigned from their intended purpose. These sculptures are a pivot in a more idiosyncratic direction for my work that reflects the melancholy and absurdity of the past two years. For example, Heavy Duty Ladder is a sculpture of a ladder that is sitting down to rest, Hose is a hose that can no longer be used for irrigation, and Under Over is toilet paper that has slid away from the roll to sit on the floor. The objects are simply existing, rather than being perpetually useful.
https://www.mariannaperagallo.com
Max Spitzer
In my sculpture practice, the conventions which one might think of as scaffolding artwork, such as the caption, the critique, or the documented making-of, are subsumed into the object itself, blurring the boundaries between materiality and all of its contextualizing mechanisms. Or more simply: between showing and telling.
This habit of conflating these dichotomies addresses objects’ communicative potential. Though I have faith in a material’s ability to convey meaning, I recognize it is largely mute without its reliable network of histories and publics. Thus, my work grows out of these fruitful collaborations between the things themselves and the contexts where they exist. Typically for my practice, these contexts are institutional spaces of education and exhibition. But my most recent project, Still Niagara, diverges from examining these institutional conventions, finding a home in the materiality and narratives of heirlooms and cemeteries.
Still Niagara began when my father informed me that my great-great-grandparents’ gravestones had eroded and needed to be replicated and replaced. He asked me if I wanted to take responsibility for the originals. The resulting sculptures, video, and writing employ re-enactment of infrastructural development, re-tellings of family history, re-purposing of objects, and re-iterations of materials in order to illustrate that heavy responsibility of patrilineal inheritance. Here, the slowly shifting ideologies which are tacitly contained in our heirlooms and family monuments are brought into the foreground so that they may be revealed to be just as malleable as their material embodiments.
https://maxspitzer.cargo.site/
Natalie Woodlock
My work explores and celebrates the queer subject. My recent series of silk-screened portraits on satin banners celebrate a queer subculture that has its roots in punk, radical social movements and the hedonism of gay party culture. Using the form of the satin banner, each portrait becomes a commemorative object, celebrating both the individual subject and the broader community / subculture they are a part of. Banners evoke dissent and protest, as well as being a vernacular mode of commemoration used by specific communities. I see this body of work as linked to the practice of queer world-making, that within the dystopic present, seeks to create a kind of paradise, separate and in opposition to the dominant culture.
Currently I am working on a silkscreened artists' book that illustrates the scenes in Ang Lee's 2005 film "Brokeback Mountain" that brought viewers to tears at a screening I organized. At the screening, I gave handkerchiefs to each viewer. I collected these at the end of the film and asked each audience member to write down the scenes that made them cry. I see this work as a form of sentimental collaboration. Crying during a film is an act of sympathy, identification and release. By illustrating the scenes in the film that made people cry, the circle of sympathy present at the screening is memorialized in the pages of each book.
https://cargocollective.com/nataliewoodlock
Nate King
I am an interdisciplinary artist with a heavy focus on animation using photography, painting, hand drawing, and digital manipulation to create time based mixed media compositions. My work explores ideas of identity, particularly in relation to themes of urban and rural queerness and digital connectivity. I draw on my personal reconciliation with the Appalachian region, having grown up in Southwest Virginia, moving away, and returning. Metronormativity promotes that queerness and the urban are inseparable, thus invalidating the rural queer. I wish to show that ruralness and queerness are infact commonly seen together in unexpected ways. I’m Sorry Mamma, I’m A Cowboy is a compilation of hand drawn animations that takes its name from the song “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys,” and my act of coming out to my mother. By animating myself into the work, I juxtapose the hypermasculinity of the American cowboy with my existence as an act of assertion. Fly Mask, a purely photographic work made at ACRE Artist Residency, alludes to obstruction of identity and dynamics of power. The work originated in the visual comparison between a horse fly mask and a BDSM gimp hood. Growing up with a religious family, I had to conceal my queerness. I reference my mother by sewing together both the hood that I’m wearing and the polaroids. She is an avid quilter, and using her creative language is an attempt to make peace with her refusal to acknowledge my complete identity.
https://www.nathan-andrew.com’
Parker Thornton
What does the body do, and what do we do to it? Through photography, video, performance, and sculpture I try to understand the ways the body is politicized, aestheticized, and commodified. Psychosexual dynamics and intimate relationships are the basis of these investigations. Unconventional methods and materials in the work serve to abstract, distort, and obscure the human form or the way it’s typically presented.
Recent bodies of work offer a contemporary vision of the transformation, exploitation, and possessive desire conveyed in the tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. For that work I used experimental materials and methods, such as creating sculptures cast in suet designed to be eaten by birds and subtitling livestream animal sanctuary surveillance footage with autobiographical anecdotes of intimate relationships I’ve had with animals.
Quin Crumb
Design has long championed practicality, efficiency, and clarity. Pragmatism has become naturalized to the point that it seems to be the only reasonable approach to design. Things around us work as they should: quickly and effectively. We rarely, if ever, take the time to acknowledge our relationship with these objects because they are designed to be invisible. They disappear. However, objects mediate human existence and define our perception of reality. A narrow view of design translates into the world it creates. Developing an approach to design that deviates from pragmatism and ventures into nonsense and absurdity allows me to leverage intuition, material experimentation, irony, and chance to inspect and reveal our relationships with the things around us. I work in a variety of mediums including but not limited to drawing, printmaking, robotics, animation, and industrial design. Through a persistent desire to create and a dedication to remaining open and responsive to the work I make, my environment, and my peers I create objects which aim to break down traditional-hierarchies and transmit ambiguity.
Ryder Richards
Ryder Richards was born and raised in Roswell, New Mexico. He currently lives and works in the Dallas area as an artist, writer, and occasional curator. He earned a BFA in Painting with a minor in Architecture from Texas Tech University and a MFA from Texas Christian University.
Ryder is the co-founder of the RJP Nomadic Gallery, The Art Foundation, and Culture Laboratory Collective. He is also the founder/editor of Eutopia: Contemporary Art Review. He has written a series of essays to be published in 2020 on DIY alongside a podcast, and is currently a collaborator on multiple projects forthcoming.
Ryder has participated in many national and international exhibitions and residencies, and continues to explore power structures and social/politcal interactions in an attempt to collapse bias.
Sadie Sheldon
Out with the old, in with the new! is an underlying motto of our American, capitalist society in which consumption, planned obsolescence of goods, and disposability are ingrained. We are part of a culture of disposability that is so normalized that acquiring and discarding goods has become second nature. It is a habit sustained by the non-discriminant efficiency of our waste disposal programs, which accept almost anything to be buried in our landfills.
Despite the ease with which we are able to acquire and dispose of goods, remnants of our materialist activities continue to speckle the streets, sidewalks, and forests as tiny synthetic bread crumbs. They outline our paths of activity, creating a timeline of consumption. The remaining volume of our debris is hauled away, beyond our urban centers. There, it transforms into mountains and hills that will inevitably compress into the landscape as a human-made, geological strata of our lasting legacy.
My work imagines the landscapes of our future, equipped with the slow-decaying artifacts of our culture. In this thought experiment, natural environments are transformed into synthetic spaces, wherein the natural world has mutated to accommodate the vast quantities of our excess. My work encourages the viewer to experience this narrative landscape, inspired by natural, familiar forms, but created entirely from the remnants of our daily consumption. This recontextualization of material playfully highlights our culture of disposability. It calls attention to our rapidly changing and dying natural world, simultaneously acting as ode, elegy, and warning.
Sai Clayton
My work is an introspection of my bicultural experience marked by an investigation of the space between sexual and biological portrayals of the female body. Using a variety of mediums to confront my identity, I explore the bounds of Japanese and female imagery, acknowledging stereotypes and encouraging the viewer to confront their own assumptions about sex and race.
The Covid Sketchbook is a sketchbook kept during the early months of the pandemic. Each page denotes individual days with a record of United States Covid-19 cases and deaths. The obsession with case counts obscures and grapples with tragedy while becoming a backdrop for vintage gay porn, ukiyo-e geishas, mirror selfies, and quotes from documentaries. My biracialism and sexuality are explored through repetitive self portraiture– evolving and devolving into caricatures that examine the multitudes of self as being both narcissistic and insecure, naive and sexual. The Covid Sketchbook was not made to be shared. As a diary, it challenges identity with incessant self-examination while fantasizing about sex, ego, and human existence.
Similarly in the series, American Geisha, I explore self portraiture as it intersects with racial identity, American culture, and female representations. The American Geisha screen print combines all three, adapting imagery of a geisha from a Japanese ukiyo-e. She represents my identity; holding an American flag in her left hand, the geisha demonstrates her nationality despite appearing non-white. In her right hand, she clutches a Hello Kitty purse, a symbol for the capitalist commodification and cultural simplification of Japanese culture.
Sarah E Brook
I grew up in the Nevada desert. That spare geography offered me the now-radical opportunity to experience myself as governed by geological time/space, not sociocultural time/space. I placed my kid self in that expanse often, meeting gender and queer identities that didn’t fit within my community.
Today, my sculptures and installations explore the relationship between external and internal (psychic) vastness, and how embodied expanse can dismantle limiting narratives of being. I’m particularly interested in the way perceptual experience can align queer identities. Breaking from the traditional Light and Space artists, who presume a kind of universal physiological mechanism of perception, my work instead centers the subjective impact of social identity on an individual’s perceptual experience. Physiological perception is inextricable from psychological and emotional perception: who we feel ourselves to be in the world determines the world we see and move in. If our identity impacts our perception, then perhaps resonant perceptual experiences can illuminate, empower, and ground identity.
My current pieces oscillate between objects and perceptual experimentation. I utilize translucency, layering, color gradients and architectural references to speak both to bodies in space and psyches seeking sense. I use the languages of both vastness and specificity in rhythm, often bringing text, spoken word and specific sculptural gestures into relationship with expansive abstraction. I build remote works for my own practice of healing, and public artworks to offer sites of grounding and (re)alignment to others.
Soliana Habte
everything is shaped by encounter we are created through encounter
somatic discovery
food dance drums heart beats
collective ancestral
we are encounters in motion
there are no self-contained units,
[imagined] boundaries between our selves
and beyond our selves are indeterminate
our bodies are technology
our hearts, prime meridians
we can time travel
dance
collapse space time
bring about our future
site specific work my body as the site
every motion moves the site
my creative work is me
my life
creating worlds
paintings, sculptures, photographs, poems, food
self-generating
from a
material ecology
composting in
communicating ideas through opacity
collaborating with rain, sunlight gravity mark-making and
changing states
time chance accident
magical accidents are inevitable
alchemical
creatively thriving within White supremacist patriarchal capitalism
while it seeks to consume and destroy every being and every thing
I love
figuring out how to own my time
how to dance in the streets without being raped or at least, how to go to the beach and not be arrested?
how to be free without hiding how to be free outside of my own house how to be free how to be free how to be
free
afro-futurity, yes,
but also,
afro-presence
embodying the present moment
comfortability as a politic
perhaps comfort is antithetical to violence
healing is an option
nature does not hurry yet everything is accomplished
imagine things feel easy,
when
they are not even possible
without
miracles
remembering who I will become
learning who I am
encountering who I was
Stefani Byrd
Stefani Byrd’s (she/they) art practice includes video, new media, and interactive technologies. Byrd’s early work addressed social justice issues in the form of interactive temporary public art installations that created role reversal, or "empathy training,” experiences for the audience. These larger scale public art installations put audiences on the receiving end of playfully staged inappropriate behavior such as teasing and cat calling. The project “I Go Humble…” featured live on-screen heads—two women and two gay men— who observed the passing crowd and catcalled the men, thus reversing the typically heterosexual male behavior. This work was staged directly across from a downtown Atlanta park where a community of men routinely catcalled women. This installation disrupted the space in order to start a broader dialogue about male heterosexual privledge in public places. Often Byrd’s work confronts or undermines these systems by turning the tables on traditional power relationships.
Their gallery based work focuses on creating psychologically charged immersive media environments addressing topics such as how technology impacts empathy in digitally mediated spaces. Her practice aims to shed light on the complicated nature of communication and emotional fluency in a networked culture where imbalanced power structures continue to shape our interactions. This work explores how interpersonal interactions and communication are altered when the barrier of a screen, whether phone or computer, is an intermediary between humans.
Byrd’s current experimental documentary work “Magnolia and the Moon” explores the historical connections between Appalachian folk magic in the South East and Neo-Paganism.
Valerie George
VALERIE GEORGE (she/her) is an artist whose work reflects holistically on art and life. Her work takes the form of installation art, site specific works, video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, new media, drawing, collaborative projects, and curatorial practices.
George received her MFA from the University of California, Davis, having worked closely with mentors Lynn Hershman- Leeson and Mary Lucier. She is a Full Professor of Art at the University of West Florida, Arts Editor of Panhandler Magazine: A Journal of Art and Literature, a member of Good Children Gallery, and a Co-Founder and Co-Director of the 309 Punk Project.
She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including Good Children Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Locust Projects (Miami, FL), Public Address (Brooklyn, NY), Cinders Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Worksound Gallery (Portland, OR), Coop Gallery (Nashville, TN), Norton Museum (West Palm, FL), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle, WA), Sonoma County Museum (Santa Rosa, CA), Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Robert Miller Gallery (NY, NY), Adobe Backroom Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Sarai Media Lab (New Delhi, India), FemArt Mostra D’Art De Dones (Barcelona, Spain), and the Horse Hospital (London, England).
She has been invited to participate in several national fine art festivals and events, including the RCA Street Festival (Richmond, VA), {Re-Happening} at Lake Eden (former site of Black Mountain College) (Black Mountain, NC), Art in the Open (Philadelphia, PA), and South by Southwest (SXSW) at Okay Mountain Gallery (Austin, TX). She was also a Visiting Artist & Lecturer at the Hangar Residency (Barcelona, Spain) and Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA). Her work is in the Norton Museum of Art collection and was purchased for the museum by curator Tim Wride (formerly the curator of Photography at LACMA). Her work has been reviewed by NPR (WHYY), Burnaway Magazine, Tom Tom Magazine: A Magazine for Female Drummers, Tape Op: The Creative Music Recording Magazine, Amp Magazine, and Drain Magazine: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture.
She was awarded the Artist in Residence Fellowship at the Everglades National Park (AIRIE) in May 2016 and the Artist in Residence Fellowship at the Bilpin International Ground for Creative Initiatives Artists Residency (BigCi) in Australia in May 2017. She was selected as one of the 13 members of Good Children Gallery in New Orleans, LA, in 2020. Recently participated in the University of Mississippi's Artist in Residence Program in Oxford in 2022, and the Stove Works Artist in Residence Program in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2023.
https://www.valeriegeorge.us/
Yusuke Okada
I paint and draw about addiction, aging, alcoholism, anger, art school students, boat, boredom, brain, breaking up, broken heart, cactus, cars, casket, cats, coma, cops, cows, cruelty, dad, dance, death, depression, desert, Disney, dreams, drugs, end of the world, expectations, extra-terrestrial, fart, flowers, fungus, genitals, gentrification, god, guns, hats, hate, holes, horses, houses, iPhones, isolation, Japan, jealousy, Jeff Bezos, KKK, lambs, language barrier, loneliness, lottery, love, lovelessness, marriage, McDonald’s, mental illness, modelo, mom, mountains, Mr. Bean, Mr.bean movie, naked people, negativity, New York City, nightmares, ocean, old people, pain, pain killers, palm trees, piano, politics, ponies, Popeye’s, problems, qdoba, questions, revenge, road, sad vacation, supreme, tax, tears, TMNT, trust fund, umbrellas, urinals, violence, Waffle House, wheel chairs, whiteness and youth and more.
I use acrylic and oil on canvas and wood.
I use ink and watercolor on paper. Sometimes I use clay.