2012 RESIDENTS
Local Residents
Patricia Hernandez
Jiae Hwang
Lucas Leyva
Jilian Mayer
Pioneer Winter
Visiting Residents
Richard Hoglund
Past Local Residents
Pachi Giustinian
Courtesy of Spinello Gallery
Pachi Giustinian is not only captivated by features of composition of light that are detectable by humans, but she is particularly interested in the ways that colors relate to sensations, feelings, sound and time. Her work is created with found objects that draw her attention through the color and shape they restrain. Color categories and physical specifications of color are also associated with objects, materials and light sources, based on their physical properties such as light absorption, reflection, or emission spectra.
By abstracting these objects from their everyday use she transforms them highlighting their visual characteristics and challenging the structure of our subjective color experience. Finding meaning in the forgotten and trivial allows the accident to occur, creating beauty. The appropriate error comes along and the unconscious decisions of utilizing that object finally find sense. The meaning of these objects is modified and combined with the new significance given by the mere fact of its existence.
Jiae Hwang
Courtesy of Snitzer Gallery
Jiae Hwang is an interdisciplinary artist dealing in a broad spectrum of media from traditional drawings to digital animation which seek to create new ways to engage with viewers. For the past 7 years her work has investigated places that we inhabit in our mind as well as worlds beyond our perception. Inspired by the ideas of string theory and parallel universes, she contemplates our physical existence in the world while playing at romanticizing it’s infinite possibilities.
Her current body of work is about delicate narratives created with graphite on paper. The subject matter has revolved around demolished satellites as an exploration of insignificant fragments that if left alone become mere trash. Taking the idea of ‘space junk’ and relating it to how human’s desires to be immortal transform in unexpected ways through unintentional materials rather than a grand legacy. Simply stated, it is a small meditation on what we will actually have left over from our culture once we are gone.
Jiae Hwang was born in Seoul Korea in 1981, and grew up in Korea and Space Cost in Florida U.S.A. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Serpentine Gallery (London), Tomio Koyama Gallery (Tokyo), Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery (Paris), Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami) as well as MoCA North Miami, Rubell Contemporary Art Foundation. She is currently lives and works in Miami, and represented by Fredric Snitzer Gallery.
Manny Prieres
Courtesy of Spinello Gallery
Every collision leaves a trace behind: debris, a trail of residue that marks the site where violence took place. The work of Manny Prieres is that sort of remnant, the product of the clash between a traditional, temperamental heritage, and an intense, idiosyncratic counterculture. During the process of this convergence, a series of artifacts are created. They stand at the threshold of a new folklore: they are the iconography of a new tradition.
In this sense, Manny Prieres is an archaeologist, one that has painstakingly and lovingly preserved the objects of an unexplored civilization: their symbols, their gods, their rituals, and their lore. These artifacts bring up tales from the artist’s personal history, yet as a whole they create new narratives that, despite having hybrid elements from multiple sources of influence, are nevertheless moving towards an entirely different place.
TM Sisters
Courtesy of Justin Broadbent
Tasha Lopez De Victoria, 26, and Monica Lopez De Victoria, 28, grew up in Miami and collaborate under the name TM Sisters. They work in the mediums of video, digital video performance, VJing, collage, social experiments, zines, clothing, installations, and interactive video created along with their brother Samuel. Their do-it-yourself ethic started by being home schooled together by their parents. They were raised with intense psychological and spiritual discussions regarding behavior, relationships, creativity, and truth.
The sisters’ work has been included in the international exhibitions “Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium” curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Daniel Birnbaum, and Gunnar B. Kvaran, the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, and PERFORMA 07. Their work has been seen and written about in publications like L’Officiel magazine, The Guardian, STEP Inside Design, the New York Times, Vogue Italia, and on the cover of ARTnews magazine for its 2007 “25 Trendsetters” article.
Viking Funeral
Courtesy of Viking Funeral
Under the collaborative name Viking Funeral Juan Gonzalez and Carlos Ascurra collaboratively explore the constructs of DIY music subcultures. Through the use of sculpture, collage, sound, and performance they examine the self-governed parameters, identities, and propaganda formed by annexed groups of people. Their work occasionally attempts to deconstruct or confuse vernacular via fictitious flyers for shows, and fanzines.
Past Visiting Residents
Brookhart Jonquil: October-December 2011
Chicago
Courtesy of Dorsch Gallery
Brookhart Jonquil works sculpturally across a wide range of materials, transforming banal objects and architectural situations into uncanny perceptual experiences.
While his sculptures and installations are certainly tangible, they are in constant dialog with the virtual and formless. In his work, Jonquil uses reflective surfaces to open up perceptual spaces within architecture, and solid forms to visually collapse physical spaces. Mirrors, glass, digital photographs, and everyday objects have qualities that he uses to probe the relationship between the physical and the immaterial. By accessing this paradoxical duality, his work creates uncanny situations in which a space, an object, or a moment in time, seems to contradict its own existence.
Brookhart Jonquil was born in Santa Cruz, CA in 1984 and has lived in Portland, Tucson, and most recently Chicago, where he received his MFA in 2010 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent solo shows in Chicago, Saint Louis, Miami, and Los Angeles.
Justin Broadbent: October, 2011
Courtesy of the Artist
Toronto/Canada
Justin Broadbent is an accomplished Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist. His work includes video performance,poems, funny ideas, illustration, design, music video direction, and installation. Justin is also a self-taught
photographer. A graduate of Ryerson University’s New Media program, Justin currently ranks among Toronto’s top graphic designers. Among his prestigious accolades, he has performed at the AGO Massive Party and also created the branding and web design for Oscar-nominated Short I Met The Walrus. Justin’s work has been published internationally and he has received awards from Design Taxi. In 2009, Justin was commissioned to create a one-day, experiential art exhibit in an underground subway in Toronto, Canada. Just most recently, Justin co-wrote and directed an online interactive commercial for Doritos.
Co-directing music videos under the moniker HotDogGarbage, Justin has done work for recording artists such as Shad and Metric. He has achieved a CBC Bucky Award and two 2009 Much Music Video Award nominations for his work.
Justin chooses layered projects that challenged his expectations. His work often centers on meaning-of-life-topics, which he delivers with a glimmer of charm and wit. Hence, he’s often reminding people that the sun is a burning ball of fire floating in outer space!
Justin’s work is inspired by the impossibility of a seed becoming a tree, thrift stores, clever lyrics, and human perseverance.
Lynn Basa: September 2011
Courtesty of the Artist
Chicago
Lynn Basa is a Chicago artist who divides her practice between studio painting and large-scale public art commissions around the country. She is the author of The Artist’s Guide to Public Art, and teaches a class in the Sculpture department at the School of the Art Institute on public art professional practices. She is the former chair of the public art committee of the Seattle Arts Commission and has recently been appointed to the board of the Chicago Artists’ Coalition where she chairs the Artists Advisory Committee. She believes that the most successful public artworks are those where materials and meaning are closely tied to each site, and where there is a bond of communication between artist, design team, and representatives of the community who will be living with the work. She strives to create places with art that encourage interaction by providing shelter, seating and other useful amenities that make people, pets, native plants and animals feel welcome. Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach to materials, her work is fabricated in whatever suits the site practically and metaphorically. Terrazzo, mosaic, steel, stone, concrete, glass, Fiberglas, and light are a few of the mediums she has worked with so far. She prefers to work with local fabricators whenever possible and looks for ways to combine the construction and art budgets in order to maximize resources.
www.lynnbasa.com
www.guidetopublicart.com
Sarah Trigg: September 2011
Auerbach, Courtesy of the Artist
New York
Sarah Trigg is a painter and photographer based in New York. At LegalArt, Trigg will be visiting with Miami-based artists for her project GOLDMINER—an anthropological approach to observing the practices of visual artists. The curiosities surrounding their practices are photographed and archived within the following six categories: MASCOTS, COLLECTED OBJECTS, RITUALS, RESIDUE, MAKESHIFT TOOLS, and HABITAT. The one rule is that the selections can’t be a direct representation of the artist’s work. In her documentation, she also steers away from typical portraits of the artist or general views of their workspaces.
To date, the project includes over 100 artists in the US and abroad including Jim Shaw, Tauba Auerbach, Dana Schutz, Peter Halley, Jonah Freeman, Ana Gallardo, Matias Duville and Diana Al-Hadid. The intention is to provide alternative approaches to understanding contemporary art and a platform for artists to share aspects of their practices that would otherwise remain unseen. So far, she has visited with artists in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, and Berlin among others. The project is internationally-focused, and she will be continuing to organize trips to more locations within the US and abroad.
To learn more about the project, the complete list of artists involved, and a selection of artist pages posted to date, please visit the GOLDMINER website: http://thegoldminerproject.com/
Angel Brynner: August-September 2011
Since early 2008 AB has been spending considerable amounts of time in different art communities scattered across North America, soaking up life and producing work “on the road style,” music blaring in her ears as she goes wherever she is led to see, serve and sow seeds.
The work created on the road has led to the Art of Life [AOL] project, encompassing collages, murals, paintings, stop-action film shorts, literature, and applied design. Spending time in art communities and hostels AB has created visual art inspired by the spaces she has lived. She has spent the past 7 months creating a rough-hewn rooftop respite called “Alto Paraiso” that overlooks the ocean, as well as adding color to other areas within the complex and working on the collage series keyed to the Miami arm of AOL.
Claire Breukel: April-June 2011
New York
After graduating from the University of Cape Town, Claire Breukel began her career working for the South African Center for Photography and the Association for Visual Arts, both non-profit organizations. Invited to curate the 2002 Cape Town Month of Photography biennale, she went on to curate the Vision Photography Festival and Brett Kebble Art Awards, 2003 and 2004. Introduced to Miami through the Rubell Family Collection, she took the position of Executive Director at Locust Projects, a renowned alternative non-profit. Breukel has independently curated exhibitions in South Africa, New York, Miami and Vienna and served as Vice Chair of Miami Beach Art in Public Places. As art critic and writer she has been published in Eikon, ArtPulse, Wynwood magazine and Arte Aldia. She is currently nomadic in her role as Coordinator of PUMAVision and Curator of PUMA.Creative.
Her most recent exhibition Coca-colonized, at Brotkunsthalle Vienna, Austria and Marte Museum, San Salvador, El Savador in May 2011, exhibits artists from Africa and South and Central America, and focuses on exploring the concept of a “new and empowered identity” in regions that have been traditionally associated with colonialism. This empowered identity she suggests stems from the ability for artists to speak on both a local and global platform (an ability acquired by being exposed to both worlds), as well as the ability to interact with audiences in an immediate and direct manner through the use of unconventional and public exhibition space.
Breukel is interested in site specific and installation artworks that challenge conventional modes of interaction with artworks and traditional modes of navigating exhibition spaces.
Julia Blaukopf: April-June 2011
Philadelphia
Wouter Bouchez: March-April 2011
Belgium
Wouter Bouchez (°Bruges 1982) is a freelance curator, producer and administrator in the contemporary arts. Wouter holds a bachelor’s degree in Art History and master’s degree in Performance and Theater studies (both from Ghent University, Belgium). After his studies he went to Portland, OR to do a traineeship at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). He stayed involved in the organization as freelance international relations associate, working from Brussels. The work he did for PICA motivated him to found and run the non-profit organization ‘Performing Arts International’ with the mission to foster international mobility and exchange in the contemporary performing arts. Between 2004 and now, this organization initiated various programs, ranging from international promotion, production- and tourmanagement for emerging artists (a.o. Ann Liv Young, Miguel Gutierrez, Jeremy Wade, Marty Schnapf, Robin Jonsson, …), the organization of discursive and curated events/festivals
(a.o. Frisches Gemüse – Brussels; Reloading Images – Damascus; SummerCamp – Bruges; Springdance Dialogue for Critics – Utrecht; THE YOUNG ONES #1 & #2 – New York, …), the organization of international prospection trips for curators to several festivals in the US, and the
operation of K53, a temporary artistic lab/workspace in Brussels. Besides ‘Performing Arts International’, Wouter has also been working as interim tour- and productionmanager for the acclaimed dutch dance company Emio Greco / PC, as interim director of BBOT (urban digital storytelling and arts lab) and as consultant for various cultural institutions in Belgium. He has been part of several juries, serves as president on the board of ADA (an organization for audience engagement in the contemporary arts), is one of the initiating members of the Belgian ‘Independent Artist Alliance’ and is part of two sector-wide commissions/think tanks for the advancement and development of the arts in Brussels and Flanders. In the past Wouter has
also performed as an artist in several contemporary performance pieces (with a.o. Raimund Hoghe, Christine De Smedt) and written essays for several arts and culture publications.
Laura Hita: January-February 2011
Buenos Aires/Argentina
vos y yo collage
Laura Hita is a multi-disciplinary artist who is guided by her images. A lover of the natural and animal world, she investigates the relationship between color, form, and texture. Her intention is to create a spring of beauty and well-being out of her paintings taking inspiration from dark nights, humid forests and winged animals.
Her artwork involves the different disciplines of painting, drawing, sculpture, and video inspired by the same idea. Since 2007, Laura Hita has been part of a group called Conchetinas formed by Alina Pekins, Natalia Cristofano,Victoria Colmegna, and Laura Hita. Conchetinas is an art collective, a group of women who get together to develop ideas and projects by making paintings, installations, performances, and totems or sculpture. She received her BFA from the National University of Visual Arts in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At the same time, she studied with many artists in workshops including De Sagastizabal or Ballesteros. She participated in several group exhibitions. Her first solo show was in Galeria Perotti in March, 2009. She has been selected twice for Ruth Benzacar Gallery at curriculum cero contest and in the 14contest of painting. Conchetinas last show was in Apettite Gallery, New York in May, 2009.
Alfio Demestre:March-April 2011
Buenos Aires/Argentina
Alfio Demestre lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Alfio works in different media–with sculpture, drawing and photography. He began working on installations 10 years ago when he and a group of four other artists founded the collective Oligatega Numeric. Since 1999 they have been working on installations, videos, texts, sculptures, music, and performances.
Since 2002 collaborative work has been full time, the main interest being the complexity and problematic of group work, the construction of fictitious situations, the relationship with the spectator, and the combination of different disciplines.
An important element in the success of Oligatega as a collective has been the constant search for new strategies in group work, allowing each member to express his individual vision, and as a result Alfio has been able to develop his individual work alongside his work in the group. One of his main interests has been the study of light, employing it as a key element in his work. For the past year Alfio has been teaching a course on art and light, in which he investigates together with his pupils, who include artists, photographers and designers, the past, present and future possibilities of Light Art in the context of contemporary art. These investigations are a valuable means to understanding not only art itself but everything as a whole in contemporary culture.
At present he is working on a series of sculptures that embody many of these ideas. They are rotating pieces in which light often plays an important role. The next project consists of a series of installations with these sculptures placed in different spaces, both outdoor and indoors. The photographs of these installations can later be exhibited in Buenos Aires.
PAST RESIDENT WRITER
Sandra Beasley: January-February 2011
Washington DC
I Was the Jukebox Cover
Sandra Beasley won the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize for I Was the Jukebox, selected by Joy Harjo (W.W. Norton, 2010). Her first collection, Theories of Falling, won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize judged by Marie Howe. Her poetry has appeared in such magazines as Poetry, Slate, and The Believer, as well as the anthologies Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Best American Poetry 2010.
Honors for Beasley’s work include the 2010 University of Mississippi Summer Poet in Residence position, a 2010 DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Individual Artist Fellowship, the Friends of Literature Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the Maureen Egen Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She has received fellowships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (as a Walter E. Dakin Fellow), the Millay Colony, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jentel Artist Residency, and Vermont Studio Center.
In addition to travel for residencies, Beasley has given readings across the country. Recent venues have included such Politics & Prose, Books & Books, McNally-Jackson, and Square Books, as well as academic institutions such as Barnard College, SUNY Stony Brook, the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and Catholic University of America. She led a workshop at the 2010 Cleveland State University Imagination Conference and has been a visiting writer at several institutions including Northern Michigan University, the United States Naval Academy, Foxcroft School, and Charlotte Country Day School.
Beasley lives in Washington, D.C., where she serves on the Faculty and Board of the Writer’s Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing from The American University, and a BA in English from the University of Virginia. Her nonfiction has been featured in the Washington Post Magazine and she is working on Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales From an Allergic Life, a memoir forthcoming from Crown in 2011.
Rosell Meseguer: November-December 2010
Madrid / Spain
Courtesy of the Artist
With a doctorate in Fine Arts from the Complutense University in Spain in 2004, she is a professor of Fine Arts in Cuenca. The transformation of space and the concept of defense in the military context, social or political, are constant themes in the creation of visual metaphors. She makes though various mediums, especially photography. These concepts are developed in projects like “Batería de Cenizas. Metodología de la Defensa”, funded by Generaciones Caja Madrid (2003) and exhibited in The Photographers’ Gallery, London and the Kulturhuset, Stockholm. In this work, the methodology of war is shown against the peaceful sea, the local is extrapolated to the universal. Duality, interior and exterior or the sea as a bridge, are continuous reflections that are repeated in other proposals such as “Tránsitos. Del Mediterráneo al Pacífico”, a project on nitrate and mining industry, funded by Matadero-Madrid (2006) and developed between Spain and Chile-Bolivia. Currently working on “Ovni Archive”, a dialogue between the intelligence of the 20th and 21st centuries, where the term UFO is used as a metaphor for the failure to declassify or understand public documents pertaining to security and privacy of a Nation. The project was presented in PHotoEspaña 2010.
Past Resident Curators
Omar Lopez-Chahoud: November-December, 2011
New York
Omar Lopez-Chahoud earned his MFA from Yale University School of Art in New Haven, CT. As an independent curator, his most recent exhibitions include: “NY/Prague6,” at Futura Contemporary Art Center, Prague, Czech Republic; co-curated “Lush Life,” which spanned nine galleries in New York, NY: Salon 94, Invisible Exports, Lehmann Maupin, Eleven Rivington, On Stellar Rays, Y gallery, Scaramouche, Sue Scott Gallery, and Collette Blanchard Gallery; and “The Pipe and the Flow,” at Espacio Minimo in Madrid, Spain. He has written essays for several publications including the catalogues for Dynasty (2006) and Rewind/Re-Cast/Review (2005). Lopez-Chahoud has participated in curatorial panel discussions at Artists’ Space, Art in General, MoMA PS1, and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and was a guest critic at Art Omi in 2007.
Trong Gia Nguyen: December 2011 -January 2012
New York
Trong Gia Nguyen is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, and writer. Working in an array of media, his studio work examines power structures and mechanisms of control at various levels of culture and society. He was formerly part of the collective Art Hijack, which disbanded ceremoniously with the two members simultaneously firing one another and hiring their replacements via classifieds on NYFA and Craig’s List. Trong has exhibited in numerous exhibitions including solo shows in New York, Berlin, and Ho Chi Minh City. He has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Harvestworks Digital Media Center, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Puffin Foundation.
As a curator, Trong has assembled over 25 exhibitions, including the recent “Room without a View” at Freies Museum Berlin and “Never Late Than Better” at EFA Project Space (New York). Two years ago, on the 100th anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto, he organized a panel on the future of panel discussions. From 2005-07, Trong found and directed New General Catalog, an experimental gallery in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. He has written articles and contributed interviews to publications such as Art:21, New York Arts Magazine, and Flavorpill. He is currently a senior editor at Artslant, and will curate their exhibition at Aqua Miami this December.
