Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
September + October 2022 Artists-in-Residence!
September 21 - October 11
OPEN STUDIOS: October 6th 5-7PM
Arantxa Ximena Rodriguez (AXR)
Brooklyn, New York
Arantxa Ximena Rodriguez (AXR) is a Mexican artist living in NYC. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including three solo shows in Mexico City. AXR has exhibited in Galeria Oscar Roman, and other group shows at the Franz Meyer Museum in Mexico City. She has participated in The Affordable Art Fair in NYC, Crossroads Art Fair in Shoreditch London, Museo Internazionale Italia Arte (MIIT) in Turin, and Untitled Art Fair Miami.
“My art practice is multidisciplinary, mainly creating installations, drawings, and performance art. I layer and create geometric textures to explore an organic process of fluid connections between feeling, spontaneity, and material experimentation. In my performance, I use the body to express the complexity of self as characters. I use naturally dyed yarns in my installations which are unique to my country Mexico, I work with them in an active meditation. Through the movement of stringing pieces, I continue to bind a dimensional representation of the intuitive language between material, experience, and the intangible.”
Yasmine Ameli
Shrewsbury, Massachusetts
Yasmine Ameli is an Iranian American poet and essayist based outside Boston. She holds a BA in English from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Virginia Tech. She has received support from Poets and Writers, Reese’s Book Club, MASS MoCA, the Edith Wharton House, the Straw Dog Writers Guild, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Sun, Ploughshares, Narrative, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing through the Loft Literary Center, Grub Street, and Hugo House as well as works independently as a holistic writing coach.
@yasmineameli
Carlos Vielma
Mexico City, Mexico
Graduated as an Architect, Carlos works with painting, graphics, video and installation. One of the main subjects he works with is “the longing” and how not getting what is longed for leaves a feeling of disenchantment. He is interested in abstract concepts like the borders, the limits or the horizon, exploring formal boundaries between disciplines and have been lately working with dust, dirt, cement and bricks.
He has been awarded with the FONCA scholarship for young creators and has been an artist in residence in the Banff Center in Canada, also in the National University of Colombia in Bogota and in Casa Wabi in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, among others.
He has been selected in Salon ACME and some biennials in Mexico and the United States.
Recently he was honored as a member of the National system of creators (SNCA) and is currently living and working in Mexico City.
Melissa Koziebrocki
Toronto, Canada
Melissa Koziebrocki is an interdisciplinary Artist whose Feminist Performance Art practice focuses on the body as the physical site for processing trauma and promoting healing through collective witnessing. She considers the fetishized fat body as a sculptural form into which knowledge is carved. Through radical somatic explorations, her work dwells outside the margins, broaches questions of queer identity and tackles systems of oppression, including: the body politic, fat-phobia, patriarchal violence, misogyny, misandry and antisemitism. Koziebrocki approaches this problematic subject matter using the tactics of kitsch intervention and radical humor, presented under the conventions of high Art. Koziebrocki’s Art is irreverent. It subverts normative notions around gender boundaries and exposes the injustice of the status quo enforced by an androcentric and gynocentric system.
Melissa Koziebrocki was the 2015 recipient of the Graduate Fellow Award from the San Francisco Art Institute where she received her Masters of Fine Art in New Genres in 2017. She was also Artist in Residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Centre and the International Feminist Art Conference at Artscape Gibraltar Point. She taught contemporary art, digital media art and performance art at the Bay Area Video Coalition, San Francisco Art Institute, the Contemporary Art Gallery and Place des Arts Coquitlam. Koziebrocki’s Art has been exhibited at selected cultural spaces such as the Socrates Sculpture Park, Berkeley Art Museum, Artist Television Access, the Rhubarb Festival and Toronto Pride. Her Art has been featured on the cover of Foglifter Magazine. In 2007, Koziebrocki founded the Fridge Door Gallery, which is still in existence today at McGill University.
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
Bayamón, Puerto Rico
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo is a theatermaker, filmmaker, performer and visual artist whose work reconstructs history through a transdisciplinary approach to research, form and narrative. Melding theatrical performance, intuitive experimental ethnography, and collaborations with non-professional performers, Natalia’s practice centers on excavating imagined and archived history, decentralizing canonical narratives through embodied reenactments, and challenging the prioritization of written history by foregrounding instead the creation of new mythologies.
She earned an MFA in Theatre Directing from CalArts and a BFA in Drama from the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Residencies and fellowships include: Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship ( Washington DC, 2022) , Amant Foundation (NY, 2022),Fonderie Darling (Montréal, 2016), Miami Light Project (Florida)and Beta-Local (Puerto Rico) Her work is part of the KADIST collection, and her films and performances have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Museo Cabañas (Guadalajara, MX), TEA Espacio de las Artes en Tenerife (Canary Islands), SeMa(Seoul, Korea), The Flaherty Seminar, USF Contemporary Art Museum (Tampa), Walt Disney Modular Theatre in California, among other venues, festivals and performance venues internationally.
Joanne Dugan
New York, New York
Joanne Dugan is a process-based visual artist who uses traditional photographic materials to make abstract works inspired by mindfulness meditation practices and a fascination with science and chance.
Working with the nearly 200-year-old practice of exposing light directly onto silver and chemically-coated papers, Dugan reinterprets two of analog photography’s most notable printing techniques—Silver Gelatin and Cyanotype—to celebrate the effects of light as a mystical, contemplative subject. Her collaged pieces are equally informed by technical process and intuition. The works—typologies of camera-less photograms cut and assembled by hand—explore the intersections between photography and painting. The images are exposed slowly in a traditional photographic wet darkroom, as well as outside in open air. Dugan finds inspiration in the Buddhist Mandala, the Tantric Yantra (ancient geometric renderings used in meditation) and many cultural references including modernist architecture, abstract expressionist painting and jazz.
Dugan’s work has been exhibited in galleries and art fairs in the US, China, England, Germany, Poland, Amsterdam and Japan. She has been profiled in the New York Times T Magazine, the Harvard Review, Lenscratch, Unseen Magazine and Photograph magazine and recently received residencies from Mass MoCA, the Abbott Watts Residency for Photography and the Peaked Hill Trust.
“The unpredictable, magical responses of traditional photographic materials to light are the basis of my practice. And working this way with my eyes and hands, slowly, connects me more deeply to my intuitive self. Each work is a visual meditation, meant to be looked at quietly and repeatedly."
Caleb Jamel Brown
Atlanta, georgia
Caleb Jamel Brown (b.1993) is a multidisciplinary artist and Plumber from Atlanta, GA. His work examines themes of black labor & leisure in the south, craft traditions, our relationship to clothing/Textiles, and overlapping psychological states. Utilisation of abstraction and vernacular as the foundation for larger cultural narratives is at the core of his practice. Caleb is a 2022 Working Artist Project recipient and a Mint Leap Year Fellow 2020. He holds a BFA from Valdosta State University and has participated in residencies throughout the United States and abroad including Shandaken: StormKing, New Windsor, NY; Mass MOCA; PATA, Lodz, Poland; Proyecto Ace, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Coleman Arts Center, York, Al; Aviario, Portugal
Mike Vos
Portland, Oregon
“All of my photographic work is made using traditional and experimental 4x5 film techniques and make up an overarching series of interconnected projects that revolve around a central theme: wildlife’s reclamation of the industrial landscape. Inspired by literary themes such as magical realism, surrealism, and parallel timelines; I use my camera to craft visual narratives to advocate on behalf of preserving wild spaces.
My first major series, ‘Someday This Will All Be Gone’ is a story of nature’s reclamation of industrial civilization in lieu of human interference. This project is rooted in critical issues such as climate change, ecological destruction and species extinction and the images are created to help facilitate dialogue and awareness around such issues. These are topics that have frequently come up throughout my artistic work, but this series in particular was created so that these issues felt more accessible to the viewer as questions have been raised more frequently over the last few years as to whether we can inch closer to a symbiotic relationship with our planet. Drawing from my past work as an environmental activist, this project carries an ecocentric narrative that is meant to both inspire action in the viewer as well as provide a sense of comfort and relief around emotionally heavy subject matter.
All of the images from “Someday This Will All Be Gone” are shot with 4x5 film using in-camera double exposures. None of the blending is done in Photoshop or any kind of post-processing, everything happens within the camera directly onto the film. The way that the photograph is made is not only important in terms of the final image but it’s also a key part of the narrative, as it helps me to develop a relationship with the landscape that I’m photographing. The mixing of organic and inorganic shapes highlights the temporary nature of the human made landscape.
I am constantly trying to push the boundaries of what is possible with my 4x5 camera without digital manipulation. My motivation is to capture the natural landscape in ethereal, haunting and captivating ways to harness the wonder and awe that is experienced in viewing these natural places firsthand.”
Sonya Yong James
Atlanta, Georgia
Sonya Yong James (b. Knoxville, Tennessee) lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. She received a BFA in Printmaking from Georgia State University in 2000 where she focused on etching and sculpture. James has exhibited nationally and internationally for the past twenty years and has been the recipient of several grants, awards, and residencies including the Artadia grant in 2019.
Her work is held in numerous corporate and private collections including Art in Embassies and has been exhibited in galleries and museums such as MOCA GA, Atlanta Contemporary, The Hudgens Center for the Arts, The Minnesota Museum of American Art and the Zuckerman Museum of Art. She was currently a member of the Studio Artists Program at Atlanta Contemporary and is represented by Whitespace Gallery.
James is a multidisciplinary artist that works with thread and cloth for the references that they hold such as mending, repairing and connecting. Her current work is interested in narratives that speak to collectively shared mythologies and folk tales. These once familiar stories are then fragmented and conflated with another to form new clusters of meaning and association. Textiles are also the instruments of both female domestic culture and universal production. The work seeks to join together the points where these stories and systems overlap and where sources of sexuality, memory, and death construct meaningful relationships and dialogue.
Shane Smith
New York, New York
Shane Charles received his Master of Fine Arts degree from UNC at Chapel Hill, where he focused on sculpture and performance. Previously he studied painting at the University of Maine through the indigenous Wabanaki program.
He has received significant support through commissions, collections, or solo exhibitions by many museums and Fine Art institutions, including NARS Foundation, NYC (2022); Space Gallery, Portland, ME, with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation (2022); the Goethe-Institut Boston (2021); the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (2020); the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2019); Wassaic Project (2019); I-Park Foundation (2019); the School of Visual Arts, NYC (2018); the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D (2015); and the Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC (2015), among others.