Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
August -September 2022 Artists-in-Residence!
August 17 - September 13
OPEN STUDIOS: September 8th 5-7PM
Susan Calza
Montpelier, Vermont
Susan Calza is a multimedia, interdisciplinary artist living in central Vermont.
She says of her work, “By making these images I face the tension between struggle and surrender. Joy and love and loss are our birthright. Magnificence and abjectness belong to all of us. As humans we possess the stunning ability to laugh and grieve in the same breath. Our moments here are delicious and fleeting. This is our imperfect beauty. I create images to process and touch what I can barely comprehend.
In the past 3 years I’ve done multimedia installations about mass shootings, immigration, homelessness, racialization, the slave trade, climate change, sexual, political and power inequalities.
My video and multi sensory installations function as cultural critiques. They are my personal interface and direct channel to the Vermont community as well as global communities.”
Freddie Rankin II
New York, New York
Memphis-born Freddie L. Rankin II has been a photographic artist since he received his first camera at twenty years of age. Self-taught, Rankin has had a notable fascination with film photography, traveling across the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States, capturing what he deems a deeply “personal narrative..., the untold story of life as an African-American male in a cross-cultural world.” Rankin is a 2019 M.F.A. graduate of Bard College.
This work was born out of a pivot from my MFA thesis that centered on the relationship between subjugation and agency as it pertains to blackness. Entitled ‘Meditations on Pleasure’, this body of work serves as a channel through which I interrogate my understanding of and relationship to the notion of pleasure. In the past two years, these meditations have intensified as the pain spurred by the recent pandemic has called into question everything that is and has been pleasurable. Whether it was a simple walk in the park or to feel the touch of another, I was forced to renegotiate how I engaged in my pursuit. I begin each studio session by asking myself three foundational questions: What does pleasure mean to me? How do I experience pleasure? How do I give/receive pleasure? Through the use of abstraction, I am able to deploy varied points of reference through which the resulting objects become offerings for contemplation.The pieces themselves are made of mixed materials – sand, beeswax, coffee grounds – that infer a sense of rediscovery. My intent isn’t to create a 1:1 representation, yet it is to foster a daily practice that considers pleasure in its multiplicities. I hope through the witnessing of my work the viewer is led to urgently reimagine those same foundational questions.
Selin Balci
Annapolis, Maryland
Selin Balci is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Her artistic practice combines scientific equipment and biological mediums with traditional art materials. Selin’s work is classified as bio-art, a new direction in contemporary art that employs living organisms. The marriage of her formal science and art education let her exploit this relatively new practice. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Maryland, a Bachelor of Fine Arts from West Virginia University, and a Bachelor of Science from Istanbul University.
Selin is the recipient of Mary Sawyers Baker Prize in the Inter-Disciplinary category by the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, Maryland State Arts Council Creativity Grant, College Art Association (CAA) Professional-Development Fellowship and Hamiltonian Gallery Fellowship in Washington, DC. Some of the venues where Selin has shown her work include Hamiltonian Gallery, DCAC (District of Columbia Arts Center), WPA (Washington Project for the Arts), ConnerSmith Gallery, Honfleur Gallery in Washington, D.C; Rush Arts Gallery, Smack Mellon in NY and Contemporary Istanbul in Turkey. She has attended residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Istanbul Art Residency.
Oscar Gavilán Ortiz
Worcester, Massachusetts
Oscar is a performance artist from Chile, currently based in Massachusetts. Oscar’s background in acting and philosophy informs their transdisciplinary practice that considers the influence of extractivist industries, notions of normality, heritage, and post-industrial cities through exploration of the physical and collective social body. Oscar’s projects are based on research, experience, and often include exchange and experimentation with communities of workers, including those with disabilities. His work also often evolves in dialogue with his long-time collaborator, Chilean philosopher Pablo Angulo V.
Oscar’s work has engaged with the history of coal cities in southern Chile, their fragmented processes of economic reconversion, as well as the bodies mutilated by that extractivist industry. They are currently developing work that considers history through an exploration of repetitions and renewals materialized in cyclical occurrences like pandemics and social-political conflicts, considering how they unfold in relation to the state and the mutilation of the social body and subjectivities.
Tatiana Florival
Piscataway, New Jersey
Tatiana Florival is a NYC-based artist-filmmaker. She graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. Her work has been shown in galleries such as Kunstraum Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, and Woods-Gerry Gallery in Providence, RI. She has also screened her work in theaters such as the Bijou Theater in New Haven, CT.
Her work aims to investigate and at times propose explanations for natural phenomena, such as death, origin, and the connection between mind and body. She’s interested in the observation, imitation, and interpretation of those natural patterns, and translating those observations into imagined landscapes, characters, and stories.
Oscar Morel
Bronx, New York
Oscar Morel is a figurative sculptural painter from New York currently in the MFA program at Boston University. Oscar received his B.A. in Studio art and Computer Science at DePauw University in 2019. He is a Dominican artist focusing on narratives delving into the intersectionality of identity. He explores the iconographic significance of the afro Caribbean experience. Oscar’s work provides a recording and performance of identity, a splatter of thoughts, and rigid displays of specificity, both relatable to the people who share that space and windows for those who live outside it.
He provides a small dissection of cultural breaths, fleeting and reconstructing through the only way self is created; through an amalgamation of surroundings. As a child of immigrants, Oscar explores the loss of agency in one's history and the alterations needed to adapt in spaces unknown to both him and his caretakers. Stewing these factors into the melting pot of New York City provides acute moments of childhood and growth distinct to his displaced populous.
The work provides a feeling of repurposing through its materiality and decision-making in figuration. His sampling of other's works provides a visual language that lives and interconnects the work to one another, like physical ancestry. Oscar cultivates different textures and colors to build murals and landscapes. Places where the things he creates can live and breathe in an active display. By relocating fragments of former things and mixing them to create something new, seeing displays of himself in the worlds created
Jenny Olsen
Winchester, Massachusetts
Jenny Olsen is an oil painter. She received her MFA 2D Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in May 2022. Before entering graduate study at MassArt, she worked full time and painted on her own. Jenny has shown her work in solo, small group, juried and invitational exhibitions. She is a recipient of the Saint Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist award and grant in 2022, and the “Best in Show'' winner of CAA’s National Prize Show in 2015.
A mostly abstract painter before. Figures are now dominant in her work. She is interested in the parallel existence of time and places. Birthday cakes, books, bathtubs, toes, shoes, and ghosts are some of her recent recurring themes.
Laura Christensen
Williamstown, MAssachusetts
Massachusetts-based artist Laura Christensen finds and alters vintage photographs. She partners with the whole thing, the photograph as object, as well as the poignant appearances of people from the past. With paint and thread, Laura cancels parts of images and conjures additional illusions.
Laura’s work embodies response and homage. Like family and friends of the depicted, she pays extraordinary attention to each photograph, yet with a different eye. She makes her work on, and in response to, the old photos. In addition Laura often responds to famous artworks, historical artifacts, specific poems, novels, and places. For example, in 2021, The Rotch-Jones-Duff House and Garden Museum invited Laura to create an exhibit in response to and presented throughout the historic home.
Her anthology project THEN AGAIN: Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Thirty-One Writers was successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2019. Since then Laura has coached several artists, businesses, and nonprofits to crowdfund their own projects.
Laura’s artwork has also been featured at Kidspace at MASS MoCA, The Art Complex Museum, Bennington Museum, and other places. She is the recipient of a Finalist Award from the Artist Fellowship Program of the Mass Cultural Council, MASS MoCA’s “Assets for Artists” Professional Development Grant, and two A.R.T. Grants, a fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.
Macha Colón (Gisela Rosario Ramos)
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Gisela Rosario Ramos is an indisciplinariany artist who studied Black & Puerto Rican Studies and Film & Media Studies at Hunter College, NYC. She worked as a documentary editor in NY. At her returned to PR in 2001, she worked for various independent TV productions as editor and as director.She was editor of Mi Santa Mirada, the first Puerto Rican film to compete for the Palm D’Or short film section of the Cannes Film Festival. In 2014, she directed the short documentary El Hijo de Ruby, winner of best documentary in the Kerry Film Festival in Ireland. In 2017, she made a commissioned video piece for the Museum of Contemporary Art called Recetario. In 2019, she received an Art Matters Foundation grant, a Puerto Rican Artist grant by NALAC for her musical performance and visual artist work under her persona named Macha Colón. She also received the first Resiliency Award through the Arts from the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture in Chicago. She’s been nominated twice to the USA Artist Fellowship and is about to film her first feature narrative, Perfume de Gardenias, which has received funds from Ibermedia and Tribeca Film Institute, in February 2020.
Jo Cosme
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Jo Cosme is a queer multidisciplinary artist from Puerto Rico. Graduated with a Bachelor's of Fine Arts in Photography. She has five years of work experience through freelancing and agency work in fields such as: photography, videography, video editing, social media and graphic design. As an artist, she encourages social justice and activism by addressing socio-political and mental health issues, helping give visibility to matters that are often overlooked. She strives to promote critical thinking and provoke relevant conversations for educational purposes. Her work can extend from photography and video to installations, sound pieces, and other fields for mixed media purposes.