Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!
Residency session: May 17th - May 30th, 2023
Sung Eun Park
Monmouth, Oregon
Sung Eun Park is an artist working across the mediums of drawing, sculpture, and painting. In her current body of work, Park has been exploring life and death. Her ongoing series of works have been investigations into a “good death”, the reflection on our mortality, and the intensity of this inevitable shadow that forces us to accept the prospect of death—an acceptance that impacts the way we lead our lives.
In each work, Park weaves a narrative that allows the viewers to journey through a surreal world, a trip that will compel them to stay immersed in the present, free themselves from the past and the future, and contemplate the dignity and value of their lives.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Park migrated to the United States. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her work has appeared in print and exhibitions, such as Vox Populi, Wassaic Summer Exhibition, and CICA Museum. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Wassaic Project, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Vermont Studio Center, and others. She is currently living and working in Oregon.
Rae Red
Baltimore, Maryland
Rae Red (they/them) is a multimedia performer living in Baltimore, MD. They imbue their projects with playful sincerity while examining ideas of perception and transformation, often using the color red as a conduit. They are originally from Albuquerque, NM where they developed their love of both DIY culture, and nature with its queer, sexy, and violent rhythms. Rae has performed all over the country, in spaces grungy and chic, from Mana Contemporary Chicago to the barn at Bread and Puppet in Glover, VT. They have been awarded numerous grants and residencies and were recently an artist in residence at MacDowell Colony, and they are currently a Sondheim Prize semifinalist. They hold an MFA from Towson University and a BA from Bard College.
Sarah Aziz
Albuquerque, New mexico
Sarah Aziz is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of New Mexico and an incoming PhD student at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her background as a second-generation British Pakistani informs her research practice that maps patterns of migration across multiple scales and geographies, starting with her grandfather’s walk from Delhi to Lahore during the Partition of British India. Currently, she is working with collaborators from across the Great Plains to tag, track, and build with tumbleweeds because they defy human-made borders and ask new questions of indigeneity and invasiveness. Her drawing work has been featured in AD Magazine, PLAT Journal, Architect Magazine, Soiled, and CLOG. Most recently, she was awarded a 2023 Architectural League Prize with Lindsey Krug, and in 2021, the pair received an ACSA Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society to study the 19,000+ extra-ordinary Dollar General stores in America.
She is a recipient of Art Omi, MacDowell, and UW-Milwaukee Fitzhugh Scott Innovation in Design Fellowships and has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Colorado Denver as the inaugural Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture with an Emphasis on Issues of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, and Texas Tech University.
Chicago, Illinois
Vesna Jovanovic is a Chicago-based artist whose work focuses on embodiment, biopolitics, posthumanism, and related bodily subjects. She has worked in various disciplines throughout her career, currently concentrating on drawing and painting. Jovanovic is a recipient of many residency fellowships including Santa Fe Art Institute; Ucross Foundation; VCCA France; and a two-year studio residency at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Gordon Center for Integrative Science at the University of Chicago; Haggerty Art Gallery at the University of Dallas; Greymatter Gallery in Milwaukee; Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington; OSU Urban Arts Space in Columbus; Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; and Chashama Gallery in New York, among many other venues, and is included in permanent collections at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; International Museum of Surgical Science; and the Koehnline Museum of Art.
Clare Hu
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Clare Hu is an artist and weaver currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She completed her BFA with a focus in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
Haptic skips of woven textiles gone awry, the distortion of image dictated by the hand, and games of hide and seek, inform the use of weaving, mended imagery and installation, to examine false histories and notions of the South. By utilizing slow craft, Clare Hu draws from her own experience living in the Southern United States and her research documenting and archiving how Southern narratives are made and maintained throughout the history of Georgia. By exploring how Southern myths are acted and re-enacted in the stories and objects surrounding them, Hu iteratively pieces, mends and patches as a way to respond and dissect the physical and personal distances between cultural spaces - both set afar and rewritten one on top of the other.
A tarp becomes a boundary, dividing the complete from the unfinished - a blinder, hiding spaces that become momentary place holders. Images taken from Hu’s family photos are printed onto warp to then be distorted by the tension of the hand. Making use of woven offcuts, Southern iconography and collage, prospective patches are both used and exhibited as objects in action. Hu magnifies the blurry edges of vision, piecing together moments of her personal narrative to subvert larger myths of the South. Creating patches for unmaterialized textiles, becomes a guarded optimistic practice used to conserve personal places in memory and allow space to consider something new.
Garvin Sierra Vega
San Juan, Puerto rico
Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1977. Garvin Sierra Vega holds a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in Sculpture and Graphic Arts from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. During his formative years he worked as an assistant to prominent sculptors such as Ramón Berríos and Soucy de Perellano. Parallel to his work as a visual artist, Sierra Vega currently works as a freelance graphic designer, exhibition designer and set designer.
“My artistic proposal is transmitted and transcribed, in the situations that we live in as a country, living in a colony and depending on inefficient governments in my inkwell to carry out my work every day, to be able to capture through my art the injustices in which we live and bring the viewer a synthesis that is easy to read and playful. In all my plastic proposals I transmit the representation of the past, present, and future of the imprisoned island of Puerto Rico in addition to our situation of colonial imposition by the United States. The diversity of reading in my plastic proposal is put by each spectator, there are no limits to interpretation. My work is not limited by any specific medium; in the same way, I work with serigraphy, installations, sculptures, encaustics, constructions, and digital graphics, among others, all aiming toward the decolonization process for Puerto Rico.”
Norma Vila Rivero
Caguas, Puerto Rico
Interdisciplinary artist, exhibit coordinator and cultural manager, Norma Vila Rivero received a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón (2005) and a master’s degree in Art Administration from Ana G. Mendez Universidad del Turabo (2010).
Vila Rivero employs a broad spectrum of mediums to explore social science, phenomenology, semantics, and the human condition in an artistic practice that weds aesthetics to social engagement. The aim is to subtly address emotional issues or intense social themes from a humanist point of view. Through photography, installation, sculpture and mixed media, Vila Rivero has criticized and offered a comment on the role of religion in wars, the immigrant condition, economic inequality due to gender, and recently the threat/aftereffects of disproportionate development without long-term planning and the privatization and subsequent overexploitation of the natural resources in Puerto Rico. This type of development ("economic growth") usually prioritizes foreigners over residents of the island. Her aim is to subtly create works whose meaning is elaborated and interwoven in a contemplative-collective network instead of being suspended in a space for individual consumption. She often responds to social oriented themes, objects with high significance, or situations in her surroundings. Site specificity is usually the point of departure for her creative process, involving research into the site and its surrounding geographical impacts. Vila Rivero always tries to combine many disciplines that work inclusively and socially.
Anastatia Spicer
South Royalton, vermont
Anastatia Spicer is a writer and weaver. Her work engages philosophies of object network relationships by activating temporal entanglements and questioning narratives of subjecthood. She has assisted weaving courses at Penland School of Craft, worked as an upholsterer's apprentice, and currently helps operate a wool mill in Vermont. Her work has been published by The Barnard College Journal of Art Criticism, Asymptote, The Poetry Foundation, and The Academy of American Poets. She received her BA from Hampshire College, Amherst, MA in 2017 and has been accepted for a MA as a Lois F. McNeil Fellow at the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, University of Delaware, Class of 2025.
Dahn Gim
Los angeles, california
Dahn Gim is an artist and educator born in South Korea, raised in Canada and currently based in Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Gim’s work stems from personal experiences to reflect the process of adaptation to constant shifts and changes of surroundings. In the studio, she explores hybridity both in concept and materials while translating her personal experiences into questioning the process of adaptation and the nature of human connection in the digital age. Her recent works visualize the ambiguity, hybridity and contradictory elements that comes from cultural globalization in the digital age.
Since completing her M.F.A. from UCLA in Media Art in 2015, Gim has exhibited at international venues such as BASIS in Frankfurt; GAS Gallery; Steve Turner Gallery; Brand Library & Art Center; AA|LA; LAMAG; Human Resources in Los Angeles; Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, New York; Somerset House in London; and Post Territory Ujoengguk in Seoul.