2014 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE:
Elizabeth Emery at Bunnell Street Arts Center from Asia Freeman on Vimeo.
Elizabeth Emery, Sept. 16 – Nov. 15
The Bunnell Street Arts Centers hosts Rasmuson Artist in Residence, Cleveland printmaker and multi-disciplinary artist, Elizabeth Emery, September 16-November 15. She will present a talk about her work and plans for her residency including a 2000+ postcard exchange between Cleveland and Homer.
Emery hosts an open studio Potluck and Printmaking Salon for local printmakers to share ideas, dine and network.
Bring a potluck dish to share. 6-9 pm, Wednesdays, October 8 – Nov. 5
“I really look forward to getting to know the arts community in Homer and to create friendships that will last. A career in the arts is strengthened by relationships with other artists. These friends could become future collaborators, curators, advocates, exhibition partners, workshop leaders, and also people who understand the lifestyle of art making. Exploring an area of the country I’ve never been to and have been intrigued by for years is also extremely important.”
Searching for the Sublime at the End of the Road
Jimmy Riordan reading at Bunnell Street Arts Center from Asia Freeman on Vimeo.
WHO: James Riordan, Michael Gerace, and Jesus Landin-Torrez III
WHAT: Ephemeral Art Installation and Sound Sculpture
WHEN: Through-out the Month of May
WHERE: Bishops Beach in Homer Alaska
Searching for the Sublime is a multidimensional social art project conceived by James Riordan, Michael Gerace, and Jesus Landin Torrez III. It explores Alaska narratives concerning romantic notions of individualism, epic adventure, opportunity, and the search for self within the sublime limitlessness of nature. The artists will engage the Homer community through interviews and the collective building of an ephemeral art installation and sound sculpture on Bishops Beach in Old Town Homer. The installation will consist of a ceramic structure that will be fired on the beach and will house a large piece of ice that will be turned into melting musical symphony. The artists will host a number of events and art actions centered around structure through-out the month of May, all are welcome come and participate.
Important Dates:
May 29 – 31st – Thursday-Saturday – Community/Artists Open to Activate Sculpture
June 1st -Sunday- Old Town Block Party – Second Sound Installation performed in Sculpture – Evening Beach Fire and Dismantling of the Old Town Temple of the Sublime
Schedule of events:
May 4th -Sunday- Sublime Supper Club #1 at Bunnell
(informal community event/potlatch)
May 5th -Monday- Construction Begins on The Old Town Temple of the Sublime
(volunteers needed)
May 14th -Wednesday- Full Moon Fire Ceremony – Beach Fire/ Sublime Supper Club #2
(informal community event/potlatch)
May 15th -Thursday- The Gathering Begins – Clay Gathering – Story Gathering
(volunteers needed)
May 23rd -Friday- Firing Ceremony – Friday Morning 8:05am (informal community event)(Filming)
May 28th – Wednesday- New Moon Ceremony – First Sound Sculpture – Beach Fire – Sublime Supper Club #3
(informal community event/potlatch)
May 29 – 31st – Thursday-Saturday – Community/Artists Open to Activate Sculpture
June 1st -Sunday- Block Party – Second Sound Sculpture – Evening Beach Fire and Dismantling of the Old Town Temple of the Sublime
Jimmy Riordan is an Alaskan artist and educator. Though technically trained in book-arts, his work is not bound by any specific media. Riordan often collaborates, asking the audience and other artists for their participation. Community and location play a large role in his choice of form and development of content. Riordan is the founder of Rabbit Rabbit Press, a member of the Great Alaska Brick Company and co-director of the Girdwood Summer Arts Camp. He teaches for the University of Alaska and regularly participates in artist residencies in rural Alaska. His artwork has been shown internationally and the bookwork comprising Le Roman du Lievre can be found in the library collections of the New York MOMA and the Tate Britain.
Jesus Landin -Torrez III is a multidisciplinary time-based artist exploring ideas of ritualistic practice, memory, and death. He works to create catalysts for co-authored art experiences and subtle poetic gestures. He uses the abstract telling of narrative through metaphor to reinterpret these experiences and gestures in the forms of sound and film installations, performances, and experimental musical scores. Landin-Torrez III is an Alaskan artist currently based in San Francisco. He received his BFA from the University of Alaska Anchorage in Interdisciplinary Arts and an MFA from the California College of Arts in Social Practice. He’s been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Performance Art International conference at Stanford University, The Anchorage Museum, The Southern Graphics Conference, and at the Wisconsin State Capital when he was 10.
Michael Gerace – Curator, Artist, Architect: Michael’s work investigates relationships between governance, community identity, material culture, and place. Michael has curated large-scale social arts projects across Alaska including: The Berth, a two week long series of street performances and interventions reclaiming urban space in downtown Anchorage; Common Space: Nome, which explored the role of subsistence food traditions in connecting native and nonnative residents in one Alaska’s most integrated cities; and, most recently, Re-Locate, a multidisciplinary group of partners working with the village of Kivalina, Alaska, and other displaced communities around the world to support community-led and culturally specific relocation processes. Michael is the creator of numerous exhibitions of visual art and social sculpture, for both inside the gallery and in public spaces, including FREESTUFF a month-long anthropological study of Anchorage revealed through diagnostic artifacts found on Craigslist at anchorage.craiglsist.org. He was the exhibition designer for Andy Warhol: Manufactured, an original Warhol exhibition at The Anchorage Museum of History and Art. Since graduating from the University of Arizona College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture in 2004, several of his works of residential architecture have been published internationally. Michael has served as a board member for several Alaska-based art and design non-profits, and is a proud member of the 77 Crew of whalers in Kivalina.
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE PROGRAM
Old Town Artist in Residence is a program for visiting artists from Alaska and the United States to galvanize the community around Homer’s Old Town neighborhood through the creation and presentation of artwork that activates the Arts Center’s space and surrounding outdoor neighborhood sites. Old Town AIR offers opportunities through art to explore creative placemaking, shared values and communal stewardship in the historic neighborhood of Old Town, Homer. Old Town AIR seeks solutions to entrenched problems like speeding traffic and pedestrian accessibility with artist-led amenities, participatory events and both permanent and ephemeral public art installations. The national call for proposals closed December 1, 2013. A local call for artists proposals is open till March 1, 2014. Old Town AIR is supported by a grant from ArtPlace America.
Adrien Segal, Artist in Residence, Bunnell Street Arts Center from Asia Freeman on Vimeo.
Adrien Segal
Old Town Artist in Residence, May 1-31
Oakland, California-based sculptor, Adrien Segal will provide a residency combining local investigation and shared experiences. Segal will begin by offering a community workshop series on carving and whittling. The second objective is to collaborate with local scientific researchers to gather site-specific data, which will inform a sculptural investigation. Segal will present her creative process in the gallery space and invite public interaction as experiment, design, and respond to the landscape. Using local materials gathered from around the town, the whittling and carving will introduce participants from the community to the self-sustaining and hands-on practice of carving objects from found wood. Everyone will have the chance to carve a piece of wood into a small sculpture or a useful object, such as a spoon, which they can take home at the end of the day. Emphasizing problem-solving skills, technique, and play, the workshop will cover functional design and woodworking basics, including grain direction, tool safety, reductive shaping, and food safe finishes. A second, more in-depth session will follow. Segal says, “The landscape is a great influence in my inter-disciplinary and process-intensive studio practice. In past projects, I have used data from NOAA and the NRCS, and collaborated with the USGS to create sculptures that communicate scientific information as sculptural forms. I will use the time at the Residency to collaborate with an organization that conducts scientific research in Homer’s unique natural setting that would be translated into sculptural forms such as Kachemak Bay Research Reserve, which monitors sea level rise, changes in fresh and marine water temperature, storm events, and coastal uplift. I will set up a temporary studio and installation space in the gallery, with which I will display my process of interpreting and translating scientific data into aesthetically engaging sculptures that can be experienced by the body. A compilation of this research, including drawings, models, material experiments, and found objects, would be thoughtfully organized into a process installation in the gallery. I plan for the research to culminate with a site-specific installation of a data sculpture in the Gallery. I will hold open studio hours where I will be on-site and available to the public for visits, questions, and conversations about data, science, and creativity.”
For more information about Adrien Segal visit her website here.
Jarod Charzewski
Old Town Artist in Residence, March 25-April 13
Charleston, South Carolina-based installation artist, Jarod Charzewski will build a site-specific installation referencing western civilizations consumer culture. Charzewski will select materials that are abundant in the Homer area. By using the forgotten, discarded or non-precious yet usable items and materials as the medium, the objective will be to create an immersive landscape for gallery viewers to experience. The artistic process begins with a design phase that works specifically with the unique elements of Bunnell’s exhibition space with consideration to lighting, entrances, passageways and architectural features. Charzewski says, “I look forward to engaging with the public in Homer. My work has always included local people in a very hands-on way. The outreach program I propose involves interested participants helping to create the piece. Those committed volunteers become collaborators through conversation and transference of skills as we work side by side. The artist and assistant relationship is one I have been on both sides of so I fully recognize and appreciate the time spent for each person. The commodities of both time and space, as well as a community of creative people for dialogue, are invaluable to my creative and professional development. Furthermore, teaching is an integral part of my artistic practice, and I do not leave it behind in the classroom. While at the Bunnell Street Arts Center, I will bring those elements of teaching and mentorship to my daily practice and interactions with the public and volunteers.”
Old Town Public Art Finalists
In addition to selecting four national artists residencies, a statewide panel selected two artists for public art installations in Old Town Homer. Alaskan artists beat out stiff national competition for permanent and ephemeral art installations at Bishop’s Beach.
Rachelle Dowdy was selected for the permanent public art installation. She will create an eight-foot ferro-concrete loon figure standing on a concrete pedestal adding about 20 inches to the overall height. Affixed to an aluminum mounting plate and additionally supported through the sculpture’s fist soars a commercial grade windsock on a 12’ pole. She says, “This anthropomorphic sculpture is not only a reminder of our shared space, but the windsock gives us an instant visual cue to the immediate conditions we are about to immerse ourselves into.”
Jimmy Riordan teams up with Jesus Landin Torrez III and Michael Gerace for an ephemeral installation called “Searching for the Sublime at the End of the Road.” They invite the community of Homer and Alaskan artists to help activate a temporary structure on Bishop’s Beach built of local clay and then fired. It will be a base camp for a series of art actions including walks, performances, readings, dinners and fireside chats. “Using various forms of documentation we will create an interactive digital archive of these events including impromptu discussions and discoveries springing up around the construction of the clay structure. This archive will be housed in an Apple MiPad and displayed at Bunnell Street Arts Center.”
Allison Warden
Old Town Artist in Residence, March 1-31
Allison Warden, Artist in Residence at Bunnell Street Arts Center from Asia Freeman on Vimeo.
Inupiaq Alaskan performance artist, Allison Warden will focus on creating a new piece of theater, tentatively titled, “Let Glow.” The show explores ways that we seek love in this modern age and how technology can be a deterrent to real intimacy and connection to place. Warden will use her time to research and draft the proposed interactive play. Warden’s goal is to present a staged reading of “Let Glow,” in which she invites the audience to workshop the interactive elements of the script and provide feedback. During her residency Warden will offer an artist talk, a workshop and a staged reading of “Let Glow.” Warden’s artist talk will focus on how she finds sources that inspire, connecting the dots between inspiration and the intended objective of her staged work. Warden will offer a workshop guiding participants through the statue theater technique, moving through increasingly complex levels of the activity to explore sharing stories through montage statues which will eventually speak. Warden says, “ ‘Let Glow,’ focuses on finding love: self-love, community acceptance and place, family-healing love and romantic love.’ The audience is engaged in and throughout the piece, invited to participate physically and through written and spoken word. ‘My intention is that each audience member leaves the experience feeling hopeful, more connected to community.’”
Introducing event, AKU-MATU at Film Jam 2/28, 9 pm
“Curious Caribou Potluck” Mar 16, 6 pm, free
Are you wondering what Iñupiaq interdisciplinary artist Allison Warden has planned for her March residency? Curious about being a part of the migrating herd on a quest for the missing “love lichen” that disappeared in Homer? Do you want to know what “interdisciplinary art” really means and how Allison’s process works behind the scenes?
Interactive Theater Workshop: March 17-21, 5pm to 7pm
Workshop: “Come On, Caribou!”
Migrate down to the Bunnell Street Arts Center for a unique workshop that strives to give you the experience of being in a community center in a rural Alaskan Native village. Homer residents get to be at the head of the herd as they explore space through friendly competition, dance and interactive caribou movements that will help Iñupiaq interdisciplinary artist Allison Warden create her newest piece titled, “Let Glow”. This workshop is free and open to the ages of 18 on up from March 17 -21, 5 to 7 pm at Bunnell. (Kids are welcome to be present in the space)
Let Glow show: March 28, 8 pm
tickets $10-$20 suggested admission
Feeling apart from the herd? Join Iñupiaq interdisciplinary artist Allison Warden as she returns to the Bunnell Street Art Center to work on her latest piece, “Let Glow” as the March Artist in Residence. “Let Glow” is an interactive play in which the audience is transformed into a herd of caribou that migrate themselves into an Alaskan Native village community hall and learn about love, friendly competition, connection between communities and at the end, glow from being a caribou that cares and participates! Homer residents get to be part of the building of the piece as they are invited at different parts of the residency to engage and provide caring caribou feedback. Let’s Glow!
Ibrahima “Soriba” and Shelley Fofana
Old Town Artist in Residence, February 15-March 9.
Ibrahima “Soriba” & Shelley Fofana from Santa Fe, New Mexico will share with the community of Homer the spirit and joy of West African dance and drumming. Through immersion into the traditional rhythms and songs from Guinea, West Africa, these artists will, “bring together all cultures and share the relevance of this art form through dance and drumming and its connection to sacred forms of living as we exist within community.” During the residency the Fofanas will work with locals from preschoolers to performing artists and use local resources to create a performance piece to explore the many facets of Guinea music and dance within its cultural context. This will include dance, drumming, dundun dance (dance and drumming in unison), and traditional songs and music and video imagery. Click here to find out more and to sign up for their class series.
The Fofanas will give an Artist Talk “The Culture of Dance and Drumming in Guinea” on February 16 at 5 pm (potluck followed by talk at 6 pm) where they will introduce the public to the idea of a culture which honors and supports it’s musicians and dancers as an integral piece of daily life.
Soriba and Shelly Fofana Workshop, Homer Alaska from Asia Freeman on Vimeo.
For more information about Soriba and Shelley Fofana visit their website here.
