RUTH BIANCO / VIDEO WORK / MALTA
After 800 Meters, Take the Motorway
Video, 2009
The highway offers a form of mobile shelter, temporary and transient, for contemporary “vehicular society” as we live “on the move” — in states of transition and travel. This work reveals a dismantling of privacy, and its replacement by the invasive satellite control of GPS (in the video, an incessant voice tells us to go left or right, etc.) The eternal search for freedom paradoxically brings new forms of constraint. The shelter of our car and the concept of “getting away” is put into question: the GPS voice fused with car music can either be seen to offer solace and company on the lonely highway, or a rude intrusion.
Bianco exhibits internationally, operating studios in Malta, Belgium, and the UK. She received an art education at the School of Art, Malta and the University for the Creative Arts, UK. Alongside her art practice, exhibition, and curatorial projects, her professional roles include: Senior Lecturer in Art & Design in the Department of Architecture & Urban Design at the University of Malta; Visiting Lecturer for MA Fine Art at the University for the Creative Arts, UK; Research Faculty for Transart Institute. >>site
JEAN MARIE CASBARIAN / VIDEO / USA
The Return
Video, 2010, made for THE SHELTER PROJECT
Found video footage of a recent rescue effort creates the backdrop for the words of Samuel Beckett while The Return explores the notion of shelter and the precarious boundary that exists between two worlds.
Casbarian is an interdisciplinary installation artist. Her MFA is from Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College in New York. Along with a nomination for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, she has received a number of awards and artist residencies including The LaNapoule Foundation Grant, France. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is Chair of the Studio Arts Program at Transart Institute, faculty member with both the ICP-Bard MFA program and General Studies Program at the International Center of Photography in New York City. >>site
MIRANDA CLARK / PHOTOGRAPHY / USA
Untitled
Digital Prints, 2009
Clark’s body of photographs depicts a domestic shelter. The subject is being viewed through windows, reflections, and within the walls of her home. Themes of isolation and confinement are present.
Through photography, video, performance, and ongoing investigation, Clark manipulates the ritual standards of desire, fantasy, and consumption. She holds a BA in sociology and studio art from Colgate University and an MFA in new media from Transart Institute. >>site
SIMON DONOVAN / MIXED MEDIA / ARIZONA, USA
Umbrella
Mixed Media, 2010, made for THE SHELTER PROJECT
Donovan’s Umbrella symbolizes shelter from verbal assaults concerning sexuality and gender identity. That is, shelter by means of a thick skin and by reclaiming words like queer as a means of self-empowerment and deflection of insult. Umbrella is literally and figuratively a shelter and shield.
Donovan, artist, fool, provocateur, is currently working on his autobiography Cavalcade of Humiliation. He knows he is not necessarily important enough to warrant this memoir, but being self-obsessed—he’s doing it anyway. He is an object-maker, photo-taker, a performer, and orgasm faker. Big talker, not much action. He lives off of public art commissions in Tucson, Arizona, USA. >>site
NICOLAS DUMIT ESTEVEZ & JONNY FARROW / AUDIO NEW YORK, USA
Candy (Wraps)
Audio, 2008-Present
Candy (W)raps evolved out of In His Shoes/ The More i Honor You the More You Bless me, and consists of a space where viewers can be in touch with the Holy Infant’s experiences in Prague and in the South Bronx, and can hear His inner voices.
About: In His Shoes/The More i Honor You the More You Bless me: In June 2007 Nicolás Dumit Estévez journeyed from his home in the South Bronx to the Czech Republic to embody the religious symbol of its capital, the adored Infant of Prague.
Estevez is an artist working in performance art, public interventions and art in everyday life. He has exhibited in the US as well as internationally at venues such as Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05 and 07, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, Pontevedra Biennial, The Queens Museum of Art, P.S.1/MoMA Clocktower Gallery, El Museo del Barrio, The Center for Book Arts, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, Estevez lives and works in the South Bronx. In 2010 Estevez will be baptized as a Bronxite in the Bronx River as part of Born Again, a public intervention developed for Longwood Arts Gallery/BCA. >>site
Farrow is a Brooklyn, NY-based interdisciplinary sound artist/composer/performer working with field recordings, found sounds, and the sounds of small objects. He holds a master’s degree in musicology from The City College of New York, is the co-chair of the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology, and is the recipient of a performance grant from Meet the Composer for his collaborative work Musique d’ombre. Recent projects/performances include Soundbox 1&2, Musique d’ombre, and The Canary Project’s 40?, 73? soundwalk series. He also frequently curates/hosts the webradio program, “Giant Ear))),” a show dedicated to the art of field recording. >>site
FISHPOOL / MIXED MEDIA / AUSTRIA
House Available: IRREALITÄTENBÜRO
Mixed Media, 2010, made for THE SHELTER PROJECT
Space has become a rare commodity. “From a neoliberalistic perspective, space must be optimized economically.” [ Wolfgang Müller-Funk, UniStandard, 29.4.2010, “Studentischer Lebensraum im Ausverkauf” von Johannes Bode ] On the other hand, there is a necessity to create and preserve space for social, artistic, and cultural activity. Thus, fishpool takes up real estate: living space on sale! During THE SHELTER PROJECT, fishpool will sell institutions, cultural monuments, and public spaces. Visitors can make a deposit for the object of their choice. The amount will be contributed to a homeless shelter.
fishpool: aquarium für kunst und soziales, aquarium for art and social affairs with Isabel Czerwenka-Wenkstetten, Katharina Grilj, Ani Mezaduryan, Christian Rupp, Christiane Spatt, Anne Suttner, and Claudia Dworzak. >>site
NINA GOLDNAGL / PHOTOGRAPHY / AUSTRIA
Untitled
Color Photographs, 2010, made for THE SHELTER PROJECT
Goldnagl’s color photographs explore places that once gave shelter—once accommodated people. Her photographs provide an insight into places that were once filled with life but that are now deserted. Places that tell stories. She encourages the viewer to imagine what had once happened in these places.
Goldnagl is an artist and photographer and holds a BA from Parsons in New York City and an MFA from Transart Institute. >>site
NIKI HAMPTON / MIXED MEDIA / USA
Untitled
Mixed Media, 2010, made for THE SHELTER PROJECT
For Hampton, place is temporary but keepsakes are permanent. Her work for SHELTER is comprised of three dinner napkins, made from salvaged cotton materials, embroidered with the names—“The White House,” “Schönbrunn Palace,” and “Versailles Château”—and nailed to the wall.
Hampton works with cotton products (paper, thread, fabric) and needles. Her works are driven by life experiences and frequently contrast grandeur with insignificance or opulent aesthetics with inelegance. Her MFA is from Transart Institute. Her photographs of NYC graffiti are included in the 2009 book Discovering De La Vega by Rachel Goldberg. A selection of her paintings are slated to be incorporated in the movie Restless City which is expected to debut at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. >>site
VICTORIA HINDLEY / PHOTOGRAPHY / USA-AUSTRIA
Uninhabited
Silver gelatin and digital pigment prints, 2007-Ongoing
“There is another world and it is in this one.” —Paul Éluard
Uninhabited forms an exploration of urban environments that remain just beyond reach, either literally or figuratively—structural shelters, urban detritus, partially realized projects: the hint of former substance embedded in articulations of absence. Part of a larger body of ongoing work that explores themes of loss, desire, and perception in relation to the urban environment, Uninhabitated investigates the changing essence of cities.
Hindley is an artist, writer, and independent curator. She applies strategies of decoding such as decontextualization, appropriation, and abstraction, in her work to examine stereotypes, cultural obsessions, and institutionalized constructs. She works with photography, language, chance, disruption, atypical book forms, and often collaborates with other artists. She has studied art, literature, and semiotics in the US and Europe and holds a BA and an MFA. Her work has been exhibited and collected internationally. >>site
RENEE KILDOW / PHOTOGRAPHY / NEW YORK, USA
America’s Next Top Model
Color Photographs, 2009
Kildow conceives of shelter as a basic structure that provides cover and references the concept of interior and exterior realities. Where there is a threatening outside, one is safe inside. Shelters are generally found in contexts like natural disasters, war, and chaotic events. Their goal is to recover and rebuild order from within. Kildow’s work, however, responds to sets inside TV studios and explores the way we assimilate different kinds of representation. The possibility to re-signify these representational limits lies in the same confrontation to the limits they usually impose. In her Next American Top Model series, the notion of reality television leaks into its sets, which Kildow documents while emphasizing the border between inside and outside and its chaotic tangle of representations.
Kildow’s work in the film industry often merges with her own art practice in photography and video. Her current work raises questions about the nature of perception. Subtle image juxtapositions reveal cultural perceptions of identity, beauty, class, celebrity, and illusion. Renee received her BFA in painting at Massachusetts College of Art. She is the recipient of a Massachusetts Artist Foundation Award and numerous residencies. She has exhibited widely. Originally a painter and sculptor, she now works primarily in photography and video. >>site
KNOLL + CELLA / PHOTOGRAPHY / USA
Inside Out
Color Photographs, 2009
What is the point of roots if you can’t take them with you? – Gertrude Stein
So sehr Heimat auf Orte bezogen ist, Geburts- und Kindheitsorte, Orte des Glücks, Orte, an denen man lebt, wohnt, arbeitet, Familie und Freunde hat – letztlich hat sie weder einen Ort, noch ist sie einer. Heimat ist Nichtort, ou topos. Heimat ist Utopie. – Bernhard Schlink
KLAUS: We don’t have the same word: Cella’s home is not congruent with my Heimat. She is envious for something I lost long ago. We each form our own idea of the term, talking of roots and other subterranean intentions. Some experience still is comparable, beyond all cultural and language boundaries: exile, being homeless, her early hunger for and my old hatred of normality. Home/Heimat is the focal point of this work, in fantasy as well as the one felt painfully missing. The play with projections speaks of deception, vision, and the flowing boundaries between them. The melding of interior and outer world, the mutual penetration of separated spaces is not without a certain erotic component.
CELLA: These images diary a preoccupation with home. Creating camera obscuras out of places I have lived, slept, or imagine living is in a/my sense the embodiment of a place, a room (a sort of outer skin). The act of creating a camera obscura is a way of bringing that which is outside inside (a kind of internalizing which is not dissimilar to a plant digging its roots). The live rooms nurture a desire to belong where I am, a kind of home, and the pictures document these acts.
Knoll+Cella have been collaborating on projects since 1998. Klaus has work in the collections of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris; National Austrian Fine Art Photography Collection, and jointly with Cella in the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg. Exhibitions at the Tokyo Shinjuku Nikon Salon, Berlin Brennpunkt/DGPh; Alfred Lowenherz Gallery, New York; and with Cella at the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg, and the Art Complex Museum in Boston. He holds a PhD in Literature and Communication, University of Salzburg, Austria. She holds an MFA in New Media and Cultural Studies, Vermont College and directs the Transart Institute’s international MFA program in Berlin and New York. Klaus is an assistant professor of photography at University of Hawai’i Manoa in Honolulu. Knoll+Cella were most recently visiting artists at the Lingnan University Visual Studies Program in Hong Kong. >>site
LUIS LARA MALVACÍAS / CHOREOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE / VENEZUELA
Movable Objects
with performers Luis Lara Malvacías, Ivo Bol, and Jeremy Nelson
Movable Objects—a sound/performance/dance/installation— explores issues of displacement, immigration, adaptation, and memories. The work references the constant changes that displaced people experience daily. Displacement, and the experience of immigration – separation, home, transition, the sense of shock as well as the pleasure of the new experience competing with the old—are constant stories that exist all around us. The demand for integration and the urgency to learn a new language are struggles that displaced people experience when adapting to a new culture. For these reasons, language (Danish, English and Spanish) will be used as a structural vehicle in the development of the piece. It will take place directly within THE SHELTER PROJECT exhibition space and among the attendees.
Born in Venezuela, Brooklyn based Malvacías is a choreographer, performer, designer, dance teacher and visual artist. He has danced for the Venezuelan Company Espacio Alterno and in the work of David Zambrano and Mark Tompkins. In New York he has danced for Jeremy Nelson, John Jasperse, Marguerita Guergue, Yoshiko Chuma, and in his own choreography. He has presented his work in Europe, South America, North America and Asia, as well as in many venues in New York including DTW, PS122, Danspace Project, The Kitchen, and Joyce Soho among others. Malvacías was awarded a 2006 NYFA Fellowship for choreography and has received support for his work from the Jerome Foundation, MAP – Rockefeller Foundation, Arts International and CONAC from Venezuela, among others.>>site
KAREN MARSHALL / PHOTOGRAPHY / NEW YORK, USA
Traditional Hogan (Round House)
Silver Gelatin Photograph, Canvas Inkjet, and Self-published Book
Karen Marshall spent a decade photographing a group of Navajo Indians in Northern Arizona who were forced to relocate from ancestral land by a United States government relocation act. Navajo Indian culture is intrinsically connected to the earth. It is the backbone of their spirituality and the heart of their understanding of the universe. Marshall’s image of a Navajo Hogan (traditional round house) is partnered with text on canvas, created from contemporary definitions of ‘Hogan’ found on the web. A Hogan always faces east to meet the rising sun, reminding its inhabitants of their connection to the cycles of the universe. Marshall attempts to confront the transition between her photograph that bears witness to the demise of an ancient way of life and the detached embodiment of search engines that now define our histories.
New York photographer Marshall documents American social issues. Since 1985 she has worked on a series of long-term projects that focus on the social and psychological lives of her subjects within the American landscape. Her work often reflects a story that extends over many years. Marshall is interested in establishing new frameworks for the documentary genre in the context of collaborative media and contemporary practices. She is the recipient of artist fellowships and sponsorships through the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as grants and support from private foundations. Her work has been widely exhibited and is part of several collections. She earned an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute and is on the faculty at the International Center of Photography, New York University and The Maine Media Workshops. >>site
FREYA OLAFSON / AUDIO, VIDEO, PERFORMANCE / CANADA
A/S/L (age/sex/location)
Video, 2009
A/S/L (age/sex/location) is part of Olafson’s AVATAR SERIES exploring methods of creating, validating, and disseminating one’s identity through the use of technology and the Internet. The series is inspired by the mantra “I post therefore I am” whereby Internet users legitimize their existence by documenting their lives and uploading this media to personal webpages and blogs. The work in this series facilitates an inquiry into our desire to share and publicize our lives. In relationship to SHELTER, A/S/L (age/sex/location) questions domestic privacy. Does having a computer in the home facilitate looking out into the world or does it allow the world to peer in? A/S/L explores this exchange of private and public.
Olafson is an intermedia artist who works with video, audio, painting and performance. Her creations have been presented and exhibited internationally at festivals and galleries such as the Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art (Winnipeg), InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Center (Toronto), Winnipeg Art Gallery, Kling&Bang Galleri (Reykjavik, Iceland). >>site
VICTORIA OSCARSSON / PROSE-POETRY / USA-AUSTRIA
Shelter
Prose-Poem, 2010, written for THE SHELTER PROJECT
Oscarsson explores the theme of shelter using a prose-poetry text titled shelter inspired by the subject’s multi-faceted interpretations. Based on day-to-day observation and inner philosophy, visual comments or vignettes describe polarities of fear, conflict, suffering, belief, positive/negative karma, compassion, ego, betrayal, voices distinguishable and hidden, patterns or non-patterns of existence, a story of beginnings and ends.
With a BA from Trinity College, Hartford, CT. and post-graduate work at Sotheby’s, London, Oscarsson embarked upon a twenty-year career in the arts, which included the Oscarsson Hood Gallery of Contemporary Art in NYC. Following her life-long passion for writing, twelve years ago she attended the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Colorado and has since been published in various literary publications. Vienna has been her home since 1991.
HEIDI PHILLIPS / VIDEO / CANADA
Residual
Video, 2010
Residual is a multimedia video in which Phillips uses experimental darkroom techniques to manipulate footage of abandoned farmhouses, shacks, and churches. This single channel video is part of the larger work that transforms the desolate prairie landscape into a wasteland that verges on the apocalyptic. Residual invites the viewer to re-experience forgotten prairie dwellings as our own haunted, soulless spaces.
Phillips’ art practice straddles experimental film and installation art. Her film work has been screened in such festivals as Transmediale, Berlin, and Images, Toronto. Phillips’ installation piece Revival showed at Ace Art in Winnipeg in the spring of 2009. She completed her MFA from Transart Institute. >>site
WOLFGANG SCHNEIDER / PHOTOGRAPHY; VIDEO / AUSTRIA
LUMBAGO: Views of Heldenplatz
Photographs, 2009
LUMBAGO: 10 Views of Heldenplatz is a series of photographs made the night before the Austrian National Holiday, October 26. The pictures depict military equipment and young men providing national service, protecting equipment from the celebrating folks that cross the central square during the night. Waiting. Watching. Sometimes freezing. Most of the boys are a long way from home. They live in the provinces, some of them are in the capital for the first time. Yes, this is about history, too. And young men. And, most of all, about me.
HAHA
Video, 2010
HAHA is an experiment about jokes and their sheltering function according to Freud. According to his famous study Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Umbewussten (Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious) jokes are truly funny: They protect our brains from their own nasty, tedious intelligence. HAHA will be a real no-brainer.
Schneider is an artist and writer who completed a Cooking Apprenticeship in Salzburg, and studied History, Political Science, and Philosophy at the University of Vienna. He focuses on the connections between artistic and scientific methods and practice. He works with communication and process orientated projects in the public-social sphere, as well as photography, installation, video, performance, and text. From 1996 to 2000, he was a member of the artists group “trans wien.” His major works since 2000 are collaborations with the artist Beatrix Zobl. >>site
TRICIA SELLMER / MULTIMEDIA / CANADA
Shroud
Mixed Media, 2010, made for THE SHELTER PROJECT
In Sellmer’s work, the concept of shelter speaks to social conditions, transient movements, governmental barometers, economic benchmarks, and internal self-constructions. Shroud references shelter as a form of protection; a protection that comes not from the permanence of architectural materials but rather from the organic and obscure point of internal identity. The work draws on the trope of psychological cloak or the elusive shroud of our experiences, our sense of place, dignity, pride, and self-esteem—our security (or not). It is a home, where we feel less or more vulnerable.
Sellmer uses childhood memories, stream-of-consciousness writings, conversations with intimate strangers, good friends, astonishing adventures, intense research, observation, and vivid imagination to connect the coded dots within a multi-layered, multi-media art practice. Sellmer has attended residencies at The International School of Painting, Drawing & Sculpture, Umbria, Italy and The School of Visual Arts in New York City, New York. She studied drawing at the New York Studio School, painting at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, and holds degrees from the University of British Columbia as well as Thompson Rivers University. Her work has been exhibited in public and private galleries internationally and reviewed in numerous media and covered on City TV in Vancouver and Canada’s national network: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. >>site
