Australia

Alexandrer Knox

Multimedia Artist

Alexander Knox is a Melbourne based artist working with a various range of materials combing lighting, optics, audio, kinetic and more formal elements that pull from his training in film and industrial design.  In his piece Channel Me, Knox combined the aesthetics of optical art, computer games, and commercial mall architecture with state of the art technology to create a multifaceted panel that was suspended from a central gallery column.  He has exhibited at Asia Pacific Artist’s Initiative’s Project 1 in Melbourne, and Project 2 in Bangkok. In 2000, Knox worked on a series of sculpture commissions for NFK, a leading Melbourne architecture firm.  Beginning in November of 2002, Knox, funded by the Australia Council for Arts, traveled to Los Angeles to be the artist in residence at 18th Street for three months.  While here, he experimented with a hybrid of optical technologies and created virtual environments that explored the machinations of visual spectacle. Referencing both historical and contemporary uses of illusion, Knox challenges an understanding of special effects that relies on a linear conception of technological evolution, and incorporates devices that range from trompe l’oeil, proto-cinema and dioramas, to op art, video, cinema and computer games.

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Annette Douglas

Installation Artist

For four months, the Australian mixed media artist Annette Douglas, joined 18th Street as an artist-in-residence through the Australia Council for the Arts.  While at 18th Street, she began work on her installation ‘Smile We’re Going To The Mall’, in which her first images were made in the form of a constructed plastic wall, with stitched and assembled plastic and paper sketches of signs and symbols generic to mall culture, including the fantasy of Disney icons such as blue birds and black mice.  The neon styled stitching evolved as a method of advertising the excess of products and the sameness along the mall corridors adorned with endless patterns, directions, and information.  Douglas tried to convey her belief that regardless of the artificial environment of the mall, individuals continue to make their work place special by including images and objects they hold sacred in their lives. 

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Beata Geyer

Photographer, Painter and Installation Artist

Beata Geyer is a Polish-Australian contemporary visual artist who works with various media ranging from painting and photography to site-specific, large-scale installation projects.  Geyer is a recent graduate of the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts with Masters of Visual Arts Degree. She has also studied architecture, design and photography in Warsaw and in London at City of Westminster College.  Geyer has lived and exhibited throughout Europe and Israel, but currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia.  In 2002, she was a recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts studio residency at 18th Street, where she spent three months developing ideas and work as well as furthering her interest in the process of accumulation, designation, and negotiation.

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Bonita Ely

Printmaker and Sculpture Artist

Bonita Ely is an Australian printmaker and environmental artist who was born in Midura in 1946. She has been a leader in environmental art since the 1970s and is a founding member of the Environmental Research Institute for Art (ERIA) at COFA. Her pedagogic research explores ways to facilitate the delivery of art education in culturally diverse settings, and her online course, Cross Cultural Sculpture, specializes in this innovative approach. Exhibited in prestigious international venues such as Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Harbourfront, Toronto, and the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra, Ely’s work has been selected for surveys of contemporary Australian art such as Fieldwork, the opening of the Ian Potter Centre for Australian Art, Melbourne, and the National Sculpture Prize, NGA (2005). She has a diverse, interdisciplinary practice, and her methodology based on the premise that a particular idea and context requires the deployment of particular mediums and disciplines. Throughout her work, she purposefully creates a non-representational, sculptural catalyst for contemplation. It is a poetic interaction to evoke the impact of the viewer’s cathartic imaginations upon their epic and intimate habitats.

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Bronia Iwanczak

Mixed Media Artist

Bronia Iwanczak is a mental ecologist, a monitor of the pervasive cultural toxicity that characterizes contemporary life in the west. Her work consistently addresses the role that technological mediation plays in this cultural landscape and focuses the viewer's attention on the relationship between their inner subjective worlds and outer 'objective' worlds. Iwanczak employs touch as a vital element in her work as she believes it has some transformative effect on the viewer. This artistic preoccupation is here explored with direct reference to the Timebinder series (2004), a body of work acting as a precursor to Iwanczak's most recent series Many Fish Sacrifices (2005). The subject of these works is the ugly social reality of untimely, unjust death and they ultimately act as a means through which Iwanczak aims to mobilize the current cultural inability to meaningfully honor grief.  During her 1999 artist in residence at 18th Street, Iwanczak worked on an installation titled “Exit/Salida,” which addressed the crowd management in a modernized global economy.  The installation, in keeping with Iwanczaks way of working, represents a site-specific response to the experience of her residency, an experience that, although novel, also connected with a long line of artistic inquiry.

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Bryce Ritchie

Painter and Installation Artist

The Australian painter and installation artist, Bryce Ritchie, joined 18th Street for four months in 1998 as the artist-in-residence.  Sponsored by the Australia Council for the Arts, Ritchie produced a body of work that related to the way of life and crime within Los Angeles.  He fabricated paintings and an installation that dealt with the American urban environment, relationships between American contemporary history and Australia, the American artists’ allegiance to America, and American attitudes to art produced in countries outside the U.S.; and finally links between advertising, crime and creativity, and the prison system.  In particular, he was able to comment on how American advertising dictates the culture of desire to a global youth, giving a sense of heroic affiliation through the mass media as a fashionable gesture.  The work that Ritchie produces is always in dialogue with the viewer as it often shifts between painting and installation.  The work he produces is a process, which embodies participation, with the agenda being his theoretical concern that he keeps obscured with a superficial simplicity, humor and a graphic approach.  He has a great affinity with commercial advertising and its psychological impact on the human psyche. 

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Christopher Dean

Painter

The Australian painter, Christopher Dean graduated from the University of Sydney in 1986 with a BFA, and later graduated from the Sydney College of the Arts in 1991 with a MFA in painting.  Dean’s projects discuss issues in contemporary art with an emphasis on the historical and theoretical debates surrounding abstraction.  He has been exhibiting regularly since 1988 in over twenty artist run spaces throughout Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, USA and UK. Dean has also exhibited at the Art Gallery of NSW, the Museum of Contemporary Art and The National Gallery, Canberra. In 2001, Dean was the recipient of the Australia Council's studio grant for his artist-in-residence program at 18th Street.  

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Daren Wardle

Painter

The Australian painter, Darren Wardle, joined 18th Street as the Australia Council for the Arts’ Artist-in-Residence for four months in 2004.  While here, Wardle developed a mass of research material in the form of digital and analog photography, in which he documented the suburban sprawl and mass of vernacular architecture of greater Los Angeles.  After returning to Australia, he then developed these photographs into a series of finished paintings.  In general, his paintings explore the extended possibilities of the painting process, resulting in seamless, nearly cinematic urban landscapes. Continuously exploring new “spaces” such as those produced by the aftereffects of the industry’s impact on the landscape, Wardle attempts to realize the “unreal” in his quest to capture manmade urban abstractions. Continuously exploring new “spaces” such as those produced by the aftereffects of the industry’s impact on the landscape, Wardle attempts to realize the “unreal” in his quest to capture manmade urban abstractions.  Invoking the now iconic architectural phenomenon of the suburban office-scape, the artist, who sites Ridley Scott’s 1980’s classic cult film Bladerunner as a major influence, renders a seemingly post-apocalyptic view of his subjects.

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Dominic Redfern

Video Artist

Dominic Redfern is a video artist who works within the traditional realm of performance video, by often depicting himself in some unresolved narrative of existential precariousness.  His work operates in the gap between self-portraiture, fiction and documentation, to draw audiences’ attention to the artifice of video language.  Through exhibiting in festivals, galleries and live performances, Redfern utilizes humor as well as a variety of self-reflexive devices to complicate the relationship between artist, representation and viewer.   In 2003, Redfern had the opportunity to have a studio residency at 18th Street through a grant from the Visual Arts & Crafts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.  Currently, Redfern lives in Melbourne and is the Senior Lecturer in Video Art as well as is the Studio Coordinator of Media Arts in the School or Art at RMIT University, where he has also taught for the past 12 years.

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Fiona Fell

Ceramic Artist

The Australian born ceramic artist, Fiona Fell, addresses issues integral to the genre of figuration in ceramics.  In 1987, she received her BA from the University of New England in Australia and she continued with school to receive her masters in the arts from Southern Cross University, also in Australia, in 1998.  Along with being considered a professional artist, Fell has also been an educator at Tertiary institutions for over 10 years.  She has received several international grants and has exhibited nationally and internationally.  In 1998, she received a project development grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, which funded her studio residency at 18th Street. 

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Fiona MacDonald

Photographer and Video Installation Artist

Fiona Macdonald works in photography, installation and video/film. Since 1988, Macdonald has been working in video exhibiting her video works as installations - at the Australian Centre for Photography, the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, the Colonial Gallery of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and the Old Treasury Building, Melbourne.  She has also screened her work in film and video festivals in Italy, France, Austria, Netherlands, Turkey, Canada and USA as well as Australia. Macdonald has also held several solo exhibitions and installations at museums and contemporary art-spaces in Australia. Her work represents collaboration with a variety of writers, artist and musicians in many of her photographic, video/film and installation projects.  In 2003, Macdonald received a grant from the Australia Council for Art to sponsor her artist in residence at 18th Street. While at 18th Street she created a short film shot on video that uses both documentary as well as a fictional/dramatic form.  It was a response to her experience in Los Angeles and so she expresses both the contemporary life of L.A. as well as the past stories and histories of the city. 

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Gail Hastings

Sculpture Artist

While Perth-born artist Gail Hastings is known as a sculptor, her Sculptural Situations are neither the traditional image we have of sculpture nor installation. Rather, they are specific spaces where the process of perceiving, understanding and taking action occupies the central place. Hastings puts the process of perceiving, understanding and taking action at the center of her space-related constellations of texts, objects, colors, material and formally linked structures. Her sculptures or Sculptural Situations, create spaces intended to appeal to and involve people as physical, intellectual and aesthetically competent beings. Although we can see her work as abstract pictorial compositions, as they extend into the three-dimensional world, we can step into them, use them and meet their possibilities for action. In 1996, Hastings joined 18th Street for a four-month studio residency through the Australia Council for the Arts.

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Heidi Wood

Painter

Heidi Wood studied at Ecole Nationale Superi-eure des Beaux Arts, Paris, Universite de Paris lIl-Censier, Paris, and Victoria College, Melbourne.  She has held solo exhibitions at CBD Gallery, Sydney, Stephen McLaughlan Gallery, Melbourne, Australian Embassy in Paris and has exhibited regularly with La Galerie Gauche, the exhibiting space of the Beaux Arts in Paris.  For three months in 2004, Wood was a visiting Artist-in-Residence at 18th Street through a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts.  While in Los Angeles, the city and experience of living here radically changed the form and context of her work as she absorbed the influence of the city’s sprawling, new world esthetic and the high-powered self-promotion strategies of Los Angelinos.  At 18th Street, Wood created a series of inkjet print, which combined digital photographs with text and her own painted images.  These works were exhibited at 18th Street in 2006 in the exhibition, “Imaging LA”. Currently Wood lives and works in France. 

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James Lynch

Mixed Media Artist

James Lynch was born in 1974 and grew up in Reservoir, a 1950s northern suburb of Melbourne. He studied fine art painting and graduated from the Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne.  He has exhibited widely, garnering a powerful reputation as a leader in animated work, but also becoming renowned or his drawings and installations.   Lynch works across various media including drawing, installation, painting and animation. Lynch’s early work frequently used painted and hand-drawn trompe l’œil effects to emphasize the constructed nature of our everyday lives and fantasies. Lately he has created a series of artworks and animations based on a real collection of people’s dreams in which he has appeared, as well as retellings of people’s earliest memories, painted tableaux and turned old, broken washing machines into medieval magic lanterns. His work mediates our often conflicted and ambivalent relationships with the Other.  In 2001, Lynch was the Australian artist-in-residence and exhibited in the show ‘Ascendance’.

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Jane Trengove

Mixed Media Artist

Since the 1980's Jane Trengove has worked across several visual art media including painting, installation, collaborative works and the coordination/curation of visual arts projects. Trengove was born in Melbourne and studied at East Sydney Tech and at the Victorian College of the Arts. She has been showing her work in Melbourne and Brisbane since the late eighties, worked as a curator, and has been closely involved with the art and disability organization Arts Access. She employs her skills in painting to explore western cultural impacts on the human interface with the natural world and the social ordering of individuals. Trengove's works engage with complex political, aesthetic and social issues, drawing on a multitude of contentious issues such as the value of women's work, male dominance in modern art, the aftermath of colonizing forces and the tensions between nature and culture. Trengove's practice clearly articulates the relevance of contemporary art in wider social and political debates. She currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.

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Jemima Wyman

Painter and Video Artist

Jemima Wyman is an Australian artist working with installed performance based video and painting. She graduated from Queensland University of Technology with first class honors and is represented by Bellas Gallery in Australia. Wyman has exhibited in-group and solo shows throughout Australia and California. In 2004, she received a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts to complete a studio residency at 18th Street where she worked on her project, Minnie Peep. Her current work focuses on the physicality of the body and the particular relationships the body has with designated spaces and objects, emphasizing various performance characters and 'screen sets’. Through installed video performances Wyman explores the interrelationships between fiction and reality, by presenting virtual space within the screen in association with actual objects/bodies located in the gallery. These lines of inquiry also result in photographic works and DVD editions. She currently lives and works in Brisbane, Queensland.

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John Smith

Woodmaker

Trained as a furniture designer in England, John Smith migrated to Tasmania to establish a three-dimensional design course at the Tasmanian School of Art at Hobart in 1970. This program later focused on utilizing quality Tasmanian timbers for furniture design application in 1981 as the Design in Wood program.  Throughout his work, Smith expresses his deep interest in exploring furniture conventions to include influences of architecture and art. For the past 35 years, Smith has been the recipient of numerous grants for his own professional development and for organizing national / international residencies, conferences and exhibitions. He has received Australian Research Council and University grants to explore sustainable timber use through innovative design practice. He has exhibited his work through solo and group exhibitions including SOFA in New York and Chicago, and through national and international collections and publications.

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Jon Tarry

Sculpture Artist

Jon Tarry is an Australian artist who specializes in 3-D sculpture and architecture, including the design and production of large-scale public sculpture and memorials.  After beginning his residency at 18th Street in 2004, through the Australia Council for the Arts, Tarry shared a wealth of experience in both his lectures about art as well as his construction of large scale 3-D sculptural works.  At a juncture where there is an increasing interest in memorial and other public art projects, Tarry’s perspective on working in these forms were valuable to local artists who are interested in pursuing public art commissions, designing and constructing memorial art, and also creating large sculptures for museums or gallery settings.  Tarry currently lives and works in Australia. 

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Jonathan Nichols

Figurative Painter

The Australian contemporary figurative painter, Jonathan Nichols was born in 1956, Canberra, Australia.  He completed a Bachelor of Visual Art at the National Institute of the Arts, Australian National University, Canberra in 1988, where he was also awarded the Lyle Cullen Memorial Prize. From 1989 to 1993 he lived in Sydney, completing a Graduate Diploma of Professional Art at the College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales (1989).  In 1997, Nichols received a grant from the Australian Council for the Arts that funded his four-month residency at 18th Street.  He currently lives and works in Melbourne Australia. 

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Jurek Wybraniec

Painter

In his attempt to co-opt minimalism into the larger Pop project, Jurek Wybraniec has consistently called upon the rhetoric of duplication, repetition, and industrial process to celebrate the potential and possibilities of the inherently beautiful qualities found within the materials of mass production. As such, Wybraniec’s art attracts the ideation of the optimistic sentiment attached too the modernist project. In his decidedly post-post modern affirmation of the “traditional” notion of participatory democracy and shared culture value, his work aligns itself with the pragmatism of the new millennium. Indeed for Wybraniec, the hardware warehouse has long ago replaced the art shop as the source, not just of materials, but also ideological signification. In 2002, Wybraniec joined 18th Street as the Australian Council artist-in-residence and featured project room artist.

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Kieran Kinney

Painter

The Australian painter, Kieran Kinney, makes picture perfect paintings. For most viewers the first response is one of dumbstruck admiration. His “masterful” display of the dying art of painterly illusion elicits that same grasp of incredulity for which photorealist are famous. He received his BFA from Victoria College in Australia and has exhibited his work mainly throughout Australia and in some galleries in California. In 1997, through the Australia Council for Arts, Kinney had the opportunity to join 18th Street as an artist-in-residence. He currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.

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Lesley Giovanelli

Sculpture Artist

Lesley Giovanelli lives in Sydney, Australia where she has maintained an active art practice since 1985. She has a Masters degree in Visual Art from Sydney University and she currently teaches Art History/Theory in tertiary institutions, where for many years she worked with Aboriginal people as an art teacher.  Her sculptural practice is informed by her early studies in Architecture and Interior Design, as well as an interest in textiles, which she developed during her travels, learning Batik dyeing in Indonesia and Tibetan weaving in India.  Since 1998 she has worked in a variety of venues that accommodate her large installations. In these, her earlier interest in textiles has evolved into a broader experimentation with texture, color and the transformation of materiality. Giovanelli also breaks away from the traditional purposes of architecture and design to explore and create non-functional and experimental uses of space.  In 2003, she received a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts that enabled her three-month residency at 18th Street.  While here she worked on an installation titled “Chromophobic,” where she painted a colored square on a wall, leaving the casual brush strokes visible, but ensuring that the colored wool hung over it vibrated against the rough color underneath. This helped to  create the perception that the wool is rising off in response to the high energy color harmonics.

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Louisa Bufardeci

Digital Artist

The work of Australian artist, Louisa Bufardeci, initially seems, for a moment, like large paintings but in reality they are not.  Rather, Bufardeci makes mostly wall-sized digital prints (in effect maps and charts) that utilize various systems and investigate the color-coding of visual information, statistical information. The results are not subjectively derived through usual symbolic convention. They have a bracing and arbitrary linkage-to social analysis, political economy.  These are not emotional and culturally embedded understandings of color and form that underlie these 'pictures'. This recognition is something of a shock and a challenge-a move away from color as emotional index, and it relates more to a culture of technology, and analysis.  From 2001 to 2002, Bufardeci received a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts to fund her four-month residency at 18th Street.  Currently, Bufardeci lives in Chicago as an MFA (Art and Technology) student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

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Michael Lindeman

Mixed Media Artist

Born in Sydney, Australia, Michael Lindeman attended the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales to receive his BFA and MFA.  His paintings and sculptures respond to global consumerism planned obsolescence, and a fabricated popular culture of indulgence.  In 2001, he received a grant from the Australia Council of the Arts for a studio residency at 18th Street and here he focused his attention on the ubiquity of discarded objects and a moral order that was dominated by plasticized cartoon characters promoting childish notions of good and evil.  His approach combines serious intent with ironic playfulness, as he is interested when making art in a nostalgic reminiscence and re-invention of unfashionable materials.  Lindeman’s practice seeks to contain the hegemony of popular cultures, specifically its methodical absorption of sub-cultural ideals for power and wealth. 

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Nadine Christensen

Painter

Melbourne based artist Nadine Christensen works primarily in painting. With a sustained interest in geographic and atmospheric phenomena, her practice seeks to examine the changing possibilities and conditions of perception and light, tracing the illusory spaces that can both imitate and invert the natural world. Christensen has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and Glasgow. She holds an Advanced Diploma of Electronic Design and Interactive Media from Victoria University, a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts and a Bachelor of Arts in Painting from Monash University, Gippsland. In 2002, she received the development grant from the Australia Council for the Arts for a studio residency at 18th Street. While here she continued to work on her series “Directional Drawings.” She also compiled a large archive of photographs, notes and collected fliers, papers, catalogues to use in future works.

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Pierre Cavalan

Jewelry Artist

Mosaic-like wall hangings and ornate silver jewelry typify the work of Australian jeweler and 3D illustrator Pierre Cavalan.  He combines techniques of montage and assemblage to make ornate silver jewelry as shown in the Sculpture Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) Fair in Miami (1996), and in Australia (1994).  His recent works include Single Mask Brooch (2006), a human blindfolded face cast in silver with a contrast-texture “x” over the mouth, and Sisyphus Brooch (2006), a Grecian referent made of bronze, silver, and copper.  These two pieces toured Australia, Japan, Korea, and Denver, CO as part of his Faces exhibition.

Robert Pulie

Mixed Media Artist

The Australian artist, Robert Pulie, is well known for his paintings, sculpture and installation work.  By extending the process of play into the gallery space through the installation process, Pulie is able to enable further connections to be made with the viewer through a more immediate engagement with the objects. For example, Transcontinental Interiority (1996), consisting of 24 cut-out wooden busts on stands, includes installation instructions to place the busts in three concentric circles, creating a kind of political hierarchy. Each bust is an individual 'portrait,' made distinct by different hairstyles, skin colors, clothing and accessories, yet with no clear indicators as to social position. The arrangement of the busts is left up to whoever installs the work, creating a game involving personal prejudice and taste. As the viewer walks around the work, the relationships between the figures shift and they are left to ponder why decisions were made, and what their decisions might be.  Pulie’s work engenders the performance of the spectator; it considers the act of viewing significant.  It allows the act of viewing to become the work of art in which the audience is suddenly thrown center stage, becoming signs whose performance must be considered significant. 

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Stuart Bailey

Mixed Media and Installation Artist

Stuart Bailey is a Melbourne based artist and curator. He works in a variety of media with an emphasis on site-specific installation. One of his most recent works that was exhibited in 2007, Crafting self-esteem, explores issues around the past uses of the building now occupied by the Fremantle Arts Centre. Channeling an art therapy class for troubled teens, Bailey has created a group of ‘difficult’ sculptures. His sculptures are installed alongside a wall drawing and works by Basil Hadley from the City of Fremantle Collection, as Bailey is drawn to Hadley’s enjoyment of the tragicomic and looks to him as a possible mentor in his commentary on the impact of institutions on the individual. Bailey completed a three-month residency at the Australia Council’s Los Angeles Studio in 2005 and has curated a number of exhibitions, including Slowing Down and Wolfgang Sievers: Work at the Glen Eira City Council Gallery, Melbourne (2007) and World famous in New Zealand at Canberra Contemporary Art Spaces (2005).

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Camaroon

Goddy Leye

Visual and Video Artist

Cameroonian Goddy Leye is a visual and video artist whose films range in topics from television clips to ancient African writings. His films distort and transform images on the screen in an attempt to reveal the unseen. He alternates living and working environments as he often switches between Douala, Cameroon and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In his video performance, “Behind the Scenes,” Leye was “interested in pushing forward the exploration of this issue of the relationship of the contemporary man to images (new and old); the links between the images, people, the electronic media; the power of images on our perception.” While primarily known as a video artist he also works with installations, performance, painting and drawing. In 1999, UNESCO-ASCHBERG and the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored his 18th Street Arts Center artist residency.

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Cuba

Manuel Piña

Photographer

Born in 1958 in Havana, Cuba, the photographer Manuel Piña is known for his gelatin silver prints of photographs taken in his home country.  In 1998, he held a famous exhibit at the Marvelli Gallery in New York titled “(De)constructions and Utopias.”  In this exhibit, Piña developed the black and white photographs from negatives shot by Eduardo Muñoz. These images of the Microbrigadas building project call up issues of how history is constructed, the failed Cuban Revolution and visions of utopia. Piña holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from the Vladimir Polytechnic Institute, Vladimir, Russia. Piña began as a practicing artist in 1990 after working for several years in the engineering field. Since that time he has participated in a number of individual and group exhibitions in Cuba and around the world. Piña is interested in the ways in which visual culture, particularly photography, has historically advanced political agendas. The now almost instantaneous global transmission and dissemination of images, whether photographic, digital or video-based, can be used as instruments of power or historical revisionism. Piña's current work engages in this dialogue of visual culture and politics. 

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Finland

Jaako Helikkilä

Photographer

The Armenian photographer, Jaakko Helikkilä, from northern Finland, provokes talk about the history of the Finnish-Swedish border in regards to smuggling and Swedish language politics, as well as the general attitude on life around the border.  He has documented people of the White Sea in Russia as they have a rich history of trade, yet the political injustices of Communism have destroyed their culture.  Helikkilä tries to trace back and discover the signs of this disappearing culture.  In 2005, he was able to travel to California where he received a grant from FRAME for a residency at 18th Street for three months. During his residency, he photographed various Diaspora Los Angeles communities.  The photographs were subsequently exhibited at the Venice Biennale.  Currently he lives and works in Finland. 

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France

Carole Benzaken

Painter

Carole Benzaken is a multimedia artist specializing in surreal urban settings.  Most recent shows include: Contemporary, Cool, and Collected at the Mint Museum of Art in North Carolina, and Chalcographie Contemporaine at the Musee de Louvre in Paris (2007).  Recent work Rush Hour (2006) was an installation at Galeries Nathalie Obadia in Paris.  Six LCD screens framed in mahogany showed a series of action shots: a woman in a dark dress travels horizontally left to right, feet first, against a gray sky.  She also took part in the group show Peintures/ Paintings in Berlin that same year.  She received the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2004 at the Centre Pompidou at the Musee Nationale d’Art Moderne, in Paris.  Her early paintings, Tulipes and Autoroute series, bear texture and color contrast that makes the images fairly leap out at the viewer.  Of note are the stained glass windows she crafted for the church at Varennes-Jarcy in France.  The tulip motif inserts colorful, contemporary sensuality into the ritual space: French journalist Benjamin Cherrière likened her to Marc Chagall in his web article, “Le Vitrail Contemporain/ Modern Window,” in the 2005 edition of web magazine, Banc des Savoirs/ Bank of Memories.

Delphine Coindet

Installation Artist

The work of French installation artist, Delphine Coindet, can be typified by its simple lines, geometric forms and minimalist visual language, although her world is radically foreign to what art history understands to be Minimal Art.  In fact, she sees the Minimal Art movement of the 60s and 70s as expressing a will “to assert rightness, knowledge, a masculine, phallocratic, megalomaniac power”, and its exponents as advocates of a reading of art based on mutually quoting and responding masculine figures.  In 2001, Coindet came to Los Angeles to be an artist-in-residence at 18th Street for three months.  While here she developed a line of artistic research based on methods of spatial representation and design, and at the same time specifically questioned her relationship to the body and to sculptural space. 

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Denis Brun

Multimedia and Digital Artist

Mixed media and digital artist Denis Brun makes avant-garde pieces concerning heroism and non-heroism that push the limits of the viewer.  The video Overman was product of a collaboration through 18th Street Arts Center and EZTV (2006), and took part in the show, Hacking the Timeline: EZTV, Digilantism, and the L.A. Digital Arts Movement, presented by 18th Street Arts Center that same year.  The artist cites David Lynch and Bret Easton Ellis as major influences.  With an air of foreboding and mystery, Brun draws skulls in freehand on newspaper; creates intriguing digital art designs and collages meant to rattle the cage.  He most recently exhibited work at Galerie Le Haut de L’Affiche in Marseilles, France.

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Ivan Fayard

Painter

Ivan Fayard critiques mass-produced images with shocking spoofs on familiar subjects.  At the foundation of his work lays a somewhat abnormal distinction from the pictoral context and signature imprint of any artists.  For instance, he uses bright colors to bring out the dark side to Disney characters in his Peintures (paintings), shown in Switzerland and France in 2002.  In 2003, Fayard participated in 18th Street’s international residency program where he was able to create a solo exhibit titled “The Better You Look, The More You See.”  Here he created an installation called, “Tondibulles,” in which a series of animated “googly” eyes, all of varying sizes, were almost an imitation of the Turkish evil eye.  Currently, Fayard lives and works in Paris. 

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Matthieu Manche

Mixed Media Installation Artist

Mixed media installation artist Matthieu Manche plays with aesthetics and vanity in his fashionable photos of models sporting giant protrusions made of resin, silicone, and Velcro.  This theme of Masquerade is present in his show Cote Quest, shown in San Francisco and Los Angeles at 18th Street Arts Center (2000).  A collaboration with Japanese design studio Miyake produced the installation World Cup (1998).  Current group show Haptic, put on by Kenya Hara of Tokyo’s Nippon Design Museum in Glasgow, makes the case that the human senses should be the “animating force in manufacturing.”  Manche’s piece is a multi-socket extension cord made of silicon and rendered flesh tone.  He recently appeared in the Japanese film Body Drop Asphalt (2000); prior to that, he designed a series of latex garments manufactured by Fresh in Japan (1998-2000), seen in the photography book Skin Surface Substance and Design that suggest “an elaboration or overflowing of the body.”

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Philippe Jacq

Photographer/ Video Artist

Philippe Jacq, a French photographer and video artist, is known for his pastoral shots of nudists with livestock in the series “Picnic on the Grass,” which were taken in France in 2003.  However, in 2002, Jacq was able to join 18th Street Arts Center for the international residency where he created an exhibit of photographs titled, “Photographies de Tableux Classiques.”  These photographs were meant to be “live” paintings that were recreated from famous classical paintings.  By using a video camera and a tape recorder, he recorded the various interactions he encountered with the people from Los Angeles and throughout his residency, which eventually resulted in an exhibit of “live” portraits in the form of a surf movie.  In addition to his work at 18th Street, he has also photographed Kurtz’s Monologue (2002) in Los Angeles: It is a reference to the character, Colonel Kurtz, portrayed by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola’s film, Apocalypse Now.

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Samon Takahashi

Sound and Video Artist

Born in 1970 in France, the Japanese artist, Samon Takahashi, is known for his extensive sound composition and production as well as his video directing and acting.  However in 2004, Takahashi was able to try his hand at something new when he joined 18th Street’s international residency program.  While in Los Angeles, he worked on his plastic art installation that also combined his musical talent to produce his “Cortical House.”  This house was a utopian idea of a place for living that would be an extension of the owner’s brain.  It was a formal pretext to the elaboration of new forms and concepts to enhance the interface between an individual (his way of thinking) and his surroundings, as it was an attempt to find an ideal place for living that followed ones needs and even anticipated them.  The project involved various fields and disciplines such as design, architecture, cybernetic, behavior, theory of information, theory of groups, semiotic, biometry, neurology, psychoanalysis, new energies, and the ecology among others.  Currently Takahashi lives and works in Paris, France. 

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Sandy Amerio

Video Artist

Sandy Amerio is a Parisian video artist who makes films dealing with social and economic issues.   Says the artist on her website, amerio.org: “Most of my work is filmic, photographic and textual. My fields of research are wide-ranging and spring from my fascination with the signs given out by today’s society. They have to do with socio-political, economic and strategic phenomena. I constantly create aesthetic, theoretical and poetic links that reveal the deeply heterogeneous nature of our realities (documentary, fiction, re-enactment...). Resistance, disjunctions, tangles and digressions all serve a textual manipulation of reality... This is what can be seen through the magnifying and distorting filter I apply to the things of our existence and to what we commonly call the collective unconscious.”  One such example is the 45-minute video entitled, Hear Me, Children- Yet- To-Be-Born (2004) which she developed during her residency at 18th Street Art Center.  The film follows a man and woman in the middle of Death Valley, dressed in business attire. The film weaves together elements of the corporate storytelling world with the narrative of the creation story found in the bible.  The film was co-produced by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and 18th Street Art Complex.  Her latest film screening took place at the Festival de Cannes 2005.  Other past works include: Surfing on (our) History (2000) situated in her family’s apartment, and Waiting Time/Romania, a collaboration with Alexis Davey both shown at the Fresnoy National Studio for Contemporary Art, in France.  

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Tempestant

Performance Artists

The French performance troupe Tempestant performs their pieces in non-traditional spaces, as the company’s artwork can be sometimes typified as a French existential circus act.  One of their first performances, which was deemed to be a resolutely political piece, “Le Monde est une Île Mélancholique,”  (The World is a Melancholy Island), was presented in 1995 at Le Théatre Antoine Vitez.  Currently, their childlike piece, “Et Puis Dormir,” can be viewed in Montpelier, France, as well as an installation from their interactive DVD, “Chute! Chutes” is touring Europe this year in the group show Instants Video.  For two months in 1998, the Tempestant Company was able to take part in 18th Street’s international residency program where they were able to cultivate new ideas and creations for their engaging and dramatic performances.  Their performances prove to be intriguing as many of their performers don Marceau-esqe black and white face paint, use oversized props, and choreograph contemporary scenes delightful to children and poets alike.  The Tempestant Theater is based in Marseilles, France.

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Valére Chanceaulme de Sainte Croix

Plastics Artist

Plastic Technician artist, Valere Chanceaulme de Sainte Croix, handles dark subjects with levity through his “Screaming Chromatics” project that he completed in 2005 while in residency at 18th Street.  Within this project, Chanceaulme investigated the culture of American gore cinema from the 1960s to 1980s, along side researching the codification instituted in the field of criminology.  The findings of his research enabled him to create and deduce certain connotations relating to that certain era of film, which then furthered his project by allowing him to add various objects that enlarged the rhetorical field surrounding the “Gore” films. A French observer once noted that his work gave the viewer “strange, de-masked, or perturbing characters on a quest for dissolution or redemption.”

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Valérie Mréjen

Interdisciplinary Artist

Writer, visual and video artist, Valérie Mréjen seeks out ways to evoke the strange emptiness behind our words through manipulation of dialogue in videos that present images from everyday life and relationships.  

She is the author of three books: She wrote Mon grand-père in 1999, which she followed with the photography exhibit L’Appartement de Mon Grand-Pere in 2000; in 2001 she wrote the autobiographical novel L’agrume concerning the loneliness of love, which received the Second Novel Prize in France that year; and Eau Sauvage, written in 2004.  She was asked to make a film about contemporary life in Tel Aviv and presented Pork and Milk at an art gallery there in 2002.

Valérie Mréjen presented Filmed portraits (14 memories), a series she started at 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica (2001) to answer the self-posed question: how do you make someone’s portrait?  She wanted to capture the surprise of the first glance, while scrutinizing this landscape we call L.A.  By filming people in a context familiar to them (both indoors and outdoors), she extracted a story from the footage of their memories. 

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Germany

Eva Castringius

Painter and Photographer

Reanimating forgotten catastrophes and places is a core theme throughout the works of painter and photographer, Eva Castringius. A native of Munich who has lived since the early 1990s in Berlin, Castringius spent one year at 18th Street Arts Center in 2005. While at 18th Street as an artist in residence shed a new light on her way of seeing things and prompted a definitive shift from small to large formats.  Setting her sights on urban space in two major metropolises, Los Angeles and Berlin, the artist photographed famous locations at sunrise and sunset, including the harbor at Long Beach and the International Congress Center, now known as Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures), in Berlin. A signature mark of Castringius’ projects is to discreetly insert a familiar object in each picture. The intention is to let the viewer to come up with the story behind each image. While at 18th Street, Castringius developed a series of large scale paintings which further explored notions of space and architecture. 

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Ruth Schnell

Video Installation Artist

In Ruth Schnell’s video installations, she unfolds the possibilities, (which lie in the screen and in video projection) to develop new forms of information distribution in our world that is so readily changed and influenced by media.  She uses ordinary objects to serve as a screen without individual significance but that gives rise to meaning for the projected images and text.  Schnell uses these objects as an image carrier, which distorts the projected information, so that not only is a new viewing angle is created, but also a subtle new order of the images and their perceived relationship.  In 2004, the Austrian artist received a grant to be the artist-in-residence at 18th Street, where she worked on and exhibited “Patters of Perception: Electronic Media Installations,” which was composed of three of her electronic medial installations.  This exhibit was shown for the first time at the California Science Center’s Art and Science Studio. 

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Indonesia

Popok Tri Wahyudi

Painter

The Indonesian mixed media artist, Popok Tri Wahyudi, paints on canvas, paper and glass to express a complex narration that Illustrate his personal experiences with images and stories perceived through mass media. His talents as a comic book illustrator are evident in both his illustrative painting style and narrative imagery. Each of Wahyudi's paintings condenses a whole comic strip into individual action packed canvases. He often makes work that represents the lunacy of the current political situation with the country.  Wahyudi’s work reflects social issues and comments on power structures in Indonesian society.  In 2001, he received a grant from UNESCO-ASCHBERG for a two-month studio residency at 18th Street.  Here he worked on an installation titled “Everything Is So Big,” where he exhibited drawings and paintings of American culture.

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Ireland

Colin McGookin

Painter

Northern Irish born Colin McGookin, has worked extensively as a photographer using the medium as a tool for recording events, documenting installations, researching source material, archiving his artwork and recently as an artistic medium in itself. He has a vast archive of photos dating from the mid 1970's. McGookin has also effectively acted as a curator and facilitator on a number of exhibitions over the last two decades, in particular for Queen Street Studios. During his residency at 18th Street sponsored by the British Council, McGookin created the mural “Spiral Maze” as a collaborative project with the 5th grade class at the Canyon Elementary School in Santa Monica. His work has been exhibited at 18th Street in a one person presentation.

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Jennifer Trouton

Mixed Media Artist

Jennifer Trouton was a visiting artist-in-resident, from the Queen Street Studios of Belfast, at 18th Street for two months in 1999. While in Los Angeles, Trouton presented a series of mixed media works on canvas based on the history and traditions of women in Northern Ireland. She also exhibited Mould, which was a selection from a larger body of work entitled, Select Your Pattern Pieces According to the View You Have Chosen, to be a part of the 1999 LA International Biennial Art Invitational. The work of Mould dealt primarily with the tradition of dressmaking within my family history, particularly my mother. Her work was most recently seen in the group exhibition at University of Nevada Las Vegas, “Daughters of the Middle Border”, featuring twelve contemporary Northern Irish artists.

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Phil Colins

Live/Performance and Video Artist

Phil Collins works primarily with live arts and video and has shown his work widely throughout the UK and Europe. His latest video works address politically relevant instances in the Balkans and Northern Ireland. Recent large-scale photographic prints observe his battle with testicular cancer, in the series ‘You’re Not The Man You Never Were’. For the past four years Collins has been engaging with the media through reality TV formats, taking testimonials from former show participants and industry professionals that reveal televisions exploitations. Through this process the artist is able to introduce performance and conceptually grounded approaches to video and photography through popular culture and low-budget production. His work shows an increasing commitment to the social and the politic in enlisting and exploiting purposefully and temporarily, the ambivalences and uncertainties of an audience through fiction and play-acting. His performances promote fallibility, awkwardness and lo-fidelity as methods of discussing authority, and with a complete lack of legitimate ideas, which have a pressing emotional and political significance for the audience. He was a recent nominee for the Turner Prize and exhibited at the Tate Museum in London.

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Japan

Midori Harima

Installation Artist

Midori Harima was born in Japan but now works and lives in Queens, NY. She makes installations with black and white Xeroxed images found in books, magazines and on the internet, and then shapes them into three-dimensional forms. These hollow figures constructed with the fragments of ordinary mass media images correspond to our managed and disconnecting experience of reality. Growing up in post-WWII Japan, Harima was subject to numerous superficial American influences that lacked any genuine connection to Japanese tradition. As a result, her art deals with a lost sense of identity and ways in which individuals can coexist with fundamental contradictions. In 2006, Harima had the opportunity to join 18th Street as an artist in residence through the Mill Atelier Foundation.

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Miwa Yanagi

Photographer

The Japanese photographer, Miwa Yanagi, is known for her renowned work, the Elevator Girl House series, which is a composition of dream experiences and urban encounters in a capitalist consumer setting. The creation of her fictive environments mirror the absence of individuality of Japanese women, as these Elevator Girls are entrapped in spaces such as elevators, subway stations and mega department stores. Yanagi says, “Wandering about these frozen cities, one cannot connect with the women in elevators and at information counters. They are ephemeral, like the light on the subway platform, which recedes the moment one approaches it. They exist, but they do not, in a dream-like, fictitious world.” Utilizing photographs and digital collages, Miwa blends static reality with the queerness of artificiality of the contemporary society. In 1998, Yanagi had the opportunity to join 18th Street for her first residency program, where she perfected her Elevator Girl House series and debut her exhibit in Los Angeles. She has since gone on to international acclaim.

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Rogues' Gallery

Performance Artist

Rouges’ Gallery, a team composed of two Japanese artists, Yasuhiko Hamaji and Yoshinaka Nakase, are durational artists. Their ‘drive’ performances with an automobile equipped with an audio and mixing system, is designed to create an overwhelming sound environment that envelopes the listeners. In these performances they drive the audience in the rigged car while gathering, controlling and amplifying different sounds such as the rumble of the engine, the electronic beeps of the meters, the moan of the wind and other noises generated by the car’s trip. Their precise performance is constructed and directed by the artists, utilizing the actual driving route, sound effects, and the driving technique. In addition, each performance is affected by various conditions such as weather, traffic, and the atmosphere within the car. In 2000, Rouges’ Gallery had the opportunity to visit 18th Street and perform their drive performance, “Gasoline, Music, & Cruising”, for more than 30 passengers.

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Tatsuo Inagaki

Social Artist

The Japanese Tatsuo Inagaki relinquishes the traditional artist role of sole creator and directly involves individuals from various communities in his work.  He is particularly interested in investigating interpersonal communication outside of mass media and high technology.  In 2001, Inagaki had the opportunity to be in residence at 18th Street.  He conducted a series of fieldwork research on a specific group of people in the 18th Street neighborhood.  Through his research and presentation, he transformed his studio into a series of “museums,” which were dedicated to the individuals he met These individuals were not celebrities or Hollywood stars, but rather, ordinary people living throughout the L.A. region.  Visitors to the “Tappy Museum” were able to explore various aspects of the individual, his/her relationship to the person and the world around him/her, and the realities inherent within his/her existence.  The project was organic in that it explored the possibilities of 18th Street and other art forms from the aspect of one-on-one communication.

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Yuki Kimura

Photographer and Installation Artist

The Japanese born photographer and installation artist, Yuki Kimura, is well known for her photographs that address the question, “Why is it that I am alive here and now?. Kimura’s photographs take this question and bring it to the surface. Her subjects, caught in the present moment, break the illusion of their stillness, their assuredness, to remind us with sly humor that they were born and will die. She places both her subjects and the viewer in the midst of the wide network of historical, social and biological forces that form and inform us. Looking both forwards and back, her photographs not only confront the inevitability of our own death but also marvel at the continuation of life. Self-reflexive and charming, funny and perplexing, Kimura’s photographs, on a further level, interrogate the very way we perceive images. This is true both of the portraits and of her lesser-known series of landscape and travel photos, which were the subject of her ‘Deep-Take’, at the Highways Gallery at 18th Street. Playing off the word ‘diptych’ as well as the filmic techniques of deep-focus and long-take, Kimura presented pairs of images that compelled the viewer to look twice.

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Nigeria

Ofiaeli Okechukwu Okoye

Mixed Media and Sculpture Artist

Ofiaeli Okechukwu Okoye was an international artist-in-residence at 18th Street for three months in 2000 thanks to UNESCO-ASHBERG Bursaries for Artists Program. Motivated in 1983 by creative impulses and a highly original aesthetic, Ofiaeli began to research full-time the construction, longevity, and aesthetics of his hand-crafter sculptures and utilitarian objects.  He successfully was able to carve out a distinct, creative, imaginative and original medium to express the varying values, ideals and symbols in the African indigenous art.  He also maintained a necessary balance between a traditional craftsman and a contemporary aesthetician and mater artist.  His final exhibit, which he showed at 18th Street, showcased his dramatic imagery and visceral connection to nature.  He used various species of palm, mahogany and mango seeds as well as other suitable dried vegetation to create his sculptures of hats, purses, photo albums, and other objects made from natural resources. 

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Victor Ekpuk

Painter

The work of Nigerian painter, Victor Ekpuk, explores the relationships, challenges and responses to changes that characterize the human condition.  His work focuses on the indigenous African system of writing that employs graphic signs, codes to convey concepts and ancient writing forms of native Nigeria.  The reduction of these writing techniques to their basic elements results in new symbols or codes in script-like drawings, which can then be used to express his contemporary experiences. When combined with Nsibidi signs, these “scripts” also provide the background narrative to the artist’s compositions. Ekpuk believes that “art could and should be used to bridge the communication gaps between the different peoples of the world.  Through this interaction, other artists could partake and perhaps contribute to this ‘ritual communication’ of our social and cultural synthesis.”

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Pakistan

Nusra Qureshi

Painter

Nusra Qureshi is trained in the art of the Mughal miniature painting tradition and has developed an extraordinary contemporary painting practice that engages with the rich, visual histories of South Asia.  What at first appears to be a deceptively simple narrative becomes, upon close examination, a commentary on the issues of sexual politics and the impact of 19th Century Colonialism. Her narratives reverse the balance of perceived male dominance by marrying images of early Colonialism with those of male/female intimacy. Through her adept brushwork and layered meanings, Qureshi's reinterpretations provide an active voice for an otherwise passive historical feminine role.  Qureshi is part of an important generation of Pakistani artists who have revived and innovated the traditional art of Mughal miniature painting. She lectured at the National School of Art in Lahore from 1995 to 1999, migrating to Australia in 2001 to take up postgraduate study. She has shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Asia, the United States, Europe and Australia.  In 2003, Qureshi had the opportunity to travel to Los Angeles for an artist in residency program at 18th Street.  During her residency she was able to establish a dialogue with other artists on the ideas of cultural art-representation in the context of a contemporary society.

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Shahid Nadeem

Writer

Shahid Nadeem is an internationally renowned screenwriter, playwright, journalist and human rights activist who lives in Pakistan.  He has written over 30 plays and six television serials for Pakistani television, with many of them performed all over Asia and Britain.  He is the in-house playwright for Ajoka Theatre, Pakistan’s leading non-commercial theatre group.  As an activist, he has held media seminars on human rights reporting, organized film festivals and produced two documentaries on human rights campaigns in Asia.  Nadeem was imprisoned under all three past military regimes in Pakistan for non-violent protests and his writings.  He has been harassed by the government since 1986 for writing about Pakistan’s human rights record and for supporting India-Pakistan friendship,  and was banned from Pakistani television.  Nadeem has also worked for Amnesty International for many years in London and Hong Kong.  From April to December in 2001, Nadeem lived at 18th Street as a Feuchtwanger Fellow.

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Sweden

Cecilia Wendt

Installation Artist

Cecilia Wendt is a Swedish installation artist, who in 2001 with a grant from the International Studio Program in Sweden, came with her group, N55, to Los Angeles to work as artists-in-residence at 18th Street. While here, the group work on their installation called LAND, which was built in an effort to discuss the meaning of ownership of and access to land. LAND is literally constructed from pieces of land from different places in the world. The various parts are added by persons who guarantee that anybody can stay in LAND and use it. In a democratic stance, the artists say that any individual is entitled to and is allowed to use the installation. The manual for LAND states, “Attention is directed to the logical relation between persons and the rights of persons. Persons should be treated as persons and therefore as having rights. If we deny this assertion it goes wrong: here is a person, but this person should not be treated as a person, or: here is a person, who should be treated as a person, but not as having rights. Therefore we can only talk about persons in a way that makes sense if we know that persons have rights.” Wendt is also part of the international group called Learning Site. This group of artists engages with local situations (wherever they may find themselves) and developing art projects which are learning platforms and demonstrations about the economic, political and social structures of unused materials, recycled waste or conditions of production in societies. As their name suggests, Learning Site understands art as being related to forms of knowledge production and thus also to dialogue and learning.

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Per Hüttner

Photographer and Mixed Media Artist

The Swedish born Per Hüttner is known for his photographic work, drawings on paper and video installations.  Past artistic practices are project and/or process based in that he exercises different fitness activities (jogging, stretching, working out, etc.) in varying situations, which he then photographs and/or films.  The videos are short loops that are often projected, as well as he often relates to the history of painting while producing these videos.  The subject matter of his videos often deals with questions relating to the human body, media and ageing.  In contrary, his photographs are much more documentary as he wishes to challenge the notions of authenticity and the language of representations in photography and its history.  In 2002, Hüttner received a grant from the International Artist Studio Program in Sweden  to fund his residency at 18th Street Arts Center.  While at 18th Street, he allowed the contemporary culture of Los Angeles as well as the artistic approach that many local artists take, to influence and develop his work. 

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Tawain

Charlene Shih

Multimedia Artist

Charlene Shih Multimedia Artist Charlene Shih melds family photos with city landscape, Chinese calligraphy with free-flowing forms in impressionist animated works that cross cultural boundaries, exploring symbolism with heart. During her residency at 18th Street, she interviewed artists and others in the Los Angeles community to extract L.A. flavor. Ms. Shih wrote and directed the documentary, “Spirit Talk,” for National Geographic Channel about death rituals in Taiwan, to be broadcast this fall. Her film “Woman,” (1999) begins with two characters in Chinese calligraphy that slowly become animated, flying figures. This film won Grand Prize at the Taipei Film Festival that year, and was also named Best Experimental Film at the New York Shorts International Film Festival, and Best Animation at the Golden Harvest Film Festival (2000), held at Singapore Subspace Gallery. Her latest work is a combination of live-action, documentary, and animation entitled “Papa Blue,” (2003) poetically depicts the struggle of a daughter and father with depression.

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Chia-Ling Kuo

Performing Artist

Chia-Ling Kuo is a video artist who constantly observes body actions.  The artist states that the body can speak for us in an awkward moment when the words just will not come.  The body is private, because we cannot share the experience of living in someone else’s skin.  Others cannot feel one’s pain; it is only felt by the one inflicted.  Images of bodies in motion present in her art are samples of common action.  During her residency at 18th Street Art Center (2007), she explored inter-cultural communication through use of language and the body.  The main point of all this observational footage is this: although errors in spoken conversation do occur, the original intention can be revealed in the details of the “behavior transcript” of the actors’ body language.  For the video piece “Eat,” (2006) she collaborated with Lai Pei to create a double channel video.  Two screens show two women eating a bowl of noodles with chopsticks, side-by-side.  “A Mind of Skin Touch,” (2005) is a double channel video setting for performance: one screen is a close-up of the back of knees, and the other is blurred footage of the elbows of passersby. This piece tangibly conveys the experience of walking through a crowded place.  A recent piece, “Red Lip,” (2006) served as the video setting for live performance, and shows the artist’s mouth pronouncing words close up. 

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Hui-Yu Su

Video Artist

For his latest controversial work, video and performance artist Hui-Yu Su straps himself to a chair with black leather strips in synthesis of a terrorist and a victim in “The Fabled Shots.” During one showing in Miami, a female exhibiting artist asked him, "While the air conditioning is broken, could you play something a little more cheerful?"  False wounds bleed from the artist’s naked form, electric nodes attached to his forehead. The first work of the “Endless Recalling” series of video installations began in 2004. The No. 2 of the series were exhibited in the “Pseudo Hackers’ Arts in Parallel Zones” (curator J.J. Shih) in the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan. This series often employs the open-loop approach in imaging: this “reproduces” and “amplifies” the familiar episodes in television and further inflates the already exaggerated performance of the actors, creating an endless sense of ridicule.

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Lan-Ya Huang

Multimedia Sculptor

With hot glue and attention to personal character, multimedia sculptor Hwang Lan-ya practices organic form to breathe life into colorful pieces that stand on their own, brimming with energy. Green spiky orbs resembling sea creatures showed in Feminine Comfort (2001); a green-purple bulbous question mark with orange mo-hawk looms personified in a pizza box for Pizza Project (2002).  A spiky purple-yellow creature with latticework exoskeleton rises from a pool of indigo like a bubble of laughter from deep in the gut for Glue Object (2003).  Yellow-pink Epiphyte seems to have grown out of the forest floor in an outdoor exhibit in Korea (2004).  An otherworldly orange-yellow lotus-like flower floats atop iridescent green-blue lily pad at Galapagos Art Space in New York (2006).

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Lee-Ming Sheng

Interdisciplinary Artist

Interdisciplinary artist Ming-Sheng Lee says that his art explores the human tendency to develop rapidly.  His artistic career began in the late 1970’s.  In his endeavors, he tries to understand what art means to ordinary people.  He creates installation, photographic, sculptural, and performance works shown over the last twenty years in Taiwan, Japan, Germany, France and Italy: and performed “Fire Ball or Circle,” as the first-ever artist to represent Taiwan at the 1993 Venice Biennale.  Lee’s work is often considered controversial in Taiwan because of its direct references to the socio-political problems of the country, which was under martial law until the 1980’s.  While in residence at 18th Street Arts Complex, Lee created and presented the installation: “My Art,” featuring bloodstained images from Lee’s various visual and performance artworks produced over the last two decades.  Another of his acclaimed performance installation works, “Immanent Cry of Human from Depth of the Earth,” showed in Taiwan, Japan, and at 18th Street (2001).  The piece featured a roomful of cylinders, each issuing a unique sound to create a sound collage invoking organic, primal emotions into the context of contemporary culture.  Another work: “Money You/You Money,” features dozens of images from Lee’s 20-year artistic career, painted over with traces of the artist’s own blood, strewn on the floor of the space along with dollar bills, cardboard boxes, and remnants of a 12-course dinner, served up as a piquant performance art event.

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Lin Wei

Performance Artist / Photographer

Performance artist and photographer Lin Wei employs photography, wax, and light to capture the poetics of daily life.  In “Illuminating Darkness,” a photo-based installation created for 18th Street Arts Center (2004) through Highways.  Her art explores, in her words: "the heated eyes and frozen hearts of love." Images of an eye shot close up are backlit, the silhouette of a girl appears in negative, ghostly scenes glow eerily along the walls and floor.  The artist states: “I try to use various ways to represent the experiences that I go through and to describe how I feel about the fact that I can’t live alone in the world…In this exhibition, I combine materials to meditate on the fact that what is important is always invisible to the eyes.”

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Long-Bin Chen

Mixed Media Artist

The sculptures of Chen Long-Bin decry the death of literary culture while they exalt recycled goods.  His unique technique of chainsaw “sculpting” with discarded books collected from New York City recycling systems creates the look of carved wood that is surprisingly soft to the touch. His art contains political undertones of mistrust, alluding to the book burning performed by the Cultural Revolution from 1966-1970.  Splitting his time between birthplace Taipei (1964), and New York’s School of Visual Arts Masters Program (1994), Long Bin Chen uses found materials and images from popular culture to parody the disposable nature of knowledge in modern life.

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Shi-Wei Lien

Mixed Media Artist

Clothier and metal-smith Shi-Wei Lien has a keen eye for pleasing shapes. Her residency at 18th Street the summer of 2002 produced “I Saw an Air of Stubborn Dignity from a Wilted Flower:” an open-studio exhibition of a site-specific installation, utilizing media dried plants, thread, needle, paper, and pastel. Her installation incorporates a range of materials, including human hair and paper sewn to various articles of clothing, in an effort to create an abstract portrait of the relationship between the manufactured and organic elements in everyday life.  Created at the same time, “About Another Body - Hair” is an open studio exhibition of a site-specific performance installation, featuring long black strands of hair trapped in a glass jar. Past exhibitions with metalwork took place in Taiwan, such as the “Relationship of Metal” at Want Space in Taichung (2001); and in the U.S., her work took part in the group show “Enlightening Materials: Contemporary Metalwork from Taiwan,” at the Artemisia Gallery in Chicago (2000).

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Shiau-Peng Chen

Painter and Multimedia Artist

Brooklyn-educated Taiwanese painter and multimedia artist Shiau-Peng Chen takes geometric patterns and smooth curves to express abstract themes such as Tangibility (2005-7), and Immateriality (2005-6).   His residency at 18th Street (2005), inspired the series Specificity: in one piece, octagonal shapes comprised of varied colored triangles dot the long white canvas, interrupted by vertical streams of paint allowed to drip down, violating the precise lines.  He has exhibited in Melbourne, Taiwan, and China. 

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Tsai-Wei Chen

Sound Artist

Tsai-Wei Chen uses sound to improve her surroundings.  She compiles pleasing noises from the past in her Soundscape Album Always in the Happy Land (2003), to create a “joyful space” in the present moment.  Children scream on a rollercoaster ride, someone orders a hot dog, a father rinses off his child at the beach.  Recent public performances include: The Beach in My Room (2003) at 18th Street Arts Center; I Hear & I Sing in London (2002) was part of Juice at the Architecture Foundation in London (2002); and 'About Sonic Constellations' was performed in the Lacking Sound Festival at Nanhai Gallery in Taipei, Taiwan (2008).

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Wei-Wen Fang

Multimedia Sculptor

Wei-Wen Fang’s multimedia sculpture installations transform ordinary objects from his surroundings into fanciful indoor landscapes, self-contained and whole.  He studied plastic arts at the Tainan Institute for Research in Taiwan, and continues to sculpt with acrylic.  His solo exhibition (1999) contained a flexible work called Dream Vessel, constructed of used tires, rubber bands, and monitors showing fuzzy television images at opposite ends.  His most recent works evoke the urban jungle with wooden hoops and hanging vines: Wild Village (2004) and Wild Village 2 (2005).   Other works render the viewer calm and serene: Garden (2002) and A Day (2001), all shown in Taiwan. 

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Wen-Hu Chiung

Installation Artist

Wen-Hu Chiung makes installations concerned with ethics as relates to the industrial age.  His creations spring from the liminal space between human and machine.  “Sanguimotor” (2001) consists of a mass of red yarn arranged in a circle on white platform with square wooden frame.  “Anamnesis” looks like a futuristic collection of yarn, encased in clear plastic.  Venesection features a large pipe protruding from the wall; in imitation of a pasta-maker, strands of red yarn stream from pipe to floor.

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Yi-Fan Chen

Multimedia Sculptor

Conceptual artist Chen Yi-Fan practices multimedia sculpture addressing errors in communication.  His installation entitled “Languaging,” shown at 18th Street Arts Center (2002), signifies the ongoing transition of an idea from philosophical to practical form, or from visual to textual.  With this piece, Chen Yi-Fan picks up where Barbara Kruger and Bruce Nauman left off - Authoritative, white raised Latin letters form scrambled words into nonsense phrases mounted on the installation wall.  Multiple screens placed strategically about the space play footage of mouths moving, accompanied by drone-like sound and changing light.  During simulated nighttime periods, the letters glow fluorescent green in the dark.  The sensory information is at once plentiful and pointless, expressing doubt in communication accuracy.

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United Kingdom

Jon Lambert

Painter

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Kevin Phillips

Painter

The painter, Kevin Phillips, from the United Kingdom, is a painter who expresses and clarifies his personal experience within his practice. His paintings are multi-layered, allowing disparate elements the chance to create and suggest new ways forward. A specific quote from Goethe is an appropriate representation of his feelings about his paintings. “The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, molded and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.” Phillips’ recent works were made in response to specific places within Cumbria. He says “the unique qualities of the Cumbrian landscape help me to see and think clearly, enabling me to formulate color relationships and structures in order to produce paintings, which I hope touch upon the spirit of the place.”

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United States

Ali Acerol

Sculpture Artist

The outdoors brought inside: mixed media French sculptor Ali Acerol builds useful objects out of brick.  This artist plays with contradictions and tensions, flipping the viewer’s expectations upside-down.  For his residency at 18th Street Arts Center, Ali Acerol made a set of furniture out of brick and mortar.  Entitled, “Oh, It’s like owning property in Constantinople,” three chairs surround a small table in a welcoming fashion.  For “Venus de Milo,” the artist references the famous painting in sculptural form, of a woman’s torso made of brick.  Why brick?  Acerol says he likes to flirt with architecture by working with brick.  The material also has a humble quality he enjoys using: it belongs to no certain class or culture, and so is more universal than marble or granite.  After crafting the basic shape of his design, he then chisels the edges smooth to give his pieces a weathered look.  He also draws nonsense maps for the show, “This is not a Map,” using mixed media on paper. 

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Guy Cross

Photographer

The Santa Fe based artist, Guy Cross, has exhibited his photo-based works at numerous galleries throughout Santa Fe, and is the publisher and creative director of THE magazine and formerly of Edge City Magazine and The Picture Paper. In 2002 at 18th Street Cross produced a series of work titled “Sightings.” This was an exhibition of new and recent photo-based works that play with landscape and iconographic signage through creating discrete narratives filled with visual puns. His work ranges across the socio-political stratosphere of postmodern sensibilities. Cross “grabs” snapshots, taken out of or through a car window, rather than carefully composed photographs, eschewing carefully composed or contrived imagery. Urban, suburban and rural locations are all subject to his satirical sensibilities.

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Lisa Adams

Painter and Public Artist

Lisa Adams is a painter and public artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She graduated with a B.A. in Painting from Scripps College in Claremont, California and received her M.F.A. from the Claremont Graduate University. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Professional Scholar Award, a Brody Arts Fund Fellowship and a Durfee ARC Grant. In addition to her practice as an artist, Adams works as an independent curator, who in 2000, co-founded Crazy Space, an alternative exhibition space, in Santa Monica. Looking at her work is often like listening to someone else’s dream--weirdly wonderful, oddly incoherent yet begging for interpretation that seems out of reach. For all her imagery’s pictorial clarity Adams’ narratives remain suggestive puzzles. An example is the artist’s brightly colored oil on panel paintings, which presents a tableaux of active serpentine vines and fragments of trees, each pumped with a kind of tenacious exuberance for life.

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Mark Spencer

Visual Artist

Born in Boston, Mark Spencer is a painter and visual artist who has exhibited in galleries, museums and exhibitions throughout the United States for over three decades.  His work manipulates time, suspending linear thought, leading the viewer into contemporary imagery and archetypes.  Spencer forthrightly infuses his works with meaning, narrative and a sense of the joy and frailty of human existence.  His monotypes, possessing a mystery and evocative quality found more often in painting, are highly technical feats of craft and aesthetic.  Spencer believes hi