Moran Michelle Dankner is an Israeli-American visual artist currently based in Brooklyn.
Moran investigates the personal and collective memories in relationships to architecture/landscapes and body. In her work, they are all intertwined with the human experience, and can testify, reflect, and tell political histories and narratives. She does so through videos, photography, and installations.
María del Mar Hernández Gil de Lamadrid is a visual artist and photographer from Puerto Rico in New York City. Her work explores how the body interacts within a space and place, using photography as a creative and conceptual process, approaching issues of identity in a political and philosophical context. Hernández Gil de Lamadrid completed a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, and is a Master of Fine Arts in Photography, from Parsons School of Design, The New School, NYC. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including Governing Bodies, Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, New York, Apparatus of Discomfort, Photoville, Brooklyn, Unfixed, Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao, China, and Yokosuka Peace Art Exhibition & International Biennial of Prints, Japan. Currently, she divides her time between Puerto Rico and New York City.
Colleen Brady is a photographer, film director, and screenwriter based in New Jersey. After earning her B.A. in film production from Fairleigh Dickinson University, she products and directed a documentary about aerial acrobatics, which is now in the festival circuit. Her photography has been published in editions of Crooked Teeth zine (2017) and Alternative State of Mind magazine (2018). Most recently, Brady was a recipient of a 2019 Bronze Telly Award for Social Video in editing.
Joshua Lee is an artist living in New York City. He graduated from Parsons School of Design at The New School with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2019. His work examines and explores death and other subjects related to it such as grief, trauma, ephemerality, erasure, and absence.
He specializes in large format photography and processed based work, though his work often switches between digital and analogue. He often draws inspiration from many sources and interests, such as poetry, film, music, history, and dad jokes. His work has been shown in China, South Korea, and the United States.
Spandita Malik is a New York based artist from India. She finishes her Master of Fine Arts with a major in photography at Parsons School of Design, The New School in New York in 2019. Malik’s work is concerned with the current socio-political scenario with emphasis on women’s rights and violence against women.
Malik specialises in process based work in photography. Her work experiments with fabric, gel transfers, heat transfers, embroidery and silkscreen printing using photography. Recently her work deals with collaborations with women in India.
Malik is a recipient of Parsons Photography Programmatic Scholarship, Parsons Graduate Travel Grant Award and Dean’s Merit Scholarship. She was chosen for Studio Vortex Residency by Antoine d’Agata in France. Her work has been featured internationally in China, France, India, Italy, New York City and New Zealand.
Daniel Shieh is an artist from Taiwan. He received his BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and recently completed an MDes degree in Art, Design, and the Public Domain at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He creates interactive artworks that encourage participants to view each other in a different perspective. He’s also been 2019 Open Studio Fellow at Franconia Sculpture Park.
Shieh creates interactive performances and installations that encourage participants to understand each other beyond clear-cut identifications (masculine vs. feminine, native vs. foreign, authority vs. subordinate). His works usually involve two or more participants to activate. Once activated, they isolate parts of the participants’ bodies, such as the gaze or breath. Participants then present themselves to each other in a mediated manner, such as reflecting one’s gaze through mirrors or delivering one’s breath via an inflatable device.
The intimacy of mutual display and observation, in which participants become hyperconscious of their existence in each other’s minds, is enveloped with a strangeness created by the mediation. This strangeness destabilizes the meaning of social categories and the participants’ usual identifications of each other. By fostering intimacy in strangeness, Shieh challenges categorical identifications and its resulting unequal power dynamics between two people.
You can see more of Shieh’s work at https://danielshieh.com/
Bethany Marcel is a freelance writer living in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been published in Human Parts, Literary Hub, Popula, Creative Nonfiction, Off Assignment, Post Road, The Nervous Breakdown, and elsewhere. She has received a residency from the Spring Creek Project, was a finalist for the St. Petersburg Writer-in-Residence position, and an honorable mention for the Idyllwild Fellowship.
As a freelance writer, she offers ghostwriting, editing, and occasional copywriting. She primarily writes in the areas of mental health, travel, and motherhood.
She is currently working on her first book.
See selection of her writing at http://www.bethanymarcel.com/
Excerpt from You Survived, but I’m Still Grieving :
“When the tow truck driver answered your phone, everything went sideways.
I saw the world clearly now, as I hadn’t before. It was vibrating, and ugly, and cruel.
Time didn’t stop, the way they say it does. I sensed, rather, that time had continued but also shifted, coldly, beneath my feet. The universe of time was now a different animal. My body, too, was smaller than just moments before.
I had a suspicion it — my body — was falling, independent from me. I saw he world clearly now, as I hadn’t before. It was vibrating, and ugly, and cruel. I held the phone a distance from my head. And then I screamed.
The tow truck driver said you were sprawled out. The top of you in the back of the car, flung backward from impact. Your feet up near the steeringwheel. The seatbelt had always been a little funny, not tightening the way it should. When I went to see the car, to retrieve my belongings from the trunk, the tow truck driver was there.
He was a tall, thin man with the same name as my brother: Evan.
“You were crying a lot on the phone,” Evan said.”
Read the whole article at :
https://humanparts.medium.com/he-survived-but-i-still-grieve-24cb70679eb8
Scotter Isenbarger attended Indiana University in Bloomington where he earned a BA in English and a BFA in Painting and was awarded the Harry Engels Scholarship for painting. He later earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute where he was awarded a Presidential Fellow Scholarship. He has exhibited in galleries nationally.
Isenbarger writes, “I was born (1981) and raised in rural Indiana. I recently moved to New York from San Francisco with my wife Lauren Carly Shaw, who is an artist as well. We live in Bushwick with our dog George. I am a painter and emerging artist that also works out of Brooklyn. I make large colorful paintings that draw heavily from post modern and surrealist histories.
I am fascinated by the never ending amount of information present in the world and intrigued by the rate that we consume it. As an artist and image collector, the digital age has supplied me with an inexhaustible amount of fodder. To build my image, I first make a collage using the overflow of data I have gathered from film, pop culture, advertising, literature, music, the Internet, my personal life, and Facebook and Instagram. Through painting I translate the collage and explore how this inundation of information distorts classic narratives within the unconscious. Throughout this process I challenge myself to identify and subvert clichés in contemporary and historical art.
My paintings can be characterized by their fusion of classical figuration and surrealist abstraction. Enigmatic compositions utilize archetypal humans, animals, and hybrids within familiar yet otherworldly settings. I employ strong sugary colors and recurrent themes such as masculinity, the creative process, and ritual. I often implicate myself in the scenario to both question my place in art history and to identify as an active participant in the narrative. I am interested in spaces of the unconscious, dream spaces, liminal spaces and the characters that reside therein. Furthermore I am interested in how these personal mythologies inform and affect identity.”
Jasmine Yeh is an interdisciplinary artist from Taiwan based in NYC. Through the language of food and the act of cooking, they are seeking answers to questions of immigrant and diaspora identity, birthright, and self-appropriation. Using performance, installation, and social practice, they hope to create recipes to fuel and nourish social justice activism through an intersectional lens as a queer, non-binary, 1.75 generation immigrant.
Yeh writes about their artistic practice :
Among my current project goals is a memento mori sculptural installation and performance using kombucha SCOBY and sourdough starter cultures as an investigation of the human body, legacy, and the structures of family and community. The aftermath of my recent diagnosis and treatment for cancer has led me to expand and redefine my understanding of bodies. Feeling the fragility and mortality of my physical self, I became hypervigilant in the care and growth of my kombucha SCOBY and sourdough cultures. Strong, viable “mother” cultures can be divided into multiple new samples, which can then be passed on to other homes. This method has been utilized for millennia to share “mother” cultures, with many home bakers and homebrewers using “mother” cultures that have been passed down through generations. Wild yeast on a baker or brewer’s hands would often be naturally incorporated into the culture, making each culture unique to who has handled it. My confrontation with my own physical ephemerality drove me to propagate more and more “mother” cultures in hopes of leaving behind “bodies” that would outlive me. Does legacy erase the individual? Where are the lines drawn between legacy in the face of violent colonial histories and the lived realities of inherited trauma? If given the opportunity, these questions are the start of a vast tangle of inquiries I wish to chase down during my time at Spruce. With these concepts as my wild yeast, I aim to brew a delicious, multi-dimensional sculptural installation and performance.
Sarah Chan is a video artist currently living in Philadelphia, PA. She studied at the University of Oregon where she received her BFA in Digital Art (2013) and at the University of California, Davis for her MFA in Art Studio (2016). Her work has been exhibited at Cinema Pacific’s Fringe Festival, Pure Surface #10 in Portland, Oregon, Tropical Lab 9: Island in Singapore, MUX: Asheville Video Art Festival, and was recently included in the group show, 'Something from Something Else,' at Outback Arthouse in Los Angeles.
She enjoys going on field trips to photograph and film visual glitches, ephemeral omens, and other strange phenomena.
Chelsea Harris is a practicing artist operating out of Louisville, Kentucky, and Grand Rapids, Michigan (U.S.). Graduating from Kendall College of Art and Design in 2017, she earned her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts as a Painting major with a Printmaking minor. Whether in a visual format or through creative non-fiction writing, she tends to explore personal connection and relationships. Critical theories of Aesthetics and metaphysics inform her academic and personal work to weave a dialogue between tradition, religion, rebellion, and reinvention. She currently hold the Studio Programs Assistant position at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville.
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Hannah Harley, Director
Ariana Sarwari, Assistant Director
París Cordova, On Site Coordinator
Gavin Schuker, Graphic Design Intern
David Beyer, Art Education Intern
thespruceartresidency@gmail.com
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The Spruce Art Residency is designed to enable artists to expand their artistic practice by providing space for artists to create freely. Contact us at thespruceartresidency@gmail.com
