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.
Phylicia Eileen is best known for her geometrical abstract paintings . Her work captures the vibrancy and motion of cities’ landscapes.
She graduated from FIT with an Associates in Fine Arts, Bachelors in Visual Arts Management, and holds a Masters in Art Education from SVA. She has recently shown her work in several group exhibitions in New York.
Phylicia lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
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.
Georgina Arroyo is an interdisciplinary artist and arts educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Georgina's work focuses on exploration of self and constructed identities, especially in the digital age. She was born and raised in Queens, NY and received a BFA at Lesley University College of Art & Design in Cambridge, MA. She has participated in various group shows and was most recently a finalist in the Living Gallery Outpost Artist in Residency search. She was a recipient of the Boston Printmakers Award in 2015. She now works out of her studio in Bushwick.
Arroyo writes about her current project :
Phase 1
There are six stages of gentrification. Since working in Bushwick, Brooklyn, only a few blocks from where my mother grew up, I have become very aware of how rapid gentrification can happen. I began this project as a way to explore gentrification’s effects on communities of color and what happens to a community culture over time and change. The project has evolved and slowed down, so that I see it now mimicking the stages of gentrification. Phase 1 of the project is about myself and mapping the changes in my home and trying to document how it has affected me personally. I am looking at gentrification in Ridgewood, Queens, specifically, and dissecting it on an individual scale. The project is ongoing and hopes to grow to reflect other New Yorker’s experiences with the cities changes.
In 2015, Rachel Gordon graduated from SUNY Purchase with a BFA in Printmaking. Following graduation, where she lived and interned at Oehme Graphics, a fine art printshop in Steamboat Springs, CO where Gordon was a general shop assistant. Upon returning home to New York, Gordon was awarded a scholarship to work at Manhattan Graphics Center.
Read MoreRima Day has studied fashion design in both her home town of Tokyo, Japan and later in New York City. As she was pursuing her career in fashion design, she quickly realized that her joy and passion was to be found in the technical works. She went on to work as a freelance custom dance costumer in New York City and Connecticut.
Read MoreMyung Gyun You is a sculptor and installation artist currently based in a farmhouse in Nebraska and traveling through the US. He earned a BFA from Busan University and an MFA from Tama Art University in Tokyo. Since 2013 he has been living in the US and traveling as a working artist, creating site specific, large scale installations, sculptural works, paintings, and experimental projects. The motivations behind his works are the intersections of humans and nature through the researching about a variety of phenomena in the geological history of earth. Recently, he has been experimenting making new works by using the soils collected from many different states. He has had solo exhibitions in Goyang Art Studio of National Museum and Purdue University and many group exhibitions at Saatchi Gallery, Clayarch Gimhae Museum, Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, Weatherspoon Museum, and Socrates Sculpture Park, among others.
Read Morehttps://daisywileyart.weebly.com/
Daisy Wiley is a print media artist from Virginia, currently living and working in Ithaca, New York. Wiley graduated with a BFA in Printmaking and a BFA in Graphic Design in 2017 and have been working as a Graphic Designer since the completion of my studies. In 2020, Wiley willl switching gears and starting an MFA program in Print Media at Syracuse University.
In a conceptual sense, her work is concerned with the verging of objects, the seams of actualities-- specifically the interplay between desire and pain, the local and the universal, the conscious and unconscious, text and image, and the human and the digital. Wiley is interested in historical processes and art’s role in them as a visual ideology, in the stories we tell, the myths we build, and the psychological and political processes that drive them. Her pursuits are guided both by personal experience and political belief.
A recent project completed in 2018 focused on microwork and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform (microwork is a form of digital labor, where a freelance worker completes various tasks for a small sum posted by requestors online. The tasks are relatively small, thus the word micro, including jobs like identifying content in photos or answering questions for human subject research. Basically, anything an algorithm can’t do, people fill in the gaps.). Wiley became fascinated with microwork for a few reasons. One, because microwork is entirely indicative of our current historical juncture in capitalism- where labor is continually abstracted, and bureaucracy is decentralized and enacted not by larger entities but by the individual worker. And secondly, because when she was doing my research she realized that she was working on a graphic design microwork platform for a short while (in a period where Wiley was searching for a second job or some extra income). This project thus became a way for Wiley to deal with the frustrations she encountered doing that work and to provide an explanation as to how these platforms came to be. Thirdly, microwork is part of the societal trend that devalues artistic labor (considering that you can now go online and download a logo for a few bucks, or commission a portrait from artists who are continually undercutting one another). This intersection of personal experience, artistic critique, and political relevance is what Wiley always examining in her projects. She uses her work as an opportunity to self-educate, and hopefully, to arouse an alternative, questioning subjectivity in those who engage with her work.
Natalie Birinyi is a Brooklyn based artist. She received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from Hunter College. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including in Spain, Austria, Serbia, Argentina, and China. Her work examines the porous boundaries between man, nature, and technology and projects a future in which the divisions erode.
Read MoreRebecca Sutton grew up in Portland, Oregon and relocated to Brooklyn in 2011. She makes large-scale, mostly black and white watercolors depicting women in an environment of their own creation where they are free to act on their animalistic impulses without consequence. Her work incorporates vernacular objects taken out of context in order to highlight their strangeness and their interaction with the corporeal. She has shown at the Governors Island Art Fair, Arc Gallery, with the Beaver Exhibition and has curated at Peninsula Art Space.
Read MoreI am an artist mainly working in the medium of ceramics, creating biomorphic worlds, which evoke the sense of living. I create biomorphic expressionistic forms using low fire stoneware. The forms represent new worlds that range from a cellular level to a macroscopic planetary scale. The fabricated ecosystems are a representation of my perceptions and experiences of life familiar to Earth and yet an entirely new place. As an abstract reflection of biological forms within alternating scales, my work focuses on dualities present in life and utilizes comparisons of attraction and repulsion.
Read MoreQuestions? Contact us!
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
