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The 2010 Artists-in-Residence include: Sama Alshaibi and Dena Al-Adeeb, Keliy Anderson-Staley, Richard Barnes, Gerard Gaskin, Ayana V. Jackson, Christian Patterson, Simon Rowe, Lenard Smith, Zoe Strauss, Brian Ulrich, and Shen Wei, Susan Worsham, and Richard Barnes. The work by artists who participated in the 2009 Artists-in-Residence program are showcased in the Light Work Annual (CS157), now currently available. Back issues of Contact Sheet and the Light Work Annual are available for individual purchase via the Light Work Online Store.
The collaborative project Baghdadi Mem/Wars is a video and photography series in three suites: Still/Chaos, Efface/Remain, and Absence/Presence. Its conceptual premise is rooted in the corporal, intellectual, and emotional embodiment of war and displacement. Emanating from collaborators Dena Al-Adeeb and Sama Alshaibi's lived experiences and personal bodily memory of a lifetime in the trenches of an undying war, Baghdadi Mem/Wars paints the landscape of the artists' brush with annihilation. The psychosomatic narrative presented in this series of work manifests and replays on the topography of body, memory, and spirit.
Sama Alshaibi is an artist born in Basra, Iraq to an Iraqi father and Palestinian mother and is now a naturalized United States citizen. Alshaibi's photography, video, film, and performance works evoke the language of suffering, displacement, and loss. She often uses her own body as both a protagnist and a site linking struggles and the way that nations have affected and twisted lives in bodily performances. Her auto-ethnographic approach is informed by her own history of living in war, the double negation to her familial homelands, and her countless encounters with those policing borders from the undesired. An Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Arizona, Alshaibi received her M.F.A. in Photography & Video and Media Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Alshaibi exhibits internationally, with upcoming exhibitions at Paris Photo, Art Dubai, and solo exhibitions in The West Bank and London.
Artist Dena Al-Adeeb was born in Baghdad, Iraq. Deported out of Iraq just before the Iraq/Iran War in 1980, she and her family escaped to Kuwait until the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War, when she was forced to relocate to San Francisco, California. Dena left the United States in 2003 when she spent time in several places (Mexico, Cuba, Spain, U.A.E, Jordon, Iraq) before moving to Egypt for four years. She returned to the US in 2008 and is currently residing between San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. She received her M.A. in Anthropology-Sociology, Visual and Cultural Anthropology at the American University of Cairo. She received her B.A. in International Relations, Middle East and North Africa from San Francisco State University. Her work has been presented in New York, San Francisco, Oakland, Michigan, Sweden, Cairo and at the Orebro International Videoart Festival, Falaki Gallery, Mashrabia Gallery, Karim Francis Gallery, National Arab American Museum, SomArts Gallery, and Pro-Arts Gallery, among other venues.
Ayana V. Jackson has travelled the world to make her portrait-based work, spending time in places such as South Africa, Germany, Ghana, and Mexico. Collectively, her diverse array of projects, which includes co-founding an artist space in Berlin in 2005, references the African diaspora in many parts of the world as well as attendant themes of identity and memory. The acclaimed series African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth, which has been exhibited widely and published as a catalog, explores these coexisting international cultural influences.
Just before arriving in Syracuse, Jackson spent a number of weeks at Project Row Houses in Houston, TX, where she installed her part of the multi-person exhibition, curated by William Cordova, called eco, xiang, echo: meditations on the african, andean & asian diasporas. The exhibition, which will be on view in Houston's Third Ward until June 20, 2010, investigates societal and historical connections among cultures. Previous to the show at Project Row Houses, Jackson attended and exhibited her work in the 8th Bamako Encounters African Photography Biennial, curated by Michket Krifa and Laura Serani, in Bamako, Mali.
While at Light Work, Jackson will make use of our scanners to digitize a backlog of negatives, edit and archive her images, and begin work on a new book project that will take the form of a travelogue. She also plans to realize some large format prints of her work during her time here.
Ayana Jackson holds a BA from Spelman College, and she studied under Khaterina Sieverding at the University of Arts, Berlin. She has exhibited her work at Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg; Galerie Peter Herrmann, Berlin; Franklyn W. Williams Caribbean Cultural Center, New York City; San Francisco Mexican Museum; and Philadelphia African American Museum. She has received grant support from Inter-American Foundation, Arlington, VA; PUMA Creative; and Cultures France, among others. Read more about the artist and her work at www.avjphotography.com.
Brian Ulrich arrived in Syracuse after a two-day drive from Chicago. He made the trip on a half-tank of diesel fuel and with a broken ankle, no less. Ulrich arrived loaded down with cases of negatives from his ongoing project Copia that he plans to scan on one of our Imacon scanners. Having recently secured funding for the printing of a book based on this series, Ulrich will also work on image selection and a book dummy during his stay at Light Work.
Ulrich has spent the last nine years researching and shooting the images in Copia, a series for which he won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2009. About the project Ulrich writes, "I have been engaged with a long-term photographic examination of the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live. This project titled Copia explores not only the everyday activities of shopping, but the economic, cultural, social, and political implications of commercialism and the roles we play in self-destruction, over-consumption, and as targets of marketing and advertising." The images simultaneously depict the visual frenzy created by an overabundance of commercial choice as well as a loneliness and sterility that seems interlaced with this environment.
Ulrich has exhibited his work at many venues, most recently at Robert Koch Gallery in San Francsico; Julie Saul Gallery, New York City; and the FotoFest Biennial in Houston, Texas. While not travelling the country making work, Ulrich teaches part time at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Read more about Brian Ulrich and his work at www.notifbutwhen.com.
May Artist-in-Residence Christian Patterson has been working diligently on a book dummy for his latest project since his arrival. The series Out There is based on the true crime story of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate, who murdered ten people, including Fugate's family, during a week-long killing spree across the state of Nebraska in 1958. Out There was made during several road trips following the path of Starkweather and Fugate, from their hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska to the point of their capture in Douglas, Wyoming. The resulting images include significant places and things from their story, and other discoveries made along the way. Accompanying the photographs are documents and artifacts that belonged to the killers and their victims, including a poem, a list of dirty jokes, a confession letter, a stuffed animal and a photo booth portrait. The book Patterson is constructing for Out There, tentatively titled Redheaded Peckerwood, features facsimiles of these artifacts that the artist has painstakingly re-created down to the aged look of the paper, where appropriate. (Shown here is a map tracing the path of the spree, recreated on vellum, to be inserted into the book.) The project is part road trip, part time machine, and mostly a testament to the thin line between fame and infamy, truth and representation.
Patterson is based in Brooklyn, New York. His work is in numerous public and private collections and has been featured in exhibitions in France, Japan, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Switzerland, and the United States. Patterson has been nominated for the 2007 Santa Fe Prize for Photography, the 2008 New York Photo Awards Best Fine Art Series, and the 2009 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers. His first monograph, Sound Affects, was published in 2008. Patterson is represented by Yancey Richardson in New York, Robert Koch in San Francisco and Kaune-Sudendorf in Cologne. Visit his website at www.christianpatterson.com.
Lenard Smith (www.lenardsmith.com) is spending his time at Light Work to both create new work and catch up with some existing projects. Since day one of his residency, Smith has been shooting with the 4 x 5 camera to create a whole new series based on his impressions of and experiences here in Syracuse, a body of images that he calls the AIR Work. These images are half found, half constructed moments in space and time that exalt the scratches of individuality found within institutional architecture. In this way, the images resemble Smiths' Park Nursing Home series that examines how residents transform the cold comfort of the nursing home into a real hearth be adding personal touches, especially artifacts from their past lives, to their rooms. Besides editing, scanning, and making large-format prints of AIR Work, Smith has been casting a host of models to appear in a series of images based on schematic drawings he came across in several books from the 1950's. These images, which each involve anywhere from 3 to 9 models, aim to create a surreal atmosphere somewhere between sexuality and healing. Finally, Smith has been reexamining images of African Americans, intended to be recontextualized by way of appropriation, a series which he thought was completed years ago but which has recently started calling to him again.
Smith lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from Bard College/International Center of Photography in New York City. Smith has done commission for the Studio Museum, Harlem, NY as well as for BURRO Gallery, London. His work has been exhibited at venues including Blender Gallery in Sydney; Australia, Humble Arts Foundation, Christie's Rockefeller Plaza, Talman + Monoe Gallery, and International Center of Photography, New York City; as well as Ravenscroft Gallery and BURRO Gallery in London, among others.
In her series Some Fox Trails in Virginia, Susan Worsham evokes a Southern Gothic atmosphere in which the verdancy of this landscape and its people seems to have run wild and then aground. Worsham began the series when she was 34 and had moved back home to Virginia to care for her mother, her last living relative, who died very shortly thereafter. With an exquisite use of color, and the amazing ability to weave a quiet thread of grace through every image, Worsham reveals the world of her childhood through the experience of an adult's eyes. She writes, "These photographs are not meant to be purely autobiographical, but rather representations of how I view things, based on my own experiences, and those of the people that I have met along the way. My boyfriend Michael, stands on the street I grew up on, bridging the gap between past and present. Lynn, the first stranger that ever sat for me, continues to pose for me, along with her son Max. I have been photographing her for seventeen years now."
During her residency, Worsham plans to edit, scan, and print editions of Fox Trails as well as her newest work, By the Grace of God, which focuses on the hospitality of strangers in the South.
Worsham's book Some Fox Trails in Virginia was first runner up in the Blurb Photography Book Now International Juried Competition, Fine Art Category, in 2009 when she was also a Critical Mass Finalist and nominee for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography. Her work has been featured online at F-Stop magazine, Nymphoto, and Flak Photo. Worsham has exhibited her photography at Silver Eye Center For Photography, Sasha Wolf Gallery, and Dean Jensen Gallery, among other venues. For more information about Worsham and her art, visit her website.
When Queens-based artist Gerard Gaskin applied for the Light Work residency, he explained that he had eight years and five projects worth of images that had never been realized as prints. He's just been too busy making images to devote much time to digitizing and then making prints from his film. The residency will give him the chance to finally engage this process.
Gaskin's work includes series such as Trinidad's Artists, portraits of colleagues from Gaskin's country of birth, and The Beach, which investigates visual ideas surrounding hip hop music and videos. In between work on these series, Gaskin has found the time to freelance for publications such as King, Vibe, The Source, Newsday, and The New York Times as well as for Def Jam Records and JMJ Records.
Gaskin arrived in Syracuse with a box of his favorite paper and a selection of images to begin scanning immediately. He will begin with images from the series Lefrak City, which depicts some of the over 30,000 residents of the housing development in Queens where Gaskin grew up and where he still lives. In the process of documenting the diversity of people who make up this community, Gaskin found himself on a search to rediscover his own personal experience with immigrating to America. According to the artist, "This is a diverse neighborhood where immigrants from all over the world come to make a better life for themselves, just like my parents did 35 years ago. So I am looking inside of those eyes I photograph and asking, 'Where is Gerard, that young child from Trinidad?'"
Gaskin holds a BA in Liberal Arts from Hunter College in New York City. His art has been exhibited in venues including Space Gallery in New York City, A Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ, and the Chattanooga African American Museum. His images are in the permanent collections of The Museum of the City of New York, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Queensborough Community College Art Gallery.
Gaskin will be video blogging his residency on Facebook.
For more information about the artist, see his website at www.gerardhgaskin.com.
Keliy Anderson-Staley arrived in Syracuse with all the equipment and materials she needs for her work with the wet plate collodion process, the leading mode of photography in the 1850's and 1860's. During her residency, Anderson-Staley will create tintypes of Syracuse residents as part of her ongoing series, Americans. The artist will process the tintypes in our dedicated Artist-in-Residence black-and-white darkroom using chemistry hand-mixed from 19th-century formulas. She also plans to use a portion of her time to scan negatives from a variety of series of work using our high-resolution Imacon scanner.
Americans investigates the essence of photographic representation and how it has influenced and informed issues of cultural identity both historically and today. The wet plate collodion image captures a pose held over several seconds or even minutes. This prolonged gaze creates a tension between the sitter and the camera. While a snapshot captures a moment about a 1/1000 of a second long, the tintype process allows for a portrait to unfold over time; the image produced can then slow down our process of looking. As was the case in the 19th-century, the shoot becomes an event, a performance, in which the camera, the chemistry, the photographer and the model all come together to preserve a face for posterity.
If you are in the Syracuse area in August, Anderson-Staley invites you to have a tintype portrait taken at the Light Work/Community Darkrooms studio between August 5 and 28. Anderson-Staley will explain the process while producing the images and will send a digital scan of the portrait to each sitter who provides an email address. All are welcome, but appointments should be scheduled in advance with the artist at keliyas@gmail.com. Sitters will be asked to sign a model release.
Keliy Anderson-Staley has a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, and an MFA from Hunter College, NYC. Her work has been exhibited at California Museum of Photography, Riverside, Flomenhaft Gallery, NYC, The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY, among other venues. The exhibition Contemporary American Portraits: Abe Frajndlich, Eric Klemm, Mary Ellen Mark and Keliy Anderson-Staley opens January, 2010 at Focus Gallery, Cologne, Germany. For more information about Anderson-Staley and her art, visit her website.
Simon Rowe arrived at Light Work from London already intrigued by Lake Onondaga, which lies north of Syracuse. During his time here, he has continued his research and made several trips to the lake to create images that investigate the current physical and symbolic status of Onondaga and its meaning to the people who live around and love the lake. Rowe has also made good use of Light Work's facilities to further his ongoing Untitled series by preparing and printing several editions and exhibition prints while here.
Previous work by Rowe includes the series Local Authority 2007 in which he collaborated with the residents of Pepys housing Estate, Deptford, South East London to depict their ideas about perception and regeneration in the estate. Ultimately, Rowe writes about his work, "My photographic practice has enabled me to appreciate a world in which my concerns with human social relations and impermanence can be creatively explored, made somewhat visible and reflected upon."
Rowe is a partner in CACAO, an evolving collective of creative artists, social researchers, and educators. He holds an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths College University of London and is currently a visiting fellow at the Centre for Urban and Community Research there. His work has been exhibited in venues in London including Limelight Gallery, International Planned Parenthood Foundation, Stark Gallery, and Photofusion, and also at Gallery Hunchentoot, Berlin.
Rowe's residency is held in collaboration with Autograph ABP, a London-based charity that works internationally to educate the public about photography and associated issues of cultural identity and human rights.
During his residency, Shen Wei has been making self-portraits in and around Syracuse. Growing up after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Wei explains that this series is partially based in a response to his traditional upbringing in China. The artist, who often appears naked in the images, investigates concepts of self-expression, the body, sexuality, romanticism, and human bonding in these performative photographs. His images also address the boundaries between interiority and the physical world, as well as notions of public and private, ideas that also came to the surface in his previous series Almost Naked.
Wei holds a BA in Decorative Art and Design from Shanghai Light-Industry, a BFA in Photography from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, NYC. His art has been exhibited around the work in venues including Randall Scott Gallery, NYC, Kunst.Licht Gallery, Shanghai, The Kinsey Institue Gallery, Bloomington, IN, and Daniel Cooney Fine Art, NYC, among many others. In 2009 Wei was a resident at the Rockerfeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, and his work is in several collections including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the Museum of Chinese in America.
Wei's book Chinese Sentiment will be published in 2011 by Charles Lane Press.
For more information about Shen Wei and his work, visit his website.
October Artist-in-Residence Zoe Strauss spent her time in Syracuse editing images in a new series of work entitled On the Beach, which is comprised of images that Strauss made down in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP Horizon disaster began. The series will eventually be edited into an exhibition and a book; while here, Strauss tried out different printings of the images as well as different sequences. Strauss also worked on getting her scans in order for a retrospective of her work that will be held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in early 2012.
Zoe Strauss began taking pictures at the tender age of 30. In 2010 Strauss completed her ten year landmark project Under 1-95 in South Philadelphia. A monograph of her work entitled America was published in 2008. For more information about Zoe Strauss and her work, give her blog a read.
Richard Barnes
from the series Animal Logic
Richard Barnes has a wide-ranging practice that, as he states, ". . . looks at architecture as artifact and, placing it within the context of archaeology, challenges our conceptions of the way we inhabit and represent the built environment"” His work has investigated the role that museums play as de facto arbiters of memory and cultural relevance, sometimes focusing on those moments when art and representation seemingly outweigh real life. During his time at Light Work, Barnes plans to scan and work on digital files for a new body of work, while photographing new images for yet another series.
Barnes has work in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. He was a recipient of the Rome Prize for 2005-06. While in Rome, Barnes made photographs that would eventually become the book Murmur, which features the delicately voluminous shapes that starlings form in flight. To read more about Barnes, including his series Animal Logic, from which this image was taken, see his website at www.richardbarnes.net.
Since 1976 over 300 artists have participated in Light Work's Artist-in-Residence program. Each year Light Work invites 12-15 artists to participate in this program. During their month-long residencies each artist is given the opportunity to create new work at our studio facility in the Robert B. Menschel Media Center at Syracuse University. Each Artist-in-Residence donates a few examples of their work to Light Work's permanent collection. The Light Work collection currently includes over 3,000 images.
Past Artists-in-Residence | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005
