Seven Below Arts Initiative - A.I.R.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM:
The Seven Below Arts Initiative Artist-In-Residence Program was established to foster artistic development and to support arts education in the state of Vermont. Seven Below, in partnership with Burlington City Arts, is pleased to request proposals for six-week residencies at The Barn near Burlington, Vermont. The residencies are designed to provide artists with a peaceful, inspiring, and supportive environment for individual and/or collaborative new work. The residency program is open to artists at any stage of their career and working in various visual arts media. To apply, please download the application (.pdf) from the link below.
ELIGIBILITY:
The ideal applicant should be an artist with a history of rigorous work, excellent communication skills, and enthusiasm for interacting with other artists and the public. Although we cannot subsidize travel to Vermont, we encourage the participation of artists from outside New England as well as locally.
ACCOMMODATIONS:
Residents will live and work at The Barn, a uniquely restored property on 65 acres offering magnificent views of Mt. Mansfield and the Green Mountains. The 200-year-old Alan Irish Barn was reconstructed in 1996 and served as the recording and rehearsal facility for Phish, Trey Anastasio, and other musicians. In 2006, to support the activities of the Seven Below Arts Initiative, The Barn was retrofitted to provide living and workspace for up to three artists in residence at a time. The six chosen residents will be selected from a diverse range of applicants from all over the country. They are joined by Seven Below Studio Manager and working resident R. Elliott Katz from Cabot, Vermont. For more photos of the program, please visit our facebook page through the link below.
2010 RESIDENCY DATES:
Session #1: June 11th – July 23rd, 2010
Session #2: July 26th – September 6th, 2010
2010 RESIDENTS
Session 1:
Hon Eui Chen’s work focuses on issues of duality, identity, and memory. Her installations imbue materials with the residual emotions emerging from her scattered personal history – she is a culturally displaced child raised in Mississippi but born in a refugee camp on the border of Thailand to an immigrant Cambodian family of Chinese descent. Hon joins Seven Below Arts Initiative from Richmond, Virginia.
Thu Vu Kim’s drawings are created spontaneously without intention or meaning – they are a form of meditation that chart the unexpected events that occur between thought and physical expression. Thu will travel from Hanoi, Vietnam to participate in the Seven Below Arts Initiative.
Chris Mahonski, a Richmond, Virginia-based artist, intricately layers found and constructed objects into sculpture that loosely translate ephemeral memories into a dreamlike state of reality.
Session 2:
Agnes Martin Barley’s paintings distill linear relationships and composition into constructed symbols of the human experience. Her work creates imagined landscapes that diagram her search for place as a metaphor for context. Agnes joins Seven Below Arts Initiative from New York City.
Megan Bisbee-Durlam, a Vermont native, assembles whimsical installations from modest, re-purposed materials. Her work addresses issues related to environmental degradation and preservation, and optimism in a time of great transition. Megan currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
David Grainger’s installations play on perception and combine the figurative with phenomenological abstractions. His work examines cultural landscapes through the personal senses, and he explores the predicaments that dig into common popular symbols for multi-layered meaning. David currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
2009 RESIDENTS
Peter Miller started out as a magician in his native Vermont
and turned to art as a way to explore “illusions that are true.”
He is very interested in cinema and the moving picture, and he uses the
medium to study the line between the technical and aesthetic merits of art.
Miller currently lives in Cologne, Germany.
Mia Feurer comes from a Hebrew-Zionist education, and
has lived in occupied Israel and Palestine. The difficult cultural and geo-political
problems of our world play a big role in Mia Feuer’s art. Provoking
and unusual, Feuer’s work consists of architectural forms and installations.
Will Walker is fascinated by the architectural and historical aspects of the landscape surrounding him, and his art is a reaction to that. He expresses himself through on-site installations, fine art and craft projects and hopes to inspire viewers to reflect on the landscape surrounding them with his work.
Christine Gray is a Virginia-based artist and brings her
hyper-detailed painting technique to the Barn. Gray injects a dose of bizarreness
to her tableaus, giving a sense of distortion or parody to the everyday.
She is currently an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Lisa Iglesias plays with notions of scale and placement
in her art, by using intricate marks on a very large scale and displaying
her work in a variety of places, such as walls, ceilings, ‘zines,
and posters. A second generation New Yorker, Iglesias is part of the art
collaborative Las Hermanas Iglesias with her sister Janelle.
Maria Pithara, originally from Cyprus, uses her art to explore the interconnectedness of the actions and peoples in the world around her. Her art combines both performance and the moving picture.
2008 RESIDENTS
Charmaine Wheatley depicts everything from sunsets to eavesdropped conversations in watercolors, and will work on a Burlington area-based comic book during her residency.
Haisi Hu, a native of China, works with narrative videos by using animated puppets, toys and mannequins. She creates armatures for her characters and elaborated sets. The New York State Council for the Arts supported her last feature-length video, "Once Upon A Lifetime."
Matt Bollinger received his BFA in painting and creative writing from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. His paintings and drawings depict fictional social groups who congregate at music shows, in art collectives, or at karaoke bars.
Meghan Gordon received her BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work explores the world of period rooms and their relationship to painting.
Wylie Sophia Garcia is currently enrolled in a low-residency MFA program with Massachusetts College of Art and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. This September 2008, she will defend her thesis and graduate.
SEVEN BELOW ARTS INITIATIVE STUDIO MANAGER & WORKING RESIDENT
R. Elliott Katz's work investigates the relationships between the self in society, the self in the environment and the expanding world of consumption. Katz transforms the day to day objects in shape or material to become symbols for greater themes that are skewed from the mundane towards the global. Katz has exhibited his work throughout the North East, including at the Firehouse Center for the Visual Arts, in Burlington, VT, at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens with Mass MoCA, in Stockbridge, MA and at the Chesterwood Museum in Stockbridge, MA.
REACHING OUT
Part of the mission of Seven Below Arts Initiative is to connect resident artists with the community through public lectures, community events and exhibitions. Seven Below also invites local Art instructors to The Barn for studio visits with contemporary artists as part of its drive to improve arts education in Vermont.
PAST RESIDENTS
- Klara Hobza (‘07) gave a public lecture at the Firehouse Center for the Visual Arts in Burlington, discussing her artist/naturalist project that attempts to banish the European Starling as an allegory to the expatriation of humankind.
- Anna Schachte (‘07) worked closely with an area elementary school to explore the links between poetry and visual art. The workshop led students through an exploration of poetry inspired by a selection of paintings and, after an engaging discussion, guided the students in writing their own poetry.
- Carlos Ferguson (‘07) took his educational component directly to the streets. Using his projection-fitted Airstream for film screenings of found and re-edited home movies, Carlos engaged locals at the supermarket, in town parks, and at public gatherings.
- Josh Reiman (‘07) created a dynamic opportunity for a crew of interns and volunteers to document his performance-oriented project, including the construction of a monumental pyramid from hay bales.