2011 Artist in Studio Residents: Justin, Brandon, Hannah, Jerushia, Margaret, Marcy, Ashley, & Nikki

Justin Rabideau

"As a new transplant to the Atlanta area I am so excited to have the opportunity to be involved with the CCHP Artist in Studio residency.  Not only will this program afford me the opportunity to focus on my creative practices, I will also be giving back to the community through the One Love Generation mentorship program. I look forward to engaging with the young artists of OLG in the culturally rich, diverse, and vibrantly artistic world that thrives here. Art and community outreach, a perfect match"

Metamorphosis and ritual inform my work. Assembling my sculptures and drawings from elements and ideas rooted in exploring the natural realm, I describe my relationship to the land as it relates to the specificity of place. Utilizing the rich cultural and natural elements of the Southern landscape, I attempt to form a poetic dialog between the often overlooked, the hidden, and quiet moments of life. From my use of Georgia red clay to hand foraged pecans preserved in blown glass, I guide the audience into discovering the wonder of the unseen world that surrounds us. 

I find inspiration from objects and environments that create a notion of beauty, awe, or wonder. I seek to examine these experiences through the use of materials and artifacts that are unique to these moments and settings. It is my desire that these sculptural objects and drawings encourage questions related to the specificity of one's surroundings, and how these environments and objects affect both mind and body.

Brandon Sadler

"I’m grateful to have been awarded this opportunity. I look forward to making connections, creating with new people, and inspiring growth. I hope to inspire young minds to be active participants in their future, by releasing the past and involving themselves in activities that will benefit their present and future goals. The space to work and experience will take my work to a new phase. It’s exciting."

  Graffiti has always been a passion of mine because of its accessibility to the public and its ability to speak to individuals from all walks of life. My desire to communicate with the community, along with my love for the art form has led to my current exploration of Eastern-inspired calligraphy and imagery originating with Ukiyo-e prints and other Asian sources. As a result of much study, I have developed a hybrid visual language that unites East and West. By employing the elegance of Japanese design, symbols and ciphers, I hope to promote personal change, social evolution, and enlightenment.

Often, the resulting imagery addresses a universal human condition; such as the experiences of inner-city youth. Environmental themes relating to urban issues include manʼs battle with himself, society, and nature. I would like my work to engage and inspire people through my ideas and connectivity to cultural concerns. This will be accomplished by communicating through multiple channels such as; exhibitions, public art, merchandise, and projects that address social justice concerns with youth and nonprofit organizations.

Ashley L. Schick

"I am looking forward to joining this new group of artists/friends in TCP's Creative Community Housing Project. This opportunity will allow me to develop one of my long-term goals of becoming a better art teacher, facilitating creativity and communication. I am excited to have this time and studio space to make work on a larger scale."

The processes I use mark an intersection between technical distance and hands-on proximity, between experience and retelling. Of bookmaking, printmaking, and embroidery, each medium requires a heavily involved process. Each process mediates my marks, translating and reinterpreting my imagery. Thematically, my work is engaged with the telling of stories: how the retelling of anecdotes creates our personal and social identity. Like friends or family members co-telling a story, the materials and I tell the story together in order to create the final image.

I strive for a body of work that is both full of personal symbolism and accessible by the broader public. The stories in my work derive from many oft-told tales in my own family, but they have a resonance with universal American (U.S.) rites of passage in young adulthood. Here we are sorting out our identities, making choices that inherently affect the rest of our lives, and seeing how the telling of a story can shape these accidental moments into the narrative of our lives.

The pieces are retellings that shift with age and change with distance. The prints and books, through their inherent processes or structures, trace a certain passage of time. They allow me to document my place and time. I can thereby locate myself among interconnections of people, objects, ideas, and disciplines.

Marcy Starz

"I'm thrilled to be a part of the CCHP Artist in Studio residency and working with artists who work in such a wide variety of mediums. Part of our responsibility both as artists and members of society is to cultivate an
understanding and appreciation for the arts if we want to see them thrive. It feels great to know that I'll be able to give back to the community by sharing my experience and supporting a youth artist through the alliance between The Creatives Project and One Love Generation.I think this is going to be a very exciting year to see how all of the artists evolve through this program."

Origins are very intriguing to me, specifically the origins of traditions, stereotypes and characteristics. As a society that's so far removed from our origins, we often forget about them when they're just a scratch under the surface of our personalities. My work is an observation of human character and the role gender plays in our perception and expectations of one another. I enjoy juxtaposing highly rendered figures against flat, repetitious surface and the negative space that they subsequently create. In the series of works created on thrift store bed sheets further juxtaposition is created by the slightly feral characteristic of the subject and the pleasant pattern of the fabrics. Animals carry a lot of symbolism and meaning for most people, representing any characteristic from wisdom to violence to fertility and the meanings associated with one animal can vary cross-culturally or stay quite similar. Living in a fast-paced and techno-centric society I'm drawn to timeless imagery that has narrative potential and bridges across generational gaps. My objective is to make engaging artwork that the viewer can relate to, striking them on an instinctual level. This fact leaves the works fairly open to interpretation and I enjoy the variety of responses the pieces receive.

Nikki Starz

"I'm really excited to be a part of the Creative's Project. Being an artist who strives to create social commentary I have always wanted my work to do more than simply be an object. This residency will give me the opportunity to share my creativity. The students in the program are all very talented and I look forward to showing them new ways of making art that will offer them a different perspective. I can't wait to see what they create!"

Art is ambiguous and undefinable. Everything has the potential to be art. The definition of art has been manipulated through a series of historical progressions with ever-changing parameters. There have been impressionists, expressionists, suprematists, constructionists, abstract expressionists, surrealists, pop artists, Dadaists, and so on. Malevich’s white square on a white background defined art as pure, universal human emotion. Duchamp’s Fountain defined art by questioning the nature of art and its institutions while altering what is expected of art objects. I am fascinated by an evolving definition of art and the vastness of its meanings. Through the use of art historical references, as dark, comedic, and satirical devices, I bring the viewer to art’s past in order to make them wonder about where art is today. Using historical references as a foundation, my work also introduces contemporary elements to question and poke fun at the society I live in.

Hannah Perner-Wilson

"I feel so lucky to have received the CCHP Artist in Studio residency. Having just moved to Atlanta, I'm really looking forward to continuing my practice in such a great space with so many nice people! I am particularly excited beacuse the program offers such a great venue for teaching and interacting with the local community."

Technology has become increasingly complex and ubiquitous in our lives and while consumer electronics may be well designed and functional they are both aesthetically and functionally impersonal.

Through my work I consider a scenario in which building electronics has become intuitive and accessible, and personal electronics are goods that we make for ourselves. We not only determine how these devices look, we also decide what they can do and how they do it. As we begin building our own electronics in a variety of ways we start to live in a world of electronic diversity. In such a world the kinds of electronics we surround ourselves with are unique and expressive of our individual needs and desires. The practice of building electronics is no longer exclusively industrial and uniform.

My work not only speculates within this future scenario, but takes steps towards achieving such a diversity in which personal technologies exist. I create working prototypes to demonstrate by example the kinds of electronic artifacts we might build. I research and develop new ways of building electronics, and a significant part of my work goes into documenting and disseminating these techniques so that they can be applied by others. I feel strongly about portraying electronics as a creative medium that is accessible and appeals to a diverse audience, so that as the technologies that surround us become ever more complex, we become ever more accustomed to building what we want.

the supporting artists:

Two alternate canidates have also been selected for participation. Although these artists will not recieve studio space, they will benefit from the exhibition and promotional services and opportunities provided by TCP. In turn they provide additional support to our programming. 

Margaret Hiden

"Atlanta's art community has so much potential and there is such a presence of creative energy-with organizations like the Creatives Project playing a key role! I am so grateful to be a part of this new gathering of unique, diverse and talented artists as well as have the opportunity to give back to the community by working with the youth from One Love Generation. I'm excited to see how the next year unfolds!"

As an artist, I am inherently an educator, and therefore feel it is my role to bring my passion for the arts into a community setting where I can share my knowledge, experience and craft with those who are also eager to learn, create and communicate. With its vernacular appeal and illusionistic base in reality, the photographic image has the ability to reach an eager audience of all walks of life. Creating mixed media art that is based in the medium of photography lies at the core of my studio practice. Most specifically, my work and research explore the desire behind and nature and function of the discipline throughout history and contemporary practice. Having an appreciation for experimentation and diversity, a broad spectrum of photographic processes, working and learning methods, styles and study of historical precedence are incorporated into my work. Processes utilized in my creative pursuits include traditional black and white darkroom, alternative processes, analogue and digital capture, scanning, advanced digital manipulation, workflow management, multi and mixed media, as well as narrative story telling through the photographic essay.

Currently, my personal work focuses on memory and its relationship to photography. Specifically, this incorporates issues of memory-loss affliction, the history of the snapshot relating to the desire behind using photograph as document, curating from familial archives, appropriation and the importance of context.

Jerushia Graham

"The act of creating is great for the mind, body, & soul. It's a wonderful thing to have a place that nurtures that in a diverse array of artists, AND gives back to the community.This is one of those rare win/win situations in which artists get much needed studio space to work, creative youth get professional mentors, and the community at large receives art that's engaging and inspirational. Everyone involved is so talented, they can't help but magnify one another."

I work in many different media but the most important aspect of my art is human interaction. Rather than outlining a full narrative my works are fragmented, implied narratives which invite the viewer to become my
collaborator. Viewers are encouraged to provide their own impression of the moments before or after the images that I present. The images I create reflect on the ways in which we communicate with one another (i.e. body language, misunderstandings, unspoken understandings) and how we nourish our souls (i.e. quiet meditation, laughter, friendship, craft, recreation). I am always striving to create work that feels simple and honest, hence my use of limited palettes and chosen media: papercuts, woodblocks, quilting, sewing & knitting. These are materials and techniques that are accessible, can be utilitarian as well as artistic, are very tactile, and whose repetitive quality is soothing. I would like to expand my sense of story into a full environmental experience. In previous installations, art objects served as substitutes for the human presence in my implied narratives.

  CCHP Artist-in-Residency:

A new partnership with Atlanta real-estate investment firm Pohl Real Estate expands our program to include housing. Fall 2012 two local artists will be selected to share a three-bedroom EarthCraft-renovated home located in the historic west Atlanta neighborhood of Adair Park. The residency will allow each artist an extremely affordable live/work environment while engaging their creative skills for the greater good. Each recipient will complete arts-based youth outreach through TCP's Community Arts Program (CAP) whose beneficiaries include VSA Arts of Georgia, Jacob's Ladder, and One Love Generation. While in the program residents will also receive promotional support, exhibition opportunities and professional development.

• Note: Each applicant must be able to committ four hours one night a week to arts outreach with  our outreach beneficiaries

Pohl Real Estate has been investing in West Atlanta for the past 30 years. In 2009, Pohl Real Estate was one of 12 Atlanta developers awarded funds from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP). Having partnered with the City of Atlanta/NSP, Pohl Real Estate has expanded into the Historic West End and the Adair Park neighborhoods.  Pohl's recent NSP homes are all renovated to EarthCraft guidelines (using "Green Grant" funding assistance from Enterprise Community Partners/Home Depot).  All NSP properties are rented within the Federal rental income guidelines provided by HUD and NSP - as a result, tenants realize amazing rental rates on energy efficient EarthCraft certified homes.

2012-14 RESIDENT ARTISTS:

Gyun Hur

When art and life intersect at a pivotal tension point, a dialogue develops in multiple dimensions. The tangibility of symbolically charged materials such as silk flowers acts as an agent of communication in my developing body of work. I have been experimenting with performative installations where improvised rituals and materials converge. I am interested in constructing a visual and psychological space where narratives of labor, loss, and place reside. In my recent installations, a community of people around me and I carefully disassembled and hand-shredded collected silk flowers, then laid them on floor, replicating my mother’s wedding blanket patterns, seck-dong. Specific methodical destruction and labor-intensive reassembly of the silk flowers create an aesthetic happening, turning public or art space into an introspective site of dialogues. My work is at a turning point where my process and materials heavily invested in labor are responding more to the architectural space and interior landscape of emotions. Ephemeral and vulnerable nature of my installations holds unspoken potential of rupture in silence. Through the menial process of making, selective collections of objects transform into a poignant residuum of the past and the present. A sentimental installment of materials and insertion of a physical body facilitate an occupied territory as a platform for opened dialogues, both internal and external.

Andre Keichian

My work addresses topics of identity. I am interested in investigating the complexity of the self through collaborative participation. I am attracted to the dynamic nature of video and film. The intersection of image, sound and movement appropriately speak to the fluidity of identity. I believe these mutable qualities challenge static depictions of the body as object, as any collaborating persons maintain an essential role through their physical participation and engagement. I focus on creating a climate of trust. In part, I establish this through the means of a fixed visual structure, so as to set a physical boundary of safe space and to establish a distance from the camera while shooting. I keep these technical decisions simple and clearly defined as to have the freedom to address and play with the performativity of the work. My aesthetic is deliberate but improvised; everything is only shot once and is unedited. I am dependent on the exchange of participants; it is a balance of having (structural) control while maintaining openness for the unexpected. I am compelled by the idea that I can never truly predict the outcome of any particular piece. This creates a neutrality of power and interdependence between artist and participant, and artist as participant. In this sense, the documented outcome speaks not only to the expression within the moment, but relies on the relational exchange of those involved. It is about setting up a stage to playfully address that, which is personal and possibly uncomfortable. But it is rooted in something real, something that is mutually desired to capture on film. It is inspired through dialogue, texts, and experiences and performed with or by those who have had similar histories, curiosities and desires for personal expression. It is about trust, acknowledging that though we cannot control our outside influences, we do respect one another and ourselves. This is enacted in the moments when we work together and in the ways in which I speak of or place our work thereafter. My work serves as studies; these videos are part of an ongoing survey. Though they largely address themes of gender and sexuality, I am additionally moving towards the consideration of the role of culture, ethnicity and language within a larger spectrum of community and identity.

MAO

I am haunted by memories: a tattered blue blanket, shattered glass, a blood stained carpet, the distressing finality of a door slammed shut—the absence that follows. I am haunted by sounds: the high pitch of a mother’s cries, the jarring suddenness of an open hand striking a woman’s face, a squeaking mattress heard through a bedroom door, the voices of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder spun from an eight track recorder. I am haunted by smells: the dying embers of an incense stick—frankincense and myrrh, the stench of pissed drenched hallways in New York City Subways, the warm scent of recognition buried deep within the fabric of a father’s suits. What is the nature of memory? Where does it reside, and how do present experiences reflect our lived past? In what rooms of the subconscious do we store our pain and our regret, with the hope that the darkness will enshroud all recollection? I am interested in those hidden spaces—spaces that facilitate a sensory experience that may dislodge an imbedded memory. My work is primarily concerned with creating “visual triggers”—objects that in form and content work to undermine the compartmentalized self. Through the use of encoded language, unconventional materials, personal and collective memory, I attempt to unmask the pathology of imposed forgetting—a pathology deeply entrenched within the American psyche.

Charlie Watts

When I approach my photographic practice, I envision the creation of images not of this world. I seek to use photography as a stepping stone to an unknown realm just past consciousness to the peripheral. During the past year, I have immersed myself in creating new work that embodies the spirit of the late Francesca Woodman. Like Woodman, I have created art that relies heavily on the use of blur, creating painterly, otherworldly photographs and placing femininity in abandoned landscapes. Advancing this mystification of the use of blur in abandoned spaces, I have initiated an allegorical dissemination and surrealist attitude towards photography in my quest to inform new work through remnants that Woodman left behind. The result is a unique aesthetic more closely related to early 20th-century movement of Pictorialism. Current movements in photography are harkening to the past. Both Woodman and I used an industrial camera subverted by the mnemonics of artisanal hands to create photographic art that appears more like dreamscapes than realistic representations. These photographs are quiet, simple pictures that resemble experimental paintings rather than technical amalgamations constructed with calculations, chemicals, and precise executions. Through the use of blur, many of the photographers allude to flight. Many figures in the presentation are not entirely readable in the photographs—making them appear more ghostly than human. The emphasis in my photography brings imagination to fruition and shows a different realm, a visual escape from the mundane to fantasy. As an artist, I create work out of a desire to explore all that goes on in my dreamscapes and to elevate photography to its proper place in the fine arts.

VIEW RESIDENTS' COMPLETE PORFOLIOS HERE

THE C.A.P COMMUNITY LIASON:

This position was created for an indiviual possessing exemplary leadership skills and an unwaivering commitment to the arts community through personal outreach efforts in Atlanta. The CAP Community Liaison leads group instruction and activities on Tuesday nights with One Love Generation Youth and also acts as a Resident Advisor to our "Artist in Studio" participants providing them with guidance and peer support throughout the course of the program.

KEIF schleifer

"Creative minds, talented hands, and compassionate hearts--that’s what it looks like behind the scenes of The Creatives Project. Everyone connected with TCP cares profoundly about giving something of themselves to enrich others. This is a value I hold high and these are the kind of people I strive to work beside. I strongly believe that TCP’s programming, support and outreach is going to alter the direction of Atlanta’s art scene and make a viable impact upon the wider community. I’m so honored to be awarded the opportunity to join in this endeavor."

Keif Schleifer (right) and TCP supporter Marmar Stewart at our Patron Appreciation party.

keif holds two A.A. degrees, one focusing on mathematics, the other on chemistry. She has an A.B. degree from Wellesley College where she studied art + architecture and a M.S. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology where she studied architecture + building technology. She is a veteran of the U.S. military working as an aviation medic and firefighter. As a civilian, that Firefighter/EMT experience has taken her to disasters in the U.S. and abroad: providing medical and flood relief in Zambia, fighting forest fires in Florida, conducting rescue and recovery at the World Trade Center towers shortly after their collapse and delivering medical supplies to Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

keif is the principal of KSDesign and a sculptor with marble works in public and private collections. A recent commission was a small monument marking the grave of a four-term Atlanta mayor in Historic Oakland Cemetery. Also at Oakland, keif co-created Arts in the Park, a 10 day, public, cultural arts event. keif is the director of engineering and logistics for Living Walls and provides logistical support for FLUX Projects.

keif is a co-founder of DanceATL and was selected for MAACC’s 2009 Arts Leaders of Metro Atlanta. She currently serves on the board of directors for CORE Performance Company, Mad Housers and the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association. Previous board memberships include JASMYN, Just Cause, Working Title Playwrights, Atlanta Coalition of Performing Arts, and Brooks & Company Dance.

We are truly fortunate to have these great individuals active within our Atlanta community. Please take a minute to congratulate them. Support their work, attend their exhibitions, and get to know them as individuals. We have no doubt that this group will help to shape our city's creative landscape for years to come.