Past Residents

Residents Map

Past Resident
2012: Pollock-Krasner Foundation

Kakyoung Lee

Kakyoung Lee’s moving images are focused on the repetitive nature of personal daily life. The monotonous daily ritual is deconstructed and reconstructed in a fresh configuration in which nothing is the same and all things are in continuous flux. Lee combines hundreds of hand drawn images and prints to construct a moving image that reflects the sequence of activities in ordinary life and alludes to her search for her identity in the different geographic and cultural milieus through which she has passed in the travels between her two home countries, South Korea and the United States.

Kakyoung Lee (born 1975) works with moving images, prints, drawings, and installations. She received a BFA from Hong‐Ik University, Seoul, and a MFA from Purchase College, NY. Lee has exhibited widely in Korea and the United States including the Drawing Center; the Lower East Side Print Shop; the Queens Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Seoul Arts Center. Lee has participated in residencies at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, Brooklyn; Yaddo, Saratoga Springs; the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; the Lower East Side Printshop, New York; and the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, New York. Lee is a recipient of awards from the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2010), the Korea Arts Foundation of America Award for Visual Arts (2010), and the AHL Foundation Award in New York (2009). Lee’s works are in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Library of Congress, Washington D.C., among others.

Keren Benbenisty

Conflict, as a theme, pervades much of Keren Benbenisty’s artistic practice. Suggesting contradiction, paradox and ambiguity, her work invests the conceptual with what appears to be its antithesis – romanticism. By investigating the emotional depths of the individual and its relation to language, Benbenisty’s work brings to mind the tension between the two. Coming from a current western context, there is a significant correspondence with Benbenisty’s oriental Middle Eastern origins. Using drawing, video, and installation, she aims to create “contemporary relics” that straddle diverse cultures and temporal perceptions. Benbenisty transforms objects, images, ready-mades, ephemeral materials and texts from the everyday, the banal, the ordinary, moving towards the unique, the individual.

Keren Benbenisty (born 1977, Herzeliya, Israel) moved to Paris in 1998 and graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2004. She attended California Institute of the Arts in 2003 and Skowhegan School of Art, Maine, in 2009. Her work has been shown in different venues and art fairs around Europe.

Past Resident
2011: Institut Français

Claire Fontaine

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based artist collective, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to develop a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box – as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes – there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.” Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.

Recent shows include Future Tense, El Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico D.F.; Economies, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; No Family Life, Air de Paris, Paris; Fighting Gravity, Regina Gallery, London and Moscow; P.I.G.S., MUSAC Contemporary Art Museum, Castilla y León, Spain; Where Do We Migrate To?, Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, Baltimore; PhotoMonth, Bunker Stuzki Contemporary Art Museum, Krakow; Network, Mastermind, Casablanca; and Relationship Building, Kunstlerhaus Wien, Vienna. Claire Fontaine is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Metro Pictures, New York; T293, Napoli and Rome; Galerie Neu, Berlin; and Galerie Chantal Crousel / Air de Paris, Paris. She is now preparing a catalogue with Buchhandlung Walther König.