Past Residents
Past Resident2012: The New York Community Trust’s Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund
Steffani Jemison
Steffani Jemison is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers issues that arise when conceptual practices are inflected by black history and vernacular culture. Jemison uses rigorous formal methods to explore her interests in the politics of serial form, the limits of narrative description, and the tension between improvisation, repetition, and fugitivity. One body of mixed media works employs acetate as print medium, glazing, or support; another uses transcription of found and staged conversations as a generative process. Steffani also organizes social and archival projects; the most recent of these is her collaboration with Jamal Cyrus, Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet, an exhibition, reading room, and discussion space inspired by the politics of early 20th century African American periodicals.
Steffani Jemison (born 1981, USA) received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, her collaborative project, Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet, was presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art; she also participated in exhibitions, screenings, and readings at ThreeWalls, Southern Exposure, Carol Jazzar Gallery, the Houston Museum of African American Culture, and other venues. Her work will be included in forthcoming exhibitions at Real Art Ways, LAXART, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. She has participated in artist residencies at Project Row Houses, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Jemison is the editor of Future Plan and Program, a publishing project featuring literary works by visual artists.
Steffani Jemison, Truth and Greatness, 2010, Archival pigment prints on Angelica Photo Rag, Lightjet prints on Fuji Crystal Archive, 11 x 14 and 8 x10 in. Courtesy of the artist
Steffani Jemison, Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet (collaboration with Jamal Cyrus), 2011, Hand-bound photocopied periodicals, and display structure, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist
Steffani Jemison, Truth and Greatness, 2010, Archival pigment prints on Angelica Photo Rag, Lightjet prints on Fuji Crystal Archive, 11 x 14 and 8 x 10 in. Courtesy of the artist
Steffani Jemison, Untitled (Transparency, for Derrion Albert), 2010, Inkjet print on acetate, newspaper clipping, hanging hardware, and glazing, 11 × 81/2 in. (27.94 × 21.59 cm). Courtesy of the artist
Steffani Jemison, The Meaning of Various Photographs to Tyrand Needham, 2009, Video projection, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Spaces Gallery
Residents from United States
Past Resident2012: Creative Australia
Alex Kershaw
Alex Kershaw uses video to mediate intercultural exchange with people and communities from a specific place. In this process, everyday people become participants and collaborators. Kershaw conceives participation as a productive entity in itself, where both subject and ‘object’ are defined through the doing of artistic praxis. Quotidian rituals used to connect and to acculturate, provide the subject matter for developing the choreography of people’s individual ‘performances’. As a result his stylistic approach shifts between: performative, cinematic, and ‘ethnographic’ genres. In his work the amalgam of fact/fiction and ‘rational’/libidinal is not a substitution of one-for-the-other, but kept in play—involving the production of a different kind of reality that could equally be a variation of realism or a new imaginary.
Alex Kershaw (born Sydney, Australia, 1977), completed a BFA in 2000 and an MFA at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales in 2010. Kershaw has exhibited extensively within Australia at venues including: The Art Gallery of NSW, Artspace, Performance Space, Heide Museum of Modern Art, The National Portrait Gallery, and The Australian Centre for Photography. In 2009 a survey of his recent video work was held at the Beaconsfield Gallery in London. In 2009 his The Phi Ta Khon Projecti, was selected for the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. Most recently he participated in the show Tokyo Story, as part of the International Creator in Residence Program, at Tokyo Wondersite, Japan.
Events & Exhibitions
Salon: Hector Arce-Espasas & Alex Kershaw
May 22, 2012
Alex Kershaw, One of Several Centres, 2007–2010, Nine channel HD video and sound installation. Courtesy of the artist, Performance Space at Carriageworks
Alex Kershaw, One of Several Centres, 2007–2010, Nine channel HD video and sound installation. Courtesy of the artist, Performance Space at Carriageworks
Alex Kershaw, The Phi Ta Khon Project, 2008-2009, Three channel HD video and sound installation. Courtesy of the artist and Grantpirrie Gallery
Alex Kershaw, One of Several Centres, 2007–2010, Nine channel HD video and sound installation. Courtesy of the artist
Alex Kershaw, The Phi Ta Khon Project, 2008-2009, Three channel HD video and sound installation. Courtesy of the artist
Residents from Australia
Past Resident2012: The New York Community Trust’s Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund
Abigail DeVille
Through bricolage, painting, and sculpture, Abigail DeVille cobbles together a visual mass that speaks to the material culture of the present moment. She experiments using found and inherited domestic objects in order to make a connection to the universe. W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double-consciousness is the conceptual frame DeVille uses to deconstruct two spatial relationships: the claustrophobic space of the urban environment violently clashing with the infinite expanse of the universe. Black holes are an integral metaphor. DeVille warps the time of physical objects. Her objects speak to the physical infinite expanse of universal time and societal ills of the present moment. DeVille’s work is interested in making the visible representation of the invisible.
Abigail DeVille (born 1981, New York City) received her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2007. She received the Camille Hanks Cosby fellowship to participate in the Skowhegan Residency Program in 2007. DeVille was a participant in the art world’s first reality television show, Artstar, which aired on Gallery HD from June 2006 – January 2009 and culminated with an exhibition at Deitch Projects (NY). She has exhibited at El Museo Del Barrio, Vogt Gallery, project spaces Recess Activities Inc., The Bronx River Art Center and Marginal Utility in Philadelphia, PA. DeVille is a 2011 MFA graduate in painting at The Yale School of Art.
Abigail DeVille, Mirror, Mirror..., 2011, Empty Alexi vodka bottles and broken mirror, Dimensions variable
Abigail DeVille, Untitled (Boots), 2011, Three Timberland boots, tar, trash bags, and chicken wire, Dimensions variable
Abigail DeVille, New York at Dawn, 2010, Tyvek, enamel and latex paint, dirt, American flags, graphite, lamp shade, synthetic hair, polyurethane varnish, chicken wire, plastic sheeting, plaster, garbage bags, pâpier-maché, fake eyelashes, duct tape, wood chips, wire, canvas, cigarette butt, acrylic yarn, metal, salt dough, and hardware, 114 × 102 × 96 in. (289.56 × 259.08 × 243.84 cm)
Abigail DeVille, Dark Star, 2010, Trash bags, wood, paper, paint, paper pulp, fabric, colored lights, and plastic drop cloths, 15413/16 × 342 in. (393.19 × 868.68 cm)
Abigail DeVille, Black Hole Pit, 2010, Trash bags, chicken wire, and accumulated signifiers, 36 × 72 × 72 in. (91.44 × 182.88 × 182.88 cm)