Past Residents

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Past Resident
2012: Foundation for a Civil Society

Tomaz Furlan

Much of Tomaz Furlan’s work is part of a continuous series called WEAR. The fourteen iterations of WEAR each include a video as well as a sculpture, machine, or installation. In WEAR, the sculptures are props often in the form of clothes; the title WEAR is derived from this. While the title suggests that these pieces are just clothes, they are also a functional object made for ritual action. The WEAR project is an attempt to reconcile both banality and stupidity.

Tomaz Furlan studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Art, Ljubljana. His work consists of video performances, sculptures and video installations. The video performances highlight the use of dresses or body accessories made for a certain purpose. He has been part of many exhibtions in Slovenia and internationally including Manifesta 9, Genk; In the Loop: Contemporary Contemporary Video Art from the European Union, Washington; Limited Access II, Parkingallery, and Eyedentify Yourself, SCCA Ljubljana. Furlan lives and works in Ljubljana.

Past Resident
2012: Artadia

Leslie Shows

Leslie Shows’ materially and associatively complex works reflect an interest in expanded representations of landscape and “wilderness”, scale, deep time, and both Eastern and Western philosophies of matter- in particular our perceptual, psychological and economic relationship to inorganic matter. Focusing on the disorienting dimensions of objecthood, her most recent body of work includes spectral, reflective images of scanned pyrite rocks reconstructed in engraved aluminum, sand, ink, crushed glass and plexiglass; a floor sculpture cast in sulfur; and a video incorporating Kafka’s short story The Cares of a Family Man. Using mixed media but concerned with the materiality of painting, Shows plays the textural, sensorial properties of materials like aluminum, sulfur, or reflected light against their illusionistic, signifying and representational capacities.

Leslie Shows’ work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the 2011 Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil. She has been the recipient of a Eureka Fellowship, an SFMOMA SECA Award, an Artadia Award, and the Tournesol Award from Headlands Center for the Arts. Shows has had recent solo exhibitions at Haines Gallery in San Francisco, Jack Hanley Gallery in New York, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha. Her work has been written about in Artforum, Modern Painters and The New Yorker, and she has published two artist books, Heap of Elements, through Headlands Center, and Black Icebergs, through Hassla.

Bettina John

Bettina John’s work explores her fascination with the ever-growing importance of the world’s largest cities and what they mean to the individual experience. She looks at how people manifest their identity in their appearance as well as what is behind that surface and investigates the insecurities a global life brings about, as well as displacement, isolation, anonymity and the construction of one’s image.

Bettina John (born 1981) lives and works between London and Halle, Germany. After graduating from Burg Giebichenstein, she expanded her practice into the field of performing arts. During her master studies at Goldsmiths University in 2009 she met two artists whom she continues to collaborate. Together they showed at live – and performance – art events such as the Stockholm Theatre Festival Stoff and the Accidental Festival in London and participated in several group exhibitions across the UK.