Changing Landscapes
New Residencies to Begin at A Studio in the Woods
NEW ORLEANS -- Three artists have been selected for the Changing Landscapes: A Dialogue Between Art and the Environment, the new artist residency program at A Studio in the Woods in Lower Coast Algiers. The six-week residencies are designed to provide an opportunity for artists to engage their communities in addressing the sort of ecological challenges that are exemplified in South Louisiana.
“We are all aware that our natural environment is in dire straits and that climate change and human threats impact our built environment, and thus our quality of life,” said ASITW founder Lucianne Carmichael. “ASITW’s goal is to intersect its location in a protected natural environment with its community resources to provide artists with tools, time and space for critical thinking, the development of new strategies and the creation of a dynamic process as a catalyst of social change for the benefit of the environment.”
Andrea Myers of Chicago, Illinois will be in residence in November and December. A painter, printmaker and sculptor, Myers says her interest is in exploring the “space between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional,” using painting as a matrix to work against and to stretch the realms of other media. She will work on a paper project, in which she constructs layered pieces that become three dimensional from the process of compiling pieces of paper and fusing each piece into a whole. After screen printing open fields of color onto each piece, she randomly glues them, then tears them by hand, creating a “spontaneous composition that is derived from a subtractive process.”
Myer’s work has been exhibited in galleries throughout Chicago, as well as shows around the country.
The central theme of the work of artist San Francisco artist Anne Devine, who will be in residence in January and February, is loss and remembrance, sometimes visibly applied to larger scale projects which examine one’s relationship to the environment. While at ASITW, she will explore space – the space between herself and others, between things real and imagined, between ideas, objects, individuals and communities.
She serves as director of Greenscene Media, a non-profit collective promoting creative combinations of environmental information, popular culture, music and multi-media and has produced a number of video works.
In March and April, Rafael Hector Joaquin Santos of Buenos Aries, Argentina will visit the artists’ sanctuary. The founder of Ala Plastica, an arts/environmental non-profit organization in Argentina, he develops projects on socially engaged art, such as the AA Project – Art in Social Context, a permanent installation created as a survival space for communities suffering the effect of floods caused by mega-engineering in Del Plata river basin.
While at ASITW, he will use photography, map creation, text development and interactive behavior as part of a diverse collaborative process.
The artists were selected via a multidisciplinary jury process that evaluated the proposals based upon several criteria, including creativeness and integrity of the proposal, evidence of rigorous thinking about the vision for the residency and harmony of purpose with the ASITW mission and evidence of previous exploration of environmental topics.
A Studio in the Woods, a program of Tulane University’s Center for Bioenvironmental research, is dedicated to preserving the endangered bottomland hardwood forest and providing within it a peaceful retreat where visual, literary and performing artists can work uninterrupted.
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Steward's Cottage
