Michael Harrison

I am a contemporary classical composer and pianist specializing in working with just intonation tunings. I am very interested in the creative process in all of the arts, and my professional engagements have included collaborations with filmmakers, visual artists, architects, and choreographers. I started working with just intonation in 1979 while studying and singing North Indian classical music with Pandit Pran Nath and composers La Monte Young and Terry Riley. Before long, I started noticing that pianos always sounded out of tune and realized that I was hearing the compromises of equal temperament. I came to New York City to study as La Monte Young’s tuning and performance assistant. Later I created the “harmonic piano,” an extensively modified grand piano able to play 24 notes per octave. To this day I continue a rigorous study and practice of both Indian music and just intonation piano which informs my entire approach to music.

Michael Harrison_Performance Shot_Photo_2010

Composer/pianist Michael Harrison’s works blend classical music traditions of Europe and North India. He seeks expressions of universality via the physics of sound – music that brings one into a state of concentrated listening as a meditative and even mind-altering experience. Harrison is a Guggenheim Fellowship and NYFA Artist Fellowship recipient. His latest release Seven Sacred Names reached the top 10 classical albums on Billboard and was called “music of positively intoxicating beauty” in The New Yorker. Just Constellations, commissioned and recorded by Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, was called "glacially beautiful" and "luminous" in The New Yorker and selected for NPR's Best 100 Songs of 2020. His work, Revelation, achieved international recognition and inclusion in the Best Classical Recordings of 2007 selections of The New York Times and Boston Globe. Harrison has been commissioned by performers including Alarm Will Sound, Cello Octet Amsterdam, and Maya Beiser. His recent engagements include the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Minimal Music Festival in Amsterdam, and Mattatoio Museum in Rome. His music has been performed at venues including Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Park Avenue Armory, BAM Next Wave Festival, United Nations, the Louvre, Pompidou Centre, MASS MoCA, Spoleto, Big Ears, and Sundance.

Sarah E. Jenkins

My work is inspired by post-industrial landscapes, labor, and experimental animation practices. I explore ideas and images of coal mining/natural resource extraction, acts of disappearing, and labor that is repetitive and unseen. I work primarily in experimental stop motion animation and sound, though my work is rooted in drawing and an ongoing social practice. My conceptual framework grew out of my lived experience and family history in rural northern Appalachia. I grew up playing on coal slag heaps in the Allegheny Mountains. My grandfather was a 5th generation coal miner and my grandma worked in a textile factory as a young woman. My family sold mineral rights to a fracking company when I was a teenager. In addition to these histories, my work comes out of research, materials experimentation, and site-responsive animation in outdoor environments.

Sarah E. Jenkins, Still from Patch Work, 2017, Stop motion animation and Video with sound, HD Video, 00:06:26

Sarah E. Jenkins (she/they) is a queer, Boston-based multidisciplinary artist from northern Appalachia. They create experimental stop motion animation, drawing, and social practice about coal and natural resource extraction, post-industrial stories & landscapes, and invisible labors. She is currently working on a stop motion animation that explores extraction and disappearance. Jenkins is graduate faculty at Massachusetts College of Art & Design, lecturer at SMFA at Tufts Univeristy, and is the animation teaching assistant at Harvard University. Their work has been exhibited in the northeast and internationally, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Wheaton College, The Lesbian and Gay Association in Germany (LSVD), and GRRL HAUS Cinema (Berlin and Boston). Jenkins is a MacDowell Fellow and will be an artist in residence at Marble House Project during the summer of 2022.

Anna Lena Phillips Bell

I write and make artist’s books for the same reasons I’ve made a garden every place I’ve lived: for joy and sustenance. Many of my poems act as notes to self, messages from parts of myself that know better or more—pay attention, slow down. Plants are a great model for this: they ask of us a careful, deep attention, and they themselves move and grow in their own time. My parallel practice as a printer requires similar care. I make work also to find new ways of talking about ecological and social-justice problems that fall under what Rob Nixon calls slow violence—incremental effects that add up to significant harm to people and ecosystems. My aim is to play, in what’s at risk of becoming the ruins, in the hope of unruining them a little.

Anna Lena Phillips Bell_Ornament_Vassar Miller Poetry Prize no. 24_University of North Texas Press_2017

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St. Brigid Press. She is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in literature, and is the 2019–2022 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for eastern NC. Bell’s artist’s books, including A Pocket Book of Forms, a travel-sized guide to prosody, have been selected for exhibitions at Abecedarian Gallery and Asheville Bookworks. Recent work appears in the Southern Review, Subtropics, and the Common Online, and in anthologies including Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia. The editor of Ecotone, she teaches at UNC Wilmington, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in what’s now called North Carolina and beyond.

Deborah Lohse

TruDee, my alter ego, is a manifestation of optimism, fearlessness, unconditional love and play. She was born in 2014 out of a dare to try on a hot pink onesie with a mullet wig in a San Diego thrift shop. She danced her way out of the dressing room, Long Island accent intact and hasn’t stopped since. Trudee, a straddler of genres, has performed in dance programs, circus cabaret evenings and house parties. Guided by love with transparency, enthusiasm and laughter, TruDee creates magic with audiences by connecting strangers to each other and to their own shine.

TruDee dressed in a peach pink sequined gown over a pink turtleneck sporting a mullet and big smile balances on one bedazzled heel in a Horton tilt on the small and glorious stage of Joe's Pub in New York City. Sept 2018 phot by Yi-Chun Wu

DEBORAH LOHSE (comedian, dancer and choreographer) Select performances include DANCENOW, American Dance Festival, Chicago Contemporary Circus Festival, United Solo Theater Festival and The Stonewall Inn. Select commissions include Women In Motion, Mantra Percussion and SUNY Purchase and residencies from The Yard, Marble House Project, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Acadia Summer Arts Program and SILO. As a performer, Lohse has worked with theater director Anne Kauffman, visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra and choreographers Monica Bill Barnes, Cori Olinghouse, Doug Elkins and dance comedy crew LMnO3, Ballez, The Bang Group and currently performs with Bindlestiff Family Cirkus and as her alter ego indefatigable cabaret persona TruDee. TruDee began her dance training at the age of five in ballet, tap and aerobics under the tutelage of Miss Belinda. Her love of theater emerged later on through the coveted role of the Virgin Mary in the church nativity play. TruDee has performed at Joe’s Pub, American Dance Festival, Chicago Contemporary Circus Festival, and the beloved Stonewall Inn. SILO and Marble House Project and Djerassi Artist Residency have hosted her musings. TruDee would like you to also note that she is an award winning lip sync artist and ribboned competitive speed walking champion

Jennifer Monroe

I'm interested in exploring and challenging the perceptions around what and how we eat, what the recent explosion of commodified splashy food imagery says about the role and value of food, and what food aesthetics reveal about us.

Untitled, 2018. Materials: leek, grapes, cauliflower, yogurt, agar jelly, cucumber, tapioca, starfruit, wax bean, lime, plexiglass. Photo by Corey Olsen. thumbnail - Untitled, 2019. Materials: jelly, candy, seaweed, fishtank gravel. Photo by Henry Hargreaves.

Jen Monroe is a chef and artist whose project, Bad Taste, is committed to exploring new ways of thinking about food and consumption, approaching food as fantasy and as a transportive medium. Past work has included a dinner about the honey bee health crisis, a 100 square foot edible map of New York City, food installations for fashion week presentations, experimental cotton candy, concept pop-up dinners, a rendering of a futuristic seafood menu in response to climate change, and a series of immersive, monochromatic ten course "color meals." Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, and Dazed.

Stephan Moore

I am an artist because I believe in the transformational power of concentrated auditory perception. My interest in the act of listening forms the basis of my work. Attention and discernment directed at the audible, to an entire environment or a minute detail, reveals evidence of physical relationships, harmonies, interactions, resonances, patterns, frictions, and the endless varieties of vibration available within the material plane. I want to create auditory experiences that alter perception, that transport the listener into a different state of attention – one that brings awareness to the unconscious habit patterns of attention itself, and that emphasizes environmental details that are normally ignored.

Stephan Moore is a sound artist, designer, composer, improviser, coder, teacher, and curator based in Chicago. His creative work manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvisational outbursts, sound installations, scores for collaborative performances, algorithmic compositions, interactive art, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. He is the curator of sound art for the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, organizing annual exhibitions since 2014. He is also the president of Isobel Audio LLC, which builds and sells his Hemisphere loudspeakers. He was the music coordinator and touring sound engineer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (2004-10), and has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Anthony McCall, and Animal Collective, among many others. He is a Distinguished Associate Professor of Instruction in the Sound Arts and Industries program at Northwestern University.

Valerie Skakun

Skakun’s red blood cells are mutated, spherically shaped and fragile; at age five they became severely anemic and underwent an emergency splenectomy. For decades, as a way of survival as a chronically-ill. person, they have researched ways to create healthy microbiomes and increase the operation of immune systems in order to improve cell function. The philosophy of their recent body of work is informed by being routinely-sick, learning to walk again after a serious bicycle accident, and regrowth after atrophy. They have explored sculptures as objects of ritual, collaborative movement, and play, ranging from time-based devotions to endurance trainings in order to transform mental and physical states of being. The materials and rituals which aid in maintenance of a disabled body inform the materials and processes used in their sculptures.

Image Description: A plastic strainer which holds Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeasts, that resemble cauliflower or curdled cheese, rests upon the lip of a large bowl filled with milk kefir. Behind the bowl are various scattered objects and artifacts arranged on colorful cutting mats: 3D objects made of Beneficial Bacteria Biodegradable Milk Polymer, strained wildflower bundles leftover from fermented tea, prescription bottles, a hospital bracelet, blue jay feathers, blown blue eggs, a dollar store graph composition notebook with a pen on top, and a light therapy lamp.

Valerie Skakun is a multidisciplinary artist based in NYC, where they received a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and an MFA from Hunter College of The City University of New York. They collectively co-exist with and care for several communities of microorganisms. They are appreciative to the Canada Council for the Arts for awarding a Digital Originals grant, New York Foundation for the Arts for a City Artist Corps Grant, Queens Council on the Arts for two SU-CASA grants, PlySpace Residency Program for a Resident Artist Fellowship and a private living space + studio during COVID (2020), ChaNorth for a private living space + studio during COVID (2021), Vermont Studio Center for an Artist Opportunity Fellowship, and to Highly Authorized for a fully funded residency.