Erika Meitner

Artist Statement

All of my books are united by my ongoing explorations into the relationship between body and place. My earlier poems address the pleasures and dangers of women’s corporeal experiences, while investigating the interstitial spaces of everyday America. These geographical borderlands are springboards for plumbing ideas of home, exile, and personal and collective memory. As a poet who also works in documentary modes, I’ve undertaken projects in collaboration with photographers to investigate social and political systems as they play out in particular (often urban) environments. My newer work addresses issues of environmental justice, gender, embodiment, and technology. I’ve been trying to find a language and framework for larger questions about survival and comfort, abundance and scarcity, justice and grace. How do we survive danger? What are our relationships to systems of power? What do we mine from the earth and each other, and what do we destroy in the process—or leave in our wake?

cover of book - Useful Junk

Bio

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010)—a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Her newest book, Useful Junk, was published by BOA Editions in 2022. Her poems have appeared most recently in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, Poetry, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Loghaven Artist Residency, Blue Mountain Center, T.S. Eliot House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Bethany Arts Community, the US-UK Fulbright Commission, and the Mandel Institute. Meitner is currently an professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

erikameitner.com

Leigh N. Gallagher

Artist Statement

My fiction concerns itself with enduring quests for meaning, integrity, and connection amidst the atomization and destabilization of contemporary American life. Under the influence of affect theory, psychology, and poetics, I endeavor to write generous, multipronged narratives that use language, syntax, and character to reflect human experience at its most mystifying.

Novel cover image 2022

Bio

Leigh N. Gallagher is a fiction writer from California currently living in Philadelphia. Her first novel, Who You Might Be, was published by Henry Holt in 2022, and her short stories and nonfiction have appeared in many publications, including Lit Hub, American Short Fiction, the Reading Room anthology, and in nontraditional formats through collaborations with artists and musicians. She works as a community educator, freelance editor, and writer for a Los Angeles-based gallery.

www.leighngallagher.com

Payton MacDonald

Artist Statement

My Sonic Peaks graphic scores resist easy categorization, primarily because they fill a need for me to explore new sonic territory, much of which is through conscious or unconscious multilingual exploration of trans-idiomatic musical grammar. The holy grail of speculative fiction (aka “science fiction” or “fantasy”)— which has had a profound influence on my artistic outlook—is the Sense of Wonder, often explained as an overwhelming experience of awe awakened when one encounters worlds and perspectives that are completely new and force one to reevaluate one’s fundamental understanding of one’s place in the universe and the most pressing existential questions that concern us as a species and a civilization. My interest in various world music traditions, as well as exotic pet husbandry and ultra-endurance sports, and all sorts of forms of avant-garde art are all an expression of my obsession with the Sense of Wonder.

Sonic Peaks score from Halcott mountain, Catskills, NY.

Bio

Payton MacDonald is a composer, percussionist (specializing in marimba), singer, and filmmaker. He explores the frontiers of art in a variety of settings, from Carnegie Hall to remote wilderness locations. He spent his early years drumming along with jazz records, while exploring the Rocky Mountains near his home in Idaho by foot, bicycle, and skis. Eventually he was shaped into a percussionist who plays marimbas, snare drums, bicycles, plants, pots and pans, and anything else that might produce an interesting tone. Along the way Payton discovered Indian classical music, and has studied that music for over 20 years. He often dreams up and executes large-scale, ambitious projects, such as his film Sonic Divide, which shows Payton pedaling his mountain bike 2,500 miles along the Continental Divide, while performing 30 new pieces of music, or his Sonic Peaks project, in which Payton hikes to the summit of hundreds of mountains and creates new music reflecting those experiences. He has released over 100 recordings. Payton studied music formally at the University of Michigan (BFA) and Eastman School of Music (MM and DMA), as well as with the legendary Gundecha Brothers (Dhrupad vocal) and Pandit Sharda Sahai (tabla). He teaches music at William Paterson University, and tours nationally and internationally as a percussionist, singer, and speaker.

www.paytonmacdonald.com

Melisa Tien

Artist Statement

Melisa Tien is a playwright, lyricist, opera librettist, and producer invested in making formally unconventional, socially relevant, and emotionally evocative work.

I repurposed a score from a workshop of my opera Forever (premiering at the Kennedy Center in 2024) and made a collage that touches on the piece's environmental themes.

Bio

Melisa Tien is the librettist of the operas Family Heirloom (Experiments in Opera, 2024), The Big Swim (Asia Society Texas Center/Houston Grand Opera, 2024), Forever (Washington National Opera American Opera Initiative, 2024), Song of the Nightingale (On Site Opera, 2023), and The Beehive (University of Northern Iowa, 2023); primary lyricist of the music-theater works Swell (HERE, 2021) and Daylight Saving; and author of the plays Best Life (JACK, 2022), Yellow Card Red Card (Ice Factory, 2017), The Boyd Show, and Familium Vulgare. She has been published in the anthologies Theater Artists Making Theatre With No Theater (Tripwire Harlot Press, 2020) and Modern Music for New Singers: 21st Century American Art Songs (North Star Music, 2021). She is currently a librettist for the American Opera Project’s 2023-2025 Composers & the Voice project and a member of Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative. She was a member of Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s 2022 Ground Floor Residency Lab, Experiments in Opera’s 2022 Writers’ Room, The Assembly Theater Project’s 2021 Deceleration Lab, a recipient of a 2020-2021 grant from the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre, and a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Playwriting/Screenwriting. BA, UCLA; MFA, Columbia University.

www.melisatien.com

Diana Shpungin

Artist Statement

Diana Shpungin’s work is dedicated to challenging ideas of drawing through sculptural and time-based forms. Her works are led by a heart-strong conceptualism, involving obsessive processes while exploring themes of memory, failure, loss, and repair, –employing optimism in a quest for empathy across identity lines.The use of graphite pencil is often the foundation of the work.

Diana Shpungin "Always Begin At The End" 2022 marble, graphite, pencil and mixed media Exhibition installation view Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY The exhibition centers around a marble tiled arena, a felled chandelier, a record player, seashells, chairs, chain link fencing, cast body parts, doors, cardboard boxes, a reconfigured American flag, and loose change add to the range of quotidian objects that the artist has carefully scattered throughout this sprawling stage and across the gallery walls. This exhibition features many objects made from cast paper, alongside combined found objects that the artist alters, construction materials, and a single hand-drawn pencil animation metaphorically smashed by rocks. Much of Shpungin’s works can be seen as “drawings” in the sense that they are literally covered in drawing’s most ubiquitous medium: graphite pencil. Shpungin painstakingly covers each object but does not obscure it, in a process that both masks and gives depth. photography: Etienne Frossard

Bio

Born in Riga, Latvia, Shpungin emigrated as a child to New York City. She received her MFA from The School of Visual Arts, NY and has exhibited extensively in both national and international venues including: The Bronx Museum; The Brooklyn Museum; Invisible Exports; Sculpture Center, NY; Smack Mellon, NY; The Aldrich Museum, CT; The Bass Museum, Miami; MASS MoCA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson; SiTE:LAB; Futura Center, Prague; Galerie Zurcher, Paris; and Tomio Koyama, Tokyo. Shpungin was awarded the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, the NYFA Fellowship in Sculpture and multiple grants from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In addition she has been awarded residencies from Art Omi, BAU at The Camargo Foundation, Bronx Museum AIM, MacDowell, and Yaddo among others. Shpungin’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, Hyperallergic, New York Magazine,The New York Times among many other publications. Shpungin has been an Assistant Professor at Parsons: The New School for Design for over a decade.

https://dianashpungin.com

Bang Geul Han

Artist Statement

I’m interested in text as sites of disclosure and declaration that blur and complicate the distinction between public and private. I collect and reorganize select texts, including legal documents, government memoranda, and written and spoken words by figures in positions of power, and create patterns in the intersections between reproductive rights, misogyny, and questions of race and class, while injecting stories and formal interventions to disrupt the dominant narrative. Many of my artworks, whether in the form of a virtual reality or experimental textiles, function as alternative archives that center and connect the voices of those in the margins while highlighting the systemic limitations and the subversive potential of language and speech. In my recent practice, weaving has become a visual and tactile manifestation of the analytical and methodical process of coding, allowing viewers to access my work in a wide range of registers, from meditative and analytical to interactive and immersive.

Warp and Weft 05, 2022, Hand-woven paper tapestry, 81" x 250", commissioned and premiered at the 2022 Art on Paper art fair. Photo by Steven Mygind Pedersen

Bio

Bang Geul Han (b. 1978) is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, text, code, performance, and, most recently, weaving. Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, her work has been shown in venues including The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Queens Museum, NURTUREart, A.I.R. Gallery, The 8th Floor at The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, Smack Mellon in New York City, and Centro Internazionale per l’Arte Contemporanea in Rome. She is a recipient of a number of artist residencies and fellowships, including 2023 Creative Capital Award, Artist in the Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program, A.I.R. Fellowship, MacDowell Fellowship, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, PA. Han received her MFA (2005) in Electronic Integrated Arts from NYSCC at Alfred University in Alfred, NY, and her BFA (2002) in Painting from Seoul National University in Korea. Han's recent solo exhibition, “Land of Tenderness” at The 8th Floor Gallery, has been reviewed in 4Columns, Art Forum, The Art Asia Pacific, The AMP, and The New York Times. Han works and lives in New York City.

http://whatbunny.org

Molissa Fenley

Artist Statement

Each work I create has a distinctive spatial design and dance vocabulary, and starts in the studio from a free associative manner, extracting phrases from my experimentation and cataloguing them for use. I rarely start with music and am interested in dance having an intact rhythmic system; sometimes I find a piece of music that has a parallel commonality with what I have created thus far. I work methodologically – lists are made of dance phrases – each has a particular space and rhythm – the phrases are put together in an intuitive way and other times are put together according to a structural format. Each work represents and embodies these specific modalities of my artistic practice in the creation of the work and through the elements of the final product.A thorough-line in my choreographic work that I have returned to periodically is that of an interdisciplinary approach to an idea. The explorations of the compositional methodology of artists working within different mediums have illuminated my own procedures and systems. In the presentation of works created by these means, there results a visual dance in which form and image emerge and develop through the lens of contemporary art. The intellectual rigor and complex patterning that one might see in abstract painting is reflected. Visual elements are entwined physically, spatially and conceptually in the choreographic process. The varied range of textures, dynamics and conditions that are possible integrate dance with the contemporary visuals arts into a transformative performance.

Mali - choreography by Molissa Fenley, performed at the Agropoli Danza Festival, July 2022. Music by Laetitia Sonami, performed by Molissa Fenley and Jared Brown. Photo credit: Federica Capo

Bio

Molissa Fenley, was born in Nevada in 1954, grew up in Ibadan and Lagos, Nigeria (1961-71), returned to the USA to attend Mills College 1971-1975. She moved to New York in 1975 and founded Molissa Fenley and Company in 1977. The Company has performed throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe, Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Choreographic Commissions: the American Dance Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Dia Art Foundation, Jacob’s Pillow, The Joyce Theater, The Kitchen, Lincoln Center, New National Theater of Tokyo, National Institute of Performing Arts, Seoul, and New York Live Arts. Choreographic Commissions for other Dance Companies: Australian Dance Theatre, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane, Richard Move, Oakland Ballet, Ohio Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Peggy Baker Projects, Robert Moses’ Kin. Fellowships: American Academy in Rome, American Masterpieces of the National Endowment for the Arts, Asian Cultural Council, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Bogliasco Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts. Residencies: Bainbridge Dance Center, Bard College, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Bloedel Reserve, Dance HUB Florence/Agropoli, Italy, Dance Hub Santa Barbara, Harvard University, Hotchkiss School, Yaddo. Bessie Awards: Choreography: Cenotaph (1985), State of Darkness (1988). Outstanding Revival: State of Darkness (2021). Faculty: Mills College, Oakland California (1999-2020), now Professor Emerita. Rhythm Field: The Dance of Molissa Fenley, Seagull Press/University of Chicago (2015). The Molissa Fenley Archive is en route to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

www.molissafenley.com

Ruth Jeyaveeran

Artist Statement

My work is based on traditional material practices. Drawing from my experience as part of the South Asian diaspora, I use textiles to examine our shared history to confront feelings of alienation and dissociation. In my sculptures and installations, the boundary between human, animal, and flora dissolve to tell a story of isolation, migration, and evolution. Familiar shapes evoke our collective memory of early vessels, tools, and bones - objects once buried and forgotten, now restored through the ritual of felting. Each piece functions as an intimate excavation as the fibers shift and resettle creating unexpected marks that rise to the surface. The act of sewing, tying, and tangling fibers together, is an attempt to repair ruptured bonds between body, environment, and community. Wool is primal, spiritual, and bound to nature. Textiles, a source of warmth and shelter, offer a tactile antidote to our disenchantment with the modern world. I collaborate with the material and the process allowing long-forgotten truths to emerge.

Mama-Sita 2023 wool, yarn, flower petals 7ft x 2ft x 2ft

Bio

Born in Lusaka Zambia, and raised in the Midwest, Ruth Jeyaveeran lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her solo show, Soft Remains, was exhibited at Field Projects in 2023. Other recent exhibitions include, Felt Experience at the Brattleboro Museum, Communion, a solo installation at Main Window Dumbo and Amplify, a public sculpture at the Queens Botanical Garden. She has also exhibited at various venues in and around New York such as Ely Center of Contemporary Art, ABC No Rio, and The Border Project Space. Jeyaveeran has been awarded residencies at Lighthouse Works, Jentel Foundation, Willapa Bay, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, La Napoule Art Foundation, and PADA Studios. She has taught courses in textiles and fibers at Parsons School of Design, and she frequently leads workshops on felting and the therapeutic benefits of craft. Currently, Jeyaveeran is an Associate Professor of Textile Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

ruthjeyaveeran.com