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Meet Artist Residents
Benjamin Larose is a Québécois artist and Assistant Professor in Fashion Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Larose holds a Master of Design in Fashion, Body and Garment from SAIC, a Graduate Certificate in Pedagogy from Université du Québec à  Montréal, and a Bachelor of Media Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
In 2017-18, Larose participated in the BOLT residency program at the Chicago Artists Coalition. He subsequently presented three solo exhibitions in two years, including a solo booth at EXPO Chicago in 2018. His work was shown in several group exhibitions across the Midwest at venues such as 6018|North, Ralph Arnold Gallery, Chicago Cultural Center, Illinois State Museum Art Gallery, Hiestand Gallery, Lubeznik Center and John Michael Kohler Art Center.
In 2014, Larose was the recipient of the New Artist Society Scholarship and in 2016, the RumChata Foundation Fellowship. In 2019, he was named Breakout Artist by Chicago’s NewCity Magazine, and he won second prize in Miami University’s Young Sculptors Competition. Most recently, Larose was awarded a generous grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for his current project: NOT AMERICAN. The Canada Council for the Arts is among the most prestigious awards for Canadian artists. NOT AMERICAN is set to premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater in June 2023.
Image: Swell, Year: 2018, Dimensions: 84" x 84" x 66”, Materials: adhesive, batting, dollhouse furniture, foam, headboard, plywood, puzzle pieces, Photo: James Prinz
(updated 2023)
The son of a Lutheran pastor and a psychotherapist, Brent Fogt was born in Ohio and raised in Texas. Fogt’s sculpture, collage and drawings have been featured in solo exhibitions at Austin College, Emory University, Indiana University and the Lawndale Art Center, and in publications such as New American Paintings, Art in America and hyperallergic.com. He has completed artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, I-Park Foundation, and Yaddo. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan and a Master of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. Fogt lives and works in Chicago. Learn more about Brent Fogt’s solo BOLT exhibition Do Something Else.
Cameron Harvey is a painter who uses color to investigate ideas about optical perception, impermanence and the nature of reality. Through her work she investigates in how we create our own realities through how perceive the world. Born and raised in Vermont, Cameron moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute in 2006. She has shown in the US and abroad, and participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and at Lijiang Studio, China.
Image: Installation View BOLT Residency Solo Exhibition, See Without Seeing, Know Without Knowing, January 2018, Airbrush on layers of voile, aprox. 9ft x 58inÂ
(updated 2019)Â
Derrick Woods-Morrow’s work is a meditation on deviation and disruption. Currently based in Chicago his artistic practice deploys a wide variety of media – photographic transfers, digital video collage, ceramics, and narrative performance. Exploring modes of representation, he salvages, displaces, and removes raw material from sites of historical significance and trauma, reimagines their future purpose and denies their perceived function, as he actively interrogates the correlation between labor & play.
Woods-Morrow is an emerging artist & adjunct assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, who has had film screenings at the Art Institute of Chicago & the Chicago Cultural Center. Recently he has exhibited work in the Ground Floor Biennial exhibition at the Hyde Park Arts Center, The BGSQD in New York, as a 2018 Chicago Artadia Awardee, exhibited during the EXPO Chicago Art Fair and will debut a new performance at the MCA Chicago in April 2019. He was a participant in the 2016 Fire Island Artist Residency, and concluded his residency with the Chicago Artist Coalition in 2018, culminating in his first solo exhibition in Chicago. In 2019 his work will be included in the Whitney Biennial as a collaborative effort with the Artist, Paul Sepuya studios.
Image: Film Still from the short film, The Roach is Coming (2018) - First debuted at the Art Institute of Chicago & The Chicago Cultural center & released on Aymar Jean Christian's OTV platform, this short film explores themes central to labor, play & sexuality. Visual components, juxtapose audio components as Woods-Morrow connects his own childhood narratives from the American South to present-day manifestations of trauma created during an interaction with a police officer named Adam.
(updated 2019)
Emilio Rojas (b. 1985, Mexico City) is a multidisciplinary artist, working primarily with the body in performance, using film, video, photography, installation, public interventions and sculpture. Rojas utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration and poetics of space. His researched-based practice is heavily influenced by queer archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. His works have been exhibited in the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Australia. Besides his artistic practice, Rojas is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth. Rojas recently  graduated from SAIC with an MFA from the Performance department. Galeria Jose de la Fuente in Santander, Spain and Gallleriapiú in Bologna, Italy represents Rojas’ work. Learn more about Emilio Rojas’s solo BOLT exhibition The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's Monuments.
Jean Alexander Frater received her MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago, and a BS in Philosophy, from the University of Dayton, OH. Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as the Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus, El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, the Images Festival in Toronto, Possible Project Space in Brooklyn, the Big Screen Project in New York, the Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, the Kulturhuset in Stockholm, THE MISSION Gallery in Chicago, Transmitter Gallery in Brooklyn and Guest Spot @ The Reinstitute in Baltimore. Alexander Frater is represented by THE MISSION Gallery, Chicago, IL. Learn more about Jean Alexander Frater’s solo BOLT exhibition Buoyant Surface.
Jeffrey is a classically trained hobbyist schooled in contemporary art. His "rugs" and "diamonds" and what have you have been spotted in common and unusual situations, but not yet in a laundromat, which is a recent aspiration. He is the co-director of Slow, a gallery and curatorial project that has been a staple of Chicago's art scene since 2009.Â
Image: Shagged Astronomy, 2017, antiquated pattern, acrylic yarn, wood dowel, funerary wreath easels, 59 x 38 x 22 inches
(updated 2019)
Melissa Leandro (b. 1989, USA) is an artist who works between the media of drawing, painting, and textiles. Leandro's woven and embroidered surfaces explore her composite cultural identity through means of intuitive mark-making. Reflecting on her past and present travels, she considers the impact of these environments on the fragmentation of identity and place.
Leandro was awarded the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship (2017) for her studio work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She was awarded the Luminarts Fellowship (2017) from the Luminarts Cultural Foundation of Chicago. Leandro was a BOLT resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition for 2017-18, and was named one of Chicago's Break Out Artists of the year for 2018. Her studio work is featured in LUXE, Luxe Interiors + Design Magazine as part of their Chicago Style Maker edition (June 2018). She is currently represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, Illinois. Leandro has attended several residencies within and outside of the USA, including Ragdale Artist Residency, Cristal Lake, Roger Brown House Residency, Michigan, TextielLab, Tilburg The Netherlands, the Jacquard Center, North Carolina. She holds an MFA from SAIC and is currently teaching at SAIC as Lecturer in the Fiber Material Studies department.Â
Image: Aqua Melt (detail), 2018 Dimensions: 48.50 x 36", Medium: Jacquard woven cloth, dye, foil, linen, stitching
(updated 2019)
Nominated by the University of Illinois - Chicago My work serves as an exploration of my specific understanding of what it means to exist in our current place in time through painting and performance. My view of the world has and continues to be molded by technology and my upbringing in a world shaped by the Internet. My approach to art making is highly researched based, utilizing texts predating myself and common tools such as Google and Instagram. Each work exists as a mark in a larger conversation that is my practice, rather than isolated commodity objects. By using images and ideas from common language in conversation with facets of history, art and otherwise, I understand my place in the larger conversation that is art history that has led up to this moment. In my performances and paintings, the abstracted body appears in many colors. My use of my own body references common performance practices of feminists in the 70’s. By using my own body as an object, I can elicit the politics and history that are attributed to the male body, and even the genderless body when presented in today’s social understandings. This inherently political process of representing my own body in the public sphere removes it of any art context and thus collapses common understandings of artwork, artist, and viewer. Image: Unsolicited Dick Pic, 2017
Roni Packer is a painter who prioritizes the paint over the image. Her spacious paintings and installations are a material and formal explorations that invariably put color at their core. Born and raised in Tel Aviv, Packer moved to the United States in 2014. She received her MFA from The University of Illinois-Chicago in 2017. Packer’s work has been shown in various spaces in the United States, including Hyde Park Art Center, 6018 North, UIMA, Aspect/Ratio, Roots and Culture, Heaven Gallery, and Gallery 400, as well as in Benyamini House, Mani House, and the Open Museum in Israel.
Image: Yellow is Mine, 2018, overbaked imported mini croutons – 30 kg, turmeric colored imported mini croutons – 70 kg, Osem mini croutons, may contain artificial colors, Jewel Osco, buy one get one free-16 plastic jars of 400g, 10’x9’
(updated 2019)
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