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Meet Artist Residents
Eric Wall’s paintings explore the materiality of the canvas and challenge our expectations of what a painting is expected to be. His paintings are meticulously hand-cut using a hobby knife. A single painting is often stretched, painted, unstretched, hand-cut, painted, restretched, and painted again. They reach a state of resolution through this repetitive process of addition and subtraction. In the end, there is often more canvas removed, than what remains for the audience to the observer. The remaining swaths of canvas cast shadows on the walls behind.
Wall has been challenging the boundaries of a painting throughout his career. With his most recent paintings, he’s shown how to break the restraints of the surface and the supports in painting. He has also introduced an expansive potential in a painting by pushing these edges and questioning his medium.
Born in 1979. Eric Wall is an American-Swedish artist, currently living in Denver, Colorado.
Image: Eric Wall, Blue Flag, 2018, Acrylic on hand-cut canvas, 150x130cm
(updated 2022)
Gwynne Johnson’s photographs reveal the unconscious residue of domestic life. Her work extends the uncertainties and unresolvable tensions inherent in our relationships with people, places, and the past.
Raised in Dublin, Ireland, Johnson currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Exhibition venues include the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids; the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, Colorado; Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York; and The Gallery of Photography, Dublin, Ireland. She is the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s 2011 James Weinstein fellow and has received two Community Arts Assistance Program grants from the City of Chicago. Her work is held in the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Midwest Photographers Collection.
Johnson received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011) and a BA in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania (1999).
(Updated 2022)
Homa Shojaie makes whatever is her “persisting question” at a given moment. This can be the color of a particular feeling, the exploration of her fears, trees in rain, or letting go. She creates to know herself, the world, and to find the light that is inherent in any act of knowing. In her work, Homa tries not to look at things but instead to look into the space of things.
Homa Shojaie was born in 1967 in Iran. She studied Painting at Atelier Aydin Aghdashloo in Tehran and Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York. She has practiced art in Chicago and taught architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2003-2012). She is currently a Masters of Arts candidate at LASALLE College of Arts in Singapore. She has exhibited at United States, Iran, Turkey, and Singapore.
Image: Homa Shojaie, Frayed Canvas, January 2011, installation including raw canvas
(Updated 2022)
Jenny Kendler is an interdisciplinary artist, environmental activist and wild forager whose work asks us to de-center the human, making space for the radical, transformative otherness found on our biodiverse Earth.
She received her BFA from MICA (2002) and her MFA from SAIC (2006). Her work has been exhibited at museums and biennials including the Smithsonian Institution, Storm King Art Center, MCA Chicago, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, MSU Broad Museum, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, California Academy of Sciences, iMOCA, DePaul Art Museum, Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India), Yeosu International Art Festival biennial (Korea), Chicago Biennial, and the 3rd Terrain Biennial.
Since 2014 Kendler has been the first Artist-in-Residence with environmental non-profit NRDC. She is Co-chair of artist residency ACRE, creator of The OPPfund (awards the MAKER Grant in partnership with Chicago Artists' Coalition), co-creator of The Endangered Species Print Project, art coordinator for Extinction Rebellion, and part of art collective Deep Time Chicago. With an interdisciplinary team she was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for her community project Garden for a Changing Climate. Kendler was also named one of Chicago's Top 50 Artists by Newcity in their biennial list in 2018 and 2020.
Image: Birds Watching (as part of Indicators: Artists on Climate Change at Storm King Art Center ), 2018–2019, Printed reflective film mounted on aluminum with steel frame, 10 x 40 x 1 ft
(updated 2022)
Kathryn Trumbull Fimreite is a Chicago-based visual and teaching artist whose work explores the relationship between personal identity and legacy. Fimreite's practice is a hybrid of studio time and arts educating. She is always seeking to create experiential encounters and learning opportunities for her students, her viewers and herself. She works in various media (watercolor, ink, hand-written text, projections and sculptural objects), incorporating stories, objects, memories and elements from her surrounding landscape.
Recent exhibitions include The Pram Endeavor Invitational at Hyde Park Art Center, Exchange at the Public Pool, 9th Measure at Chicago Artists Coalition and just us at work (public art action/social sculpture and performance) at dOCUMENTA 13, Germany.
Fimreite has created a number of public art commissions and been the recipient of several grants from the City of Chicago. Her work was selected to promote the New York and Boston Marathons for four consecutive years and she has pieces in several private and corporate collections. Kathryn Trumbull Fimreite holds a BS from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute.
Image #1: Kathryn Trumbull Fimreite, Elizabeth (9th Measure series), 2017, text-based work.
Image #2: Kathryn Trumbull Fimreite, 9th Measure series (Installation shot), 2017, text-based work.
(Updated in 2022)
During her BOLT Residency Marty Burns was a teaching artist at the Smart Museum of Art and the University of Chicago. Currently she is the founder of the charitable organization 8⊙8 and is a teaching artist at the non-profit GallupArts, both in Gallup, New Mexico, near where she grew up.
Burns has exhibited her work Debtfair at The Whitney Museum of American Art and Fast Forward:: Rewind::Play at the Hyde Park Art Center, among others.
In 2009, she received the Artists Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council. She has participated in multiple featured projects during Chicago Artists Month, and the Chicago Artists' Coalition's BOLT Residency. Burns holds a BFA with an emphasis in art history, theory and criticism and an MFA in fiber and material studies, both from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
(Updated in 2022)
Melika Bass’s films and immersive installations weave atmospheric, abstracted narratives that slip between hyper-reality and historical fantasy.
Bass was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film“ in 2018. Other awards include 3 Media Art Grants from the Illinois Arts Council, an Artadia Award (NYC), an Experimental Film Prize from the Athens International Film Festival and the the Kodak/Filmcraft Imaging Award from the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Bass was also a 2021 USA Artist Nominee in Film.
Screenings and exhibitions include the BAMcinemaFest, New York; BFI London Film Festival; Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (solo exhibition); Torino Film Festival, Italy; Kino der Kunst, Munich; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Los Angeles Film Forum; CPH Dox Festival, Denmark; and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany (solo showcase).
Her work has been profiled and reviewed in Cineaste Magazine, Filmmaker Magazine, Time Out Chicago, Art Daily, Rolling Stone Italy, Pitchfork, and Criterion.
(Updated in 2022)
"We are stargazers. We are in love with the ineffable. We are in love with the cosmos. Somewhere in the vastness of interstellar space is a tiny blue marble spinning, magnetized and orbiting a star. We look up in the fall at the Milky Way, showered in cosmic rays; we feel the vertigo of hanging upside down on monkey bars as children. We ask ourselves, well, how did we get here? So we gaze harder into the sky, ourselves, and use instruments that view beyond the limits of our eyes. We are looking for love and romance. We call out into the cosmic wild. We yearn to explore, we yearn for zero gravity, we yearn for magic. We light cigarettes with the sun, we x-ray ourselves holding objects from space and we dance into the morning waiting for the sun to come back."
Their exhibitions in Chicago include "scry til you know why", The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation; "Local Comfort", LVL3;"Slow Stretch", Mana Contemporary; Rapid Pulse Performance Festival, Defibrillator Gallery; "Cosmosis", Hyde Park Art Center; BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: Sarah Belknap and Joseph Belknap, Museum of Contemporary Art; "Our Findings From Spaceship Earth," Roxaboxen, Chicago;"Line of Site," Western Exhibitions, Chicago; "IT'S GETTING HOT IN HERE," Chicago Artists Coalition;
Sarah Belknap and Joseph Belknap are Chicago-based artists and educators who receive their MFAs in performance art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have been collaborating since 2008.
Image: Sarah Belknap and Joseph Belknap, We Ate Leaves From a Moon Tree, 2014, videostill, 1min.
(Updated 2022)
Stacia Yeapanis is a Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist, educator and writer. Influenced by existential philosophy and mindfulness meditation, she explores desire and impermanence through the portal of repetition in her cross-stitch embroideries, remix videos and temporary, collage installations. "All the conscious and unconscious repeated gestures we make as human beings are a lived engagement with the fact of existence," says Yeapanis. "We are here now, but someday we won’t be." Responding to that fact with wonder and play, as opposed to anxiety, Yeapanis's recent sculptural “landscapes” are improvised on the floor from thousands of hand-made and collected components. These landscapes last the length of each exhibition.
Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (Michigan 2013), Heaven Gallery (Chicago 2014), Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis 2017), Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery (Palos Hills, Illinois 2018) and Kent State, Stark (North Canton, Ohio 2019). Stacia's most recent solo show was The Thin Line Between One Thing and Another, at Finlandia University (Hancock, Michigan) in January 2020.
She was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence and a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at Chicago Artists Coalition’s BOLT Residency. Stacia is an instructor in the department of fiber and material studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her MFA in 2006, and she conducts weekly interviews with artists for OtherPeoplesPixels. Learn more about Stacia Yeapanis’s solo BOLT exhibition OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
Image: Stacia Yeapanis, Over and Over Again, 2012, digital and handmade media
(Updated 2022)
