Squeaky Wheel announces Spring 2018 Workspace Residents

Contact: Ekrem Serdar (ekrem@squeaky.org)

Buffalo, NY] Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center is pleased to announce the residents of the Spring 2018 session of its Workspace Residency program, now in its 4th iteration. This March, we will welcome two residents for a two-week period where they will be given time and resources to develop works-in-progress or start new projects. Artist Elizabeth Tawnie Lewin (Brooklyn, NY) and researcher Dana Tyrrell (Buffalo, NY) will be provided a stipend, travel and housing support, along with tailored access to equipment, technical consultations, and facilities at Squeaky Wheel and our collaborating partners, Buffalo Game Space, Buffalo Lab, and Silo City.

The public will have the opportunity to engage with the residents with two public events. Dana Tyrrell will be delivering a seminar on artists working in documentary photography relating to the HIV/AIDS crisis of 1980s on Wednesday, March 14th at 6pm, and both Lewin and Tyrell will take part in a public presentation of their work on Friday, March 16th at 7pm. Separately, Elizabeth Tannie Lewin will be teaching a class on the computer program Blender at Squeaky Wheel’s Buffalo Youth Media Institute, a free after-school program that takes place at the Buffalo Center for Art and Technology.

During their time with Squeaky Wheel, residents will be encouraged to connect to local art and cultural communities by participating in one-on-one critique sessions, studio visits, site visits and activities that engage in Buffalo’s local history and current initiatives led by communities and groups around the city. Residents will also have the opportunity to attend guest lectures from notable artists and scholars Shu Lea Cheang, Laura Kraning, and Tina Rivers Ryan. In addition, residents are provided with public opportunities to share and receive feedback for their work, and will be invited to a variety of site visits and activities exploring Buffalo’s unique communities and histories.

The jury for the Spring 2018 residency was composed of Kevin Kline, Laura Kraning, and Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan. Biographies and project proposals for the residents, and biographies of the jury can be found below.

About the program

Workspace Residency is a unique artist residency that supports local, regional and national media artists and researchers who are working on projects in film, video, audio, interactive media and emerging technologies in any stage of production. Initiated in 2016 by Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center in Buffalo, New York, in collaboration with local partners Buffalo Game Space, Buffalo Lab, and Silo City, the residency provides support through equipment, facilities, and technical support for artists experimenting across a range of old and new technologies, such as video, sound, digital platforms, interactivity, virtual reality, and 3D printing. Community outreach and public engagement components include presentation and education activities.

We encourage people of color, women, queer, trans and gender non-conforming people to apply. The residency welcomes applications from both emerging and established artists and researchers. A list of previous residents can be found here.

Workspace Residency is made possible with generous support from the County of Erie and County Executive Mark Poloncarz, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, individual members, businesses, and supporters. Special thanks to our sponsors at the Abdul Ahad Guru Scholars Program and Spot Coffee.


ARTIST RESIDENT

Elizabeth Tannie Lewin is a digital media artist interested in: technology, landscape, identity, disappearance, history, and utopia. Lewin uses various technologies to achieve special effects such as: 3D modeling landscapes, hacking a computer mouse to scan images, and webcameras programmed to initiate, or pause, video playback. Lewin received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and her MFA from Hunter College (2016).

Project Proposal
My current work is focused on the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), its nuclear history (the RMI, was once known as the Pacific Proving Grounds, and the location of 67 United States nuclear tests). The Castle Bravo nuclear test was conducted on Bikini, Atoll on March 1, 1954 and was the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the United States. To this day, Bikini remains uninhabitable due to radiation. Hundreds of Bikinians remain displaced. Additionally, the RMI is faces increasing fragility due to climate change (the RMI is on average, 2 meters above sea level, scientists predict that the sea levels will rise between 0.8-2 meters by the end of the century).
My time at Workspace will be devoted to producing creating a 3D virtual “game” landscape of the RMI, recording video audio, and editing scanned military photos which that will be incorporated into a developing video (working title: Nuclear Set).

RESEARCH RESIDENT

Dana Tyrrell is an artist, curator and writer living and working in Buffalo, New York. He holds an MFA in Visual Studies from the University at Buffalo (2015), a BA in Drawing & Painting and a BA in Art History, both from the State University of New York at Fredonia (2012). His work has been shown widely throughout Western New York, including solo exhibits with the Castellani Art Museum (2017) and Dreamland Art Gallery (2015). His curatorial practice includes exhibits at Anna Kaplan Contemporary (formerly BT&C Gallery), the Benjaman Gallery, Dreamland Art Gallery, and Sugar City Art Gallery. Photograph courtesy of Julian Montague.

Project Proposal
My intent for this Workspace Residency would be to research, and eventually curate a show focused upon emergent technologies. My interest lies at the intersection of technology and performance art -vis-a-vis academics like José Esteban Muñoz and Kara Keeling, as well as performance artists such as Zach Blas, Micha Cárdenas and Hito Steyerl – wherein the point of the juncture between emergent technologies and performance art becomes the human body, in all of its mutability, foibles and inconsistencies. I am interested in the interplay between the technological self and the realized, physical self and how those two things, while not always mutually exclusive, bend and blur under the ever-present and growing weight of technology.

The understanding of these artists and their further articulation within the context of a yet-to be-realized exhibit would be thus predicated upon Keeling’s own description of what is known as a “Queer OS” (Cinema Journal, 2014); a speculative project which sees the formulation of queer function as an operating system, which straddles both technical and cultural understandings. At its core, a Queer OS offers up a space in which LGBTQ+, Women, Black and Latinx people can meet – both online and off – connect to one another, and reaffirm alternative modes of technological disbursement and exploration as we delve further into the twenty-first century.

SPRING 2018 WORKSPACE JURY

Kevin Kline is an artist and educator whose work has been published widely. A native of Sayre, PA, he was awarded a residency at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY, in 2003. He received his BFA from Alfred University, and his MFA in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo. He has taught at universities and colleges, conducted workshops at CEPA Gallery, and was an instructor for the New York State Summer School for the Arts. He oversees the entirety of Squeaky Wheel’s educational programs, including West Side Studios, Tech Arts for Girls, and the Buffalo Youth Media Institute.

Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates landscape as a repository for memory, cultural mythology, and the technological sublime. Exploring absence and the fluidity of time, she evokes liminal spaces of neither past, nor present, but a landscape of the imagination. Laura’s work has screened widely at international film festivals, museums, galleries and micro-cinemas, such as the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde and Projections, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh Film Festival, London Film Festival, Visions du Réel, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, Art Toronto, Centre Pompidou, National Gallery of Art, and REDCAT Theater, among others. She is a recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation John H. Johnson Film Award, the Leon Speakers Award and Jury Awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award at the Athens International Film and Video Festival, and the Jury Award for Short Film at the Rencontres Internationales Sciences & Cinémas Film Festival. She recently relocated from Los Angeles to Buffalo, where she is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at University at Buffalo.

Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan is an Assistant Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. She specializes in art from the 1960s to the present, with a focus on the uses of film, video, and digital media technologies. Currently, she is assisting with the planning of the museum’s spring 2018 exhibition Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective, for which Squeaky Wheel is a community partner. Previously, she was a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she worked on a half-dozen shows, including the major retrospective Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms​ and the postwar survey Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950-1980. Before joining The Met, she held internships at MoMA PS1, the New Museum, and the ICA Boston, among other institutions. Her writing has been commissioned for catalog essays and research projects by museums including The Met, the Walker Art Center, the Albright-Knox, and the Tate, and her criticism and scholarly work has appeared in venues including Artforum, Even, Document, Art Journal​, and Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media​. In addition to teaching courses on contemporary art at Columbia University, the Pratt Institute, and the Museum of Modern Art, she has lectured on art to academic and public audiences in more than forty cities across North America and Europe. She holds five degrees in art history and visual studies, including a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Columbia, where she wrote her dissertation on the emergence of new media art in the 1960s.