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Meet the Residents: Everest Pipkin, Kristin McWharter, Jaehoon Choi, Léwuga Tata Benson
April 19 @ 7:00 pm– 8:30 pm EDT
Free
Friday, April 19, 2024, 7 pm ET
Online and in-person @ Squeaky Wheel
Free or suggested donation. ASL interpretation provided. Catering from AliBaba Kebab provided for in-person attendees.
Register below
Squeaky Wheel is pleased to present this hybrid artist talk with our Spring 2024 Workspace Residents! Everest Pipkin (Truth or Consequences, NM), Kristin McWharter (Chicago, IL), Jaehoon Choi (Troy, NY), and Léwuga Tata Benson (Buffalo, NY) will be presenting on their previous and current projects, including essays on video games, and media art installations that explore notions of language and translation, historic children’s games and locative sound, and the devastating effects of oil extraction. Their event will conclude with a Q&A with the residents moderated by curator Ekrem Serdar.
For in-person attendees: The event will take place at Squeaky Wheel. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm.
For online attendees: A private link will be sent to you; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 72 hour access. Not a member yet? Sign up here.
During their residency, researcher resident Everest Pipkin will be working on The Fortunate Isles: Fragment Worlds, Walled Gardens, and the games that are played there, a speculative essay about the edges of space within video games. Based on a talk Pipkin gave at the 2023 Roguelike Celebration, the essay will focus on the concept of the walled garden, expanding it to include games and games spaces. It looks at ornamental gardens, cloisters, isolate spaces, and even mythological or utopian fantasies of worlds, and goes beyond to where the garden stops and a wildness of bugs, errors, logical failures and edge cases begin. The essay seeks to connect the logic of potent isolation to the games we make and play.
Jaehoon Choi will be working on an untitled media art installation on the intermingling of translation and language through light and sound. Influenced by the work of Karen Barad, the artist will be working with mylar film, projection, and audio from speech recordings in various languages. The work is latest in a series of installations that delve into the artists concern, the first of which, “Hello. hEllo! heLLo? hellO” was created and showcased at EMPAC in May 2023.
Kristin McWharter will be working on Marco Polo, an interactive sound installation, based on the children’s game where one player, with eye’s closed, calls out “Marco” and listens for the location of other players who call out “Polo” in response. McWharter will be adapting the children’s game in a new work that incorporates megaphones, RF transmissions, and a series of sculptural beacons for audiences to engage with locative sound. Noting the Italian explorer’s role in shaping racist notions of Western superiority, the project reflects on the history of trade route landscapes and the consequences of western culture’s history of continuous evasion and pursuit.
Léwuga Tata Benson will be working towards their exhibition Fueling Change: A Multimedia Exploration of Niger Delta’s Oil Crisis that will open at Buffalo Arts Studio on July 26, 2024. Utilizing oil drums, video, and audio, the project focuses on the oil industry’s effects upon the people of the Niger Delta in Western Nigeria and the social, economic, and environmental consequences of unregulated oil extraction practices.
Everest Pipkin is a game developer, writer, and artist from central Texas who lives and works on a sheep farm in southern New Mexico. Their work both in the studio and in the garden follows themes of ecology, tool making, and collective care during collapse. They hold a BFA from University of Texas at Austin, an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and have shown and spoken at The Design Museum of London, The Texas Biennial, The XXI Triennale of Milan, The Photographers Gallery of London, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and other spaces. When not at the computer in the heat of the day, you can find them in the hills spending time with their neighbors— both human and non-human.
Jaehoon Choi is a computer musician / sound artist / researcher based in New York and Seoul. His practice involves embodied experimentation through a technical medium, which involves both the process of making and bodily engagement. As a researcher, he is interested in how a creative practice that involves embodied experimentation with a technical medium can suggest a different form of techne and contribute to technodiversity. His works have been presented at Venice Biennale, MATA Festival, NEW INC, San Francisco Tape Music Festival, NIME, ICMC, CeReNeM, ECHO Journal, ZER01NE, Dunkunsthalle, EIDF, Visions Du Reel, CEMEC, and etc. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Electronic Arts at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and graduated from Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) as a Masters.
Kristin McWharter uses performance and play to interrogate the relationship between competition and intimacy. Her work conjoins viewers within immersive sculptural installations and viewer- inclusive performances that critically fuse folk games within virtual and augmented worlds. Her software installations and performative objects incorporate experimental technologies and playful interaction to produce performances that speculate upon alternative forms of social behavior. Inspired by 20th century sports narrative, collective decision making, and technology as a contemporary spiritual authority, her work blurs the boundaries of intimacy and hype culture to challenge viewer relationships to affection and competitive drive. Her work has been exhibited at The Hammer Museum, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center, Ars Electronica, Museo Altillo Beni, and FILE Festival among others. McWharter received her MFA from UCLA in Design Media Arts and is currently an Assistant Professor in Art & Technology Studies at SAIC.
Léwuga Tata Benson: As an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker, my work bridges cultures and explores the dynamic interplay between identity, environmental sustainability, and human connection. Rooted in my Ogoni heritage in Nigeria, I draw inspiration from our tradition of repurposing to prevent waste. This ethos infuses my art, as seen in installations like “The Land Gives Until It No Longer Can, 2022,” “Hang in There, 2022,” “Traces of Displacement, 2023,” “Carrying Identity, Carrying The Weight, 2023,” and “Fueling Change, 2024.” In Ogoni storytelling, we engage all the senses, integrating songs, dance, and props for a holistic experience. My artistic practice seamlessly incorporates these traditions to create immersive narratives that provoke thought, foster empathy, and celebrate cultural richness. My journey has been marked by awards and accolades, including the NYSCA 2024 Grant and the Gregory Capasso scholarship for outstanding work in film, underscoring my commitment to the arts.
