Squeaky Wheel announces Summer Artists in Residence

Crystal Z Campbell, Jordan Lord, and Olivia Ong Evans will receive support for media arts projects and lead public events and workshops.

Contact: Ekrem Serdar (ekrem@squeaky.org)

BUFFALO, NY — Squeaky Wheel is pleased to announce three awardees of the summer Workspace Residency. During the month of August the residency will provide media artists Crystal Z Campbell (Oklahoma City, OK), Jordan Lord (New York, NY), and Olivia Ong Evans (Tonawanda, NY) with a stipend, artist fees, along with tailored access to equipment, technical and curatorial consultations. Additional financial assistance for childcare and/or disabilities is also available. The residency will take place virtually.

Crystal Z Campbell will be working on SLICK, an experimental feature film considering the longstanding reverberations of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre on the city of Tulsa and beyond. Jordan Lord is working on editing an essay film with their grandmother, Prophetic Memory, which examines the stakes in re-animating personal and collective history. Olivia Ong Evans will be working on Identity Karma, an experimental video that explores the connections between identity construction and social structures. Panelists for the Summer 2021 residency were Elizabeth Tannie Lewin, Kyla Gordon, and Tabia Lewis. Biographies of the residents and panelists can be found below.

The public will have the opportunity to engage with the residents on four occasions for virtual artist talks and skill-shares. On August 11, Crystal Z Campbell will lead Generating Sounds Collaboratively, a participatory sound workshop where attendees will generate new sound and reinterpret iconic music that will be featured in the artists film SLICK. On August 13, all three residents will present their existing and ongoing work for the public event, Meet the Residents. On August 16, Jordan Lord will lead Starting with Access: Where a Film Begins, a workshop offering both new and experienced filmmakers critical concepts to creatively integrate forms of accessibility for disabled audiences, such as audio description and captioning, into their films. Through the workshop, participants will be invited to rethink both the filmmaking process and understandings of access. On August 18, Olivia Ong Evans will facilitate Creating Identity, providing participants with the opportunity to reflect on concepts of identity construction and positionality through a series of visual and writing prompts. Registration and more information, including accessibility, will be posted on our website.

This session of the Workspace Residency marks the fifth year of the program. It is generously supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency is a bi-yearly residency open to artists and researchers working in art and technology. For more information about the program, including past residents, visit squeaky.org/workspace

Image description: A square image with three horizontal photographs. From left to right: Portrait of Crystal Z Campbell, a Black and Asian artist in the studio gazing directly into camera, with just above the shoulder length curly hair wrangled into a half-ponytail. Light from the industrial window creates a pink and reddish glow on their cheek, filtered through a transparency the artist is holding. The transparency is a film still from a found 35mm film the artist found at a now demolished Black Civil Rights Theater. The photograph is courtesy of Melissa Lukenbaugh. In the middle photograph is Jordan Lord, a 30 year-old white person with short brown hair, stands in front of a tank of bioluminescent jellyfish, wearing a face mask printed with the nose and mouth of a tiger. Their eyes seem to be smiling. On the right side of the image is a photo of Olivia Ong Evans facing the camera and smiling. She has long, black hair and is wearing metal framed glasses and a black and white shirt. Behind her is a pink, purple, gray, and aqua blue video still showing tree branches, river branches, and a smoke stack in the background.⁠
Image description: A rectangular image with three photographs side by side. From left to right: Portrait of Crystal Z Campbell, a Black and Asian artist in the studio gazing directly into camera, with just above the shoulder length curly hair wrangled into a half-ponytail. Light from the industrial window creates a pink and reddish glow on their cheek, filtered through a transparency the artist is holding. The transparency is a film still from a found 35mm film the artist found at a now demolished Black Civil Rights Theater. The photograph is courtesy of Melissa Lukenbaugh. In the middle photograph is Jordan Lord, a 30 year-old white person with short brown hair, stands in front of a tank of bioluminescent jellyfish, wearing a face mask printed with the nose and mouth of a tiger. Their eyes seem to be smiling. The photograph on the right is of Olivia Ong Evans, facing the camera and smiling. She has long, black hair and is wearing metal framed glasses and a black and white shirt. Behind her is a pink, purple, gray, and aqua blue video still showing tree branches, river branches, and a smoke stack in the background.⁠

Biographies of the residents

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipino, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—rumored information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Recent works revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks’s “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Campbell is a Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellow (2020-2021) living and working in Oklahoma, and founder of archiveacts.com. Campbell was recently named a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts.

Jordan Lord is a filmmaker, writer, and artist, working primarily in video, text, and performance. Their work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts, framing and support, access and documentary. Their video and performance work has been shown internationally at venues including MoMA, ARGOS, Camden Arts Centre, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Performance Space NY (as part of the festival “I wanna be with you everywhere”). Their exhibition “Prophetic Memory” is currently in-progress online and at various sites via Artists Space (New York, NY). They teach at Hunter College, CUNY (New York).

Olivia Ong Evans (she/her/hers) is a video artist currently living on occupied Haudenosaunee land (Western New York). She uses experimental practices to create glitchy, distorted visuals that explore positionality.  Her work centers on themes of identity construction, migration, connection to land, and Hokkien Indonesian heritage.  

Biographies of the panelists

Elizabeth (Betsy) 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. 

Kyla Gordon is the Development Coordinator at Squeaky Wheel where she is responsible for donor communications, planning special events, and sponsorships. The position is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts under Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s Regional Economic Development Council Initiative. She also works as the Curatorial Research Assistant at Squeaky Wheel. She is an independent scholar and curator. She received her MA in Visual Culture from New York University, has studied Modern Art at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and has BAs in Art History and English from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She has a background in curatorial work, archives, and arts administration. She has worked in galleries and cultural institutions around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Interview Magazine, French Heritage Society, Hallwalls, 80WSE, Shakespeare and Company, and Re:Voir Film Gallery. Her scholarly interests include film studies, fashion, and British history.

Tabia Lewis is a Black, trans writer, curator, and DJ living on Catawba Nation territory in Charlotte, NC. While they mostly creative non-fiction and critical essays they also have an affinity for poetry. Their work is aligned with Black radical imagination, memory, mythography, and transness beyond physical matter. They’re also a big fan of cartoons.