Squeaky Wheel announces Spring 2023 Artists in Residence

Feb 8, 2023

Media Contact: Ekrem Serdar, ekrem@squeaky.org

Dena Kopolovich, Elenie Chung, Laura Jaramillo, and Miranda Javid will receive support for media arts projects and lead public events and workshops as part of the Workspace Residency.

BUFFALO, NY — Squeaky Wheel is pleased to announce four awardees of the spring 2023 Workspace Residency. From April 1 through 15, the residency will provide Dena Kopolovich (Flushing, NY), Elenie Chung (Los Angeles, CA), Laura Jaramillo (Durham, NC), and Miranda Javid (Port Ewen, NY) with a stipend, artist fees, and accommodations. Residents will receive  tailored access to equipment, technical and curatorial consultations towards their work on new and ongoing projects at Squeaky Wheel’s new location at Tri-Main Center. 

The residents will be working on a variety of projects including animations, hybrid works, lyrical essays on cinema, and non-fiction films. Dena Kopolovich will be working towards the completion of her upcoming short film Container Film, an experimental essay film created in a hybrid 16mm and digital format, that engages with Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”. Elenie Chung will be assembling All the Films in My Grandfather’s Closet a planned hybrid docu-fiction, telling the tale of Chung’s grandfather, a Chinese Trinidadian whose life had been defined by an early marriage, resistance to cultural customs and the changing times in Trinidad and Tobago from the 1930s to 2020s. Laura Jaramillo will be developing a book of lyrical essays investigating the fraught history of Colombian national cinema during the War on Drugs and global neoliberalization, interwoven with her own biography as a diasporic Colombian and her family’s history. Miranda Javid will continue animating, sound recording, and editing Human Behavior, a three-minute hand-drawn film drawn with sumi ink on tracing paper, which asks viewers how even small gestures can impact others. Panelists for this session of the residency were Crystal Z Campbell, Joyce Hwang, and Richmond Wills. Jaramillo was selected by the Summer 2022 panel, and will be undertaking her residency now. Biographies of the residents and panelists can be found below.

Elenie Chung will lead a private workshop on how to creatively use archival materials, its ethics, and how it can be utilized to explore one’s heritage and relationships with our Saturday Cafe youth program. The public will have the opportunity to engage with the residents on four occasions, all for free. 

  • Tuesday, April 4, 6–8 pm, Miranda Javid will host Animation with Paper, for adults and youth ages 16 and up. The workshop will overview a fast and easy way to create animation on paper. Instead of digital tablets, this lo-fi method uses: a cell phone with a camera, a free app, some tracing paper, and drawing materials. 
  • Wednesday, April 5, 6–8 pm, Laura Jaramillo will lead Visual Media for Poets, on how to use visual media to write poetry, even for people who have never written it. 
  • Friday, April 7, 7–9 pm, Squeaky Wheel will host Meet the Residents, featuring presentations and screenings by all the residents; the event will also be broadcast online. 
  • Tuesday, April 11, 6–9 pm, Dena Kopolovich will lead a Camera-Less Filmmaking class using 16mm found footage. Participants young and old are invited to engage with the medium by manipulating the surface of 16mm film strips to create original experimental film loops. 

Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency is a residency open to artists and researchers working in art and technology, and provides support for new or ongoing projects in collaboration with our partners. Launched in 2016, the program has supported projects by over 40 artists, filmmakers, scholars, and curators. Squeaky Wheel is currently seeking applications for the Summer 2023 session of its Workspace Residency through February 19. Learn more and apply here: squeaky.org/workspace-residency

The program is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, County of Erie and County Executive Mark Poloncarz, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the office of Governor and the New York State Legislature, and individual members, businesses, and supporters. 

Bios

a portrait of Dena Kopolovich, gazing off to the left and smiling, wearing a light brown turtleneck, with curly long auburn hair that is styled down. The background is a brick wall painted two different shades of red.

A portrait of Dena Kopolovich, gazing off to the left and smiling, wearing a light brown turtleneck, with curly long auburn hair that is styled down. The background is a brick wall painted two different shades of red.

Dena Kopolovich (b.1991) is a multimedia artist & filmmaker from New York. Her recent work uses past and present aesthetics to investigate the origin and continuity of meaning. She is interested in using cinematic forms to explore the derivation of instinctive human rituals & objects. In 2022 she completed a fellowship at LABA Laboratory for Jewish Culture, where she spent a year creatively interrogating ancient mythological texts. She is an Adjunct Professor in the Film & Media Department at Hunter College and a Teaching Artist at the cinema-arts non-profit Mono No Aware. Dena received her education from the Purchase College Conservatory of Theater Arts, with a concentration in Directing and the Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College.

A close up of Elenie Chung, a young woman of East Asian descent wearing glasses and with short black hair. She is wearing a green and pink checkered wool scarf.
A close up of Elenie Chung, a young woman of East Asian descent wearing glasses and with short black hair. She is wearing a green and pink checkered wool scarf.

Elenie Chung is a filmmaker and artist, born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, currently based in Los Angeles, CA. She is interested in using female relationships as a method of illustrating cultural disconnection and ancestral amnesia. Her films have screened in international festivals and art exhibitions. Since attending the University of California, Los Angeles to achieve an MFA in Film Directing/Production, she has been working remotely at Women Make Movies, a non-profit feminist media arts organization based in New York City and has been contributing to film organizations in Los Angeles to amplify under-recognised films by women, international and non-white filmmakers.

Laura Jaramillo, a woman in a black dress stares off to the right of the frame. There are trees and foliage behind her.
Laura Jaramillo, a woman in a black dress stares off to the right of the frame. There are trees and foliage behind her.

Laura Jaramillo is a critic and poet working at the intersection of film and media theory, lyrical poetry, and essay. She received her PhD in critical theory from Duke University where she wrote her dissertation on avant-garde Latin American and Spanish cinema. She is the author of two books of poetry Material Girl (subpress, 2012) and Making Water (Futurepoem, 2022). Her writings on film and contemporary media have appeared in JumpCut, Feminist Media Histories, and IndyWeek. She is currently at work on a book of essays about the death and rebirth of Colombian cinema during the neoliberal era.

Miranda Javid, a femme iranian woman in her mid-thirties stands in front of lush trees.

Miranda Javid, a femme iranian woman in her mid-thirties stands in front of lush trees.

Miranda Javid is an animator, curator, and art-educator with a Masters in Fine Art from the University of California Irvine and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her animations describe topics like cognitive experience, human bias, and the relationship between individuals and their communities. These films have shown nationally and internationally at festivals like the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Eyeworks Film Festival, Slamdance, the Flaherty Seminar, and Malt Adult. She is a Kenan Fellow, a Denniston Hill resident, a Sherman Fairchild grantee, and a recipient of the Nancy Harrigan Prize, given through the Baker Artist Fund. Her drawings have been shown at Commune1 in Cape Town, S Africa, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Mint Museum of Art in North Carolina, and Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA. Currently, she lives in unceded Munsee territory also known as the Hudson Valley in New York State.

Bios of the panelists

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Their archive-driven work in film/video, performance, installation, sound, painting, and text, has been screened and exhibited internationally. Honors include a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and 2022 Creative Capital Award. Campbell is Visiting Associate Professor of Art & Media Study at University at Buffalo.

Joyce Hwang is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University at Buffalo SUNY and Founder of Ants of the Prairie. She is a recipient of the Exhibit Columbus University Research Design Fellowship, the Architectural League Emerging Voices Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Independent Project Grant , and the MacDowell Fellowship. Her work has been featured by MoMA, and exhibited at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Matadero Madrid, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and the Rotterdam International Architecture Biennale, among other venues. Hwang is a registered architect in New York State, and has practiced professionally with offices in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Barcelona.

Richmond Wills is a Nigerian American writer and artist from Buffalo, NY. Program Coordinator and Teaching Artist with the Just Buffalo Literary Center. He has been published in Buffalo’s Back: An Anthology of our Times, Variety Pack and elsewhere. He is a co-founder of GrayWills Book Club and an Oishei Fellow.