William Franco and Miki Seifert are the co-founders and artistic directors of With Lime, an artist collective that creates performances, installations and projections that explore the interface between cultures and/or technology. As part of their vision of the arts as a force for personal and societal transformation, they conduct research to expand performative methodologies and practices. Franco and Seifert’s artistic multilinguality allows the work of With Lime to cross the borders between visual, media, dance and theatre arts. With Lime’s work has been in galleries, museums and film festivals around the world.

During their Residency, Franco and Seifert will continue their project Azucar/Sugar, which explores the connection between the globalization of sugar and colonization. Drawn toward this work through Franco's Zapotec and Mixtec culture, they are interested in researching Savannah's history of refining sugar, and Georgia’s role in the sugar industry in the Americas. As their Residency project will align with Dia de Muertos, they will create an ofrenda with sugar skulls in the Residency studio.

Brydie O’Connor is a Kansas-born, NY based filmmaker and archivist. Her award-winning work focuses on women-driven and queer stories. Brydie’s work has been supported by The Future of Film Is Female, Hot Docs, Dok.Leipzig, Ji.hlava IDFF, NYFA, NYSCA, Brooklyn Arts Council, DocsBarcelona, ArtsKC, and the Stonewall Foundation, and has screened at places such as The Museum of Modern Art, BFI, & DOC NYC. Most recently, Brydie was selected as the recipient of the Hulu/Kartemquin Accelerator with her debut feature documentary, and she is developing two new projects in the UFO Short Film Lab. She is a graduate of The George Washington University, and has developed her work at both the Arts Letters & Numbers Residency (2022) and the Provincetown Film Society Queer Filmmakers Residency (2024). She is currently in production on her debut feature documentary on pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, executive produced by Killer Films. 

During her Residency, Brydie will continue her work on THE ROAMING CENTER FOR MEMORY, a piece from digitized archival elements that show queer life in the South and in the Midwest, blended with oral histories of queer folks reflecting on their own histories in real time. In the studio, she will present video vignettes of archival videos blended with contemporary oral histories, along with imagery of how the archival is being digitized in the present. This will consist of experimental video pieces that reference how the past and process leads us into a future that includes a broader scope of queer history. Brydie will also host archiving workshops on how to digitize and create your own archival collections, both as an artist and an individual who would like to create alternative histories through archiving.

Sav.exe, curated by Will Penny in partnership with ARTS Southeast and Gallery 2424, presents a multi-site exhibition of new media installations developed around one question: What does it mean to work at the intersection of art and technology today?  A select group of Savannah-based artists, known for challenging the boundaries of their respective mediums, have been asked to consider the role that technology plays in relation to their immediate surroundings and community.

The Ellis Gallery of ARTS Southeast will feature a Twitch activated claw machine by Sam Scheper, a sculptural interactive hug machine by Lee Cody, meditative video landscapes by Wioleta Kaminska, and an immersive sound installation by Joshua Alexander. Down the street at Gallery 2424, Abigail Portner and Greg Finger have created a fully immersive projection installation. All together, these works speak to the ingenuity and experimental spirit of artists working in the Southeast.

sav.exe will be on display across two locations – ARTS Southeast (2301 Bull St) and Gallery 2424 (2424 Drayton St) – from September 6 - October 12, 2024. Both venues will be open to the public TH – SUN, 12 – 5PM, and are within walking distance of one another. There will be First Friday Opening Receptions at both galleries on Friday, September 6 from 5 - 9PM. On Saturday, September 14 at 2PM, Will Penny will host a Curator Talk at ARTS Southeast, followed by a walk to Gallery 2424 at 2:45, and an Artist Talk there at 3PM. Both galleries will host First Friday Closing Receptions on Friday, October 4 from 5 – 9PM. 

Featured Artists

Joshua Alexander, Lee Cody, Greg Finger, Wioleta Kaminska, Abigail Portner, and Sam Scheper

Asma Khoshmehr is an interdisciplinary artist involved in immersive storytelling, volumetric media and documentary filmmaking. Her projects are rooted in East African and Middle Eastern cultures, with a particular fascination for the myths and folklore of the “One Thousand and One Nights” book. Through her lens, she captures the essence of generational trauma, forced displacement, and political sexual violence, shining a light on the struggles of those who have been silenced for too long. Coming from a multicultural background, she is currently working on a project regarding her maternal background from Tanzania to the diaspora. Asma holds a BFA in Performing Arts and an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Emerson College. She received (UFVA) Carole Fielding Grant, alongside the Virgin Unite Fund Award. Additionally, she participated in artist fellowships at esteemed institutions like MASS MoCA and MacDowell.

She is currently working on her hybrid documentary project, a result of her transformative journey spanning years across Tanzania, Kenya, Oman, and Iran. Traveling to these countries, she gathered information, filmed, and conducted interviews, leading to the discovery of a profound family secret. Now, she will meticulously edit the footage, enrich the documentary with archival research and create an immersive installation exhibition to invite viewers to engage with her discoveries.

Gweny Jin is a trained architect, designer and maker currently teaching full-time at Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio. She has taught full-time at Pratt Institute as a teaching fellow, and at Rhode Island School of Design while being a graduate student there. Jin explores drawings, painting, sculptural and installation work – all with an architectural lens – to articulate art interventions that elevate the unique placeness of ordinary space. Jin’s working process focuses on using mixed craft and techniques as the pidgin language of making, incorporating time as a factor, and adopting light and shadow as a designed element to interact with tangible forms.

Jin’s Residency project will engage audiences to experience shifting space and time in a site-specific installation based on the architectural features of the ARTS Southeast building. Starting from observation of architectural elements of the site – such as solid and void relationships, movement of natural light, scale, proportion and materials of given elements like doors, windows, walls and floors – Gweny will identify the “ingredients” for her abstraction, recreation, and representation in her own tectonic language, as if to make a drawing in space. She will experiment with the three-dimensional linguistic tectonics that most reflect the uniqueness of the ON::View Residency and its local context.

John Paul Kesling: Glued to the Horse

The Ellis Gallery at ARTS Southeast

July 5th – August 17th, 2024

About the Artist:

John Paul Kesling (b. 1980, USA) was born and raised in Northeastern Kentucky in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. He received his BFA in Arts from Morehead State University (Morehead, KY, 2003) and spent a summer in Europe studying art history (Summer 2002). He went on to receive his MFA in Painting from SCAD (Savannah, GA, 2010). He spent the next six years in Brooklyn, NY immersed in the NYC art scene. In March of 2016, while attending a month-long residency at The Vermont Studio Center he realized how integral time, space, and nature were to his studio practice and in 2016, relocated to Madison, TN, just outside of Nashville.

His work has been featured in various group exhibitions and in 2022 he was accepted to the White Columns Curated Online Artist Registry. His work is included in the permanent collections of SCAD, Vanderbilt University Medical Center Community Arts Initiative and Soho House Nashville. He has attended artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Art Residency Chattanooga, Azule, Jx Farms, and Mudhouse. He has had solo shows at Wheelhouse Arts (Louisville, KY), Oz Arts (Nashville, TN) and The Red Arrow Gallery (Nashville, TN).

Kesling is a member of the artist collective at Ground Floor Contemporary (Birmingham, AL) and is represented by The Red Arrow Gallery (Nashville, TN) and Wheelhouse Art (Louisville, KY).

Kesling is ARTS Southeast’s May 2024 ON::View Artist-in-Residence, and a Featured Artist in Vol. 3 No. 1 of IMPACT Arts + Culture Magazine!

DEADLINE TO APPLY: August 24th, 2024 by 11:59 PM via this form: https://forms.gle/8JyppEojso923Q3GA

Learn more at www.artssoutheast.org/offthewall

“Five Grim Reapers standing guard in the art box mimic the stance of a hockey team. These guys don’t care which color Jersey you wear in life, they are here to remind us all that in the after life we are all on the same team, that we will all reach the same fate, and it really doesn’t matter what team you think you belong to in this life. Aligned by death, we ultimately all wear the same jersey.”

– Maxx Feist

Maxx Feist (they/them) is a self taught artist from Asheville now residing in Savannah. Maxx paints bright, fun, monster pop art. Maxx works professionally as an artist and travels extensively in the southern US to bring some bright art to many during these dark times. Maxx is a studio artist at ARTS Southeast, and their work can often be seen during Open Studios for First Fridays in Starland.

Instagram: @maxx_feist

Artist Website: maxxfeistart.com

David Bobier is a self-identified hard of hearing media artist with a mental health diagnosis and is the parent of 2 deaf children, now adults. His work has been exhibited internationally and has been the focus of prominent touring exhibitions in Ontario and the Atlantic provinces. Bobier has received grants from Canada Council for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Grand NCE, British Council, Ontario Arts Council and New Brunswick Arts Council.

He has partnered with Inclusive Media and Design Centre at Ryerson University, Toronto and Tactile Audio Displays Inc. in researching and employing vibrotactile technology as a creative medium. As an extension of this research Bobier has established and is Director of VibraFusionLab in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The Lab emphasizes a holistic approach to considering vibration as a language of creation and exploration and to investigating broader and more inclusive applications of the sensory interpretation and emotionality of sound and vibration in art making practices. Through VibraFusionLab and in his own art practice Bobier aims at creating opportunities of greater accessibility in art making, art appreciation and in viewer experiences of art practices and presentations.

Leslie Putnam is a London Ontario based Artist and Educator. She earned her BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec with a Major in Studio Art and BEd from Western University in London, Ontario.Putnam’s work includes exhibitions in Europe and now in Ontario, her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions including Electric Eclectics, Toronto-(Nuit Blanche and Hard Twist), JNAAG, Museum London and the Canadian Clay and Glass Museum. She has received research, exhibition, and multi and inter arts projects grants from the Ontario Arts Council.

As a multi-disciplinary artist, Leslie creates multi-modal sculptures and installations on the premise that sculpture can and should include the ability of access though multiple senses, removing the barrier of “do not touch”created by the limitations of institutions. In 2010 she and David Bobier formed the o’honey collective as a platform for research and creation relating to the natural world.