ON::View Artist Residency
Past Projects
October 2024
William Franco & Miki Seifert
The New Zealand-based duo spent their time in Savannah continuing on their project Azucar/Sugar, which explores the connection between the globalization of sugar and colonization. Drawn towards this work through Franco’s Zapotec and Mixtec culture, they researched Savannah’s history of refining sugar, and how Georgia played a critical role in sugar’s history in the Americas. As their Residency aligned with Dia de Muertos, they also created an ofrenda with sugar skulls in the Residency studio as a featured part of their project finale.
September 2024
Brydie O’Connor
Brydie O’Connor is a Kansas-born, NY based filmmaker and archivist. During her Residency, she continued 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 presented video vignettes of archival videos blended with contemporary oral histories, along with imagery of how the archival is being digitized in the present.
August 2024
Asma Khoshmehr
Interdisciplinary artist Asma Koshmehr continued work on her hybrid documentary project, “One Thousand and One Nights in Zanzibar,” a result of her transformative journey spanning years across Tanzia, Kenya, Oman, and Iran. Traveling to these countries, she gathered information, filmed, and conducted interviews, leading the discovery of a profound family secret. During her stay in Savannah, she edited footage, enriched the documentary with archival research and created an immersive installation exhibition to invite viewers to engage with her discoveries.
July 2024
Gweny Jin
Based in Columbus, OH, Gweny Jin’s process mixes craft and techniques as the pidgin language of making, incorporating light and shadow as a designed element to interact with tangible forms. While in Savannah, her Residency project engaged audiences to experience shifting space and time in a site-specific installation based on the architectural features of the ARTS Southeast building.
JUNE 2024
Leslie Putnam & David Bobier
During their Residency, Putnam and Bobier (Ontario, Canada) created a commuity space where vibrotactile elements were explored and created with input from the public. As they explain, “vibrotactile artwork involves the use of transducers to change sound into vibration, allowing for the audience to experience what is known as haptic empathy: conveying emotional meaning through vibrotactile feedback.”
MAY 2024
John Paul Kesling
Based just outside of Nashville, TN, John Paul Kesling explores human intimacy in his paintings, both romantic and familial. His work delves into "the emotional and psychological intricacies of intimate relationships, personal loss, and our place in the natural world" (Artist Statement). During his Residency, Kesling created multiple large-scale mixed media paintings of figures in landscapes, drawing inspiration from nature and "the power it imbues to unite us all...presented as both a utopian/dystopian scene of nostalgia and invention" (Project Statement).
APRIL 2024
Kiara Gilbert
While in Savannah, Atlanta-based printmaker Kiara Gilbert expanded on a body of work and research centering queer lineage and the non-normative ways it manifests through communal spaces and experiences. Combining sculpture with printmaking through dimensional forms and papier maché, they activated the studio windows with rotating works that could be experienced in the round.
February + March 2024
Libbi Ponce
Based in Ecuador and Florida, multidisciplinary artist Libbi Ponce was ARTS Southeast’s first Artist-in-Residence to be awarded a two-month stay. While in Residence, they created both video and sculptural work incorporating an ambtious range of materials, from ceramics and metal to resin and glass.
JANUARY 2024
Caitlin McDonagh
Victoria, BC-based artist Caitlin McDonagh created a series of works on paper directly influenced by the local architectural and natural landscapes of Savannah. In ARTS Southeast’s first official collaboration with Cleo the Project Space, Caitlin’s Residency culminated in an exhibition and mural installation at Cleo.
October 2023
Timothy Short
Atlanta-based painter Timothy Short’s series of oil-based paintings and graphite and charcoal drawings, For Da Folks, highlights intimate moments between the artist and his family members. As Short notes, “My loved ones connect me to my Blackness and that Blackness is exemplified in the work as a palpable energy source made tangible through everyday, interpersonal familial rituals.”
Other works furthered during his Residency focused on outdoor environments occupied by Black people — spaces that Short has inhabited or traversed daily over lengthy periods, building relationships through these experiences. Night vistas submerge the viewer into the atmospheric reality of belonging to thes spaces.
SEPTEMBER 2023
Alexandria P. Clay
NC-based artist Alexandria P. Clay encouraged community members to share their methods of placemaking, and ways that they reclaim space in daily life. Through her collage-based workshop, folks were encouraged to identify the spaces that fail to support their identities, and hypothesize what changes they might make in spaces like these. Alexandria transformed the Residency studio through a floor-to-ceiling installation, exemplifying her practice of placemaking.
AUGUST 2023
Mary Katharine Tramontana
Berlin-based writer and photographer Mary Katharine Tramontana worked on two projects during her Residency: her first book of poetry with accompanying original photography, Serious Pleasures: Poems of Lust and Longing, and a series of photographs involving sensual imagery of young men, “Boys,” with an accompanying essay on sexual appetite, gender, and the way we conceptualize human sexuality and desire.
JULY 2023
Josef Schulz
During his Residency, German artist Josef Schulz continued his practice of photographing architectural objects like warehouses and factories. In Schulz’ post-processed photographs, these buildings are freed from their old contexts and placed into new ones.
JUNE 2023
Celeste Lindsey
During her Residency, San Antonio-based artist Celeste Lindsey produced a series of works with materials that absorb, reflect, or react to the presence of light, and experimented with comic-book style silhouettes and text in her mixed media compositions. She also hosted a cyanotype workshop, allowing Savannahians to experience this process – with her own twist.
May 2023
Logan Ryland Dandridge
During his Residency, Logan Ryland Dandridge shared his time-based, experimental video work. As a researcher, Dandridge explores ancestry, diaspora, and spirituality through an interdisciplinary practice, developing themes of Black ontology, collective memory, and sacred music into an experimental continuum of liberation, repose and play.
APRil 2023
Nancey B. Price
During her Residency, Nancey B. Price expanded her ongoing series “Water Signs,” a mixed-media exploration of the ways in which water has contributed to the overall story of Black people in the African diaspora. She fostered a shared space in which the community could co-create with her and tell their own stories. Her Residency concluded with an Artist Talk on identity, storytelling and how the two can enhance anyone’s creative practice.
MARCH 2023
DEEP Center
ARTS Southeast hosted DEEP Center’s Block by Block Program in the ON::View Residency studio during The Nomadic Photo Ark’s exhibition Portrait of US. Artists Monica Jane Frisell and Adam Scher worked with the young people in the Block by Block program to teach them about analog photography, sound recording and storytelling. The students made their own portraits and recordings, and their work was displayed throughout the Residency session.
november 2022
Sue Carrie Drummond
During her Residency, Drummond worked on the project, My Mold Garden, developing a pop up artist book focused on issues of domesticity and gender. The text for this book came from a collaboration with a cultural anthropologist, with a focus on emotional breakdown and mental instability.
october 2022
Carlos Estevez
Carlos Estevez’s project, Cities of the Mind, maps the human mind through the creation of his own maps. He studies urbanism and the history of local architecture to understand the socio-political roots of the human settlements, their implications from the past and their projection to the future.
A recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, the Cintas Foundation Fellowship in Visual Arts, The Ellies Creator Award, and the Grand Prize in the First Salon of Contemporary Cuban Art in Havana, Carlos Estévez was born and raised in Cuba and moved to Miami in 2004, where he lives and works.
SEPTEMBER 2022
Jen Palmer
Jen Palmer moves beyond the tired stereotypes of NFT’s and AI (artificial intelligence) to explore the possibilities that this nascent technology holds for the intrepid artist. During her Residency, she invited the public to create mixed media paintings using simple meditative prompts as a guide. The works created became part of a dataset of images to train AI. From that output, Palmer developed a set of images and short videos that were shared on-location in the Residency and as freely collected NFTs.
AUGUST 2022
Gabrielle Torres
Local artist Gabe Torres uses site-specific relational art to form bonds and foster conversation. During her Residency, she wove a giant loom painting made from donated clothing and other meaningful fabrics, incorporating live plants in reference to the invasive nature and insidious effects of colonialism. She also painted portraits of Savannah locals who visited her in the Residency space.
JULY 2022
Kazumi Wilds
Kazumi Wilds came to the ON::View Residency from Tokyo, Japan. Inspired by the magical beauty of the Spanish moss hanging from the trees in the parks and along the streets of Savannah, she investigated regional botany and created a limited-edition artist book. She used a combination of woodblock and monoprint techniques using actual Spanish moss, printed with a Japanese baren. Kazumi also offered a workshop in which participants learned traditional suminagashi paper marbling and bookbinding techniques.
junE 2022
Tiara Unique Francois
Tiara met with the Savannah community to photograph and then paint portraits of Black women in watercolor. These portraits were then collaged onto the Residency studio walls. Tiara took part in the Savannah MLK Juneteenth Celebration of Freedom on Tybee and also offered an Artist Talk and Watercolor Workshop.
Tiara Unique Francois is a painter, born and raised in Dallas, Texas. She recently graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington with a BFA in Painting.
may 2022
Timothy Harding
Harding constructed a stretcher system emphasizing painting as a sculptural object that uniquely responds to its environment and can be taken in from a variety of perspectives: seen from the street-facing window, and navigated from within the studio during open hours.
April 2022
Stephanie Barber “DIALOGS”
Stephanie’s work combines literature and video. She composed a collection of short, poetic dialogs and used the Residency studio to write, edit, shoot and share these texts and videos.
Savannahians were invited to collaborate with Stephanie by reading her dialogue scripts; over 20 different short experimental films were made during the course of the Residency!
march 2022
Monica Jane Frisell & Adam Scher - “The Nomadic Photo Ark, Portrait of US”
Monica Jane Frisell and Adam Scher gathered stories and large format, black and white portraits of residents of Savannah, GA, which have been added to their growing catalog and long term project Portrait of US.
Their Nomadic Photo Ark is traveling around the country, creating a growing and evolving collection of stories and portraits of the United States today. The Ark has a fully contained photo darkroom and small office space. From there they develop film, print portraits, and edit interviews.
february 2022
Jon Field - “The Desiring Machine - A Merzbau for Starland”
The Desiring Machine takes a Dada masterpiece as its primary point of reference. Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau was a continually changing, immersive environment meant to be experienced by the viewer as they walked through it.
Adopting this model, Jon Field oversaw the construction of a Merzbau for Starland. Combining materials collected on site, images, and ideas generated through discussion with members of the community, the artist oversaw this evolving architectural/visual installation.
Participants were invited to bring something that represents their hopes for the future. These elements were added to the installation according to the wishes of the individual or group involved.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021
Rebecca Braziel - “Steady Climbing”
Rebecca Braziel’s work entices viewers to look deeply into exuberant surface textures, discovering visions of flora and fauna in an experience intended to strengthen the human connection to nature. In her ON::View Residency Project, “hand-stitched fibers took on the form of an organic species attaching to living plants. This invasion distorted the form and threatened the health of its host, producing ephemeral sculptures that stimulated conversation around anxiety, gender roles, and the environment.”
OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021
Sinéad Hornak - “Fleeting Bodies: Eternal Souls”
Sinéad Hornak’s residency project focused on the bodily containment of the human soul, documenting the gradual decay of our bodies into an ephemeral and abstract state. The artist narrated the soul’s path to existence through abstract collages and mixed media work in a series of book pages. Each page was individually displayed in the window of the residency space, building a tapestry of abstract collaged pages composing this overarching narrative of the soul escaping the bodily containment.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021
Kellie Martin - “Holding Storms”
Kellie Martin is a deaf, queer and non-binary artist whose performance and visual works are rooted in the exploration of the internal and external aspects of their queer, deaf identity. The key aims of their ON::View Residency project were to create “healing dialogue between deaf and hearing communities…to build a strong bridge between these different worlds, to create resources for each others’ futures, and to create acceptance of various identities.” In addition to creating paintings featuring American Sign Language, Martin offered a workshop to teach some basics of ASL and discuss inclusivity, accessibility, and privilege, fostering empathetic engagement.
AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2021
Kimberly Riner - “A Time to Heal”
Kimberly Riner’s ON::View Residency project gave the community an opportunity to collaborate with the artist in the making of a Community Grief Quilt. The community was invited to add textures to black stoneware clay tiles by pressing in items from lost loved ones or special tokens from lost experiences. This process became a tactile way for people to connect to the physical process of grief, especially in this time of pandemic.
JUNE/JULY 2021
Bridget Conn - "Deep Breath"
Bridget Conn is a photographic artist and educator. Her work explores written language, communication, and the potential of photography as a physical and chemical medium through the creation of chemigrams. In her ON::View Residency project, Conn welcomed subjects to sit for a conversation about how the pandemic has influenced their perceptions of people, our society, our country, while she photographed them with lengthened camera exposures to visually document the time physically spent together. The resulting chemigrams were driven by the artist’s desire to regain comfort and trust with others through portraiture and dialogue.
October/November 2019
Karina Rosenstein - "I Bleed All the Time and I'm Fine: Social Practice & Menstruation"
“If we can’t talk about menstruation, how can we possibly make productive noise about menstrual culture and its interventions?”
During her time as artist in residence, Karina Rosenstein executed two differentiated but related social practice projects that thoughtfully investigate contemporary menstrual issues.
September/October 2019
Lizzy Taber - “Gradients: Exploring Rising Tides”
As the level of the sea slowly rises Lizzy Taber begins to question time. She think about what does it mean to be slow? How does something so subtle and slow creep up and effect land, humanity and future generations? These questions can be examined through poetic responses from the community and creative output.
Her ON::VIEW residency project conveyed and expressed not only Taber’s response to, but visual data of sea level rise. Sea level rise is one of the biggest threats to coastal cities, and Savannah is subject to many detriments due to climate change. In the four weeks at Sulfur Studios, Taber utilized the space to work on a new series of paintings that address these issues.
August/September 2019
Joseph Malson: Piecing Starland (Queer)
During his residency Malson created a small body of work that is regionally specific to the Starland neighborhood. As an artist who uses found and thrifted objects, media, and textiles in combination with handmade materials, Malson tries to make work that creates new possibilities of interpretation and experience through material decontextualization and re-assemblage. Historically, queers and queer communities create new identities, new families, and new realities out of what is available to us. Joseph’s work and methods in the studio echo these models. Using materials that have been procured from second hand stores and from personal collections in combination with disrupted versions of traditional craft techniques, the intention is for viewers to see some of our stories, disrupting the repeat patterns of heteronormativity.
July/August 2019
Nina Farryn - Looks for Life in America
This is a project born out of Farryn’s simultaneous obsession and frustration with Instagram and social media culture in recent years. Since her adolescence, she has experienced a kind of life on the internet. The unique humor and aesthetics of strange corners of the web inform all Farryn’s work. However, with this particular series, she hopes to push forward frustration towards the superficial ‘wokeness’, misinformation, and escapism in regards to politics that exists in social media. Through satire portraits of the very millennial group she belongs to, she pushes individuals to take their activism and opinions off screens and into their communities.
June/July 2019
Maggie Hayes - Unconditional love will break down the hierarchy of oppression
This residency centered around the benefits and necessity of moving towards a global community that must be founded on the basis of non-judgment and unconditional love, allowing us to move into horizontal relationship with one another and eliminating the need for the current vertical hierarchy that can only continue to exist through systematic discrimination, injustice, and exploitation. Hayes also underwent a personal transformation towards more deeply embodying my own loving nature as well, through the process of a 7 day silent meditation and fast, which took place as a performance inside of the ON::VIEW Residency space.
Guests were encouraged to visit the space throughout, including during the meditation period, in which they were welcomed and invited to interact with the installation. To receive ourselves as worthy of love, despite whatever flaws we may perceive ourselves to have, despite whatever trauma and abuse we have experienced, despite whatever mistakes or misguided actions we have taken, is truly transformative. When we can extend this generosity of spirit to ourselves, we are then able to share that generosity with the rest of mankind and all life forms.
May/June 2019
Jennifer Lee Hallsey - Body out of Order
To be ‘relational’ can only be understood in terms of the connected interactions between individuals or groups of people. In this context the art form takes on a different connotation and becomes a relationship between individuals around an object. ‘Art’ is a vehicle and the objects themselves become the language for an encounter to occur. When discussing the function of art, art should not only be assessed aesthetically as object. It should be considered in terms of the relationships it establishes through these encounters. The value lies not in the material itself, but rather in the connected interactions we have around the objects; the form itself.
Hallsey’s work exists as a discussion of and about process. . She is captivated by what is lost, what is gained, and what changes. The work created during the residency program explored a poststructural analysis of appropriated text, water-based mixed media, and the significance of scale with the human body as a standard of measurement. Small, prayer-style books were constructed of cut-up method prose and the subsequent text was be transferred to the residency window using vinyl decals, building and degrading over time.
April/May 2019
Kevin Clancy - Worth Dying For
The use of flags in artwork remains controversial. Clancy believes reactions to seeing the flag used in this way derive less from a change to the physical object and more from the change in our perception of it. By physically manipulating the United States flag, a more complicated narrative can be brought to bear upon the viewer. Through a multiplicity of processes, the flag is physically and metaphorically reoriented to draw out new questions and interpretations.
The serial production of the United States flag has killed its unique aura. Its use in advertising and propaganda have eroded and limited its meaning. The conceptual ideas that underpin much flag art stem from this history and its use by both state and non-state actors. My time here at ON:VIEW is an opportunity to engage the public on their thoughts and feelings regarding this symbol. I encourage all questions, comments and concerns.
March/April 2019
Emily Laychak - Judgment Day Circus
Drawing from archetypes, myths, symbols, and dichotomies, “Judgment Day Circus” is a puppet production inspired by the chaos and reigning spiritualties of our times. During this residency, multi-media artist Emily Laychak created and directed a theater of clowns performing a poetic review of our collective process from Genesis to Judgment Day. A variety of local artists are cast in holy roles of revelation, along with a diverse range of puppet styles including marionette, carnival, shadow, and moving toys, framed by custom constructed scenery and stages.
February/March 2019
Jemma Castiglione - TinType Portrait Studio
During her residency, Jemma expanded her experimentation of tintype portraiture. Community is one of the most rewarding parts of the photographic medium. People are connecting over mutual visual interests daily. We are united through the camera as a device of capturing reality. There is an interest in older photographic methods like tintype but the education just isn’t around or practiced by enough people to be readily available. Throughout the length of this residency, Jemma created around 30 tintypes portraits of members of the community in pursuit of spreading the importance of traditional photographic art.
January/February 2019
Sabine Remy - Analog Collage Collaboration
Sabine Remy is Dusseldorf, Germany based analog collage artist collaborating with other (collage) artists all over the world / in each continent in different projects. She continued to develop her open collage studio practice at Sulfur Studios, working specifically with American paper material for herself, and hosted a workshop initiating collaborative projects which that ended up in an exhibition in the studio at the end of the residency - kind of assembling a magazine with contributions of all participants.
November/December 2018
Nicholas Silberg - Dearest Savannah
The power of the printed word, deliberate in nature, takes time in its revolution. Handwritten letters are personal and tangible because of the time and intimate process of drawing out each and every character. Handprinted ephemera much like handwritten letters can provide the same genuine experience.
“Dearest Savannah” is a adlib patchwork of words, phrases, and sayings about our community, printed by the artist and walk-in community participants. The prints were assembled and reassembled as the living letter to our dearest Savannah growing over the course of the residency. The studio was be transformed into a letterpress print shop complete with woodtype, presses, ink, paper and other printing accoutrements. The space provided an opportunity for participants to engage with the artist and equipment to find the words to express how we feel about our community. Participants built upon what has already been said bring to light common themes of what we say about the place in which we live.
October 2018
Craig Deppen Auge - INTERVALS
The book and collage can be metaphors for life’s journey; pages and layers conveying time experienced. INTERVALS expanded on Auge’s existing collage practice, utilizing rhythmic, coded and abstracted vocabularies to explore alternative book art. During the 4-week residency, simple bookmaking techniques were distilled and/or deconstructed to produce sculptural forms. These forms, along with 2D work incorporating collage, drawing, painting and print processes, developed into a cohesive installation. Playful experimentation between color, texture, pattern and geometry merged with subtle, narrative photographic elements. Within these combinations, INTERVALS examined concepts of personal and universal journey. Works pondered the intersection of ethereal dreamscape and architectural landscape, highlighted inner spaces and interspaces, individual moments and the places in-between, that constitute a collective sense of reality.
September 2018
Annika Pettersson - Remix Resolution
This project took its inspiration from the remix culture that was first developed by end of the 20th century and has evolved ever since. "Remix" generally refers to the practice of recombining pre-existing media content.
Remix, in whatever form or medium in which it is implemented, is concerned with recordings. It is founded on the appropriation of existing media content and it manipulates this recorded data to fabricate new products or content.
Every element in a remix has been derived and copied from something else, it is a process requiring the act of copying. The result is not just a faithful reproduction but somewhat different and original in its own right.
Pettersson aims to produce new and interesting products by recycling already existing media and content. The “Remix resolution” project examines concepts of originality, innovation, authority, simulation, plagiarism, repetition, and inauthenticity.
August 2018
Lisa D. Watson - Antidote
During her On::View Residency at Sulfur Studios, Watson combined her current professions of garden design and fine art to transform the residency studio into a green space.
Roadways, bridges and sprawl are common themes in Watson’s artwork. She has been concerned with vulnerable natural habitats and human encroachment since she was a child as she watched roadways cut thru neighboring woodlands. Artwork can reflect these issues, native and drought tolerant gardens along with landscape education may just be the antidote to these sprawling problems, one garden at a time.
July 2018
Michele Quick - Shoemaking Demystified
The globalized production of fashion objects has disconnected many consumers from the traditional crafts that used to be highly visible in the production process. During her Residency Michelle Quick will use the ‘on-view’ aspect of this residency as an opportunity to demystify the process of shoemaking and educate viewers about how an object that they interact with every day– shoes - are made.
This project brought together all of Quick's skills as a designer, craftsperson, and educator into one thematic body of work exploring the relationship between design, production, and consumption of fashion objects. So often, emphasis is just placed on the final product, but the artist wants to place equal focus on the materials, making process, and final product by physically showing each phase in the final presentation.
June 2018
Becky Slivinsky - Objet de Desir
Slivinsky's work begins and ends with the act of cleaning. She questions an ideal standard of beauty that is forced upon women within western culture in searching for the correlation between unrealistic beauty expectations and the ways in which women are portrayed in the media. She explores this by purchasing magazines that can be found in common places, whether it be a drug store or a street cart, and flips through to find images of women that are displayed in different ways. Are their bodies being used as a commodity? Is this “fine-art” photography? Is this modeling? What exactly is it that makes one image professional and another “sexy”?
The image of the woman torn from the magazine is digitally manipulated and cleaning products are sprayed over her and I wipe her clean. The artist's response to her objectification is reactionary. Slivinsky is not cleaning the image because the subject is unclean, rather but rather is reclaiming her right to her body and sexuality through the obliteration of her objectification. The image is altered further by gesturally applying, pouring, spraying and wiping more cleaning products across her washed body in an attempt to force the viewer to examine the way women are seen in the world and ultimately subverting the meaning of the original image.
May 2018
Page Laughlin - Community Coloringbook
For the Month of May Page Laughlin engaged the ON::View residency space as a living laboratory for developing the Community Coloringbook Project. This is the next series in the Coloringbook Portfolio and “Paper Doll” Series, large scale oil and digital ink paintings on sheets of paper. Laughlin works at the intersection between oil painting, photography, and digital drawing. Starting from photographs she takes of people in her community, Laughlin converts the photos into composite figures and generates a line drawing, a coloring book template, for painterly exploration.
Throughout her residency, Laughlin invited the public to come be a part of the coloringbook project by taking pictures of passerbys for the coloringbook and beginning the transformation from image to line drawing.
April 2018
Anya Mitchell - Reflections on Desire
Inspired by the neighborhoods and culture of Savannah, Georgia I've been thinking about the way we divide ourselves into living a diversity of ways--thinking about how all our ways of living--for all the differences that exist--are all part of one community--though they feel worlds apart. I've been reflecting on our common desires: desires for a safe place to call home, for our children to be educated, to have access to food.
Reflections on Desires embodies these reflections. Places of intersection in Savannah--homes, schools and grocery stores-- are woven together where patterns in the environment across images reflects the one reality in which these seemingly separate places exist.
@she__makes
March 2018
Rob Hessler - Hindenburg (Shared Experiences)
On May 6, 1937 the German zeppelin Hindenburg was destroyed in a spectacular fire captured live on radio by Herbert “Herb” Morrison. The event “went viral” as it spread across newsreels and newspapers, and as Morrison’s “Oh the humanity!” proclamation was re-broadcast on radio stations across the country.
The resonance of this event has sent waves into The Other Side of the World, an alternate universe created by artist Rob Hessler. There it created a self-contained “island” where the after-effects play out on a landscape populated by elements familiar to the incident and with things as they were in our real world at that time. The One in the Duck Feather Cloak, a sentient explorer within this alternate reality, has come to explore this island, experiencing it for us in the present day, and sending back images so that we might understand the Hindenburg’s place in our history.
For this project artist Rob Hessler recreated the Hindenburg disaster at the point where it intersects The Other Side of the World. Leading up to the April 6th First Friday Art March, the space will act as a slowly changing installation piece, set in 1937 during the weeks leading up to the history-altering event. On the evening of the reception, the window on Bull Street turned into a portal to The Other Side of the World, with Hindenburg coming alive as a performance art piece including video, sound, and live actors.
Additional collaborative elements to be provided by videographer Drew Hunt and director/improvisationalist Chris Soucy.
February 2018
Friendship Magic Collective - Greg Eltringham and Honor Bowman Hall.
Our current ongoing collaborative project titled, “Homecoming,” is an investigation into our immediate environment, focusing on elements found in Savannah. We are interested in creating visual narratives that reflect our experiences in a deeply personal and imaginative painterly language. Our project is a conversation between our own points of reference. At times in synch, and at times tense, we create a dialogue about our lived experiences in Savannah. We employ specific painting strategies utilizing landscape, portraits, and narratives that touch on place, personal context, and transformation. This work is our response to the complex relationships and social dynamics that develop in this confined space. The ultimate goal of this project is to create and record our own visual diaries, evidence of our existence here at this moment in time, and to foster a lasting artistic dialog and friendship.
January 2018
Troy Wandzell
