STONELEAF RETREAT

2018 ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE

Announcing Artists for the 2018 STONELEAF Residency Program and Inaugural All Season Artist-in-Residence

After reviewing over 150 applications from the open call for women artists, STONELEAF RETREAT is excited to announce its 2018 Artists-in-Residence; Mahwish Chisty (Ohio), Theresa Chromati (Brooklyn), Liz Collins (Brooklyn), Rena Detrixhe (Oklahoma), Las Hermanas Iglesias (Queens), Emma Kohlmann (Massachusetts), Camille Lee (New Jersey), Katiushka Melo (Brooklyn), Mónica Palma (Brooklyn), Elise Rasmussen (Brooklyn) and Sinta Tantra (London).

STONELEAF RETREAT is also proud to welcome Rebecca Reeve (Brooklyn) as its first All Season Artist-in-Residence. Reeve, from now until March 2019, will use the land at STONELEAF to create photographs from her temporal site-specific works and take part in the July-August 2018 residency program.

This year STONELEAF has been focusing on what it means to ‘belong’, which influenced the choice of artists, whose diverse practices and backgrounds are complimented by disciplines which explore various subject matter such as immigration, labor, social activism, the environment, history, truth and feminism.

Special visitors to the residency in 2018 included: Alyson Baker, Sonel Breslav, Sarah Cascone, Marina Garcia-Vasquez, Anastasia James, Candice Madey, Stuart Morrison, Bahia Ramos, Tiana Webb Evans, plus a large group of ArtTable members, who all enjoyed studio visits with the artists.

LIZ COLLINS (April 27 - May 13, 2018)

BIO: Liz Collins surrounds the viewer in vibrating color fields to explore the boundaries between painting, fiber arts and installation. The cacophonic play of optics, texture, color and scale, recreates her wavering experience of the world as a place of stupendous wonder and cosmic energy. Collins has had solo exhibitions at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; Heller Gallery, NY; AMP Gallery, Provincetown, MA; and the Knoxville Museum of Art in Tennessee to name a few. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions including at the ICA/Boston; Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art; the Museum of FIT; the New Museum; the Museum of Arts and Design and MoMA. Collins’ awards include a USA Fellowship, a MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and residencies at the Siena Art Institute, Haystack, Yaddo, AIR Alaska, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She is a Queer Art Mentor and serves on the board of the Fire Island Art Residency.

STATEMENT: I work at the intersection of art and design, utilizing different scales that often culminate in large immersive environments. These spaces go beyond the realm of the visual and are functional places to rest, convene, and connect. Rather than inserting my artworks into an ostensibly blank neutral space, I often consider and construct each part of the room, including furniture, carpets, and wall pieces. My environments are comfortable while still being optically stimulating, stirring up emotions and mental activity with an arresting, abstract language of shape, color and form. Duality is at the core of my aesthetic; pain/pleasure, light/ dark, open/closed. The worlds I create also explore liquid material, electric currents, interconnectivity, energy exchange, and explosive phenomena both natural and human-made. This gives my environments, no matter how warm and welcoming, a tension, making them comfortably uncomfortable. I work primarily with fabric, yarn, and other materials and techniques in the textile realm including jacquard knitting and weaving. I often collaborate with industrial textile mills and other artists and designers. Recent collaborations have been in lighting, furniture, video, and curation, which all feed into these multi-faceted, multi- sensory worlds.  www.lizcollins.com | @lizzycollins7

EMMA KOHLMANN (April 27 - May 13, 2018)

BIO: Emma Kohlmann was born in New York City in 1989, currently lives and works in Western Massachusetts. Graduating from Hampshire College with a Bachelor of Arts in 2011, she designed her own major in aesthetics and feminist theory, as well as drawing. Her primary medium is watercolor and sumi ink. In her recent experiments include replicating watercolor on canvas and textile. Kohlmann publishes her own artist’s books and other ephemera such as zines and t-shirts. She has exhibited works at 68 projects (Berlin), V1 Gallery (Copenhagen), KIT Gallery (Tokyo) and throughout the United States.

STATEMENT: The idea of a drawing composing itself, and simultaneously falling apart engenders my work. I work in excess. I am constantly investigating the body as a symbolic image. I work from an abstract cellular level to locomotive. The work comes from different components of my own imagination. Inquiries on how gender is constructed or perceived become tools for me. In response I create alternative realities, where judgments, spectrums, binaries are not so literal or overt. Watercolor and sumi ink have always been my primary medium, although I have been exploring new modes of creation through painting with acrylic paints on canvas, sculpture and ceramics.   www.ekohlmann.com | @meiow_mix

SINTA TANTRA (April 27 - May 13, 2018)

BIO: A British artist of Balinese descent, Sinta Tantra was born in New York in 1979. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London 1999–2003 and at the Royal Academy Schools London 2004–06. Highly regarded for her site-specific murals and installations in the public realm, commissions include; Folkestone Triennial (2017) Newnham College, Cambridge University (2016); Songdo South Korea (2015); Royal British Society of Sculptors (2013); Liverpool Biennial (2012); Southbank Centre (2007). Tantra’s most notable public work includes a 300-metre long painted bridge commissioned for the 2012 Olympics, Canary Wharf, London. Solo shows include; A House in Bali (Jakarta Land & ISA Art Advisory, Jakarta 2017), Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Pearl Lam Gallery, Hong Kong 2016) and Fantastic Chromatic (Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London 2015). A recipient of many awards including the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at The British School at Rome (2017); British Council’s International Development Award (2014); and Deutsche Bank Award (2006), Tantra’s work has been featured in both UK and international press including The Guardian, The Evening Standard, Tate Shots, Architectural Digest, Wall Street International Magazine, iD Indonesia, etc.

STATEMENT: Tantra's bold interventions use colour abstractions that wrap themselves around architectural environments, transforming them in the process. The works are a hybridity of pop and formalism, a bricolage of colour and rhythm, an exploration of identity and aesthetics. Tantra challenges our understanding of geography whilst playing on notions of globalization / localization and deconstructing the modern obsession with brand. Themes within the work include the slippage between pictorial and physical space, of turning something 'inside out' and how we as bodies become submerged in surface and structure. "I describe the work as ‘painting on an architectural scale'. I create works that celebrate the spectacle, questioning the decorative, functional and social role of art. The compositional arrangements are rooted in formalism. I am intrigued when this formalism becomes 'relational' - when private becomes public and when the viewer becomes active. My work is an 'overlay' which inserts its identity within the pre existing - heightening a sense of fantasy within the functional. Colour exists as an integral aspect to my work and I am drawn to colour as a material which lies in-between the language of art and industry. Colour exists within its own structure - it is densely packed, hermetically sealed, contained. My work takes on a sculptural approach to 'colour-collage' where colour is 'cut' as opposed to filled, 'layered' as opposed to mixed, 'constructed' as opposed to emerged. Geometric boundaries are definitive and illusionary highs 'snap' into place as you walk around the work."

www.sintatantra.com | @sintatantra

RENA DETRIXHE (May 25 - June 10, 2018)

BIO: Rena Detrixhe creates contemplative work combining repetitive process and collected or scavenged materials to produce meticulous, large-scale objects and installations.  Her recent work explores systems of value in relation to land and water and slowness as a means of cultivating empathy and understanding. Detrixhe received her BFA from the University of Kansas in 2013, has exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States and is the recipient of numerous awards including a two-year studio residency with Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. Recent exhibitions include Ephemera at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS, and a solo exhibition at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Detrixhe has spent the past two years as a Tulsa Artist Fellow in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

STATEMENT: I weave carpets from dust, transform seeds into lace, suspend a fleeting moment of rain droplets on window into a solid cast form. Guided by the poetic and inherent qualities of a material and a personal interest in history, memory and geography, I respond. I might become immersed in conversation with a single tree, the collective memories embedded in soil, or an entire geological epoch, always searching for deeper understanding of environment, of relationships, and of place. In my recent work I engage in laborious processes, refining soil and sculpting it into delicate ephemeral sculptures that investigate the complicated history of the landscape and systems of value. I pursue a poetic understanding of time, material, history, and place, along with a constant reckoning of human impact.

www.renadetrixhe.com | @renadetrixhe

LAS HERMANAS IGLESIAS (May 25 - June 10, 2018)

BIO: Las Hermanas Iglesias is the project-based collaboration of Lisa and Janelle Iglesias. The sisters also pursue distinct individual practices grounded in Sculpture and Drawing. Lisa received her MFA from the University of Florida where she is now an Assistant Professor. Janelle earned her degree in Sculpture from VCU and recently relocated to Southern California. The sisters’ individual & collaborative work has been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum, Sculpture Center and Abrons Art Center, among others. As a team they’ve been artists in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts through LMCC’s Paris residency program and more recently at Fanoon: Center for Print Research at VCU Qatar. Their individual and collaborative work has been supported by the Queens Council for the Arts, NYFA, NALAC, The Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Pollock-Kranser Foundation.

STATEMENT: The moniker Las Hermanas speaks to our identity as woven into histories and philosophies of feminism and collaboration. As the children of Norwegian and Dominican immigrants who grew up in Queens, New York, our project-based, transdisciplinary work explores issues of hybridity, social participation and cultural fusion. Through employing playful structures that respond to the community and geographical context of each project, Las Hermanas create artworks that disrupt borders, engage absurdity, and promote the benefits of working together.Individually, Lisa's work is engaged with the expansive history and potential of drawing and takes into consideration the translation of patterns, images and gestures across time and material. Janelle's work is concerned in the metaphors found in objects and their physical language in space, using sculpture to access other ways of knowing.    www.LasHermanasIglesias.com | @lisa_iglesias | @theinvisibleisreal

CAMILLE LEE (May 25 - June 10, 2018)

BIO: Camille Lee (b. 1988, Seoul) has been working on various themes of minority issues mainly about herself and the communities around her. Her works are formed around familiar ready- made products or forms, exploring the counter play between her conceptual functions and the familiar contexts held by the audience. They act as deconstructions of everyday life and the implications of an ontological question about the social structure that we call daily life. Camille has had numerous exhibitions in U.S. and South Korea. She lives and works in the NYC area.

STATEMENT: As a woman, an immigrant, my work is a personal record of how I am overcoming the pain and scars of patriarchy and immigration procedures as well as rebuilding my independent self. Through the multiple dimensions of materials such as text, installation, videos, I unveil the identity of various social-injustices. Furthermore, the elaborate design of this work path realizes the significance of audience participation. Lately I have been working on installing text, showing the violent sides of American immigration, and making a video piece about a story of an escapee, myself, who moved from one patriarchal society into another patriarchal society.   www.camille.today | @camille_lee_nyc

MAHWISH CHISTY (JUNE 22 - July 8, 2018)

BIO: Initially trained as a miniature painter from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, Mahwish Chisty has aggressively combined new media and conceptual work with her traditional practice. Ms. Chisty has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at venues like University of Technology (UTS Gallery), Sydney, Australia; Boghossain Foundation-Villa Empain, Brussels; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MOCADA), Brooklyn; Imperial War Museum, London, UK and Gandhara Art Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan, among others. In 2015 Ms. Chisty was awarded residencies at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL and Vermont Studio Center, Vermont, NY. Ms. Chisty also has works in public and private collections, including the Foreign office Islamabad, Pakistan, Fukouka Asian Art Museum, Fukouka Shi, Japan and Imperial War Museum, London. Ms. Chisty is also the recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

STATEMENT: My artistic research combines my interest in Pakistani traditional folk art/culture and contemporary politics as it relates to US/Pakistan relationship. Drone series is inspired by my visit to Pakistan in 2011. I have been creating formal paintings that depict contradictions and irony within its pictorial coding. Starting from a silhouette of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, I paint colorful folk ‘truck art’ imagery on these war machines to give them a second skin that opens a dialogue about Pakistani culture. More recently, I am creating installations that interact with the space and the viewer. I am interested in the juxtaposition of terror with the representation of cultural beauty.   www.mahachishty.com | @mahachishty

MÓNICA PALMA (JUNE 22 - July 8, 2018)

BIO: Mónica Palma was born in Mexico City and lives and works in Brooklyn.She studied visual art at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Veracruz, and received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been shown at TSA (New York), 245 Varet Street (New York), Five Myles (New York), Ortega y Gasset Projects (New York) and Soloway Gallery (New York).

STATEMENT: Exposing the body in order to leave and collect traces. My drawing process is as much about imposing the body, joints squishing and folding the paper, as it is about collecting the debris of the streets, dust, and taste of the paper. It is equally about what-do-I-do to the paper or sidewalk as what these living elements do to me. Two forces work somewhere in the middle of the act of staining, folding the paper, slicing it, and the acts of spiting on, licking and smearing, and caressing the surface. Tenderness and disobedience join forces. How do I conquer a surface – make it mine? How do I take control and exercise dominion over the paper or the street? www.monicapalma.com | @mopanana

ELISE RASMUSSEN (JUNE 22 - July 8, 2018)

BIO: Elise Rasmussen is a research-based artist working in photography, video and performance. She assumes the role of artist as investigator, uncovering lesser-known histories in an attempt to challenge the hegemonic record and re-think notions of "truth." Elise received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her work has been exhibited, performed and screened at international venues including the Brooklyn Museum (NY), CCS Bard Museum (Annandale-on-Hudson), Night Gallery (LA), Pioneer Works (NY), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), and Erin Stump Projects (Toronto).

STATEMENT: An overarching thread in my work is the examination of ways that history is recorded and how this reflects implicit power structures embedded in fields of cultural production and the world at large. The discovery of lesser-known histories fascinates me and my practice involves intense researchin an attempt to uncover stories overlooked or under recognized by the hegemonic record. I look for threads of intersection at which point I record my investigations through varying artistic strategies in an attempt to reimagine a new narrative, creating works that address larger concepts related to notions of power, value systems and the relationship between the personal and political.    www.eliserasmussen.com | @eliseseye

THERESA CHROMATI (JULY 20 - AUGUST 5, 2018)

BIO: Chromati’s work has most recently been displayed at the Untitled Art Fair, Miami and featured on Art News, i-D, Cool Hunting, and in the 2018 Spring issue of Juxtapoz Magazine. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute and is currently working in her studio located in Bedstuy, Brooklyn.

STATEMENT: Theresa Chromati is a Guyanese American multimedia artist born in Baltimore, Maryland. Chromati explores black women as idealized figures that embrace empowering identifications of full figured women adorned with whimsical protective armor such as face masks, pussy lips, and protruding chest keloids referencing diversity of self-identity, ownership, body manipulation, and as an act of self preservation. The artist has begun to incorporate “electrical outlets” as objects to portray black women as powerful sources of energy, yet very vulnerable and over exposed to intrusion, energy draining, or “plugging in”.Rotating between digital and analogue media, Chromati's environments take place in an alternate universe often accompanied by layered audio melodic soundscapes. Graphic elements reminiscent of checkerboard tiles are placed against grand arches that create royal backdrops and mysterious doorways which suggest an escape for women. The artist emphasizes subtle gestures of intimacy within familial, romantic, and congenial relationships. As well as looking into a spectrum of experiences that exist for women within public and private spaces, exceeding the limitations traditionally imposed on them. Chromati often pulls references from women, mother’s, aunties, neighbors, that she experienced during her adolescent years in Baltimore City by focusing on the various nuances of communication within partnerships and black women as community.    www.theresachromati.black | @theresachromati

KATIUSHKA MELO (JULY 20 - AUGUST 5, 2018)

BIO: Katiushka Melo (b. 1977) is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist, born in New York and raised by Chilean parents. Her work often addresses the challenging questions about the role and representation of women in modern society. She often gathers historical artifacts from other women, incorporating them into her performance practice. Through the interaction created while making food, she finds meaning in the daily rituals of different cultures, collaborating with woman from different tribes and breaking bread in order to understand cultures distant from her own. Her work has been exhibited in the Americas, Europe and Asia, most recently at Miami Art Basel and a solo show at Veracruzana Cultural Center for the Arts in Mexico.

STATEMENT: Katiushka Melo's practice is predominantly performance based, using video, photography and other mediums to readdress the role of women in our current social and political systems. Her work dissects issues of gender identity and beauty ideals as well as challenging the domestic roles of women in modern society. Katiushka's work creates a space for contemplation, whilst her own emphasis on physical endurance provides a backdrop for more visceral understanding of the body as material and its capabilities.   www.katiushkamelogreen.com | @inthemoodforbyk

REBECCA REEVE: (JULY 20 - AUGUST 5, 2018) All Season Artist-in-Residence

BIO: Rebecca Reeve was born in London, England. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Bath Spa University and a Masters of Visual Arts at the University of South Wales, Australia. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally including La Biennale de Montreal, (Canada), Fries Museum, Berlin, (Germany), Museum of Latin American Art, (Buenos Aires), EFA Project Space, (NYC) the Masur Museum of Art, (Louisiana) and as part of the Hermès artist in window program series in NYC. In 2013, she was Artist in Residence at Everglades National Park and was the recipient of the Artist in Exploration grant underwritten by Rolex. In 2016 she was the Artist-in-Residence at Joshua Tree National Park. She lives and works in New York City.

STATEMENT: I am a British artist working in sculpture, painting and photography. I produce temporal site-specific works situated in natural settings. I am interested in the ways in which we experience the natural environment. My work explores the spaces between the interior and the exterior, using familiar household objects and cultural association as a means of activation and experimentation in perceptual experience.

I employ the performative method of en plein air painting, to record my experience onto an object. In the resulting photographs my response to the environment is juxtaposed against the back drop of the landscape itself. A metaphor for the human condition and a meditation upon the union of interior and exterior landscape, notions of duality, intrinsically polarizing in nature, are a common theme throughout my work.

I am interested in the visual experience of change, environmental patterns in processes such as creation, destruction, inhalation, exhalation and their inherent rhythmic, cyclical form. In placing a grid like, mapping system within the frame, the illusory effect of the geometrical planes invites the eye to travel back and forth in a rhythmic manner. Often durational in nature, my work examines this transformative experience and the process of deconstruction as a productive act.   www.rebeccareeve.com | @rebeccareeve.studio