Announcing the Selected & Shortlisted Artists for the 2016 YCIS Artist-In-Residence

For the first partnership artist residency program between Yew Chung International School and Red Gate Residency, we received an overwhelming 95 applications for one spot! We appreciate each applicant’s time and energy and it was a difficult decision but we are proud to announce the October-November 2016 YCIS artist-in-residence is Megan Mosholder.

Megan Mosholder
www.meganmosholder.com
USA // Installation, sculpture, painting

Megan Mosholder is a conceptual artist who operates in the real-world setting of the social-political landscape through site-responsive, sculptural installations. She is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design and has received numerous awards from institutions such as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences. A variety of publications have featured Megan's work including Beautiful/Decay, Hi-Fructose and Huffington Post and her diverse exhibition history includes participation in No Longer Empty’s Through the Parlor (2013) in Manhattan and an installation in Sirmione, Italy (2014), a body of work that speaks of the lasting impression a place of beauty can leave on an individual. More recently, Megan has been working in the corporate sector installing commissioned, permanent artworks, including a temporal, light-sensitive piece for Google's new office in Pittsburgh, PA. Originally from Ohio, Megan is currently based in Atlanta, GA but will be relocating temporarily in January 2017 to Oklahoma for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

"I am a site-specific installation artist and my work is determined by the location that I find myself in. Both natural and synthetic light is used as a drawing medium to bring my sculptural installations to life. Each one of the lines in my sculptures becomes an ethereal element that establishes otherworldliness and invokes curiosity. These installations are becoming monumental in size and I have had to employ a team of assistants to help me install them. As a result, my work, in some ways, has become a series of artist facilitated, directed projects. I use my role as an artist,  organizer  and mediator to educate, inspire and manage assistant and student involvement by encouraging them to visually engage with the presented materials."

Below are the other 4 shortlisted artists, as selected by YCIS and Red Gate Residency

Seila Fernandez Arconada
http://www.seilafernandezarconada.net
Spain // Multi-disciplinary artist.
Including sound, photography, video, sculpture, socially engaged practice, trans-disciplinary collaborations.

Seila Fernández Arconada is a multidisciplinary artist-researcher based in Bristol (UK). She has an BA-MA Fine Art, distinction 2009) from the University of the Basque Country and an MA Fine Art from UWE, Bristol (distinction, 2012). She has co-directed The Land of the Summer People, a multidisciplinary collaborative project with the Water Engineering Department, Bristol University, funded by EPSRC. She has been working on Some:When, celebrating cohesion through the watery heritage of the Somerset Levels and Moors, a collaborative-socially engaged project with the artist Jethro Brice. Both projects focus on climate change looking at flooding in Somerset and receive funding from the Somerset Community Foundation. Her artistic research is also written in academic papers, "Riding the Tide, socially engaged art and resilience in an uncertain future", a collaborative paper written with Jethro Brice has been recently selected for publication by the University of Groningen (Netherlands).

"The project proposal is here-NO-W-here (subtitle pending on collaborative agreement) deepens into the transitory times in which the relationship between human beings, nature and place. I am interested in hands on collaborative research in which the students will be able to imagine and feel themselves and the surrounding nature to revitalize innovative thinking and creative articulations for a positive future; therefore Beijing will be seen from a natural perspective to enable a different view conceiving creative possible future scenarios to understand the environmental uncertainty we live in. I scheme to research historical, biological and scientific together with artistic aspects of this natural heritage by providing students with artists methodologies including collaborative techniques in different media, such as sound, video, photography, drawing, sculpture, etc. to look at habitats, "imaginary homes" to observe, listen, analyze, question and create with and from. I will research about existing nature surroundings, in order to respond accordingly to the area where the project takes place."

Antonia Low
http://www.antonialow.com/
Germany // Installation, intervention, photography and sculpture.

The space-filling installations I create simulate infrastructures that underline everyday life. They suggest intriguing remains of past activities, resembling sites under construction or excavation - familiar disruptions of our physical surroundings. Peripheral things are brought centre-stage, producing unexpectedly complex, well-organized structures that propose poetic relationships between functional objects. My interventions in the exhibition space make reference to spatial circumstances. Through re-evaluations, disclosures and allocations, I thematise the different aspects of space and find new points of emphasis. My work has been shown at K21 Kunstsammlung NRW Düsseldorf/Germany; Palazzo Altemps-Museo Nationale Romano/Italy; Kunstmuseum Bonn/Germany; Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin/Ireland; Marres Maastricht/Netherlands; FRAC Nord Dunkerque/France; Chinese Arts Centre Manchester/UK and Deutsches Haus New York/USA, among others. I studied at the Kunstakademie Münster and received my MA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College London.

"Using Bamboo as a material for constructing a "Bamboo Cube“ instead of a "White Cube“ gallery space, I present my way of working as a conceptual artist, in which artistic installations and interventions re-think and re-produce aspects of typical everyday sites and find new points of emphasis: What can you actually make on your own, how can you physically construct your own reality? What is a certain material made of, what is its history and which working-techniques apply to it? How sustainable can your own construction of reality possibly be?"

Mark Rumsey

http://www.markrumsey.com

USA // Site-specific installation developed with relational practices.

Mark Rumsey is an artist working in social situations and spacial manipulations. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as internationally. The manifestations of his work take on many forms and should be viewed through the lens of a mash-up of site-specific installation, relational engagements, and live performance. Rumsey has traveled in the mode of cultural immersion, studying in China as an undergrad and in Egypt as a grad student. Between educational experiences he spent significant time traveling India and Nepal. Rumsey has continued to engage internationally in the role of Artist-in-residence including at The Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai, China; Rondo Atelier, Graz, Austria; Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, Belgium; Carvansarai, Istanbul, Turkey; and Global Arts Village, New Delhi, India.

“My paper based work is focused on providing viewers with an opportunity to experience an immersive environment, to study the relationship between light and form, to recognize the space between the work and viewer. The viewer is required to be active, to participate with the space, to move through it, to turn one's head to see a certain angle, to gain a new vantage point, to discover the continuously unfolding patterns and rhythms. The experience is a condensed and structured mimicry of natural phenomena - akin to staring at the clouds, or watching the wind sweep across a field of wheat, or laying on the ground staring up through a canopy of trees.”

Vincent Thornhill
http://vincentwork.com
New Zealand & The Netherlands // Photography and print.

My name is Vincent Thornhill, I am a designer and researcher that not only visualises the interactions between ourselves and the world around us, but also questions how these experiences are produced and consumed, and how they contribute a rapidly changing visual culture. An understanding of how new media disrupts conventional ways of seeing this world is a common thread through many of my projects, using identity as a both content and medium. Opposing commonplace nostalgic arguments of digital imagery being a poor substitute for ‘real’ communication, I approached the image from multiple perspectives, showing the complexity of the construction of identity, challenging this divide the real and virtual.

“The self-portrait is no longer static representation. How does data transform the concept of self-portraiture? This is the launching point for the residency. The objective - to create a visual framework to form a possible answer to this question. As viewable on my website portfolio, this investigation is already underway, but this residency will focus the scope of this research to exploring new mediums of self portrait (in addition to digital and print imagery I have previously explored) that communicate other intrinsic aspects of our identity, such as temporality/presence, physical ontology, and their associated ambiguities. I will use the underlying tension that exists between the medium of self portraiture, and our bodies as a medium for identity.”