Lydia Cornett

My perspective as an artist has been informed by my musical upbringing: watching my mother run an opera rehearsal, playing with my sister in orchestra concerts, and doing math homework a few feet away from my father coaching a loud soprano. While I had too much performance anxiety when it came to pursuing violin professionally, I came to filmmaking with an interest in quietly and patiently observing the world around me. As I began making work, I recognized a consistent instinct to explore the particular feelings I associate with my early experiences in music: shared, communal collaboration; a tactile sensation of physicality and breath; and reverberations of joy and intimacy. I feel that my filmmaking is an act of observing and documenting the world of these associative qualities of music. The exhilaration of capturing these moments and crafting their musicality within a narrative has revealed a way of making which feels unique to my worldview.

Lydia Cornett_Bug Farm_Film/Video_2020

Lydia Cornett is a filmmaker from Baltimore, Maryland based between Columbus, Ohio and Brooklyn, New York. As a former musician turned filmmaker, she makes work that unites the restraint of observational storytelling with the physicality and connective qualities she associates with music-making. Her work has screened at BAMCinemaFest, Sheffield DocFest, AFI Docs, AspenShortsFest, Hamptons International Film Festival, and DOC NYC, where she received a Special Jury Mention for her film Yves & Variation. She was awarded fellowships to the Jacob Burns Film Center’s Creative Culture program and the UnionDocs’ Collaborative Studio, and she has received support from the Tribeca Film Institute, IF/Then Shorts, the Princess Grace Foundation, and the NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music and Theatre. Her work has been distributed and featured by The New Yorker, PBS (POV and Reel South) Nowness, and Vimeo Staff Picks.

Sizhu Li

Li constructs immersive kinetic installations, which are typically large-scale, presented in an open forum. Designed to be experienced, mechanized movements and sounds are intrinsically involved in her works, producing a natural and orchestral environment for the audience. Daily accessible elements such as fans and metal sheets are assembled in a form of New Futurism, where crafts in technology drive behind minimal shapes, juxtaposing objects, or Sisyphean movements. With coded controls, Li’s installations are kinetic and sometimes interactive. Materials are treated as fleshy characters of living beings, where melancholy and nostalgia embed in unknown humor that enables human affections. In-depth, these emotions come from the living paradox of the unchanged desire for simplicity and purity, and yet, the unavoidable consequence of increasing complexity and degeneracy. This controversy is represented in her works as Yin and Yang, one of the essential concepts in ancient Oriental philosophies. The two opposite forces push against each other, keeping a dynamic balance driving the circle of life run and run. The permanent simplicity in the chaos of modern society is an elemental topic that the artist presents.

Responding to the global pandemic, Moonment (Moon-Moment) is a site-specific exhibition project. The inspiration is from a Chinese time-honored poem "海上升明月，天涯共此时" by a profound Tang Dynasty poet Jiuling Zhang. It means that when the moon rises above sea level, people, no matter where they are, see the moon and connect by sharing the moonlight of that moment. Inspired by the moon, a "heart" with beating sounds is created, together with metallic moving waves. People see the heart, hear the sound, thereby connecting to the ones they love beyond distances.

Sizhu Li is a Chinese-born multi-disciplinary artist based in New York. She holds a BFA from Central Academy of Fine Arts, and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art with Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, a prestigious annual national award. Lived and worked on two different continents, Li has developed a unique visual language of immersive kinetic art to illustrate her understanding of human nature and the universe. Li’s works have been exhibited at Spring/Break, Flux Factory, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Governors Island Art Fair & Public Art Project, Baltimore–Washington International Airport, Chashama Gallery, and so on. Since 2020, her pandemic-inspired touring project Moonment has been well received at Attleboro Arts Museum, Missouri State University, and Maryland HoCo Arts Council, and will exhibit at Alabama Contemporary Art Center (2022). Her upcoming show also includes Timeless Movements at Morris Museum (2022). Li currently teaches at Pratt Institute.

Missy Mazzoli

In all of my work I explore mysterious and intense aspects of human experience. I am at a crucial point where I feel the need to deepen and expand these explorations, and to that end have been working on a series of large-scale dramatic works about modern American life. My goal in making these works is to connect listeners and fellow artists by exploring a shared American experience that is often difficult, surprising and overwhelming.

Proving Up (2018), an opera based on the short story by Karen Russell, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek. commissioned by Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha and Miller Theatre

Recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (NY Times) and “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out NY), Missy Mazzoli has had her music performed by the Kronos Quartet, LA Opera, eighth blackbird, the BBC Symphony, Scottish Opera and many others. In 2018 she became one of the first two women, along with Jeanine Tesori, to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera, and was nominated for a Grammy award. From 2018-2021 she was Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and from 2012-2015 was Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia. In 2016, along with composer Ellen Reid she founded Luna Composition Lab, a mentorship program for female, non-binary and gender nonconforming composers in their teens. In 2021 she was named Musical America’s “Composer of the Year”. Upcoming commissions include works for Opera Philadelphia, the National Ballet of Canada, Chicago Lyric Opera and Norwegian National Opera. She currently teaches at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan, and her works are published by G. Schirmer.

Bridget Mullen

Mine is a process of sympathetic improvisations. I don’t pre-sketch; I repurpose abstract paintings as figurative paintings. By prioritizing formal concerns over narrative intentions and coupling irrational and referential forms, I create paintings that function as propositions or uncertain scenarios. I use repetition like propaganda to normalize strangeness, imply motion, show the shadow self, and create an army. Symmetry hypnotizes and mirrors the viewer peering in as the painting peers back, symbolic of the incommunicable abstraction of our interiority. Apparent in my work are themes of vulnerability as strength, quitting as self-care, the relationship of the individual to their community, and our unknowable interiority.

"Sunset As Self" 2021 Flashe on linen 20 x 16 inches premiered Art Basel 2021 OVR with Shulamit Nazarian Thumbnail-"Block" 2021 Flashe on linen 22 x 15 inches premiered Art Basel 2021 OVR with Shulamit Nazarian

Bridget Mullen (b. 1976, Winona, MN) holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and a BAE from Drake University. She has been awarded residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell, The Jan Van Eyck Academie, The Lighthouse Works, Roswell Artist-In-Residence Program, The Fine Arts Work Center, VCCA, and Yaddo. Her recent solo exhibitions include Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Helena Anrather, New York, NY; and Annet Gelink, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and recent group exhibitions include Anne Barrault, Paris, France; Bosse & Baum, London, UK; Nathalie Karg, New York, NY; Wild Palms, Düsseldorf, Germany; DC Moore, New York, NY; Fahrenheit Madrid, Madrid, Spain; and L21, Mallorca, Spain. She is the recipient of the 2021 New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowship, the 2017–2018 recipient of a studio from the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, and the 2018–2019 participant in the Shandaken Paint School. Mullen’s work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz, Maake Magazine, and ArtMaze. Her work is in the collections of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Netherlands, the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art in Roswell, NM, and the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach, CA. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Yoshie Sakai

My work creates an uneasy environment that embodies my love-hate relationship with pop culture and how it simultaneously perpetuates both ecstasy and extreme anxiety in quotidian life. In my videos, I am a colorful and subtly transgressive undercover cultural agent exposing the absurdities of a manipulative social structure while at the same time humorously struggling and reveling in it as a participant, negotiating contemporary social issues of cultural identity, gender roles, and familial and personal relationships. I induce intimate situations between my created personalities and the audience via my videos and installations that are pushed to exaggerated and imaginative levels. My work infiltrates the psychological space of the viewer, giving form to a sort of vulnerability – a nervous laughter. People often ask me, “Why are you so happy all of the time?” and my response is “It’s better than crying.” Ultimately, in my work I would like to continue the exploration of humor as a complicated intersection where hope, happiness, anxiety, and darkness reside much like our society, a tension-filled existence of both criticality and complacency.

Yoshie Sakai "KOKO's Love: A Soap Opera Tale of One Family" Seven-channel mixed media video installation 2016 27' x 31' x 12' tall (Antenna, New Orleans, Louisiana) Description: "KOKO's Love" has various manifestations as a video installation and changes form dependent on the related videos and the space. Here we see the three imagined characters from “Episode 2”, who act as “spiritual guides” (Alligator The Great, Mx. Friendly Beignet, Tombstone Tammy) for young Yuki, inspired by my time in New Orleans. This first room especially is inspired by the surreal and odd nature of wax museums, so Antenna gallery, which is the top floor of a two-story house really does become a psychological playhouse for the everyday doubts, anxieties, hopes, and daydreams that come from living as the Sakimoto family ("KOKO's Love" family). The "KOKO’s Love” (2014-2019) series is an original East Asian/Asian American hybrid soap opera that re-imagines the melodramatic tropes of TV dramas to challenge the myth of the “model minority” and reveal the guise of superficial “perfection” of being both Asian American and a woman. It is about a Japanese American family, whose patriarch, Hiroshi Sakimoto, is a liquor store owner in South Los Angeles that annoyingly insists on the importance of having a male inherit the family business and not a female, his only child, a daughter named Yuki. The series also explores the intersectionality of expectations and perceptions of familial gender roles by exposing the absurdity of the male hegemonic structure in the contemporary family.

Yoshie Sakai is a multidisciplinary artist, working in video, installation, performance, and sculpture. She received her BFA from California State University Long Beach and her MFA from Claremont Graduate University. She attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency and Ali Youssefi Project Artist Residency. Sakai received the 2012 California Community Foundation for Visual Artists Emerging Artist Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and the bar-fund Artist Grant. She has shown work throughout the United States in film festivals and art exhibitions at institutions such as the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, California State University Dominguez Hills University Art Gallery, Verge Center for the Arts, Antenna, University of Albany University Art Museum, Chinese American Museum Los Angeles and the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as internationally in Cambodia, Canada, Germany, Japan and Korea.

Julie Wills

My work is inspired by the tools of desire: wishes, hopes, pleas for divine or cosmic intercession, and superstitious rites. These are the things we turn to when something is desperately wanted but cannot be achieved through hard work or other rational means. I frequently draw imagery from celestial sources. The moon, stars and cosmos recur throughout in varying forms: the distant reaches of an infinite cosmos strain to reach their other halves. Individual stars fall from the sky, disrupting the known order of the universe. Through this imagery I explore constancy and mutability, current conditions, and hope for an unrealized but longed-for future.

Julie Wills, Words That Block Out the Light, 2021. Pair of framed graphite drawings on paper, 14"x14" each. Thumbnail - Julie Wills, 100 Year Flood, 2020. Installation, VisArts, Rockville, MD

Julie Wills (b. 1974) is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture and installation, drawing, text, and intersections between these media. She is recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, and has been awarded artist residencies at Cill Rialaig (Ireland), Arteles (Finland), Jentel, PLAYA, The Hambidge Center, and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, among others. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Plain Sight, Washington, DC (in partnership with the Embassy of Sweden and the European Union National Institutes for Culture); Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA; VisArts, Rockville, MD; C for Courtside, Knoxville, TN; and Arlington Arts Center, Arlington, VA. In addition to her individual studio practice, Wills is one of four artist members of The Bridge Club, an interdisciplinary performance art collaborative active since 2004. Wills is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Washington College in Chestertown, MD. Raised in Colorado, she is now Baltimore-based and serves on the Artist Advisory of Board of the ICA Baltimore.