Weihui Lu

Artist Statement

I am interested in our relationship to time, land, and loss. Using the framework of traditional Chinese landscape painting in a contemporary context, my work explores nostalgia and ancestral memory, image reproduction and degradation, and the land itself as something alive and prescient, capable of grief as much as we are capable of empathy. Moving between painting, installation and printmaking, I am drawn to slow, embodied practices, both in resistance to the technological speed of modern-day image production and consumption, and as a mode of restoration and healing

Weihui Lu_Crossroads_Fabric, site-specific installation_2022_80x70x20ft:Byrdcliffe.jpg

Bio

Weihui Lu was born in Shanghai, China, and grew up in Queens, New York. Using the framework of Chinese landscape painting in a contemporary context, her practice explores diasporic experience through personal narrative, as well as the broader environmental and psychological implications of the modern landscape. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, Trestle Gallery, Site:Brooklyn, Tutu Gallery and Studio 9D, among others, and she has been awarded residencies at Santa Fe Art Institute, Transborder Art, Byrdcliffe Art Colony, ChaNorth, and Arteles Creative Center. Lu co-curates at Bob’s Gallery, an experimental project space supporting emerging artists in Bushwick, NY, and holds a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University

www.weihuilu.com

Adriana Gallo

Artist Statement

My practice interrogates and (re)presents ecologies of labor with an emphasis on the potential of (re)productive labor, that is, labor to reproduce individuals, labor power, and culture, to address the “metabolic rift”, as Marx puts it, between humans and nature. Outcomes consist of sculptural works, bio-material and fermentation experiments, texts, landscape interventions, recipes, meals, and workshops. In my practice, materials inhabit states of change and challenge the apparent spontaneous generation of material (e.g. yeasts, mold, synanthropic organisms). Bodies and worlds become implicated in each other's imperatives to transform, with microbes and forms acting as ambassadors or fugitives between works, problematizing the nature of contamination, consumption, exchange, and domestication. Processes slip between craft, decorative, domestic, and survival practices and with a focus on embodiment and metabolization of ecologies of labor. Materials and forms are accumulated and re-presented in dioramic arrangements, grotesque aggregates, and baroque heaps: cosmoses in miniature.

Composite Organ(on) 2023 Matadero Madrid Beeswax, medical solidifier, tap water, fishmongers gloves, aluminum disks

Bio

Adriana Gallo was born in Milan and raised between Italy and the Northeastern U.S.. She earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and lives in Brooklyn. Her practice embodies and complicates ecologies of labor and outcomes take the form of installations, sculptures, paintings, texts, workshops, and meals. She writes a column for MOLD Magazine ‘Convivial Cosmogonies’ a series that examines culinary labor practices and their material origins. She has also contributed texts and images to publications such as Sali e Tabacchi Journal, Robida Magazine, Eyesore Magazine, and the Are.na Annual. She has participated in residencies and programs including the Postnatural Independent Program (2023, online and Madrid, Spain), the Nature, Art & Habitat Residency (2022, Taleggio Valley, Italy), and Pocoapoco (2019, Oaxaca, Mexico).

adrianagallo.com

Jessica Pavone

Artist Statement

As an instrumentalist and composer, I explore music's tactile and sensory experience as a vibration-based medium. Inspired by processes that center intuition and instinct, my music channels all these ideas into compositions by focusing on how music feels when played and heard and exploring how sonic vibrations affect the body, weaving my experiences as an instrumentalist into works that transcend time. I borrow from and elaborate upon traditional notation and improvisatory techniques, alternating between metered and clock-time approaches and improvised and notated instructions. I use a digital clock as a conductor to mark sections, duration, and cues. The indicated time frames on the score direct musicians to move freely between sections, creating an overlap of sonic textures. These principles are applied to my work for music ensembles by utilizing a collective improvisational vision that prioritizes an intentionally fluid style. The performers navigate indeterminacy during the compositions via time-based scores. I balance these principles with metered notation to shape the overall form of the pieces. Through the spaces left open within the structures, the musicians re-create the compositions together each time they perform. In this way, my music intersects the New Music, Jazz, and Classical genres, creating experimental work while establishing a collaborative relationship between the individual musician and larger group performance. When we perform collectively, we continue to develop the skill of responding to a score and each other, building our ability to perform a model of connectivity rather than isolation.

This is an image from the livestream premiere of Lull for string octet and soloists from 2020.

Bio

As both an instrumentalist and composer, Jessica Pavone explores the tactile and sensorial experience of music as a vibration-based medium. Pavone has been a composer in residence at the Loghaven, Stove Works, the Ragdale Foundation, Ucross Foundation, and Soaring Gardens. She has received grants and commissions from the NYFA NYC Womens Fund (2023), MATA Festival (2023), Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2021), Queens Council on the Arts (2022, 2020), New Music USA (2015), the Tri-Centric Foundation (2015), Experiments in Opera (2013), and the Jerome Foundation (2011). Her works have premiered in NYC venues, including; Roulette, the Noguchi Museum, Pioneer Works, ISSUE Project Room, Abrons Art Center, the Museum of Art and Design, the Soctrates Sculpture Park, and The Kitchen. Her albums have been produced by Tzadik, Taiga Records, Thirsty Ear, Astral Spirits, Out of Your Head, and Relative Pitch Records, and she has released four collaborative duo recordings with guitarist Mary Halvorson. From 2005 to 2012, Pavone toured regularly with Anthony Braxton’s Sextet and 12+1tet, and she appears on his discography from that time.

https://jessicapavone.com/

Anh Vo

Artist Statement

I create dances and texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. I make art about the life of a Vietnamese desiring America, of a colonized being desiring its colonizer. Foregrounding the unruliness of the body, my work unravels intolerable feelings, wounds, memories, and pleasures. I am occupied with the task of making present the unrepresentable. How can difficult histories be collectively felt with direct emotional charge, subtle provocation, sacrilegious playfulness, and earnest responsibility? The intensity of war draws me into the survival space between life and death, where life is contingent and death is imminent. This intensity is heightened by my experience surviving chronic illness. My work weaves together the erotic thrill of violence and the tenderness of care to push forth the burning desire to be alive.

Anh Vo in "Two Little Kids," as part of Dance and Process, Performance view, American Academy of Arts and Letters, June 3, 2023. Photo by Julieta Cervantes. Courtesy of The Kitchen.

Bio

Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Described by the New York Times as "risky, erotic, enigmatic and boldly humorous," their works flesh out the tremulous sexual body as a vessel for apparitional forces. Their latest body of work attempts to communicate the monotonous oppressiveness that is the weather of postwar contemporary Vietnam. Vo received their degrees in Performance Studies from Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). They are currently a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.

www.anhqvo.com

Sandell Morse

Artist Statement

As a memoirist who began her career writing fiction, I use imagery, scene, dialogue, and detail to bring my words to life on the page. As a former dancer, I feel the rhythm of my prose in my body. My work circles questions of mothering, mother loss, identity, and a family’s legacy of trauma and pain. I seek to honor the beauty, sadness, strangeness, complexity, and love that comprise our humanity. I seek connection.

Sandell Morse, The Spiral Shell, A French Village Reveals Its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II, a memoir paperback April 2022, hardcover April 2020

Bio

Sandell Morse is the prize-winning author of the memoir, The Spiral Shell, A French Village Reveals Its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II (Schaffner Press, April 2020, paperback April 2022). The Spiral Shell is a Silver Medal winner in the Story Circle Women’s Book Awards, 2020, memoir, and a finalist for the New Hampshire Literary Award, 2021, nonfiction. Morse’s essays have been noted in The Best American Essays series and published in Creative Nonfiction, Ploughshares, the New England Review, Fourth Genre ASCENT, Solstice, and Tiferet among others. She has won the Michael Steinberg essay prize, been nominated for Best of the Net and two Pushcart Prizes. Morse has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a resident at the Hewnoaks Artists’ Colony, and a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia and in Auvillar, France. She holds degrees from Wilson College, the University of New Hampshire, and Dartmouth College. She lives in New Hampshire with Zeus, her Standard Poodle.

sandellmorse.com

Vaune Trachtman

Artist Statement

As a photographer, I’m on the lookout for moments that contain something larger than themselves. The picture I’m after is of a moment in time that is full of other times. That's what my photographer's eye is looking for. As a printmaker, I’ve dedicated myself to mastering the photopolymer gravure process, because I love that I can achieve the tonal richness of early gravures without their toxicity, and I love that this process requires physical effort– the rubbing of plates, the turning of the press– and that working with paper and ink is so tactile. With this photographic and printmaking process, I not only feel like I’m painting with light, I feel like I’m painting with time.


Vaune Trachtman “Divers” Direct to plate photopolymer gravure with surface roll. Akua ink on Shirimine paper. 2023, 19.5” X 24". From the series NOW IS ALWAYS: Collaborating across time, which is supported by a grant from the Vermont Arts Council and NEA with additional support from the Tusen Takk Foundation.

Bio

Vaune Trachtman is a photographer and printmaker whose work honors historic processes, but without using toxic chemicals. Her images explore the evanescence of dreams and memory, resulting in “works that seem more like emanations than photographs” (Mark Feeney, Boston Globe), and a "fleeting, wondrous, sacred habitation" (Collier Brown, Od Review). Vaune is a Photolucida 2022 Critic Mass Top 50, and a 2022 finalist and People's Choice Award Winner in Klompching Gallery's FRESH ANNUAL Her series NOW IS ALWAYS was named a Top Portfolio by Rfotofolio and an Outstanding Work by the Denis Roussel Awards; she was shortlisted for the International Hariban Prize, and she's been a semifinalist in The Print Center’s 95th and 97th ANNUAL International Competitions. Her work is exhibited widely, including recent exhibitions at Soho Photo’s International Alternative Processes Competition, Klompching Gallery, Photographic Center Northwest, and the Dennos Museum Center. She has had recent solo shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography and Vermont Center for Photography. Vaune received her BA from Marlboro College and MA from New York University and the International Center for Photography. She lives in Vermont.

Wendy Call

Artist Statement

My residency at Marble House will be devoted to finishing my essay collection, Grief Ephemeral, a dozen personal, lyric, and collage essays about navigating grief in our death-denying culture. The collection has three strands. The first is a family memoir of the six months between my mother’s diagnosis and death from pancreatic cancer. I describe our family’s experience with illness, the medical-industrial complex, and end of life. I also delve into our society's end-of-life rituals, from “get well soon” cards to “celebrations of life.” The second and third strands explore material I collected during residencies at Harborview Medical Center (Seattle’s public hospital) and the American Antiquarian Society (the largest pre-1820 historical archive in the US). Grief Ephemeral explores how I grieved, how my family grieved, how our society grieved long ago, and how our society grieves now. As we grieve.

This is the cover of my 2022 book of poetry in translation, In the Belly of Night and Other Poems.

Bio

Wendy Call (she/ella) is co-editor of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide (Penguin, 2007) and Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum, 2024) and author of the award-winning No Word for Welcome (Nebraska, 2011). She has translated two poetry collections by Mexican-Zapotec poet Irma Pineda, with whom she won the 2022 John Frederick Nims Prize in Translation from the Poetry Foundation. She co-translated How to be Good Savage and Other Poems (Milkweed, 2024), by Mexican-Zoque poet Mikeas Sánchez. Wendy has received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, and Cornell University’s Institute for Comparative Modernities. She serves on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. She is the Fall 2023 Distinguished Writer in Residence at Cornell College and Translator in Residence at the University of Iowa. She lives in Seattle, on Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca, Mexico, on Mixtec and Zapotec land.

www.wendycall.com