2018 Bresler Resident Artists

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Kaplan Gallery

2018 Bresler Residents

Liz Donadio
Of a river or a road
January 18 – March 10, 2019
Kaplan Gallery, VisArts, 2nd Floor

Kanat Akar
Distance
January 18 – March 10, 2019
Kaplan Gallery, VisArts, 2nd Floor

Heloisa Escudero
INTERACTIVE VARIABLE
January 16 – March 10, 2019
Common Ground Gallery, VisArts, 2nd Floor

2018 Fleur and Charles Bresler Resident artists –  Heloisa Escudero, Liz Donadio, and Kanat Akar – present their recent projects completed at VisArts. The three artists were selected for four-month studio residencies to focus on photography, video, new media, and installation.

Liz Donadio set out on foot during her residency to investigate and document the natural habitats and human-made structures of a section of Rock Creek Park close to Rockville. Working both in the park and the studio, she documented with digital and analog photography, video, and audio field recordings. She consulted scientists and ecologists directly engaged with stream health, watershed management, stormwater runoff, erosion, and environmental mediation. Her multi-media sensory installation adds to an evolving historical and geographical record of a major watershed running from Maryland through the District of Columbia. Donadio considers how photography, video and sound can transmit both the facts and qualities of place.

Through photography and video, Turkish artist Kanat Akar focuses on socially and politically driven contemporary issues, exploring larger ideas through people’s everyday stories and experiences. Akar presents a series of photographs of the back of his head, shot daily over 21 days — the same period of time as his upcoming mandatory military service in Turkey. A second piece features a two- channel video projected on large canvases that lean against the wall like large photographs. The video juxtaposes street photography shot by a young Syrian boy, a refugee from Aleppo to Ankara, Turkey, with a painstakingly slow trip down a road that opens to the area where the boy lived, but was never the subject of his photographs. It is a haunting, poetic meditation on displacement, temporality, and cultural ambiguity.

Heloisa Escudero presents new work featuring video and interactive performances that convert negative thoughts into positive affirmations. Using inventive rituals and humor, Escudero gently invites viewers to participate in activities that derail current cultural obsessions, anxieties, and fears.

About the 2018 Bresler Resident Artists:

Liz Donadio is a Baltimore-based photographer and video artist whose visual practice is centered on the nexus of art, ecology, and architecture. Her photographic prints and immersive installations conjure meditations on the natural and human-made world. Donadio received an M.F.A. from Towson University in 2012 and her work has been exhibited and screened across the US and Canada. Donadio is a Lecturer of Photography and Art History at Towson University, and runs Color Wheel Digital, a fine-art print studio in Baltimore.
www.lizdonadio.com

Kanat Akar is a photographer and a visual artist from Ankara, Turkey. Using photography and electronic media as a communication tool for the visual investigation of the human experience, he aims to tell effective stories about people in the politically and socially loaded environment that we are living in. He received his M.F.A. degree in Photographic and Electronic Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, Maryland) in 2018. He also has a B.A. degree in Economics (2014) from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.

 Heloisa Escudero grew up in São Paulo, Brazil, but relocated to the United States in 1987. She obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. She holds American, Italian and Brazilian citizenship. She is interested in conceptually based art that is both tactile and interactive. Her most recent art projects focus on art that emphasizes the participation of the viewer. Her work, performances and collaborations have appeared in numerous national and international exhibitions and performance festivals, including the Highline Park, New York City; SOMArts Gallery, San Francisco; Supernova Pink Line Festival, Rosslyn, Virginia; Dumbo Arts Festival and Governors Island Art Fair in New York City; Arlington Art Center, Arlington, Virginia. She is the creator of the BackPack Gallery Project and collaborated with DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) in the project Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica. She is an Exhibit Specialist at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.
www.heloisaescudero.com


About the Fleur and Charles Bresler Residency: In honor of VisArts patrons, Fleur and Charles Bresler, VisArts invites applications and proposals from local, national, and international artists for a four month residency at VisArts at Rockville. This residency provides a unique opportunity for a dynamic individual artist or collaborative artist team to create a new body of work, evolve an existing body of work, or develop a project in a stimulating, supportive environment. Studio space is provided free of charge. The residency encourages interaction, dialogue and exploration both within the VisArts artist community and the larger Rockville community as well. The residency offers the gift of time and space to three artists and/or collaborative artist teams each year to experiment and realize new work. Each year the current Bresler Resident Artists present their work in a three-person exhibition at VisArts.

Learn more about the Fleur And Charles Bresler Residency.

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