HCL Announces 2022 Artists in Residence and new programs
February 3, 2022
High Concept Labs (HCL) announces 2022 Resident Artists: Corey Smith, Juliann Wang, Maggie Bridger, Meredith Haines, and Shalaka Kulkarni. These multidisciplinary artmakers exemplify HCL’s commitment to deepening the creative process and practice through artistic and cultural collaboration. They represent a cross section of sound art, performance, design, dance, video, new media, architecture, and disability aesthetics and culture. Artists receive 12-month residency support and $1000 cash stipends; with access to no-cost studio space, and grant writing, curatorial, marketing, and production support, with the ability to show work or host public engagements at any stage of their process. Artists are selected by a diverse, multidisciplinary panel of highly respected artists who are committed to mentorship throughout the residency year.
“The 2022 artists do not shy away from grappling with the politics of access between spheres of power, and I sense a substantial amount of their artmaking will speak directly to issues marked by intertwining and diverging histories for years to come.”, says Artistic Director Yolanda Cesta Cursach Montilla. “Some are situating female subjects, based on ancestors, living kin, diasporic identities, and deities. Others are leaning into open-ended, community-based, and collaborative modes pointing to emergent art. In certain projects, they are renewing attention to erased figures who have influenced generations. Other projects attend to the minute details in performance prompting viewers to look closer ponder the notion of ordinary and, think about how we live and what we see and do not see.”
In response to the artists desire for regular public sharing, HCL is developing an ongoing monthly public showcase beginning in the spring, as well as supporting individual showcases, work-in-progress showings, and artist talks. First events of the year include Game Day, with 2021 Artist in Residence Kristin McWharter, a discussion and screening of the first full football game designed through experimental software and football simulator, Football Practice, February 13th at 10am. This will be followed by 2022 Artist in Residence Juliann Wang’s participatory performance, Spring Celebration, an evening of music, tea, games, reflection, and spontaneous joy, February 25th at 7pm. Both events are free admission and will take place at the HCL studio at Mana Contemporary Chicago, at 2233 S. Throop St, Chicago, Il, 60608.
In addition to HCL’s core Artist in Residence program, HCL hosts returning artists as Fellows. Fellows return to invest in the next stages of their projects and have access to no-cost studio space and opportunities to self-present with marketing support. 2022 Fellows include The New Quartet (Deidre Huckaby, Jessica Anne, Mabel Kwan, and Jasmine Mendoza), Aaliyah Christina, Aaron Wilder, Ayako Kato, Irene Hsiao, Ginger Krebs, Lional Freeman aka Brother El, Propelled Animals (Raquel Monroe, Esther Baker-Tarpaga, Barber, and Heidi Wiren Bartlet); Yoshinojo Fujima aka Rika Lin, and Vanessa Valliere. HCL additionally extends residency resources to artists participating in programs with HCL’s valued partners. This year’s recipient is Kinnari Vora through the Chicago Dancemakers Forum.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Maggie Bridger, is a sick and disabled dance artist and scholar interested in creating work that uses and reimagines pain through the creative process. HCL is supporting Maggie to develop a new dance work with pain as collaborator, indexing her current research into the distinct movements and stillness that either soothe or cause pain. Maggie is a person with a non-apparent disability. She is exploring what it means to make dance based on physical experiences of illness, but absent any explicit, legible signifiers of those experiences. Maggie considers access part of the creative process, and she works to make features like audio description, captioning and other access tools an essential, aesthetic part of every piece. HCL is partnering with Bodies of Work, a program of the Department of Disability Art, Culture and Humanities at the University of Illinois-Chicago, which provides Maggie additional generous support in 2022.
Shalaka Kulkarni, started in dance as a child in her native India, where she studied and continues studying Bharatnatyam. Her movement practice intersects Indian Classical and other dance forms, in order to explore female identity and erased narratives, both in Western and Indian cultures. HCL is supporting Shalaka to develop a new dance solo that incorporates text and new media, adopting a semi-autobiographical interpretation of the term “wearing ethnicity” to help shape her process for making connections across different movement forms, including Bharatnatyam, Kathak, ballet, yoga, and martial arts.
Corey Smith, is a classically trained composer and Michigan native. He has compiled a body of work in the past seven years of performances, books, video pieces, essays — all thinking through Midwestern identity. His work sits between performance, architecture, and music as a form of musical composition, i.e., as the sculpting of image, sound, and emotion through time. HCL is supporting Corey to develop a body of research and artwork that explores the life and architectural work of Roger Margerum. Corey plans to hold public events, at HCL and off-site, including roundtable discussions with architects and architectural historians, collective site-visits and tours of Magerum-designed buildings, works-in-progress showings of artwork, and talkbacks. Roger Margerum was a pioneering figure — an African American working in a field that, to this day, is predominantly white.
Meredith Haines, is a multidisciplinary artist who uses sound art as part of an ongoing exploration into how trauma and abuse materialize in relation to the self and others. She uses a DIY aesthetic, the notion of noise as violence, interpersonal communication, and postmodern dance training to create. A critical community-builder, she makes and performs her sound art publicly for people to heal from violence, with violence. HCL is supporting Meredith to develop two components of a new work: an audio zine resource and a performance installation. The project focus is to directly confront the social stigma of STIs, in order to foster collective healing and provide an alternative narrative for coping with the diagnosis. Meredith is among the 70 million people, a fifth of our national population, diagnosed with STIs.
Juliann Wang, Juliann’s interdisciplinary art and design practice is the product of her earliest surroundings, in native China. Her upbringing by a mother famous in Chinese Opera was rich with travel and exposure to artists and Chinese cultural history, and ingrains her art with aesthetics from Chinese philosophy and spiritual practice. HCL is supporting Juliann to develop a prototype of a highly accessible multimedia immersive installation and performance that individuals may encounter in gallery, community centers, virtual spaces, and other settings. More broadly, the artwork is meant to promote viewers’ personal inner healing methodologies.
ABOUT HIGH CONCEPT LABS
High Concept Labs (HCL) strengthens the creative sector by providing accessible residency programs for artists across disciplines interested in experimentation, discovery, exchange, and risk. Through these residencies, HCL meets artists where they are while promoting visibility for the creative process and advocating for critical investment across every stage in the development of new work.
HCL is generously supported by the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, the MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Norwottock Charitable Trust, the Martha Struthers Farley and Donald C. Farley, Jr. Family Foundation, and individual donors. HCL is in partnership with the Monira Foundation Residency at Mana Contemporary Chicago and receives additional space support by the Harris Theater for Music and Dance.
High Concept Labs is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
High Concept Labs is supported by a Grant of U.S. Department of Treasury funds through the City of Chicago. The opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations expressed in this publication/program/exhibition are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Treasury or the City of Chicago.
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HCL is based at Mana Contemporary Chicago at 2233 S. Throop St. Chicago, Illinois 60608.
