The 2023 Residency: Impressions from HCL’s Artistic Director
HCL’s 2023 Artist in Residence (AIR) and Fellow in Residence (FAR) programs brings together an accomplished cohort of artists working across various disciplines. In collaboration with HCL Artistic Director, Yolanda Cesta Cursach Montilla, and Curatorial Assistant Intern, Mallory Yanhan Qiu, these artists will shape their 2023 residency to best serve their needs:
The following text has been written by Artistic Director, Yolanda Cesta Cursach Montilla, and edited by Curatorial Assistant, Mallory Yanhan Qiu.
“A defining concern among the 2023 residency artists is loss, the concept of safety, and how one can access healing modalities in engaging the somatic experience of connection. The artists are untethering the control of the cognitive, letting the collective experiential happen and tooling it, through embodied movement, sound, and visual art. They are widening the idea of “audiation” too. This practice for making the hearing of the sound inside transmutable for collective healing has spread. The dance, visual and music-based artists understand the need of collective experiences for persons in their communities and everywhere to connect within.
It’s inconceivable for these artists to remove themselves from the experience of their practice. In fact, they seek that alchemy effect. HCL is ideally structured to be the apothecary. The artists at HCL are pushing the boundaries of their practice and making a meaningful impact in their communities and beyond.
The year-long residency and studio provide a unique opportunity for artists to combine different elements to create powerful and transformative experiences. The artists are multihyphenated and don’t underestimate themselves as community-gatherers, self-producers, administrators, and artists to push for progress around the issues of race, equity, and access at the institution. Some are making work that evoke both the immediate present and the past, the earthly and the unearthly, or letting a sense of humor shine into oppositional forces against the power structure. Yet, they are consistent about spanning outward from an unapologetic emotional center and visible inner presence. They create through deep collaboration and combine sound, music, movement, and technology to create expansive sensory universes. No artist is doing “a thing”.
HCL’s vision for 2023 is that artists forge divergent paths and embrace the studio’s possibility to hone practice, convene around ideas, stage skill sharings with peers, create and curate installations and performances, and much more unknown from here. We believe that the world is in need of new modes for healing and we are honored to provide the space for our resident artists to share their internal self-healing process and contribute to this collective endeavor.”
