2009-‘10 Wexner Center Residency Award Recipients Announced

Columbus, OH—The Wexner Center is pleased to announce its 2009–’10 Residency Award recipients in all programming areas: Mark Bradford in visual arts, Reid Farrington in performing arts, and Lewis Klahr in media arts.

 An essential part of the Wexner Center’s role as a multidisciplinary art center that supports the creation of new work as well as the presentation of art in all disciplines, the center’s generous Residency Award program serves the field while complementing The Ohio State University’s mission as a leading research institution. Chosen by the center’s curators and director, residency artists receive significant financial resources, along with technical, intellectual, professional, and moral support to develop new work.

“Our Residency Award program underscores the very essence of what the Wexner Center is and does as a creative laboratory and research center for all the arts,” says Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin. “It’s a unique program in that, like the Wexner Center, it’s fully interdisciplinary in nature, allowing artists to migrate between and among artistic disciplines that aren’t necessarily their primary métier. We often engage artists at pivotal moments or turning points in their careers, allowing them the freedom to explore new directions and media—and we encourage them to tap into academic resources and expertise across the entire university. The pioneering projects produced and the creative relationships built have ongoing reverberations in the larger cultural arena, and we’re very proud of that.”

In addition to accomplishing noteworthy projects here, many Wexner Residency Award recipients go on to be nominated for and receive such prestigious awards in the arts as the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, the Praemium Imperiale, the Turner Prize, the Gish Prize, the Hugo Boss Award, the Tony award, or recognition at leading international film festivals. See page 3 for a complete list of past Wexner Center Residency Award recipients.

2009–’10 RESIDENCY AWARD RECIPIENTS

VISUAL ARTS: MARK BRADFORD Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Mark Bradford will be developing new commissioned work for the Wexner Center’s survey exhibition Mark Bradford: You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)—to be on view at the Wexner Center May 8–August 15, 2010— which will chart the arc of Bradford’s career from the last decade, and will feature more than 40 works. For this residency, he is developing several projects: a major new sculpture entitled Lazarus, comprised of more than 1,000 collaged basketballs; and an ambitious suite of new paintings; Pinocchio (see picture inset), a sound-based sculptural environment that explores the social experiences of a young black man growing up in L.A. in the early ’80s; and a film entitled Mithra, which documents and reflects on the production and afterlife of Bradford’s monumental public sculpture, an “ark” that was installed in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans for the hundred-day run of the 2008 biennial exhibition Prospect.1.

Recipient of a 2009 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, Bradford is best known for his dazzling multimedia works on canvas that examine the class-, race-, and gender-based economies that structure urban society in the U.S., specifically those of Leimert Park in Los Angeles, where the artist works. The exhibition will tour to major museums around the country after it premieres at the Wexner Center. Bradford will give an artist’s talk at the Wexner Center during the run of the exhibition, and he will work with the campus community, particularly BFA and MFA students, during his time here.

PERFORMING ARTS: REID FARRINGTON

For his Residency Award project, new media artist, director, and designer Reid Farrington looks to Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope and its original inspiration (the one-act play Rope’s End by the British playwright Patrick Hamilton) for his hybrid theater work Gin & “It.” Co- produced by the Wexner Center, Gin & “It”—which will have its world premiere at the Wexner Center March 4-7, 2010—melds video and live action, and echoes the technical feats of Hitchcock’s film, which was shot in luridly saturated color and transferred the compressed drama of a one-act, one-set play into a suspenseful film by creating the appearance of being shot in one uninterrupted take. Its story, loosely based on the sensational Leopold and Loeb murder case, dealt with a thrill killing by a pair of privileged young men. Hitchcock’s Rope skirted the issue of the protagonists’ homosexual relationship to satisfy the limitations imposed on Hollywood by the Production Code of that era (the director and his cast only referred to this obvious aspect of their material as “it”). In Farrington’s Gin & “It,” passages of witty repartee from the film and text drawn from the original play come together in revealing contrasts and bring this once-taboo subtext out of the closet.

While at the Wexner Center finalizing his production, Farrington will work with students in the theater and film studies departments as well as with student advocates for GLBT issues at The Ohio State University. The premiere performances of Gin & “It” take place in conjunction with the Wexner Center’s annual Out@Wex series of film screenings; other special events of interest to the GLBT teen community in particular will also be held, including with the Kaleidoscope Youth Center.

Previously, Farrington served as a video designer for The Wooster Group (Wexner Center Residency Award recipients for House/Lights in 1997), and first directed The Passion Project, a hybrid film theater installation piece that was acclaimed for its inventive take on the 1928 silent film masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodore Dreyer.

Reid Farrington's Gin & “It” is coproduced by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, Performance Space 122 and 3LD Art & Technology Center. It was developed at 3LD Art & Technology Center, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center and Wexner Center for the Arts' creative residency programs. Reid Farrington is a 2009 fellow in Digital/ Arts from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Gin & “It” has also received generous support from New York State Council on the Arts, The Greenwall Foundation, the Experimental Television Center, and the Jerome Foundation. Wexner Center for the Arts is a NPN Partner of the National Performance Network (NPN). This project is made possible in part by support from the NPN Performance Residency Program. Major contributors of NPN include the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), the MetLife Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. This presentation is supported by the Performing Arts Fund, a program of Arts Midwest funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional contributions from the Ohio Arts Council, General Mills Foundation, and Land O’Lakes Foundation.

MEDIA ARTS: LEWIS KLAHR

L.A.-based collage animator Lewis Klahr—called “the reigning proponent of cut and paste” by the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman—uses images from advertising, comic books, and other ephemeral talismans of American commerce and popular culture to investigate our national dreamscape. With his Residency Award, Klahr has completed Wednesday Morning Two A.M., a tale of lost love set to music by The Shangri-Las that had its world premiere at the 2009 New York Film Festival. In addition, Klahr’s Residency Award has supported the creation of three new animated melodramas—Lethe, Nimbus Smile, and Nimbus Seeds—that inaugurate a major new series of films titled Prolix Satori. In May 2010, the Wexner Center will present a monthlong retrospective of his work—celebrated pieces and rarely seen treasures by Klahr, including such genres as film noir and melodramas— paired with his some of the feature films that have influenced and inspired him. Klahr will kick off the series with an onstage discussion May 1. While in town, he will also work for a week in the center’s Art & Technology video editing suites, and will teach a master class at The Ohio State University. Klahr, on the faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, has been making films since the late ’70s. He also written screenplays, including for the The Mothman Prophecies, and has created special effects and animation for television shows, music videos, commercials, and movies. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992.

PAST WEXNER CENTER RESIDENCY AWARD RECIPIENTS:

PERFORMING ARTS: Young Jean Lee, Improbable (multiple), Anne Bogart/SITI Company (multiple), da da kamera, The Builders Association, The Wooster Group, Mark Morris Dance Group, Elizabeth Streb/Ringside, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Amanda Miller/Pretty Ugly Dance Company, Ann Carlson, Twyla Tharp.

VISUAL ARTS: William Forsythe, Kerry James Marshall, Josiah McElheny, Zoe Leonard, Lee Mingwei, Hussein Chalayan, Greg Lynn and Fabian Marcaccio, Shirin Neshat, Barbara Bloom, Lorna Simpson, Alexis Smith, Barbara Kruger, Ann Hamilton, Softworlds, Maya Lin, Terry Allen, and (collectively) Michael Curry, G.W. Mercier, Donald Holder, and Molly Anderson. all collaborators for the Julie Taymor exhibition.

MEDIA ARTS: Guy Maddin, Jennifer Reeder, April Martin, Jennifer Reeves, Deborah Stratman, Phil Collins, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Sowon Kwon, Sadie Benning, Rineke Dijkstra, Miranda July, Cheryl Dunn, Tacita Dean, Steven Bognar, Helen DeMichiel, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Tom Poole, Julie Dash, Isaac Julien, Judith Barry, Todd Haynes, Yvonne Rainer, Tom Kalin, Chris Marker, Steve Fagin, Daniel Minahan, William Wegman, Robert and Donald Kinney, and Paper Tiger Television.

The Wexner Center Residency Award program highlights the creative laboratory work of the center by focusing on key projects in each program area of the center. The Wexner Center also supports many more creative residencies and commissioning projects each year to further its creative laboratory mission.