SUMMER 2024 ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE SHOWCASE 

SUMMER 2024 ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE SHOWCASE

The land we live on is inseparable from the bodies we inhabit. Artificial boundaries are enforced, and rights and resources are bestowed before being gradually taken away. Every cut leaves a scar. Summer 2024 Parent + Educator Artists-in-Residence Sepideh Dashti, Júlia Pontés, Oswaldo Ruiz, and Michael Webster are artists and researchers whose work exposes the connected marks left on the landscape and the humans that traverse it.

Sepideh Dashti navigates the interlocking systems of oppression in patriarchy and racism and their impact on female bodies denied agency. She accomplishes this through her performance, video, photography, textiles, and installations. She utilizes her diasporic lens to explore the intricate and multifaceted gender and race-based challenges experienced by an Iranian immigrant woman, portraying the body in varied forms of pain or grotesqueness.

Visual artist and mining researcher Júlia Pontés dedicates her work and research to mining explorations and the emotional relationship between herself, the people, and the landscape. She employs photography, filmmaking, performance, portraiture, and installations to help shed light on ecological and human rights violations committed by large-scale mining companies. In this work, she seeks to communicate the challenges that an extractivist-based society faces. 

Oswaldo Ruiz undertakes an anthropological and conceptual exploration of landscape, utilizing photography and video. He delves deep into the intricate connections between physical space, its historical context, and its social dimensions. He establishes a visual dialogue that articulates the interplay between the environment and the individuals who inhabit or traverse it while exposing the scars left on both in the name of progress.

Michael Webster responds to the social organization of space through site-specific projects, sculpture, and lens-based media. His work is context-driven and materially attuned, investigating the effects of power on social geography with a focus on long-term participatory projects rooted in the southern United States. His practice recontextualizes everyday objects while looking outside the self to find insight on living in fractured geographies.