Artists' Residencies
A program that makes the Wexner Center unique.
Residencies at the Wexner Center offer support to artists and often provide opportunities for interaction with the Ohio State community and the public at large. They are an essential part of our mandate to be a creative research laboratory for all the arts.Wexner Center Residency Awards are our most substantial and high-profile residencies. They are given annually in our main program areas--performing arts, media arts (film/video), and visual arts--with some projects extending over two or more years. Residency Award recipients for 2009-10 are Mark Bradford in visual arts, Reid Farrington in performing arts, and Lewis Klahr in media arts.
Other artists participating in exhibitions and performances also may receive commissions and often engage in residency activities--workshops, master classes, and discussion sessions with students or the community--during their time at the center. In addition, about 20 visiting filmmakers and video artists from around the world are invited to use the facilities of our Art & Technology studio and editing suite each year.
Wexner Center Residency Awards 2009-10
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, 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, theater director and video 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.
Art & Technology Studio
Maya Lin's Groundswell
This site-specific installation was created as a Wexner Center Residency Award project.
