Southern Constellations

Rosa Nussbaum is a British/German visual artist based in Austin, Texas. Rosa works at the intersection of performance and sculpture, of object and objectification. Her work explores the place where the (female) body touches the institution, submitting to it’s projected desires.

During Nussbaum’s residency, she created Keeping Young & Living Longer: How to stay Active & Healthy past 100, or How to avoid Life Shortening Errors with fellow Kevin Brophy.

Michelle Lisa Polissaint is a visual artist & arts organizer based in Miami, Florida. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Florida International University in Photography & Fiber Based Painting. Her current practice is focused on producing community based activations that encourage artists and community members to form collaborative relationships. As an artist she explores the nature of human interaction through textiles and photographs. Her most recent work moves from a previous series of self-portraits, Dancing With Myself, which explored her relationship with herself away from the guidance of her parents, into a new body of work documenting trips and interactions with her parents and family, If Home Was Home. She is currently a resident at Bakehouse Art Complex. Her upcoming project, Moonshine Moanin’, is a research performance project exploring identity and queerness as it relates to her upbringing in the South.During Polissaint's residency, she created Dine nan Nwa.

Kevin Brophy is a language-based performance artist based in Tampa, FL, and Pittsburgh, PA, most recently residing in Lawrence, KS as visiting faculty and artist at the University of Kansas. Her research includes the Internet of Things, biased training of AI, our changing psychological response to the screen, and how language functions—past, present, and future—in relation to these cultural occurrences. Kevin works at the intersection of digital and physical space; as in, the ‘crash’ of these two bodies and their mutual creation within the construct of the social. Our politic embodied and our personal beyond the site-of-self. Through exaggerated forms of communication, she critiques in satirical and self-implicating ways: these days, she performs more for machine than human.

During Brophy’s residency, she created Keeping Young & Living Longer: How to stay Active & Healthy past 100, or How to avoid Life Shortening Errors with fellow Rosa Nussbaum.

Diana needs some soup right now and then maybe you'll find them in the bedding section, swimming in linen duvets for a bit. She feels fulfilled in some kind of cul-de-sac upbringing, couch shopping not so different from any experiential art. 'walkie check', She confirms and performs for the visitor, 'yes, that is a thing we have and it is of different value on different kinds of days'. Framed moments in time no different than now, just a different space-time in the spectrum of a when she's walking around a bed thinking about what information you will need from another room in another space. Fulfillment, Depends on the season of art-making, apparently some on custom order or are just made to be consumed by some other process.

During Caramat’s residency, they created Social Sensory Stimulation.

Leiva’s research-based practice exists at the crossroads of installation, video, animation, and photography. Within this multidisciplinary approach, she explores issues related to migration, displacement, alienation, loss, the media and the effects of violence on the central American individual and society.

In Leiva’s work, personal and collective stories intertwine to create narratives that posit the individual’s vulnerability within institutional and social hierarchies. In some of her site-specific works, she forges a dynamic that engages the space’s history to reveal specific human rights issues. Her video work, which often incorporates found footage or text, explores surveillance, online culture, coded language and the impact of mass media on the individual’s perception of reality.

During Leiva’s residency, she created Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (The Last Supper).

Josh T. Franco is an artist with an art history Ph.D. He often builds or suggests environments that invite haunting by ancestors and disincarnate peers. Enfleshed folks are invited into these settings to share stories with Franco and make something new together, be it physical, experiential, or spiritual. He is devoted to handwriting, printed text, and beeswax as mediums that can command visual attention and physical space while also transmitting and preserving knowledge between generations. Franco is guided by the understanding that art history is made by hand.

During Franco’s residency, he created PICTURES ELSEWHERE combines three acts of reverent and irreverent gratitude to art historian Michael Baxandall and Elsewhere matriarch Sylvia Gray.

Lonnie Holley was born on February 10, 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama. From the age of five, Holley worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking. He lived in a whiskey house, on the state fairgrounds, and in several foster homes. His early life was chaotic and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood.

Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. His art and music, born out of struggle, hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity, has manifested itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound. Holley’s sculptures are constructed from found materials in the oldest tradition of African American sculpture. Objects, already imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, are combined into narrative sculptures that commemorate places, people, and events. His work is now in collections of major museums throughout the country, on permanent display in the United Nations, and been displayed in the White House Rose Garden. In January of 2014, Holley completed a one-month artist-in-residence with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva Island, Florida, site of the acclaimed artist’s studio...Read More.

During Holley’s residency, he created Mixed.

Daniel B. Coleman (he/they) lives a life-project centered life that de-compartmentalizes his work as an artist, scholar, and organizer between the U.S. South (NC) and the Mexican South (Chiapas). Each of these elements are an integral part of who he is in the world. Daniel is an Assistant Professor in Women's and Gender Studies at UNC Greensboro, a performance artist and choreographer and a transfeminist and abolitionist organizer. As an artist, Daniel has taught and performed throughout México, the U.S. and Canada, as well as in Costa Rica, Brazil, Colombia, Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, Greece, The Netherlands, Poland, and Estonia.

During Coleman’s residency, they created Warriors: Beyond Unicorns and Erasures.

Jessica Gaynelle Moss is an artist, writer and entrepreneur.As an ardent advocate for artists, arts education and communities of color, in 2016 she founded The Roll Up, a national network of art incubators embedded in neighborhoods across the United States. Prior, she served as the Creative Director of the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, NC and earlier, on the senior management team of Rebuild Foundation in Chicago, IL.In addition to her numerous management and leadership roles, Jessica continues to practice as an artist. Her work--often focused on race, class and accessibility--is in private and public collections across the United States including the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) Baltimore, the University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC), and the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection (JFABC) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Her curatorial projects include 2018’s ‘Black Blooded’ at the New Gallery of Modern Art in Charlotte, NC, which presented the work of 50 interdisciplinary artists from Kerry James Marshall to Sherrill Roland-- and the 2016 exhibition ‘1975 Paintings: Noah Davis’ at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, IL.

Jessica received a bachelors in Painting, Drawing and Printmaking from Carnegie Mellon University; a masters in Arts Administration, Policy and Management from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and a masters in Studies of the Law from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Her interests in innovation, activism and collaboration continue to influence her projects today.

During Moss' residency, she created The ABOVEGROUND RAILROAD Scholarship.

Shan Wallace is an award-winning photographer, artist, and freedom fighter from East Baltimore. Inspired by the service of social change and the social power of art, and harsh realities rooted in racial and economic divides during her upbringing in poverty, SHAN uses the lens to document communities of the African diaspora. Her work conveys and reveals the social, cultural, and political narratives of black life serving as photographic documentation and archive of Blackness. Dedicated to demonstrating and promoting the value of archiving and photography, and increasing Black visibility, SHAN distributes her photographs internationally. Inspired by the legacy of photo albums, this ongoing project is a grassroots and accessible method of storytelling and archiving, articulating and legitimizing Black people’s experience. The goal is to provide subjects with physical copies of images of themselves to build or contribute to their own archive and challenging us to consciously or unconsciously enforce new ways of seeing, thinking, and being a part of the African Diaspora. SHAN has received recognition from the Baltimore Beat for Best Solo Show, Best Photographer from the City Paper, and awarded 2nd Place for Small Outlet Feature of “Losing Conner’s Mind” by Association of Health Care Journalists'. Her work has received widespread support from publications like the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, Essence, and the now-defunct Baltimore City Paper. SHAN has also exhibited work in museums internationally from the Reginald F. Lewis Museum to Mariano Arts Center, in Havana Cuba. More recently, she's working on confronting oppressive politics and histories of Black Americans through collages and installations.

During Wallace’s residency, she created THE BANSHEE UNDE[RAGE].

Poncili Creación (Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro) is a Puerto Rican group that generates performance and audio-visual experiences that sprout from their interactive sculptures they call objects. They have focused their body of work in the relationship between objects and reality. Since 2012, they have worked with large-scale objects, installations, and video. Although they are most known for their performances that involve live music, dance and experimental storytelling. Their performance tours have taken them around the United States, Canada, Europe, and The Dominican Republic. Their objects have been exhibited in museums such as the MAPR and the MoCa as well as in independent galleries 787 studios, Art lab, Gr_und, Edge zones, Meta-gallery, Poor Farm Experiment among others.

During Poncili Creación’s 2018 residency, they created Multi-Parade.

william cordova's work attempts to reconcile ideas of displacement and transition through the use of alchemy, ephemeral residue and vernacular architecture that continually shifts and shapes what could be described as our contemporary situation.During his residency at Elsewhere, Cordova created untitled: or obsneerg y las cronicas marcianas.

Rontherin Ratliff is known for creating textural assemblages and sculptural work that examines contemporary society. In 2009, Works and Process at the Guggenheim NYC commissioned the set installation for the production of Peter and the Wolf of which Ratliff lead the artistic direction and co-creation.

In 2010 Ratliff exhibited at Diverse Works in Houston Texas and in 2012 the Arts Council of New Orleans commissioned a site-specific art installation for The Norman Mayer Branch Library. Ratliff has exhibited at Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, Rebecca Randall Bryan Gallery at Coastal Carolina University SC and was selected for the Joan Mitchell Foundations Artist In Residence Program in New Orleans in 2014. He was a collaborating artist for the nationally acclaimed street art installation ExhibitBe New Orleans.In 2015, the Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator and NPN/VAN awarded Ratliff with an artist residency in Miami, FL. His commitment to his practice lead him co-found Level Artist Collective with local artist of color living in New Orleans. In 2016 Ratliff exhibited at Governors Island New York, 516 ARTS, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA and was a recipient of the Adeline Edwards Founders Award along with a Blights Out artist fellowship. In 2017 Ratliff exhibited at Xavier University Gallery at Xavier University and Carroll Gallery at Tulane University in New Orleans and was invited to the Netherlands where he created an outdoor installation in response to the 1717 charismas flood.During his residency at Elsewhere, Ratliff created Rosa No. 7 Yellow Independence.

Zeelie Brown is a visual artist and cellist who through sound, textiles, and installations depth charges wells of Afro-Atlantic dynamism to conjure up works which provoke a sense of environmental and cultural shift. Her work meditates black freedom in the 21st century, and the renegotiation of the parasitic networks of power and privilege weft into the global, colonial world order. She was born in San Antonio and was raised between there and Pollard, Alabama. She graduated from Oberlin College with a BA in Africana Studies (Fine Arts) which they used to open their heart and soul to jazz, philosophy, and other great arts of the black world.

During her residency at Elsewhere, Brown created Fear No Joy.

Ash Smith is a director, designer and new media artist who grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina. Ash incorporates strategies of play and speculation to solve problems, re-imagine systems and build worlds—to create interactive stories, mixed reality experiences, simulations and prototypes of the future. Data, science and/or humor may be used to tell stories for film, stage, and improvisation that may blur the distinction between art & life, fact & fiction, and nature & technology—a liminal space—that considers how myth and history modulate a present reality while simultaneously engendering future dreams. Ash is interested in the dreaming collective and how these virtual shared spaces may bleed into the real and shape our co-existence. Ash also plays music in a few bands and loves to parallel park.

During 2017 their residency at Elsewhere, Smith created 11½ Spells for Our Future Selves. In 2019 Ash was the resident artist for the 2019 Rural Residency in Appalachia and created Southern Devices//Appalachian Futures.

Saba Taj is a Southern Muslim artist and activist based in Durham NC. Heavily inspired by Islamic stories and speculative fiction, Saba uses mixed media practices to illustrate the liminalities of diasporic identity through the creation of hybridized femme-monsters. Taj remixes cultural references from her South Asian, American, Muslim, and queer identities, and explores themes of diaspora, inherited trauma and apocalypse.

During her residency at Elsewhere, Taj created Interstellar Uber/Negotiations with God.

Maria Molteni is a Nashville/Boston based multimedia & performing artist, educator & organizer. Her practice sprung from formalist roots in painting and printmaking and has grown to incorporate research, participation, and spiritual experimentation. From fiber to found-object sculpture, painting to movement, performance to publication, she employs tactile and tactical processes per their ability to manifest elaborate conceptual orchestration and intuitive synaesthetic provocation. Exploring iterations of sport, craft, feminism, animism, glossolalia, urban planning, and more she takes interest in standardized systems that influence ritual in everyday functionality. She playfully asks audiences to imagine her serving Black Mountain College as a PE coach : )

During her residency at Elsewhere, Molteni created Revolving Spectrum.

Charisse Pearlina Weston is a Houston-based artist and writer. Her work focuses on the deconstruction and reconfiguration of language, representation, and history through the manipulation of various mediums including video, photography, and printed text. She has exhibited and performed in various venues including Project Row Houses, the Lawndale Art Center, and DiverseWorks, and has participated in residencies at Alabama Song Houston, Sunblossom Residency (organized by Carrie Schneider), Vermont Studio Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has received awards from the Artadia Fund for the Arts, the Santo Foundation, the Sally Mead Hands Foundation, and the Dallas Museum of Art's Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund. She will be attending the University of California-Irvine as a MFA in Art candidate this Fall.

During her residency at Elsewhere, Weston created Politics Surrounded.

Antoine Williams creates mixed media assemblage installations, paintings and collages, which are an investigation of identity, semiotics and social structures. Heavily influenced by speculative science fiction (specifically social science fiction and cosmic horror), hip hop, plus his rural working class upbringing in Red Springs, North Carolina, Antoine has created his own mythology of hybrid creatures that exist between the boundaries of class and race. Antoine is an Assistant Professor of Art at Guilford College.

During his residency at Elsewhere, Williams created Because They Believe in Unicorns.

Cosmo Whyte is a Jamaican-born, trans-disciplinary artist who employs drawing, performance, and sculpture to create conceptual work that explores how notions of identity are disrupted by migration—particularly migration as an unfinished arc of motion whose final resting point remains an open-ended question. He situates his work in the liminal space between early culture shock and final acclimatization. Cosmo's creative process begins through the interrogation of his own body and the personal memories that are embedded within it. He uses this archive as his entry point into collective political interrogations.

During his residency at Elsewhere, Whyte created Guess Who is Coming to Dinner.

Jane Cassidy is a multi-disciplinary artist from Galway, Ireland and is currently is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. In 2008 she earned a Masters in Music and Media Technologies from Trinity College Dublin and in 2014 a MFA in Digital Art from Tulane University, New Orleans. Cassidy’s primary work is based around site-specific audio-visual installations with a focus on creating meditative, immersive environments. Past performances include the European Media Art Festival, Germany, the New Orleans Film Festival, Punto Y Raya Festival, Spain, Currents New Media, Sante Fe, Arts Council New Orleans LUNA Fete and group shows in Dublin, Galway, New Orleans, Atlanta and Philadelphia. Cassidy has had solo shows at the 53rd Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan, and at Tulane University and PARSE Gallery in New Orleans.

During her residency at Elsewhere, Cassidy created We Went Down To O'Shea's Woods.

Hồng-Ân Trương lives and works in North Carolina and New York. Her interdisciplinary projects examine structures of time, memory, and the production of knowledge by engaging with archival materials, individual and collective narratives, and histories that span cultural and national borders.Her work has been shown at the International Center for Photography, Art in General, Smack Mellon, and The Kitchen among others. In 2013 she was recipient of an Art Matters Grant, a Franconia Sculpture Park Jerome Fellowship, and a Socrates Sculpture Park EAF. She was an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2015. She was a studio art fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program and is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

She is currently working on To Preserve, Destroy.

Rachel Debuque is currently an Assistant Professor and Foundations Coordinator in the Art department at George Mason University. She has exhibited extensively including, New York, Croatia, and Philadelphia. She was recently awarded to attend the internationally recognized Bemis Center for Contemporary Art’s residency program. Her research spans installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Debuque de-familiarizes space and objects using common decorating design strategies such as pattern, paint, and the arrangement of objects. Her work purposefully plays with two and three-dimensional realms, creating a push/pull in perceptions. Vibrant colors to create directional line patterns that suggest dimensional space and flatten objects with matte paints.

Rachel created Future Holiday during her time at Elsewhere.

Jana Harper is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the themes and tensions between materiality and transcendence, chance encounters and human willfulness, relationships and connectivity, and the natural world and human acts of meaning making. Materially, her work takes many forms: drawing, printmaking, artist’s books, sculpture, photography, installation, social practice, and video. Originally trained as a printmaker, Jana has a broad definition of what constitutes her practice. She divides her time between teaching, research, and creative activity: working both individually and in collaborative settings.

Jana created New Walks in an Old Field during her time here.

Iman Person is a visual artist and sculptor based in the Atlanta area. Her use of natural materials and ritual consciousness, create a hybrid reality between physical space and ethereal realms. Coupled with the concept of authentic nature; she embeds qualities of the feminine, primordial memory and anthropological customs to illustrate lineage and identity within the new, synthetic landscape.In 2010 she received her B.F.A from Georgia State University and has become a fixture both in exhibition spheres and public art arenas. In 2012, she was included in Barbara Archer Gallery’s, “Talent Loves Company”, and named one of the 30 most influential artists in Atlanta. She is a member of the Atlanta based collective, Dashboard Co-Op, is a 2011 Hambidge fellow and is 2013-2014 Walthall fellow.

Iman created All Acts of Pleasure during her time here.

Regina Agu is a visual artist and writer based in Houston, TX. Agu’s work has been included in exhibitions, public readings, and performances at New Museum, labotanica, Diverseworks, Project Row Houses, University Museum at Texas Southern University, Box 13, and Lawndale Arts Center, among other venues. She is a 2012 Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant recipient, and received a 2014 The Idea Fund grant for her collaborative project “Friends of Angela Davis Park” in Houston, TX. Agu is a partner at Alabama Song, a collaboratively-run artist space in Houston, TX, and a co-founder of paratext, an independent small press. Published experimental texts include ON | OFF (onestar press, Paris via Book Machine Houston), Visible Unseen (Nyx, a nocturnal, Goldsmiths, University of London), and Index, With and for: “Black Mo'nin',” by Fred Moten (Book Club Book, Future Plan and Program).

Regina created A Living Index during her time at Elsewhere.

George Jenne was born in Richmond, Virginia to a father who, at age ten, watched HIS father, Herb, a cold war spy, buckle the back brace that curled his spine as a disguise on the days that he left their German flat to insinuate himself into tense exchanges behind the iron curtain. A generation later, Herb, retired from espionage, secretly watched George sculpt his likeness in green clay, over the only armature he could find: a busty female mannequin, painted silver. The uncanny qualities of that facsimile brought George to Jim Henson’s Creature shop in Hollywood where, as a plebe,he was expected to watch all manner of abject videotapes under the gaze of an eight foot tall Big Bird, during lunch. He escaped California for New York, where he made movie props by day and exhibited art by night in spaces such as Exit Art, PS122 and Freight+Volume, trekking weekly to teach at his alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design. George currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he creates video, sculpture and prose for the sake of fakery, transgression, and a story well told.

George created Two Bizarre and Unexplained Deaths during his residency. 

Stacy Lynn Waddell creates works that appropriate the power invested in linguistics, historical record and cultural leitmotifs. After earning her MFA from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007, Waddell’s works and multimedia installations have been on view at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University (NC), the Weatherspoon Art Museum (NC), The North Carolina Museum of Art (NC), The Gibbes Museum of Art (SC), The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PA), Project Row Houses (TX), The Studio Museum in Harlem (NY) and Koplin Del Rio (CA) among other venues.

Waddell’s works are represented in public and private collections across the country. She has been awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, an Art Matters Grant and has been in residence at Project Row Houses. Currently, she is participating in When The Stars Begin To Fall: Imagination and the American South that originated at The Studio Museum in Harlem and will travel to the NSU Museum of Art, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. (Fall ’14) and the Institute of Contemporary Art-Boston, MA (Spr ‘15). She resides in Chapel Hill, NC.

Hillerbrand+Magsamen are a collaborative husband and wife visual artist team comprised of Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen. Based in Houston, Texas their interdisciplinary projects explore family identity, everyday interactions and consumer culture. They often work with their two children, pets and home. Hillerbrand+Magsamen have presented their videos in international film and media festivals and their photographs and installations have been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums. They have been awarded grants from the Austin Film Society, Ohio Arts Council, Houston Arts Alliance and Houston Center for Photography. Hillerbrand+Magsamen received a 2013/14 Houston Airport Systems video commission and their videos and photographs are in numerous collections including the Portland Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Stephan Hillerbrand is an Associate Professor at the University of Houston and Mary Magsamen is the Curator at Aurora Picture Show.

Lee's work explores animal protagonists and the emotional spaces and physical landscapes where humans and animals co-habitate. Circulatory systems, ecological processes and ideas of flow, immersion, and convergence inform much of her work.

Lee Deigaard graduated from Yale University with a major in fine arts and earned graduate degrees from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design and from the University of Texas at Austin where she held a Michener Fellowship in Creative Writing. In 2012 she won the Clarence John Laughlin Award for her series of nocturnal photographs of animals "Unbidden". In 2013, she had solo shows of site-specific installations at the Alexandria Museum of Art, the Acadiana Center for the Arts, the University of New Orleans, and the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans. Her solo show of photography "Trespass" and her video installation “PULSE” were on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2014. Her work has been featured on National Geographic's blog PROOF. She is a member of the New Orleans-based artist collective The Front. Some of her curations there include the group shows "PhotoBOMB", "You Beautiful Bitch", and "Latin for Crab".

Nsenga Knight is a interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Much of her work utilizes archive, memoir, and documentary materials, and expands upon the common aesthetic and theoretical concerns of the conceptual arts movement of the late 1960s and 70s, minimalism, Islamic geometrical art and other systems-based works. Through a restless hybridization of artistic practices she mobilizes a play with language and form and act as disruptive intervener and ardent preservationist. Knight has held residencies at Artspace in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Galveston Artist Residency (Galveston, TX), Brandywine Workshop (Philadelphia, PA), and Film/ Video Arts (New York, NY), and has been awarded with fellowships and grants from the Philadelphia Independent Film and Video Association, the Leeway Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, Brooklyn Historical Society, and the Puffin Foundation LTD. She has participated in recent solo and group exhibitions at Project Rowhouses in Houston, TX, Artspace in Raleigh, NC, Galveston Arts Center in Texas, MoCADA, New Museum and MoMA PS1 in New York. Knight earned a Bachelor of Arts in Film at Howard University and a Masters of Fine Arts degree at the University of Pennsylvania. During her residency at Elsewhere, Knight created Make Safe, Make Space.

Martha Whittington’s constructed environments speak to the tenderness and innocence of the human spirit as it faces the harshness and treachery of life and labor. By recreating the history of significant objects and ideas such as manual tools, antique devices, and life experiences of laborers, she builds an immersive experience. This new view of life and labor asks the audience to re-examine concepts, archetypal associations and connotations. Whittington has been the recipient of artist residencies at the Bemis Center in Omaha Nebraska and the Hambidge Center-Creative Arts in Rabun Gap Georgia. In support of her work, she has been awarded grants from the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia (WAP), Office of Cultural Affairs Atlanta and Austin Green. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally with shows at Moot Gallery, Hong Kong, Dans Kamera Istanbul, Turkey, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville Florida, Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, and the AMOA-Laguna Gloria Austin Texas. Whittington received her B.F.A. in Sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute. She received her M.F.A. in Sculpture From Tyler School of Art.

Izel Vargas is a South Florida based mixed media artist and educator who hails from the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas (Alamo, TX). Raised in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Vargas cites his upbringing as playing a vital role in his approach to making art. He earned his BFA from the University of Texas Pan American and his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC. As an educator, Vargas has taught art to all age groups and is an currently an instructor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL.

Jillian Mayer steeps her artistic practice in the verisimilitude of a generation that came of age in the 1980s. Mayer calls upon drawing, photography, video, online platforms, installation, and performance to enact scenarios of apathy, dysfunction, and disillusionment. Indoctrinated into expectations of upward mobility, instant gratification, and the succinct finesse of a television sitcom and web experience, Mayer critiques the dissonance between her childhood optimism and the state of contemporary culture with an erudite playfulness. In 2010, her video Scenic Jogging was one of the 25 selections for the Guggenheim’s Youtube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video and was exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany. Recent solo projects include Family Matters at David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2011), Love Trips at World Class Boxing, Miami (2011), Erasey Page at the Bass Museum of Art (2012) and Precipice/PostModem at Locust Projects (Miami) for which the gallery received a Harpo Foundation grant. Her video works have been premiered at galleries and museums internationally and film festivals such as SXSW and Sundance. She was recently featured in Art Papers and in ArtNews discussing identity, Internet and her artistic practices and influences.Mayer is the front woman for #PostModem, a performance collaborative that makes meta-pop music based in art/web theory. Their original songs will be used in a feature length musical film that Mayer is writing, directing and producing in collaboration with Lucas Leyva. The satirical film takes place in the future and tackles digital identity and net neutrality. The film extends to software apps, poetry, installations and Internet experiences.

Nikita Gale is a self-taught conceptual artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a BA in Anthropology (Archaeological Studies) from Yale University and exhibits regularly throughout Atlanta, Georgia and New York City, New York. She was an Artist-in-Residence at The Center for Photography at Woodstock in Woodstock, New York in 2011 and is currently in the Studio Artist Program at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. She currently serves on the board of directors for BurnAway, and Atlanta-based non-profit arts publication.Her work can be found in numerous collections including the Howard Greenberg Gallery collection in New York. Gale has had work featured in ART PAPERS, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Headline News, and Oxford American and has been profiled and reviewed by numerous publications including Frank151 and Artforum. Listen: Interview with WUNC's The State of Things July 16, 2013, Live from Triad Stage

Andrew Raffo Dewar is a composer, soprano saxophonist, ethnomusicologist, educator, and arts organizer. He has studied and worked with major figures in contemporary music such as Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Steve Lacy, and Alvin Lucier. He is an assistant professor in the experimental, interdisciplinary New College at the University of Alabama, co-director of the University's Creative Campus arts and culture initiative, and founding artistic director of UA's Sonic Frontiers concert series for innovative and experimental music. His work can be found on the Porter Records, Striking Mechanism, and Rastascan Records labels, and he also appears on a range of recordings by Anthony Braxton and Bill Dixon. For more info: http://www.freemovementarts.com

John Q is an idea collective whose name references “John Q. Public.” The “public” is left understood, though the work is considered a kind of public scholarship, and the “Q” is left hanging to reference the group’s interest in queer history and politics. The collective consists of Wesley Chenault, Andy Ditzler, and Joey Orr. John Q has been funded by Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue (New York) and has participated in the 2012 National Queer Arts Festival at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco.

Joey Orr holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an ABD Arts and Sciences Fellow at Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. His dissertation, Practicing the Past: Socially Engaged Remembering in Contemporary Art, looks at cooperative memorial practices at the intersection of memory studies and art history. The study includes a practice component in the context of the collective, John Q, of which he is a founding member. Joey also currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal for Artistic Research (Bern, Switzerland). Past projects have been reviewed by Art Papers, Art in America, ARTnews, Contemporary (UK), Public Art Review and Sculpture magazine, among others.

Wesley Chenault is a certified archivist and head of special collections and archives at Virginia Commonwealth University’s James Branch Cabell Library. His interests in memory, place, and identity take forms as diverse as collection development, exhibitions, public art, teaching, and traditional scholarship. Chenault’s work on Atlanta LGBTQ archives, history, and memory includes the book Gay and Lesbian Atlanta; public artworks, exhibits, and publications with idea collective John Q; and exhibitions at the Atlanta History Center and online through OutHistory.org. He holds a PhD in American studies from the University of New Mexico and a MA in women’s studies from Georgia State University. 

Elsewhere Project | Untitled (Books)

Born and raised in Detroit, Melissa Vandenberg is an artist, educator and curator living in eastern Kentucky. Her recent creative inquires investigate fear, impermance and power with everyday materials like fabric, stickers, temporary tattoos and found objects. Current events, nationalism and ancestry play a fundamental role in her studio practice through imagery of flags, gravestones, life-vests and atomic explosions. Additionally, she is exceptionally fond of mustard and cilantro, not together though.

Elsewhere Project | Sew To Speak

Nick Szuberla multimedia artist and the director of The Prison Poetry Workshop, a national radio series that connects audiences with the genre of prison poetry found within US jails, detention centers and prison. He  works with Appalshop -  a 40 year-old non-profit multi-disciplinary arts and education center in the heart of Appalachia producing original films, video, theater, music and spoken-word recordings, radio, photography, multimedia, and books. Dedicated to the proposition that the world is immeasurably enriched when local cultures garner their resources, including new technologies, to tell their own stories and to listen to the unique stories of others, Appalshop’s education and training programs support communities' efforts to solve their own problems in a just and equitable way.