Artists Archive
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Charlotte Vanden Eynde is a contemporary dancer and choreographer, based in Ghent. In 1999, she graduated at P.A.R.T.S., the renowned school for contemporary dance headed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Since, she has been creating highly personal choreographies and performances, focusing on the body with a strong sculptural and imaginative sensibility. Her early works revolved around vulnerability, intimacy and femininity. In ‘Lijfstof’ she explored the body as object/matter and in ‘MAP ME’ video images were projected on the body as on a canvas. She pursued her movement research in the solo’s ‘I’m Sorry It’s (Not) A Story’ and ‘Shapeless’, and in various site-specific performances and improvisation solos. Her last work ‘Deceptive Bodies’ displayed an iconography of the theatrical body and was also shown in exhibition spaces. She often collaborates with other choreographers, theatre makers, film makers and musicians. Additionally, she gives advice to other artists and conducts workshops based on her own artistic practice.
Learn moreErika Vogt (b.1973, East Newark, New Jersey) is a Los Angeles based artist represented by Overduin and Kite in Los Angeles and Simone Subal Gallery in New York City. She received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from New York University. Solo exhibitions include: The Engraved Plane, Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2012); Geometric Persecution, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles (2010); Room Gallery, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA (2010); and Daniel Hug, Los Angeles, CA (2008). Selected screening and group exhibitions include: Affective Turns at Pepin Moore, Los Angeles (2012) and Made in L.A. at The Hammer, Los Angeles (2012), Foam, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2011); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2011); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2010); Whitney Biennial, New York, NY (2010) and Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY (2009).
Learn moreKurt Vandendriessche is an actor, dancer, performer and scenographer.
He worked for television, the film industry and as an independent stage artist, both as a freelance performer, and in creating work through collaboration.
Together with Charlotte Vanden Eynde he created MAP ME, an intimistic evocation of the cycle of life, which won the choreography award of the SACD and toured extensively through Europe and the United States. With Dolores Bouckaert he conceived several performances and installations, as well as providing the video- and light design and dramaturgical support for her latest piece GALOP. For several productions he joined Troubleyn, the company of Jan Fabre, playing the role of Prometheus in PROMETHEUS: Landscape II a.o. Furthermore, he has worked with Jan Decorte, Emio Greco, and so on. In 2012 he played one of the lead parts in WELCOME HOME, Tom Heene’s debut movie, which was selected for the International Film Festival of Venice. Throughout his career he did puppetry, street theatre, experimental video design and has an overall experience in many fields of the arts, led by a desire to fuse and be influenced by a broad experiential domain.
He invited Sibran Sampers and Jürgen de Blonde in 2017 to join him in a project entitled THE BODY ELECTRIC (referencing Walt Whitman’s I sing the body electric).
The initiative was an attempt to resource his personal experiences both as a spectator, as in being on stage, in need of reduction of context and meaning. Perhaps as a way of liberating the mind from imposing paradigms in order to experiment with shape, matter and definition as the standards of a universal connectedness. Since then they have presented performative happenings, non-voiced audiovisual sensory experiences, that aimed to share the perception of basic phenomenologies, initially starting from simple principles of molecular cooking, later developing to a macro-/microscopic form of land art.
Learn moreIn early 2010, Holland Andrews began a solo project behind the alias of Like a Villain. She pulls her influences from notable minimalist composers such as Arvo Pärt, contemporary vocalists including Diamanda Galás, modern experimental musicians like Björk, and is heavily influenced by broadway and opera music. By creating tapestry of live loops using her voice, clarinet, and glockenspiel, her aim is to put emphasis on the roots of organic sounds, and to create an emotional realm of sonic healing and magic.
Selected Press
"Holland Andrews (HA) of Like a Villain," Cameron Clowers, Bridge.Town.Low.Down, April 11, 2010.
Selected Video
Learn moreMariana Valencia | Photo credit Ian Douglas
Mariana Valencia, (creator/performer) has held residencies at Chez Bushwick (2013), New York Live Arts Studio Series (2013-14), ISSUE Project Room (2015) and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (2016-18). Nationally, she has held residencies at Show Box LA and Pieter Pasd (2014) in Los Angeles; and was part of PICA’s 2018 Creative Exchange Lab. Valencia is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award to Artists grant recipient (2018), a Jerome Travel and Study Grant fellow (2014-15), a Yellow House Fund of the Tides Foundation grant recipient (2010-13) and a Movement Research GPS/Global Practice Sharing artist (2016/17). Her ethnographic research has taken her to Belize, Mexico and the Balkans and she has performed in works by Jules Gimbrone, Elizabeth Orr, Kate Brandt, AK Burns, Em Rooney, robbinschilds, Kim Brandt, Fia Backstrom and MPA. Valencia is a founding member of the No Total reading group and she has been the co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence (2016-17). She holds a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA (2006).
Learn moreMaya Vivas is a multidisciplinary artist working in a variety of mediums, such as ceramic, performance, painting, and installation. Maya has exhibited work, spoken on panels, and hosted workshops throughout the United States, including venues and institutions such as The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, Louisiana State University, and Yale. Vivas is also co-founder of Ori Gallery. Whose mission is to redefine "the white cube" through amplifying the voices of Queer and Trans Artists of color, community organizing and mobilization through the arts
Maya is a 2022/3 Golden Spot Residency awardee.
Learn moreMona Vatamanu (Romania) and Florin Tudor (Switzerland) live in Bucharest, Romania, where they have been working together since 2000. Their practice spans film, photography, painting, performance, and installation, and reflects the social upheavals of post-communist Eastern Europe. The duo has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America, and has been featured in the 2008 Berlin Biennial and in the Romanian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Vatamanu and Tudor have had residencies at Basis Voor Actuele Kunst in Utrecht, AIR Vienna, and Project Room at Ludwig Museum in Budapest, among others. They received first prize in the 2006 Fair:Play Video Festival in Berlin. Vatamanu and Tudor are represented by Lombard Fried Projects, New York.
Peripheries
Moscow's Poplar Curse, New York Magazine, April 17, 2011.
Learn moreBorn in 1970, Philippe Quesne received his education in Visual Arts. For 10 years he designed sets for theater, operas and exhibitions. In 2003, he created the Vivarium Studio Company, and directed his first show, La Démangeaison des ailes, based on the acts of taking off and falling down. Philippe Quesne hunts the marvelous, the tiny, and pushes to the extreme experiences of our daily lives as well as the relationship between mankind and nature. As he did as a child, collecting insects, he now works and studies small communities under his microscope. The scenography is used as an ecosystem in which he immerses his actors into. His shows, such as La Démangeaison des ailes (2003), Des expériences (2004), D’après nature (2006), L’Effet de Serge (2007), La Mélancolie des dragons (2008), Big Bang (2010), Swamp Club (2013), Next Day (2014), compose a repertory that tours all over the world. In addition to his work for the theater, he creates performances and interventions in public spaces or natural sites, and displays his installations in the context of exhibitions. Since January 2014, he has been serving as the co-director of Nanterre-Amandiers, National Dramatic Center. In 2016, he will create Caspar Western Friedrich at Kammerspiele in Munich and Welcome to Caveland! at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels
BIO PAGE IMAGE/S:
La Mélancolie des dragons 1 @ Martin Argyroglo
La Mélancolie des dragons 5 © Pierre Grosbois Learn moreLonnie van Brummelen (Born 1969, Soest, NL) and Siebren de Haan (Born 1966, Dordecht, NL) are an Amsterdam-based collaborative. Van Brummelen and de Haan have been working together since 2002, creating films and installations that question the boundaries of the public realm. Their documentarian methods often look closely at the geopolitics of Europe, using 16mm and 35mm film and text. Presentations of their work have been included in international exhibitions at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2011), Project Arts Center, Dublin (2009), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2009), and MoMA New York (2008), and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007).
Learn morevanessa german is a self-taught citizen artist working across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, immersive installation, and photography, in order to repair and reshape disrupted systems, spaces, and connections. The artist’s practice proposes new models for social healing, utilizing creativity and tenderness as vital forces to reckon with the historical and ongoing catastrophes of structural racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, resource extraction, and misogynoir.
A visual storyteller, german utilizes assemblage and mixed media, combining locally found objects to build protective ritualistic structures known as her power figures or tar babies. Modeled on Congolese Nkisi sculptures and drawing on folk art practices, they are embellished with materials including beading, glass, fabric, and sculpted wood, and come into existence at the axis on which Black power, spirituality, mysticism and feminism converge.
Based in Homewood, Pittsburgh, german’s artistic practice is intertwined with and inextricable from her dedicated role in activism and community leadership. In 2011, german founded the Love Front Porch, an arts initiative for the women, children, and families of the local neighborhood that began after she moved her studio practice onto the front steps of her home. Three years later, in 2014, german opened the ARThouse, which combines a community studio, a large garden, an outdoor theatre, and an artist residency.
Upholding artmaking as an act of restorative justice, german confronts and begins to dismantle the emotional and spiritual weight imposed by the multi-generational oppression of African American communities. As a queer Black woman living in the United States, german has described this as a deeply necessary process of adventuring into the wild freedom that the inhabitation of such identities demands. This activist instinct emerges in german’s work to postulate powerful narratives of freedom and love.
german has been awarded the 2015 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, the 2017 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2018 United States Artist Grant and, most recently, the 2018 Don Tyson Prize from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Her work is held in private and public collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the West Virginia University Museum, Everson Museum of Art, Figge Art Museum, Flint Institute of Arts, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, David C. Driskell Center, Snite Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College. german’s fine art work has been exhibited widely, most recently at the Figge Art Museum, The Union for Contemporary Art, The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Flint Institute of Arts, Mattress Factory, Everson Museum of Art, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Studio Museum, Ringling Museum of Art and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Learn moreBorn in Harlem in 1986 to Dominican-Ecuadorian parents, Venus X grew up in Washington Heights and has recently made a name for herself in NYC’s underground music and art scene. She’s been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vibe, ArtForum, Modern Painters, V Magazine, and Fader for her multi-faceted sounds. She performed at various New York Fashion Week after-parties and composed soundtracks for runway shows (earning the title of “Fashion Week’s Most Extreme DJ” from Rolling Stone for her Gerlan Jeans set), scored a performance by K8 Hardy for the Whitney Biennial, and has performed various times at MoMA, the New Museum, and other similar institutions. She has toured with Gang Gang Dance and Theophilus London, starred in music videos for A$AP Rocky, and worked as a researcher and consultant for Shakira.
Selected Press
Venus X: I don't like pretending to be stupid,
Sampling Rap, Salsa, and Al Jazeera, Alex Hawgood, The New York Times, April 18, 2012.
The X Factor: Meet Venus, Fashion Week's Most Extreme DJ, Colleen Nika, Rolling Stone, September 19, 2011.
Learn moreVictoria Fortuna is Assistant Professor of Dance at Reed College. Her teaching and research interests include Latin/x American concert and social dance, dance as a mode of political and community organization, collaborative creation methods, and cultural histories of dance in transnational perspective. Victoria is currently working on a book that examines the relationship between Buenos Aires, Argentina based contemporary dance practices and histories of political and economic violence from the 1960s to the present. She is trained in modern and contemporary dance techniques and collaborates with several Buenos Aires based dance collectives. She has received grants and awards from Fulbright, the Society of Dance History Scholars, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Latin American Studies Association. Victoria holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.
Learn moreVideotones is a neurodiverse digital media collective that employs homegrown, collaborative editing practices, exploits the hidden potential for accessibility in cheap consumer technologies, and adheres to a vision of filmmaking that privileges improvisational experimentation and nonlinear play over predetermined outcomes to make their idiosyncratic brand of music and video art. Since its inception in 2018, the project has yielded three full-length albums of experimental music as well as countless short video works. In the Videotones universe, authorship is dispersed—each project born out of a process of equal participation and nonhierarchical decision making, resulting in work that is discordant, polyvocal, awkward, hilarious, mysterious, fragmented, joyful, and deeply affecting.
Since 2020, Videotones has been sustained under the auspices of Elbow Room, a 501(c)(3) community art studio and gallery space dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Elbow Room provides art materials and mentorship in painting, drawing, creative writing, sewing, digital media, music, hand tool woodworking, ceramics, and many other forms of artmaking.
Joel Stotesbery is a multidisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR. Over the past decade, he has explored a process of making abstract video diaries he calls Videotones. This process eventually merged with his role as a caregiver in Portland’s intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) community, and was incorporated into an ongoing collaboration with a group of neurodivergent artists. Today, Videotones is a loose collective of artists working out of Elbow Room, a nonprofit art studio and gallery space Joel helped found in 2020 that is dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. They meet online and in-person to create hybrid works encompassing abstract video collage, narrative shorts, animation, electronic music, and sound design.
Andy Louie is a multimedia artist from Portland, OR. He uses digital drawing software and traditional drawing materials to capture what he sees in the world. Recurring subjects include people, animals, and environments. His videos, animations, and digital art have been exhibited at Gallery 114, Portland; Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College, Portland; 1122, Portland; and the Hollywood Theatre at Portland International Airport, Oregon. He has been a central collaborator in Videotones since its inception in 2018.
Endale Abraham's off-kilter, often surreal drawings are distinguished by their soft touch, attention to detail, sinuous line work, and hybrid subjects. He has been honing his rendering skills for many years, and has developed a talent for capturing wonky and humorous likenesses, which he often endows with farcical or mocking handwritten names. Boldly taking on new subject matter with focused goofiness and versatility, Endale captures perspective space, charming details, and striking contours with his signature linework and style. In his work with the Videotones collective, Endale’s curiosity and quietly absurdist humor are able to shine. His meandering curiosity and quietly absurdist humor have become vital ingredients of Videotone’s leftfield digital stew.
Mohamed Omar was born in Somalia and moved to Portland, OR when he was five years old. By his own account, his work is rooted in a deep concern for color:
“I get inspired by the colors of the sky, bright sunsets, primary colors, bold colors. I really wanted to use certain greens, so I painted the Statue of Liberty. I think of colors and different shapes, sometimes words. When I’m out in the community, I feel OK and special and I see different things like cars, trucks, and bricks. When I see paintings like yellow, black, red, and blue, and red cars, I choose those colors. Or the sunset. And I like different colors.”
While his early paintings exhibit a meditative simplicity, over time he has been drawn increasingly towards figurative gestures and has developed a playful, expressive style all his own. In his loosely rendered scenes, quilt-like images of cartoon characters and jungle cats are cobbled together from discrete blocks of color. He augments his patchwork scenery with words whose rainbow lettering resembles train car graffiti and refrigerator magnets in equal measure. Like the bright sunsets he reveres, his works invite you to bask in their warmth. In addition to his work as a visual artist, Mo is a member of the audiovisual collective Videotones and records music under the name M. Omar. His debut album Mo’s World was released on cassette via Cityland Tapes in 2023.
Chanel Conklin has a deep interest in pop culture and current events that she merges with images from her personal life, altering and distorting them through the use of digital collage, sculpture, and video. In her work, figures from current events, horror movies, pop music, the New Testament, and her own life are recast in an epic and surreal struggle between the forces of good and evil. In 2023, she published Love Chanel, a full color art book showcasing her prolific collage practice. Chanel is a longstanding collaborator in Videotones, where her horror-inflected provocations add a lurid edge to every project she works on.
Jamond Williams brings his works on canvas and paper to life with fluid lines and breathtaking color palettes. Portals, faces, and ghostlike creatures that collide, layer, and intersect are recurring images in his work. Dots, grids, and squiggles create visual staccatos that bounce along his landscapes and bring an astoundingly bright rhythm to his scenes. He regularly uses familiar line patterns and repetition to achieve his effects, but just when you think you have become acquainted with his aesthetic, he mystifies you with a new and brilliant cacophony of vibrant color, composition, and character. Jamond is often compelled to draw windows, covering entire canvases with layers of portals, each providing a fractured glimpse into one of his surreal and magical worlds. In addition to his 2D work, Jamond has made forays into video, performance, sound design, and music as a member of the Videotones collective. His first album, Flat on the Sides, was released on cassette by Cityland Tapes in 2023. Learn moreVivian Phillips is Director of Marketing and Communications for Seattle Theatre Group, the largest performing arts organization in the Puget Sound Region, where she serves as chief spokesperson and oversees all marketing and communication functions for more than 750 annual events presented by STG. Vivian chairs the Seattle Arts Commission and previously served as Director of Communications to Seattle Mayor Paul Schell, overseeing citywide public information and emergency operations communications functions including WTO.
As a seasoned broadcast professional, Vivian produces and hosts award-winning arts programming for King County television, and previously hosted public affairs programs for the ABC and PBS affiliates in Seattle. She regularly hosts/moderates live conversations, most recently moderating a conversation with best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates for a sold out crowd of 2900. Other noted interviews/conversations, live and for television, include: Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Sherman Alexie, Magic Johnson, Charles Johnson, Alex Rodriquez, Mechell Ndegeocello, Dan Savage, Terry McMillan, Jesmyn Ward, Gloria Steinem, Eve Ensler, Congressman John Lewis, among others.
Vivian has represented the Seattle Theatre Group to the Africa Consortium for 11 years.
Learn moreAlthough the Magnolia Housing Projects have long been demolished, a light post still stands at the corner where youth like Vockah Redu (Javocca Davis) gathered to rap and create beats. The light post marks one of the birthplaces of Bounce music, a genre of rap specific to New Orleans that has invigorated crowds throughout the South. Vockah Redu and the Cru animate the stage with their dynamic revival of dance, music, and art from the street corner to the club. More than your typical hip-hop act, this theatrical performance sets the stage for a sweaty, hands-down, booty-up good time, transforming any party, bar, or dance floor in your neighborhood.
The original Cru formed in 1997 and was composed of the Ave Girls: Joi Jadah (Joi Denise Sessions), Teedy Booh (Tasha Marie Butler), Ninny (Shanita Davis), and Grahonda Pooh (Madonna Melissa Oliver). Currently the Cru is composed of Shortee Whop (Glendell Weir), Energyzah (Clarence Mosley), and Taveion Rodeo (Donte Brown). The Cru dominates the stage with electrifying choreography, costumes, skits, and superb street style.
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