TBA:19 Creative Exchange Lab

Meet the Artists: Round 2

Join PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab artists in residence for brief presentations about their current projects and practices over happy hour drinks!

Creative Exchange Lab (CXL) artists in residence are collaboratively selected by PICA’s Artistic Directors, who seek to invite a diverse, intergenerational cohort of emerging and established artists from a spectrum of disciplines, perspectives, and geographies. Reflecting a need for in-depth, cross-disciplinary research opportunities for artists, CXL offers time for experimentation, collaboration, and interaction among participating local, national, and international artists.

The Fall 2019 CXL artists will be in residence during TBA:19. You’ll see them at festival performances, hanging out on The Patio, and around Portland.

Our Fall 2019 Creative Exchange Lab residents are DB Amorin (Honolulu, Hawai’i), Ilana Harris-Babou’s (New York, NY), Phoebe Davies (London), Jaamil Olawale Kosoko (Detroit / Philadelphia / NYC / LA), Ralph Pugay (Portland, OR), S.J Norman (Melbourne, Australia), and Anna Martine Whitehead (Chicago, IL)

ARTISTS' BIOS

Phoebe Davies is a Welsh artist and researcher based at Somerset House Studios. Working across video, sound, performance, and print, her practice investigates how people perceive their social framework, often working with and in response to individuals and communities, generating work through collaboration, collective action, and DIT (Do It Together) strategies. She currently co-facilitates two research groups, Synaptic Island, a London-based womxn and non-binary sound collective and Art is Action, a UK-based social practice research group.

Anna Martine Whitehead makes performances. She has been presented by venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; San José Museum of Art; Velocity Dance Center; Chicago Cultural Center; Links Hall; AUNTS; Pieter; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; and CounterPULSE. She has developed her craft working closely with Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, Julien Prévieux, Jesse Hewit, and the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, among others. She is the recipient of a 2019 Graham Foundation Award, 2018 3Arts Award, 2018 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award, and a 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant. Martine has written about blackness, queerness, and bodies in action for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, frieze, Art Practical; and contributed chapters to a range of publications including most recently Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017), Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements (Sobsercove, 2016), Platforms: Ten Years of Chances Dances (2016), and Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (NYU, 2009). Martine is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).

DB Amorin is a media-based artist from Honolulu, Hawai’i currently living and working in Portland, Oregon USA. His work has been supported with awards from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, and PICA’s Precipice Fund grant funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Calligram Foundation. He was selected for the 2019 Honolulu Biennial, and his visual art and curatorial programming has been exhibited nationally.

Ilana Harris-Babou’s work is interdisciplinary; spanning sculpture and installation, and grounded in video. She speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor as a means to digest painful realities. Her work confronts the contradictions of the American Dream: the ever unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom. She has exhibited work throughout the US and Europe, with solo shows at Larrie, 80WSE, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Her work is currently on view in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She has been reviewed in the New Yorker, Artforum, and Art in America, among others. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and a BA in Art from Yale University.

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian American choreographer, performance artist, poet, and curator originally from Detroit, MI. He is a 2017-19 Princeton Arts Fellow, 2019 Red Bull Writing Fellow, 2018 NEFA NDP Production Grant recipient, and a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow. His creative practice draws from Black study and queer theories of the body, weaving together visual performance, lecture, ritual, and spiritual practice. His most recent works, Séancers (2017) and Bessie nominated #negrophobia (2015), have toured internationally appearing in major festivals including: Tanz im August (Berlin), Moving in November (Finland), Within Practice (Sweden),TakeMeSomewhere (UK), Brighton Festival (UK), Oslo Teaterfestival (Norway), and Zürich MOVES! (Switzerland) among others. He is the author of two chapbooks and his poems and essays have been included in The American Poetry Review, The Dunes Review, The Broad Street Review, among others. Visit jaamil.com for more information.

Born in the Philippines, Ralph Pugay is a Portland-based artist who creates paintings, drawings, animations, and socially engaged projects that collapse cultural norms to humorous effect. His works often evoke the clunky, absurd, and dissonant experiences of assimilation. Pugay holds a BA and MFA in Contemporary Art Practice from Portland State University and is a residency graduate from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Other residencies include the Rauschenberg Foundation at Captiva Island and the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans. Pugay’s awards include a Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award. Notable solo exhibitions were held at the Seattle Art Museum, Upfor, Vox Populi, FAB Gallery (Richmond, VA), and King School Museum of Contemporary Art among others. His work is represented by Upfor Gallery in Portland OR.

S.J (Sarah-Jane) Norman (b. 1984) is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer. Their career has so far spanned 15 years and has embraced a diversity of disciplines and formal outcomes, including solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video, and sound. They are a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori, born on Gadigal land. Their practice is routed through the volatile interstices of the social and the corporeal. Working extensively with durational and spatial practices, as well as intimate/one-to-one frameworks, Norman's primary medium is the body.