ARC 2023
ARC (activate, research, create), A.P.E.'s curated summer program, is in its seventh season, continuing the investigation of a contemporary art gallery as an active space within the community. From May 26-July 1, 2023, A.P.E. will host six projects that consist of a queer femme interactive installation, video game as memory palace/junkyard, a community live-painting project, stick collecting & collections, collaborative performance & choreography, and an immersive greenspace meets oral history preservation experience. During each residency, the gallery will be open to the public through a variety of workshops, performances, showings, talks, and interactive installations. SEE FULL DETAILS BELOW! Each project maintains a central inquiry into the relationship between the public, the work, and the space in which it is made.
The ARC 2023 projects are: tender fortress by Jae Southerland; Your Ghost Body by Karinne Keithley Syers; Blank Canvas Exhibition by Kahli Hernandez; Stick Show by Kole Kovacs in collaboration with Michael Osgood; Skin in the Game by Lailye Weidman with collaborators Catalina Hernández-Cabal, Alta Millar, Madison Pallfy, and Ashley Shey; Story/Sound Arbor by Michael Medeiros.
The ARC 2023 projects are: tender fortress by Jae Southerland; Your Ghost Body by Karinne Keithley Syers; Blank Canvas Exhibition by Kahli Hernandez; Stick Show by Kole Kovacs in collaboration with Michael Osgood; Skin in the Game by Lailye Weidman with collaborators Catalina Hernández-Cabal, Alta Millar, Madison Pallfy, and Ashley Shey; Story/Sound Arbor by Michael Medeiros.
tender fortress
Jae Southerland
May 28-31
Open to the public:
May 28, 29 + 31, 2-5pm
Tuesday, May 30, 7:30-9pm • tender fortress after dark •
*see the installation in its ethereal “dark mode”
at this special lights out event*
Jae Southerland works with tulle as an expression of femme identity and queer desire. In tender fortress, a large-scale interactive installation invites the viewer to explore dreams and memories. Emulating a painterly style with tulle creates a dream-like world that elicits a simultaneous feeling of safety and childlike wonder (a soft and tender fortress for our inner child), much like the blanket forts we make with our friends and family in childhood.
Jae Southerland is a queer visual artist and graphic designer from North Carolina currently living and working in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. They received an AAS in Graphic Design from GTCC in Jamestown, NC (2009), and a BA in History from UNCG in Greensboro, NC (2006). Their creative practice has included painting, zine making, sculpture, interactive installation, photography, and graphic design. More recently, they began working with tulle as their primary medium to create small adornments, sculptural pieces, and site-specific installations. In 2022, Southerland created their first interactive public work, where we dream–an outdoor installation made with hand-dyed tulle and reclaimed wood, constructed on the beach at Laurel Lake in Erving, Massachusetts. The piece was dedicated to the transgender community and part of the Survivor Art Collective's annual Queer Trans Beach Day.
Your Ghost Body
Karinne Keithley Syers
June 1-3
Open to the public:
June 2, 12-5pm; June 3, 12-8pm
WORKSHOP, June 3, 3-4:30pm:
A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Memory Landscapes in Twine
(ideally bring your own laptop but you can also work on paper)
RSVP HERE for Twine download
ARTIST'S TALK, June 3, 6-7pm:
A Story is Made of Movement through a Landscape
Your Ghost Body (or California in the 20th Century) is a memory palace in the form of a playable junkyard, both as videogame and live game show. Played through three avatars for the author, looking from middle age back at childhood and the cusp of adulthood, Your Ghost Body wonders how memory functions as a medium to rejoin absent people and places that our lost to us and yet somehow also a part of who we are.
For the ARC residency, game-maker and playwright Karinne Keithley Syers and set designer Sara Walsh lay out each level of the game in progress for play-testing to further explore what engages a player here at the cusp between performance text, interactive fiction and maze-puzzle game.
In addition, Syers will give a public artist talk and workshop on writing memory games in Twine.
Karinne Keithley Syers is an artist and teacher based in Amherst who makes works in text, song, dance, sound, bookmaking, essay, video, game design, and points in between. Her work has been produced or published by McSweeney’s Quarterly, National Sawdust, Chocolate Factory Theater, the Ohio Theater, Danspace Project, P.S. 122, Here Arts, Dixon Place, Surf Reality, Incubator Arts Project, SoundProof, and Ur, a dance palace she co-founded with Chris Yon. She has been a fellow or member at New Dramatists, The MacDowell Colony, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, LMCC Groundwork, and Puppet Lab at St. Ann’s Warehouse. She founded 53rd State Press, co-hosted (with Jason Grote) the Acousmatic Theater Hour on WFMU and made an experimental sound podcast, the Basement Tapes of the Mole Cabal, from 2006-2014. She collaborated as a performer, librettist, sound and video designer, and choreographer, with artists including Big Dance Theater, Sara Smith, David Neumann, Young Jean Lee, Sibyl Kempson, Theater of a Two Headed Calf, Chris Yon, The Civilians, and Talking Band. She teaches independently through the Pelagic School.
Karinne Keithley Syers
June 1-3
Open to the public:
June 2, 12-5pm; June 3, 12-8pm
WORKSHOP, June 3, 3-4:30pm:
A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Memory Landscapes in Twine
(ideally bring your own laptop but you can also work on paper)
RSVP HERE for Twine download
ARTIST'S TALK, June 3, 6-7pm:
A Story is Made of Movement through a Landscape
Your Ghost Body (or California in the 20th Century) is a memory palace in the form of a playable junkyard, both as videogame and live game show. Played through three avatars for the author, looking from middle age back at childhood and the cusp of adulthood, Your Ghost Body wonders how memory functions as a medium to rejoin absent people and places that our lost to us and yet somehow also a part of who we are.
For the ARC residency, game-maker and playwright Karinne Keithley Syers and set designer Sara Walsh lay out each level of the game in progress for play-testing to further explore what engages a player here at the cusp between performance text, interactive fiction and maze-puzzle game.
In addition, Syers will give a public artist talk and workshop on writing memory games in Twine.
Karinne Keithley Syers is an artist and teacher based in Amherst who makes works in text, song, dance, sound, bookmaking, essay, video, game design, and points in between. Her work has been produced or published by McSweeney’s Quarterly, National Sawdust, Chocolate Factory Theater, the Ohio Theater, Danspace Project, P.S. 122, Here Arts, Dixon Place, Surf Reality, Incubator Arts Project, SoundProof, and Ur, a dance palace she co-founded with Chris Yon. She has been a fellow or member at New Dramatists, The MacDowell Colony, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, LMCC Groundwork, and Puppet Lab at St. Ann’s Warehouse. She founded 53rd State Press, co-hosted (with Jason Grote) the Acousmatic Theater Hour on WFMU and made an experimental sound podcast, the Basement Tapes of the Mole Cabal, from 2006-2014. She collaborated as a performer, librettist, sound and video designer, and choreographer, with artists including Big Dance Theater, Sara Smith, David Neumann, Young Jean Lee, Sibyl Kempson, Theater of a Two Headed Calf, Chris Yon, The Civilians, and Talking Band. She teaches independently through the Pelagic School.
The Blank Canvas Exhibition
Kahli Hernandez
June 4-10
Open to the public:
June 5-7 + 9; 12-9pm - Creative Community Hours
Art's Night Out; Friday June 9; 5-8pm
Saturday, June 10; 5-8pm - Community Reception
The Blank Canvas Exhibition is an interactive experience that aims to inspire creativity and spark conversations. Large blank canvases will be on display throughout the week, allowing individuals to witness the space's "blank" beginning state and its transformation into a full gallery experience. During Creative Community Hours, patrons can add anything they want to the canvases, creating an open forum for conversation. The only caveat is that new artists are expected to express their thoughts using symbols, shapes, colors, or other means. The visual conversation will change and transform daily, so visitors are encouraged to drop by and see the new works each day. The exhibition is open for friends and families to thoroughly enjoy.
The Blank Canvas Exhibition will culminate in a celebration of all the completed works as a collective artistic accomplishment. It is expected to create lasting memories and draw the next generation of artists and creatives to a brighter future for all.
Kahli Hernandez, Artoonist, born in Brooklyn,NY, was raised in the 413 (Springfield, MA ). Growing up a number 2 pencil and computer paper were his main tools for creativity. He started using his God given talent to draw things that made him excited, consistently adding things he liked on any surface he could get his hands on (including mom's kitchen walls, tables, and chairs). The digital art space became his new playground when he discovered "Paint" on his dad's Windows 98 computer. During high school and college, he widened the door to mixed media and expanded on new ways to express himself.Like Saturday morning cartoons fused with various art styles, the media produced has a cartoonish blend of characters, bold black lines together with a touch of graffiti, vibrant playful colors , and whimsical themes. Style is not a cage he locks himself into, so the tools of choice currently are acrylic, oil, and aerosol paints. Mixed media is his infinite well of expression. "Growing up a mischievous and intelligent child, I would (literally) draw trouble my way." Fast forward to the present day he is using the same talent to promote purpose in the lives of others. His vision is to set his environment ablaze with culture, art, inspiration, and life.
Stick Show
Kole Kovacs;
in collaboration with Michael Osgood
June 11-17
Open to the public:
Opening Reception: June 12, 5-7pm
June 13-16, 3-7pm
June 17, 12-3pm
bring your sticks to add to an emerging, public stick sculpture!
Stick Show is a multi-faceted celebration of sticks
and the beauty of nature and her found objects.
Featuring
++ a special collection of sticks found by ‘artists’ and ‘non-artists’ alike
++ drawings, images, paintings, sculptures, and videos with sticks
as both subject and object matter
++ an open invitation to community members to contribute sticks
to a group sculpture.
Kole makes collaborative works with cameras, computers, and friends. He's interested in playful spaces where the structures that are set up to contain us fail over and over again.
Michael makes things in many disciplines including digital and appropriative arts, djing, and experimental melodies. His visual art tends to be humorous and a bit poignant.
Skin in the Game:
Investigating risk & togetherness
Lailye Weidman, with Catalina Hernández-Cabal, Alta Millar, Madison Palffy, Ashley Shey, and Meredith Bove (dramaturg)
June 18-24
Open to the public:
Open Rehearsals
June 20: 7-8:30pm + June 22: 12:30-2pm
Informal showing and conversation
June 24: 2pm
Skin in the Game: Investigating risk & togetherness is a week-long process-based residency investigating the following questions: With the continued threat of a powerful illness in our midst, how do we move together in meaningful ways? What is needed to care for each other? How has the risk of contagion registered in our bodies, shaped our movement, brought us together and pushed us apart? Choreographer Lailye Weidman will work with four performer-collaborators—Catalina Hernández-Cabal, Alta Millar, Madison Palffy, and Ashley Shey—in daily rehearsals utilizing practices and scores that center bodily negotiation of proximity, connection, touch, and vulnerability during this uncertain time of the lingering-pandemic. The artists will also explore the porousness of the gallery, its exposure to the street through glass windows and the potential for passersby and patrons to engage with the choreographic process and its content. In addition to exploring togetherness amongst the performers, the choreography will also consider the ways that the public moves and gathers in relationship to the performers. Skin in the Game refuses to forget or ignore the pandemic. Rather, the artists seek to learn from its reverberations in their bodies and to chart a path forward that honors the risk of shared breath.
Lailye Weidman (choreographer, lead artist for ARC residency): Lailye Weidman is a choreographer and educator based in Western Massachusetts and a queer parent raising a feisty toddler. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hampshire College, where she combines improvisation, somatics, and mindfulness with a focus on the politics of movement and embodied action. She was an artist in residence at APE incubating new work during the first two pandemic years as part of the Distributed Curation cohort. Her work has been supported by a NEFA NEST grant and the NEFA Dance Fund, and she was a 2018 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Choreography. Her work has been shown in venues on both coasts, the Midwest, and Europe. In addition to APE, she has been an artist-in-residence at SPACE, Light Box in Detroit, the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature, and Dance (iLAND) in New York City, Hothouse at UCLA, and the SEEDS Festival at Earthdance. She was Associate Editor for several issues of Contact Quarterly and remains invested in archiving and storytelling about and through dance practice.
Investigating risk & togetherness
Lailye Weidman, with Catalina Hernández-Cabal, Alta Millar, Madison Palffy, Ashley Shey, and Meredith Bove (dramaturg)
June 18-24
Open to the public:
Open Rehearsals
June 20: 7-8:30pm + June 22: 12:30-2pm
Informal showing and conversation
June 24: 2pm
Skin in the Game: Investigating risk & togetherness is a week-long process-based residency investigating the following questions: With the continued threat of a powerful illness in our midst, how do we move together in meaningful ways? What is needed to care for each other? How has the risk of contagion registered in our bodies, shaped our movement, brought us together and pushed us apart? Choreographer Lailye Weidman will work with four performer-collaborators—Catalina Hernández-Cabal, Alta Millar, Madison Palffy, and Ashley Shey—in daily rehearsals utilizing practices and scores that center bodily negotiation of proximity, connection, touch, and vulnerability during this uncertain time of the lingering-pandemic. The artists will also explore the porousness of the gallery, its exposure to the street through glass windows and the potential for passersby and patrons to engage with the choreographic process and its content. In addition to exploring togetherness amongst the performers, the choreography will also consider the ways that the public moves and gathers in relationship to the performers. Skin in the Game refuses to forget or ignore the pandemic. Rather, the artists seek to learn from its reverberations in their bodies and to chart a path forward that honors the risk of shared breath.
Lailye Weidman (choreographer, lead artist for ARC residency): Lailye Weidman is a choreographer and educator based in Western Massachusetts and a queer parent raising a feisty toddler. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hampshire College, where she combines improvisation, somatics, and mindfulness with a focus on the politics of movement and embodied action. She was an artist in residence at APE incubating new work during the first two pandemic years as part of the Distributed Curation cohort. Her work has been supported by a NEFA NEST grant and the NEFA Dance Fund, and she was a 2018 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Choreography. Her work has been shown in venues on both coasts, the Midwest, and Europe. In addition to APE, she has been an artist-in-residence at SPACE, Light Box in Detroit, the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature, and Dance (iLAND) in New York City, Hothouse at UCLA, and the SEEDS Festival at Earthdance. She was Associate Editor for several issues of Contact Quarterly and remains invested in archiving and storytelling about and through dance practice.
Story/Sound Arbor
Michael Medeiros
June 25-July 1
Open to the public:
Mindfulness Writing Sessions
June 25; 1-3pm
June 26; 11am-1pm
June 27; 6-8pm
Open Hours
June 28 + 29; 12-5pm,
June 30; 12-8:30pm
**live music and reading starting at 7pm**
July 1; 12-5pm
Story/Sound Arbor is an immersive greenspace and oral history preservation experience. Participants will be encouraged to deeply visualize and share their experiences in gardens and nature in three mindfulness and writing sessions facilitated by Michael Medeiros.
Those personal garden/nature experiences, if the participants choose, will be recorded to be played in an oral history soundscape within the Story/Sound Arbor on display Friday + Saturday of the residency week.
Michael Medeiros is a writer, potter, and photographer living in western Massachusetts, where he runs Poesia Pottery. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2021, and is in the midst of certification for teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction from the Mindfulness Center at Brown University. He apprenticed in the techniques of Arts and Crafts-era tile making at the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, and was a co-founder of the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival at the Emily Dickinson Museum.
ARC 23 follows the success of previous summer series:
6 x 6, 2016
ARC, 2017
ARC, 2018
ARC, 2019
ARC, 2021
ARC, 2022
6 x 6, 2016
ARC, 2017
ARC, 2018
ARC, 2019
ARC, 2021
ARC, 2022