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
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.
Your Ghost Body
Karinne Keithley Syers
June 1-3
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.
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 teaches independently through the Pelagic School.
Karinne Keithley Syers
June 1-3
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.
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 teaches independently through the Pelagic School.
The Blank Canvas Exhibition
Kahli Hernandez
June 4-10
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 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 Springfield, MA. Growing up a number 2 pencil and computer paper were his main tools for creativity. 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. 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
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.
Kole Kovacs;
in collaboration with Michael Osgood
June 11-17
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
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. 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 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.
Investigating risk & togetherness
Lailye Weidman, with Catalina Hernández-Cabal, Alta Millar, Madison Palffy, Ashley Shey, and Meredith Bove (dramaturg)
June 18-24
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. 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 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.
Story/Sound Arbor
Michael Medeiros
June 25-July 1
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.
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