Clinton Sleeper is a multidisciplinary artist exploring sound, video, collectivity, and technology. The work is often precariously caught between nostalgia and hope, using new technology to update old objects for the purposes of sound installations. Additionally, this work may range from online collaborative initiatives, public repairs, and neighborhood tree swings. Clint is an MFA student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver BC.

Lea Devon Sorrentino is an installation/mixed media sculpture artist who has had the opportunity of exhibiting her work prominently around the Minneapolis/Twin Cities and nationwide. These endeavors, along with thoughtful writing, and a few relational aesthetic performances had her named among the "Artists to Watch for 2013", by the Walker Art Center. She is a contributing writer for Quodlibetica, an online arts publication, and has been a Visiting Artist for the University of Minnesota. This summer she will be attending several residency including the Vermont Studio Center and Elsewhere Residency in June of 2013. Her practice is an auto-ethnographical investigation of life in pursuit of understanding contemporary American culture. Through her work she calls attention to the constructs of American success and the emotional investments placed on possessions and entertainment to create individuality. Or, in not art speak, she's interested in why we eat too much, spend too much, and cry at reality television.

Greg Bloom has a decade of experience in community organizing. He seeks out spaces that foster collaboration, and likes to cultivate common resources from which anyone can benefit. He is currently researching alternative economic models such as mutual credit systems and cooperative enterprise. 

Elsewhere Project | The Great Reconomy

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)

Rebecca Noone is an artist from Canada. She makes installations that interrupt everyday experiences and tech-filled landscapes with playful meditations on the nature of information, preservation, participation, and memory. Recently, she has been planning science fairs, mailing people the Analogue Internet, making household archives, and playing with rainbow parachutes in city parks. Rebecca has a Master’s Degree in Museum Studies from the University of Toronto and works as a curator for Toronto’s pop-up Children’s Own Media Museum. Yeah!

Elsewhere Project | [Insert Title]

Ashley Yeo Yakka creates work that reflects on the nature of being and existence. The personal effort of making her works has become her methodology in an attempt to repossess what she feels is becoming less visible in the human condition. Recent works explore the idea of slowness and work with ideas of creating depth and curiosity. Ashley recently completed her MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design in London.

Elsewhere Project | Blue Yonder

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

Lauren Bullock was born in Boston, Massachusetts but spent most of her life in Georgia where her interest in the arts developed from an early age. Her formal studies in textiles began at the Rhode Island School of Art and Design’s Pre College Program where she first studied pattern screen printing. She also traveled to Japan to study cultural techniques such as dye resist with rice paste, paper spinning and weaving. Currently, she is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Georgia. Her creative work concerns ecofriendly art and design by constructing fabric from discarded materials, employing multiple strategies such as weaving, sewing, soft sculpture along with other contemporary and traditional techniques in order to give used objects a new purpose or identity. 

Elsewhere Project | Reflect Inward

2013 Resident

Peter Pendergrass is a multidisciplinary artist from Greensboro, NC. Working primarily in visual media and performance, Peter's work focuses on gender, sexuality, and personal identity; contemporary political issues, especially feminist movement; the evolving role of technology in culture; spirituality beyond the context of major organized religion; and the intersections thereof. He currently lives and works in Oakland, CA, but has yet to establish a permanent home besides Greensboro, which he loves very much.

Elsewhere Project | SanctuWHEREium

2013 Production Intern

James Huckenpahler tosses away the software manuals before making images on his laptop. He is represented in Washington DC by Hemphill Fine Arts, teaches new media at George Washington University, is a fellow at Provisions Library, and serves on the advisory board of Transformer, non-profit, artist-centered organization that connects and promotes emerging artists locally, nationally and internationally. His current work-in-progress, "Allegories," is an illustrated history of the capital city.

Elsewhere Project | The Inscrutable Women of Pompeii, NC in the Year 10,000AD

Jenny Lee Craig is an artist and a cultural producer currently based in Vancouver, BC. Her projects are diverse and interdisciplinary, often striving for community engagement and collaboration. Though she is inspired by almost everything, her work often draws directly from craft, DIY, surrealism, and storytelling. Highlights from her extensive list of accomplishments include competing in the FINA World Synchronized Swimming Championships in Riccione, Italy in 2012, writing and directing a play about a tender jewel that goes for a journey in a giant hat, and acting as co-director for the Tin Can Studio.

Samantha Persons is an interdisciplinary artist, who is currently working towards her MFA in Sculpture/New Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute, as well as studying internationally at the International Ceramic Studio in Kescskemet, Hungary. Her work is heavily engaged in issues of personal autonomy and social agency, individualism, and gendered space and materiality. She makes immersive installations that incorporate built shelters, complex written narratives, props, sound and video.

Elsewhere Project | A place for lost bois and girls

Carmen Tiffany received her BFA from Minnesota State University in 2005, and her MFA from the University of South Florida in 2010. Working in several mediums, including installation and video, Carmen has exhibited in the United States and Europe. Carmen focuses on personal histories and imaginative storytelling using references from popular and consumer culture.

Monica Lacey is a multi-disciplinary artist from Prince Edward Island, Canada, whose work focuses on the beauty of the broken, overlooked, or discarded. Monica spent many years traveling, working in the film industry, and developing her skills as a writer, dancer, and yoga teacher before returning to studies in Textiles and Photography at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design. She believes deeply in the power of the arts to uplift, teach, and transform and regularly volunteers her time to those ends. She has received several awards and grants for excellence in her work as well as for service to her community. She lives in Charlottetown, PEI with her musician & digital artist husband, her trouble-making yet adorable cat, and a 3 minute walk to the ocean.

Elsewhere Project| Elsewhere Oracle

April Bartlett is a textile artist based out of Dawson City, Yukon Territory, driven to explore contemporary ideas through a traditional craft. Her recent artistic work is focused on the themes of navigation and the mapping both cognitive and physlcal landscapes.

Elsewhere Project | The Urban Explorers Guide to the Elsewhere Commonwealth

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.

Elsewhere Project / Elsewhere Book Project