We are excited to announce our 2020 resident artists!
7 Week Group Residency | April 28 - June 16, 2020
David Hamlow is a sculptor and installation artist based in Good Thunder, Minnesota. Over the last 15 years, David’s work has focused almost exclusively on installation environments created using material detritus resulting from his own consumption. His focus is on the observation and recording of the experience of being a living human and its translation into temporary environments that underline the hidden enormity of individual experience and impact. For the residency, David would bring an amount of his own post-consumer refuse and continue to create components of modular installations while also experimenting with geodesic constructions created from available dead natural refuse (i.e. tree and plant matter, rocks and sand, etc) and arranging these constructions in contrast to and relationship to the post-consumer creations. These hybrid installation environments will then be photographed in nature, with a strict leave-no-trace process. Natural elements will be returned to the environment to complete their cycles of decay, and all post-consumer materials would return with artist after the residency’s conclusion.
Sandy Rodriguez is a Los Angeles-based painter and our 2020 Alma Ruiz Fellowship.. Her work investigates the methods and materials of painting across cultures and histories. Her ongoing series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragon is made up of a collection of maps and specimen paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. Sandy’ creative process synthesizes interdisciplinary research – especially historical and ethnobotanical investigations – with the urgency of the current human rights crisis in the United States, particularly as it impacts Latina/o communities on both sides of the US-Mexico Border. The JTHAR residency will push her on-going research into new territories engaging with the Joshua Tree area of the Mojave desert. The outcome will be a series of landscapes, star maps and studies of native plants using colorants and mineral pigments that are hand-processed into inks and watercolors. The recuperation of Indigenous knowledge systems is crucial to her project, with special emphasis on understanding plant use and recovering paint and pigment recipes. Recovering the medicinal and esthetic uses of local plants and pigments enables her work to provide a space of healing and visual possibilities for current and historical traumas. Read more about her work in the LA Weekly
Patrick Wilson is sculptor and an assistant professor of art at Western Michigan University's Gwen Frostic School of Art. Patrick works to express the cultural collision between expanding population centers and their varied frontiers through metal, wood, and fabric sculptures that employ the language of urban and nomadic architecture. As part of his JTHAR residency Patrick proposes to build a series of wood and fabric structures for the desert environment that will be in direct dialog with the specific terrain of Joshua Tree National Park. The purpose of this inquiry is to examine the way humans and the environment are in dialog and co-constructed by their respective creative and destructive capabilities. These sculptural objects will share the material palette of nomadic shelters and contemporary tensile architecture, but will derive their form and aesthetics from unique geological structures that will be photographed while in residence.
6 Week Solo Residency
Francisco Cohen (Painter) March 9 – April 20, 2020
Los Angeles artist Francisco Cohen is a former company commander in Afghanistan and is curious about the lives of active service members and veterans in 29 Palms. During his residency Fransisco will ask willing subjects what it's like to be here and now at this particular time and in this particular place, what are their days like, what are they most proud of and what do they wish could be different. With their permission, he will record the progress of the painting and the conversation. When finished his visual ethnography will consist of 30 portraits prompting conversations about the browning of America, the performance of gender, and notions of class in one of the country's most elite institutions. Additionally, the project will study issues of power, empowerment, inequality and dominance that the subject encounters as an infantryman in the United States military.
Bethany Johnson (Collage) June 29 – August 10, 2020
Bethany Johnson is an Austin based visual artist whose work has everything to do with nature, and with our collective human interactions (both well-intentioned and otherwise) with the natural world. She has recently experimented with the development of three-dimensional sculptural manifestations of the aesthetics found in the collages. These works take the form of stratified vertical plinths of contrasting materials that are reminiscent of geological core samples, landfill strata, archival stacks and material storage. While in residence at JTHAR Bethany will generate a series of new dimensional works composed of waste materials found in the region of the residency site. In this way the works would both be products of the setting, and would also represent an act of service to the community by consolidating, transforming, and removing unwanted waste materials from the natural setting. While the layered compositions strongly invoke land formations and geologic processes, since all of the materials are discarded or found items, they also address notions of anthropogenic waste and its entombment.
Katy Niner (Writer) August 24 – October 5, 2020
Chicago based writer Kathy Niner's current book project focuses on recon/figuring the essentialized biography of sculptor Marisol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marisol_Escobar) to include her experience of living and art-making with Alzheimer’s disease. As part of this residency, Katy will challenge herelf to translate her research practice into an experiential format accessible to all. Having secured unpublished images taken of Marisol's live/work loft, Katy will imagine a somatic recreation of her studio accompanied by an artist-book catalogue explicating specific features and dynamics of the space and her biography, as well as a content-sharing audio tour.
Rachel Maxi (Painter & Sculptor) January 20 – March 2, 2021
For twenty years, Seattle based artist Rachel Maxi has worked in the realm of representational painting, but more recently her mode of expression has turned to abstraction. She is still inspired by many of the same things she sees in the world: nature, urban landscapes, the quality of light on architecture and trees, walls with patches of painted-over graffiti, and urban decay. While at JTHAR she will produce a small and varied body of work that will be unique to the experience of Joshua Tree landscape, incorporating much the same materials and methodology she is exploring now: painting, mixed media, assemblage and sculpture and working intuitively.
7 Week Group Residency | April 28 - June 16, 2020
David Hamlow is a sculptor and installation artist based in Good Thunder, Minnesota. Over the last 15 years, David’s work has focused almost exclusively on installation environments created using material detritus resulting from his own consumption. His focus is on the observation and recording of the experience of being a living human and its translation into temporary environments that underline the hidden enormity of individual experience and impact. For the residency, David would bring an amount of his own post-consumer refuse and continue to create components of modular installations while also experimenting with geodesic constructions created from available dead natural refuse (i.e. tree and plant matter, rocks and sand, etc) and arranging these constructions in contrast to and relationship to the post-consumer creations. These hybrid installation environments will then be photographed in nature, with a strict leave-no-trace process. Natural elements will be returned to the environment to complete their cycles of decay, and all post-consumer materials would return with artist after the residency’s conclusion.
Sandy Rodriguez is a Los Angeles-based painter and our 2020 Alma Ruiz Fellowship.. Her work investigates the methods and materials of painting across cultures and histories. Her ongoing series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragon is made up of a collection of maps and specimen paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. Sandy’ creative process synthesizes interdisciplinary research – especially historical and ethnobotanical investigations – with the urgency of the current human rights crisis in the United States, particularly as it impacts Latina/o communities on both sides of the US-Mexico Border. The JTHAR residency will push her on-going research into new territories engaging with the Joshua Tree area of the Mojave desert. The outcome will be a series of landscapes, star maps and studies of native plants using colorants and mineral pigments that are hand-processed into inks and watercolors. The recuperation of Indigenous knowledge systems is crucial to her project, with special emphasis on understanding plant use and recovering paint and pigment recipes. Recovering the medicinal and esthetic uses of local plants and pigments enables her work to provide a space of healing and visual possibilities for current and historical traumas. Read more about her work in the LA Weekly
Patrick Wilson is sculptor and an assistant professor of art at Western Michigan University's Gwen Frostic School of Art. Patrick works to express the cultural collision between expanding population centers and their varied frontiers through metal, wood, and fabric sculptures that employ the language of urban and nomadic architecture. As part of his JTHAR residency Patrick proposes to build a series of wood and fabric structures for the desert environment that will be in direct dialog with the specific terrain of Joshua Tree National Park. The purpose of this inquiry is to examine the way humans and the environment are in dialog and co-constructed by their respective creative and destructive capabilities. These sculptural objects will share the material palette of nomadic shelters and contemporary tensile architecture, but will derive their form and aesthetics from unique geological structures that will be photographed while in residence.
6 Week Solo Residency
Francisco Cohen (Painter) March 9 – April 20, 2020
Los Angeles artist Francisco Cohen is a former company commander in Afghanistan and is curious about the lives of active service members and veterans in 29 Palms. During his residency Fransisco will ask willing subjects what it's like to be here and now at this particular time and in this particular place, what are their days like, what are they most proud of and what do they wish could be different. With their permission, he will record the progress of the painting and the conversation. When finished his visual ethnography will consist of 30 portraits prompting conversations about the browning of America, the performance of gender, and notions of class in one of the country's most elite institutions. Additionally, the project will study issues of power, empowerment, inequality and dominance that the subject encounters as an infantryman in the United States military.
Bethany Johnson (Collage) June 29 – August 10, 2020
Bethany Johnson is an Austin based visual artist whose work has everything to do with nature, and with our collective human interactions (both well-intentioned and otherwise) with the natural world. She has recently experimented with the development of three-dimensional sculptural manifestations of the aesthetics found in the collages. These works take the form of stratified vertical plinths of contrasting materials that are reminiscent of geological core samples, landfill strata, archival stacks and material storage. While in residence at JTHAR Bethany will generate a series of new dimensional works composed of waste materials found in the region of the residency site. In this way the works would both be products of the setting, and would also represent an act of service to the community by consolidating, transforming, and removing unwanted waste materials from the natural setting. While the layered compositions strongly invoke land formations and geologic processes, since all of the materials are discarded or found items, they also address notions of anthropogenic waste and its entombment.
Katy Niner (Writer) August 24 – October 5, 2020
Chicago based writer Kathy Niner's current book project focuses on recon/figuring the essentialized biography of sculptor Marisol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marisol_Escobar) to include her experience of living and art-making with Alzheimer’s disease. As part of this residency, Katy will challenge herelf to translate her research practice into an experiential format accessible to all. Having secured unpublished images taken of Marisol's live/work loft, Katy will imagine a somatic recreation of her studio accompanied by an artist-book catalogue explicating specific features and dynamics of the space and her biography, as well as a content-sharing audio tour.
Rachel Maxi (Painter & Sculptor) January 20 – March 2, 2021
For twenty years, Seattle based artist Rachel Maxi has worked in the realm of representational painting, but more recently her mode of expression has turned to abstraction. She is still inspired by many of the same things she sees in the world: nature, urban landscapes, the quality of light on architecture and trees, walls with patches of painted-over graffiti, and urban decay. While at JTHAR she will produce a small and varied body of work that will be unique to the experience of Joshua Tree landscape, incorporating much the same materials and methodology she is exploring now: painting, mixed media, assemblage and sculpture and working intuitively.
