Automata LA announces fall/winter 2020-21 artist residencies | Photo credit Benni Quintero (Film/Video BFA 20). Image courtesy of Automata LA
Downtown Los Angeles-based experimental performance venue Automata has announced its latest edition of artist residencies. The fall/winter 2020-21 residencies feature six resident artists, five of whom are CalArtians: Benni Quintero (Film/Video BFA 20), Ramona Apthorp (Art BFA 19), Susan Simpson (Film/Video BFA 99), Sichong Xie (Art MFA 17), Tim Tsang (Music-IM MFA 16), and Tarish Pipkins aka Jeghetto.
In light of COVID-19, Automata has devised a new series of individual artist residencies, created to serve artists while in-person group gatherings ar= on hold. The selected artists will be granted 24-hour access to Automata’s facilities for uninterrupted work time. Throughout the residency, the artists will share their processes through virtual offerings, as well as answer audience inquiries about individual projects.
Quintero is a South Central LA native whose multidisciplinary practice focuses on sequential imagery, storytelling, illusion, performance, and puppetry. Their practice “promotes internal reflection as well as exterior discussion on power, collage, and intersecting notions of identity” through the use of archival images, video, and audio.
Apthorp is an LA-based installation artist, filmmaker, and puppet fabricator who works in live and stop-motion puppetry. She also creates comics that relate personal traumatic stories through “whimsical and often comedic imagery.”
Simpson is the co-artistic director at Automata and former faculty at the School of Theater. Her multidisciplinary practice involves animation, puppet theater, dioramas, and performance art. Simpson’s works engage with the “history, mythology and social dynamics” of her site-specific works, as well as the history of “liberational thought and action” in queer communities.
Xie is a cultural organizer who investigates the movements and forms of body-based sculptural forms like masks and costumes. Her multimedia installations have led to residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, and at The Watermill Center in Long Island, NY.
Tsang is an interdisciplinary artist who creates spaces for contemplation, critical thinking, and escapism in the contexts of exhibitions, academic conferences, events, games, and concerts. These spaces, whether theoretical or physical, “invite perplexity and warmth” as they activate “poetic explorations, re-framings, reflections and expansions of interactive creative processes.”
Read more about artist residencies on Automata LA’s official website.