Jaime Bull was selected to participate in our Artist in Residence Program during the 2014 year and due to scheduling offered to participate during 2015 season. She will be working and living at Bernheim from June 1st – July 31st, 2015. Jaime received her BFA in Drawing and Painting in 2012 and her MFA in Art, in 2013, both from The University of Georgia. Her work is about theatrics, performance and razzle-dazzle. Masks and costuming are recurrent themes, as well as an interest in nature, underwater worlds, outer space and fantasy. Humor, play and intuition are essential in making these works. Like stepping into a funhouse, her flamboyant worlds engage imaginations, even though you can still see “the man behind the curtain” and the puppet’s strings. Vivid colors, metallic shine and glitter prevail. She creates a unique space for exploration and play but like any good story or titillating experience, a dangerous element lurks, adding intrigue and danger.
While at Bernheim Jaime plans on developing a combination of drawings, collage, soft sculpture and costuming to create performative, immersive environments. She will harvest materials from the forest and garden to inspire drawings and make sculptural costumes. She will then document the costumes performing and moving worn by live models. The final installation will consist of two and three-dimensional works accompanied by video projections. The work will be inspired by the ecosystem and will excite and inform the community about this natural world. People will not only be encouraged to see the plants and animals of Bernheim through a new, fantastic lens they will also take an active role in the construction and performance.
Cathleen Faubert will be living and working at Bernheim from June 15th – July 31, 2015. She is an Assistant Professor of Art, Technology & Culture at the University of Oklahoma. She earned her MFA from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Faubert’s teaching focuses on photography and video art, while her artistic endeavors are multi-disciplinary, including olfactory artworks. She is interested in scent and it’s growing role in the visual arts. Recent work utilizes our sense of smell as a language to access ideas, expectations and projections about locations, the American landscape and the unseen. Over the last two years she has developed a method of working with scent as a creative medium. Using a small, glass, steam distiller, she gathers plant material and extracts essential oil or hydrosol (scented water). These extractions represent the local landscape through aroma, molecular structure and symbolic meaning of the materials gathered. She proposes a continuation of this olfactory-based artistic exploration at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest. Her project could consist of both a site-specifically designed scent walk of the fragrant plants already present in the landscape (or new plantings if permissible) and a collection of hand crafted fragrances (to be left at Bernheim) based on time spent researching the arboretum and forest.
Rachel James will be working and residing at Bernheim from September 15th 0 October 31st, 2015. Rachel James holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Concordia University and a MA in Arts-Informed Research from the University of Toronto. She has created installations and sound performance pieces at the Painting Center, and MoMA PS1 and the Brooklyn Art Museum in New York, and the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago among many other sites nationally. She has been a reporter and an assistant producer and producer for many broadcasts including Snap Judgment, Radiolab, and This American Life. Her proposed project is to “playfully subvert the traditional format of an arboretum and research forest by producing a mirror research facility and museum exhibit.” This will be accomplished by using museum style text, research, interviews and community engagement. She will explore the intimate – both banal and profound – experiences we have with the natural world.
She is an interdisciplinary artist whose narrative practice is rooted in an ethos of witness and collaboration. She is interested in the profundity of embarrassment as a human condition, camp, comedy, and improvisation. Her practice centers on documentary assemblage – placing archival, sound, and visual narratives onto a surreal plane in the spirit of bricolage (French for “tinkering”) and improvisation.
Don Pollack made multiple visits to Bernheim in 2014. From these hiking and biking visits, the artist is making numerous large paintings of the terrain and landscape of Bernheim. Don Pollack is a painter and adjunct professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is slated to visit Bernheim four times throughout the year during which he will tour the region by foot or bicycle. During his purposefully slow journey, Pollack plans to gather images to paint, ultimately culminating in an exhibition January – May, 2016, Carnegie Center for Art and History, in New Albany, Indiana.
While riding his bike and walking Pollack came to experience ‘time’ as somewhat of a measured visual perception; a tree on the horizon 15 miles away might be seen as an hour, the bend in the road ahead could be 10 minutes away. As terrain changes, adjustments in sighting changed accordingly. Time and space constantly reminded me that being a casual observer was illusory. Experiencing physical distances at a much slower pace allows the landscape to become an aspect of time.