Silver City, Nevada-The Resident Artist Program in Silver City has hosted some extraordinary people over the past few years, such as former poet laureate of Utah David Lee, internationally acclaimed photographer Frances Melhop, and London-based artist Stewart Easton, whose work has recently been on view at both the Tate Modern and the Ashmolean in London, the University of Oxford’s museum of art and archaeology, founded in 1683.
The Program is unique in that Residents are encouraged to deeply engage with the community and to produce work that reflects their interpretation and experiences of northern Nevada. For instance, New Zealand artist Sophie Scott's painting of Silver City, based on an 1860s photo of the town, was selected for display at the Nevada Legislative Building during the 2017 session. Michigan-based artist Brian Schorn's 22 assemblages, created with objects found in the historic Comstock region, have been shown in his solo exhibit
Comstock Wabi Sabi at the Reno Microsoft Campus and 50 West Liberty Street in Reno's Arts District, and at St. Mary's Art Center in Virginia City. Frances Melhop's upcoming exhibition at the Haldan Gallery at Tahoe,
Comstock Portraits, will include dozens of photographs of people from the Comstock region, which encompasses Silver City, Gold Hill, Virginia City and Old Town Dayton (townsfolks' stories, recorded by filmmaker Mary Works Covington, will be incorporated into the exhibition, which opens in October of 2017). Danish writer Peter Krogh Andersen completed a short story while at the Residency, and partnered with emerging Comstock artist Marielle Toll to illustrate it. Oakland-based artist and writer Scott MacLeod led locals in a group project to create a unique ship art piece from found objects that was then displayed at St. Mary's Art Center. He also created several miniature ghost towns, and another ship art piece dedicated to Bob McKinney, and placed them in the hills around Silver City where townsfolk can discover them on their afternoon walks. Program Residents have also curated and designed exhibitions for other arts groups such as Silver City Arts, created their own pop-up shows, offered poetry readings and free workshops on topics such as sound ecology, embroidery, illustration, memoir writing, and surrealist art techniques, and served as guest speakers at area schools and teen leadership camps.
What are they doing now? Following are highlights of the work former Residents have been involved with following their Residencies in Silver City:
BRIAN SCHORN
After his Residency in 2015, Brian Schorn has been a whirlwind of creativity. The two dozen artworks he made while in Silver City,
Comstock Wabi Sabi were featured in solo shows at St. Mary’s Art Center, and through Sierra Arts “Galleries At Work,” at 50 West Liberty in Reno’s Arts District, and at the Microsoft Campus in Reno. Since 2015, Brian has also created new work that has been in shows at Michigan’s Art in the Loft gallery, Crooked Tree Arts Center, and Michigan Artists Gallery. In addition to being a visual artist, Brian has a Masters in Fine Arts in electronic music and recording media from Mills College. This spring his graphic score Nebula was performed in London by the Aurora Orchestra. It is on the bill along with Bach, Pauline Oliveros and Cornelius Cardew. And this summer, Brian has been awarded a Residency with the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory on Lake Okoboji. He’ll spend a month at the scientific research station studying nature and making art. He’ll hike, kayak and explore the area collecting materials, making sketches and taking photos that will aid in the creation of a new body of work. He plans to experiment with a variety of natural materials and media including drawing, painting, printmaking and calligraphy.
Textsound, a journal of experimental soundworks from the U.S. and abroad, is publishing another one of Brian’s pieces in its upcoming issue. Follow Brian at his website or on Facebook, and be sure to sign up for his monthly newsletter.
SOPHIE SCOTT
Sophie Scott of New Zealand, one of the 2015 Residents, has a BFA in painting from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Since we last saw her, she’s been busy working on her family’s lovely high country sheep ranch in the South Island of New Zealand, and creating new artwork as well. She had work in a group show with the Wakatipu Art and Kulture Collective in Queenstown, New Zealand in 2016, and we’ll see more of her new work when she returns to the Resident Artist Program in Silver City this Fall. One of the paintings she made while at the Silver City Residency, based on an historic photograph of Silver City Nevada in the 1860s, was selected for display at the Nevada State Legislative Building in Carson City during the 2017 Legislative session. The painting was previously in a solo show in Silver City in October of 2015 that attracted an audience that was a real “who’s who” of the northern Nevada art scene. In Sophie’s artwork, images are "stripped back until the places are recognizable only through their landmarks, with just a suggestion of buildings and land form. She draws the viewer into a world which is familiar yet strange, challenging our notion of how we connect with place."
A 2016 Resident Artist, Oakland-based artist/writer Scott MacLeod, recently gained a major new collector of his work, The Farhat Art Museum, which has various venues in the Middle East. Since his Residency in Silver City, Scott has been remarkably productive. This summer he’ll have two pieces in Sweet & Low, a group show at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, California. And in December, he has a major solo exhibition at Pro Arts in Oakland. He’ll also have four of his"Target" sculptures in shows in France (at Le Garage in Lorgues and at Les Perles in Barjols).
Scott helped install the Oakland Museum of California's new exhibition Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing, which will be on view until August 13, 2017. Scott writes that it's, "very satisfying to work on projects that are meaningful, relevant and inspiring. The OMCA's Black Panther show was one, and so is this."
Earlier this spring, Scott contributed documentary performance videos to ProArts' "The New Situationists" show in Oakland, and also had an exhibit of new paintings and sculptures at Cricket Engine in Oakland with Jakub Kalousek.
Last year, Scott completed yet another ship art piece, the U.S.S. Arthur Machen, and created an artwork for the Setkani 2016 symposium in Kostelec nad Cernými Lésy, Czech Republic. A number of his silkscreens were exhibited at the Liminal Gallery in Roanoke, Virginia as part of the AfterMAF 2016 festival. His cement and millinery pins pieces were shown at Berkeley Art Center as part of their annual auction exhibit. Scott also helped install the Oakland Museum exhibition All Power To The People: The Black Panthers at 50, which was on view from Oct 2016 -Feb 2017.
STEWART EASTON
Stewart Easton’s unique work fuses hand embroidery, sonic art, music and illustration. Stewart was among the 2016 Resident Artists in Silver City, and since then he’s had work on display in a whole host of diverse and impressive settings such as the Tate Modern in London, and the Ashmolean, the University of Oxford’s museum of art and archaeology, established in 1683. He took part in the first ever Uniqlo Tate Late event at the Tate Modern in London in 2016, showing his piece ‘His Piety Knows No Bounds‘, an interactive sonic quilt made in collaboration with sound artist Gawain Hewitt, composer Michael Tanner, and the ‘Quirky Quilters’. Some of Stewart’s work was selected for Contemporary Visions VII, BEERS London's annual group exhibition - he was one of just 11 artists chosen from a field of 4,100. This winter he also had some of his unique embroderies on display at 57W57Arts in New York City, and was on stage with Dead Rat Orchestra at Colchester Arts Centre in England with his artwork. IN other musical collaborations, Stewart created the illustrations for Nathaniel Mann's SF Cody: a Rushmoor Epic, which was performed in April 2017 at The Anvil in Basingstoke, the largest performing arts organization in Hampshire, England. Stewart was one of the illustrators for a recent Puffin Books publication, Doctor Who: 12 Doctors of Christmas, and created the artwork for the jacket of a brilliant new book about the Suffragettes by Linda Newbery. While he was in Nevada in 2016, Stewart's work, including the quilt later shown at the Tate Modern in London, was featured during the entire month of July at Sierra Arts Foundation in Reno as part of Artown. Stewart offered embroidery workshops in Silver City while he was a Resident Artist, and created two oil paintings of the Resident Artist housing, one of which will be shown at a future exhibit in the UK.
PHOTO BY WILLA GEBBIE OF ONE OF STEWART'S INTERACTIVE SONIC PIECES AT THE TATE MODERN IN LONDON
CLAIRE SCULLY
London-based artist and Brighton University lecturer Claire Scully, who was one of the 2016 Resident Artists in Silver City, writes, "For nearly two months of the summer Stewart Easton and I took part in the Silver City artist residency program in Nevada. During our time there we each had a solo exhibition of our work, we ran workshops for the good folk of Silver City looking at ‘drawing and identity’ and ‘stitching our history’. We journeyed across the desert to Idaho, saw a ten thousand year old canyon carved by a flood at the end of the last ice age, explored an underground ice cave in the middle of the searing heat of the desert, rafted down a river, saw bald eagles and lived in a geodesic dome, to mention but a few highlights. And above all, we got to spend time with some amazing people in a breathtaking landscape." Claire has since had shows at Outline Editions in London, published popular adult coloring books with illustrations of wildlife and landscapes, and taken some of her Brighton University students on a study trip to Berlin, Germany.
In August 2016, internationally acclaimed photographer Frances Melhop held a photo shoot in Silver City as part of her Residency. The portraits will be the focus of an exhibition at the Haldan Art Gallery at Lake Tahoe that will open in October of 2017. Since then, Frances has been busy finishing a degree at University Nevada Reno, and preparing to complete her Master of Fine Arts next. She was recently a juror for the annual student art exhibition at Lake Tahoe College and will be offering an Artist Talk there on May 18th. Frances is a narrative, story-telling visual artist, voted “One of the World's 200 Best Advertising Photographers 2009/2010″ by Luerzers Archive. Based in Australia for a decade, then in Milan, Italy for the next decade, Frances is well known in Europe and the South Pacific as a creator of extraordinary and unique imagery in the fashion and advertising arena. Her photographs have appeared in European magazines such as Vogue Italia, Vogue France, British Vogue, and Glamour, Purple, Marie Clarie Italia, Elle, Vogue Pelle, Vogue Gioello, and D della Repubblica. Photographs from Frances' fairytale inspired series- which she describes as "an imaginary world of tall-tales, dreams, games of scale, surreality and story-telling" - have been exhibited in Paris, Cannes, Rome, Albuquerque, Virginia City, Reno, etc. Now living in Nevada, Frances has continued to produce outstanding work on the Comstock and beyond, including portraits of Comstock residents, and panoramic portraits of the Burning Man arts and music festival. She explains that as a resident of Nevada for the several years, her attention has turned to "portraiture and its geographical and biographical content."
PHOTO BY MARY WORKS COVINGTON OF FRANCES MELHOP WITH INTERNS AVA COVINGTON AND MARIELLE TOLL AT THE COMSTOCK PORTRAIT PROJECT SHOOT IN SILVER CITY IN 2016.
DAVID LEE
Northern Nevadans are looking forward to poet David Lee's return to Silver City this spring. He'll offer another of his extraordinary readings at the Silver City School House on Saturday, May 27 at 1pm. Utah's first poet laureate, David Lee has been a boxer, pig farmer, seminary student, cotton mill worker, and a baseball player. The Utah Endowment for the Humanities declared him to be one of the 12 greatest writers to ever emerge from the state. He’s published 22 books of poetry, and has received the Utah Governor’s Award for lifetime achievement in the arts and the Entrada Institute’s Ward Roylance Award, and was also considered as a candidate for Poet Laureate of the United States. His book Last Call was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He’s received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award in Poetry and the Western States Book Award in Poetry.
Danish writer Peter Krogh Andersen, dancer Jessica Sanford of Earlham College, emerging musician Mylo McCormick and emerging photographer/illustrator Marielle Toll have also been Resident Artists. Updates on their recent work will be showcased in a future blog post. An added benefit of the Program is that Resident Artists often bring along other creative friends for a visit while they’re at McCormick House, the housing for guests of the Resident Artist Program. Danish designer Christina Balsvardé, New Zealand film maker Miranda Bellamy, Nevada artist Lisa Jayne, and Nevada artist Wes Lee have been among the visitors at McCormick House. The Program has also hosted visits from plein air painters and photographers from across the U.S. attending California artist Sandy Imperatori’s annual week-long workshop at St. Mary’s Art Center.
