The public is invited to a ceremony to honor northern New Mexico’s highest achieving undergraduate and graduate art students at SITE Santa Fe on November 30, 2012 from 6-7 pm.
The 14 students selected for the 2012-13 SITE Scholar program are given opportunities to network and work collaboratively on a project to be presented in a museum context. This year students will engage with the More Real? exhibition that is presented at SITE through January 2013. This exhibition travels to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the spring of 2013. The SITE Scholars will conceive of the first half of a project that will travel with the exhibition and will be completed by students in Minneapolis.
Biographical information about the scholars:
Brandee Caoba is mixed media artist, blurring the line between painting and photography. Her work alternates between analog and digital, and explores the relationships of how we relate to the narratives of myth and mythologies as individuals and as a society. She is the former apprentice of feminist artist and activist May Stevens, and most recently interned with Bostick and Sullivan furthering her exploration of hand crafted photography and alternative processes. She is in her final year at The Institute of American Indian Arts.
India Cochrane is from Baltimore, Maryland and is currently a sophomore at St John’s College. She has been drawing her whole life, but she picked up art more seriously in high school where she built a portfolio of mostly charcoal drawings, oil paintings and a few pieces in fashion design. She rediscovered her love for visual art and took many painting and drawing classes in 9th and 10th grade, then in 11thgrade she learned to design and create clothing. She decided upon a different route for college and chose St John’s where she passionately studies the Classics of the Western world through the Great Books Program. Art is not offered at St John’s; because of this she has once again rediscovered my love for making visual art and my need for a creative outlet.
Nina Dubois is an artist whose work and research focuses on the ways in which the built environment is informed by and reflects our understanding of natural systems. Through sculptural and architectural installations, she explores the pragmatic, phenomenological, and symbolic aspects of those relationships. After receiving a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, she participated in the Land Arts of the American West program at the University of New Mexico, where he is currently finishing her MFA with a focus in Art & Ecology. Current projects include collaboration with Jeanette Hart-Mann and Chrissie Orr on the SeedBroadcast Mobile Seed Story Broadcasting Station, and SOUND COLONY, an outdoor sculptural/sound installation sited at the Alvarado Urban Farm in conjunction with ISEA 2012 Machine Wilderness.
Katherine Goldman started off as an art student, then changed course and spent a number of years traveling and working as a chef. She has recently become involved in making art again. She is currently attending Santa Fe Community College in preparation to complete her bachelor’s degree in linguistics and art at the University of New Mexico.
Hannah Hoel’s current work emphasizes repeated action, employing fiber arts within a formal setting while exploring the relationship between the handmade and the geometric. She is pursuing her second bachelor’s degree at Santa Fe University of Art and Design in Studio Art after previously earning a BA in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths College, London, and an MA in Eastern Classics from St. John’s College, Santa Fe.
A product of the Peace Corps, KB Jones was raised in the US and Africa. She received her BA from Columbia University in 2002 and lived and worked in the New York art world before moving to New Mexico for her graduate studies. A second year MFA candidate at UNM, she is primarily a painter. Her work is about the figure, culture, and the practice of painting: her connection to everyone.
Lucy Madeleine is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, sculpture and installation. She is interested in the relationship between language and the body and makes work that explores this dynamic through visual metaphor. Recently relocated to Santa Fe from Los Angeles, CA, she is completing her BFA in Studio Arts at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
KaiLani Mayer holds on to things. Her installations are carefully constructed spaces that incorporate both personal belongings as well as found objects. Focusing on preservation and the human impulse to keep things, she is interested in how we collect pieces of evidence of our past in order to have a way of nderstanding ourselves. She pushes her honesty, authenticity and vulnerability in order to establish an intimate experience with the viewer. Playing with both revealing and hiding, she strives to connect with the viewer while also maintaining
a distance or sense of longing. Currently, she is working on her honor’s thesis work for her BFA at the University of New Mexico.
Jessica Minnich moved from Portland, Oregon to Santa Fe where she is a junior at SFUAD. She is interested in ideas of morbidity and the uncanny and explores notions of gender identity through her performance.
Conor Peterson is in his final year of studies as a graduate student of Electronic Art at the University of New Mexico, where he moved after studying at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Though primarily raised by roving packs of coffee and semi intelligent tree moss, Conor has taken a liking to the relics of nuclear science that litter the desert of New Mexico. Inspired by the historical complexity of the area, Conor has been transmuting the concerns of new media into novel technological works by applying his background in computer
science and engineering. He recently helped to organize the Underground Symposium of Electronic Art, a metashow coincident with ISEA 2012 that emphasized local experimental art.
Alycia Smith was born in Oregon. She completed her BA in Philosophy at University of Oregon and is currently working toward an MA in Liberal Arts at St. John’s College. Her primary focus in art is poetry and photography. She is interested in the notion of transience in art, and artwork as interactive and evolving activity.
Miles Tokunow is a multimedia storyteller. He is both an artist and educator. Currently a Masters Candidate at Highlands University in Las Vegas, NM, Miles is interested in creating interactive performance spaces combining dance, film and sound. Miles has worked at and with non-profits in Santa Fe teaching elementary, high school and college students how to tell their own stories through different forms of media. He is currently in the process of making collaborative art that focuses on social change through multimedia performance.rang
Minh Vu was born in Saigon, Vietnam. One of 11 siblings and theyoungest of 7 girls, she immigrated to United States after the Vietnam War. Trang earned her MFA in 1995 from UC Irvine in Video Installation with an emphasis on Marginalized Identity. She currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is pursuing a degree in photography at the Santa Fe Community College. Her approach to exploring gender and the body utilizes a personal photographic narrative: a silent dialog with the camera. The subject is the viewer’s perception of sexuality,
emotion, cultural and social restraints. The visual language includes abstract elements, ordinary objects, fetish images and the human form. Nuance, innuendo, and symbolic constructions are all present and important.
Crystal Demientieff Worl is Raven moiety, Sockeye Clan, from the Raven House from the Chilkat region in Southeast Alaska. From her mother’s side, she is Deg Hit’an Athabascan from Fairbanks Alaska. She was introduced at a young age to her traditional arts, practices, and story telling. Today she is a senior in both Studio Arts and Moving Images at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Crystal works in jewelry metals, glass, and painting. The forms Crystal focuses on are based on traditional Tlingit form line (aka Northwest Coast Design.) Today at IAIA Crystal utilizes her education to apply new techniques and ways of presenting that have not been done before to traditional designs and stories. It is her responsibility to carry on her ancestral knowledge of creation and life through contemporary story and art and pass it down to the next generations.
Nominators:
Lauren Addario, AmeriCorps Cultural Technology Coordinator at New Mexico Highlands University
Michael Hoffer, Design Chair, School of Arts + Design Program Head, Sculpture, Ceramics Assistant Professor, Fine Woodworking, Santa Fe Community College
Scott Marshall Anderson, Painting and Drawing Professor, University of New Mexico
André Ruesch, Chair of Arts, Professor of Photography, School of Arts + Design at Santa Fe Community College
Adrienne Salinger, Photography Professor, University of New Mexico
Linda Swanson, Chair of the Art Department, Santa Fe University of Art and Design
Charlene Teters, Chair of the Art Department, Institute of American Indian Arts
Mary Tsiongas, Associate Chair & Graduate Director, Associate Professor Electronic Arts, Art & Art History, University of New Mexico
Edward Walpin, Assistant Dean, St. John’s University