Caldera

 

Lani Asuncion received a BFA in sculpture and painting with a minor in printmaking at Middle Tennessee State University. Drawing influences from growing up in Tennessee, Hawaii, and Okinawa, Japan, Asuncion continued to create dynamic imagery through sculpture, performance, and video at the University of Connecticut where she received an MFA. Asuncion has shown nationally and internationally at galleries and art festivals in Tennessee; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Los Angeles, NYC; Gothenburg, Germany; and the United Kingdom. She currently works full-time at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut as a Media Production Specialist and adjuncts for the School of Communications department teaching Essentials of Video. Her work has been selected to permanently be a part of the Special Collections department at Walker E. Lee Library at Middle Tennessee State University and has been included in Aspect EZ: Vol. 4, Déjà Vu limited edition DVD printing by ASPECT: The Chronicle for New Media, Boston, MA.

 

John Berendzen has been creating electroacoustic music and sound for the theatre, dance, and arts communities in Portland and elsewhere for 20 years. He is the resident composer and sound designer with Liminal and has collaborated with Imago, defunct theatre, Oslund + Co/Dance, Hand2Mouth, Oregon Children’s Theater, and many others. John studied composition and voice with Terry Riley and La Monte Young and was one of the last sound engineers to work at the Knitting Factory in New York City. John creates custom software and electronics for real-time interactivity with music and media. He gets excited about performance that inspires a continual immersion in present experience. 

Shelby Davis is a multimedia artist who focuses on sculpture and has a penchant for raw materials. He is a skilled draftsperson and craftsman who mixes high tech digital planning with a folksy and precision obsessed hand held approach. His subject matter is derived from the deeply personal, the humorous, or the paradoxical. He holds a deep interest in science and unfinished fiction. Some art is installed without permission. He is from a small town in South Carolina and now resides, works, and teaches in Portland, Oregon. Davis received his MFA from Portland State University in 2008. He has shown prolifically in Portland, cities all over the southeastern United States, and has exhibited in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Tennessee, and in Portland’s Time Based Arts festival as a member of the art group PAINTALLICA!

 

Jessica Kreutter  is a clay artist who works with discarded objects. She received an MFA from the University of Tennessee in 2010. For 10 years previous to graduate school, she worked as an artist, art teacher, and social worker in Portland, Oregon. Recently, she has exhibited at Pirate: Contemporary Art, Mütter Museum, Seattle Design Center, and the Fort Collins Museum of Art, as well as in group exhibitions in Philadelphia, Washington, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Colorado. She has been a resident artist at ART342, Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch, PlatteForum, and The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. This fall, she will be the ceramics resident at Oregon College of Art and Craft until the end of 2012. 

Beth Loffreda grew up in Audubon, Pennsylvania and attended the University of Virginia and Rutgers University. Currently, she is the director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Wyoming, where she teaches non-fiction writing. She is the author of Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder, and more recently, short fiction and essays that have appeared in places like EPOCH and the anthology West of 98.  She’s currently working on a collection of essays about disappearance. She lives, and mountain bikes as often as possible, in Laramie, Wyoming.

 

Jimmy Newborg is a recent graduate of the Bennington College low-residency MFA program in fiction. His short stories have appeared in or are forthcoming in the online magazines Art Faccia and Little Fiction. He plans to spend his time at Caldera refining a short story collection and breaking significant ground on a novella set in post-apocalyptic America. You can find him on twitter @jimmynew.

 Crystal Schenk primarily makes sculpture and sculptural installations, although she sometimes dabbles in video, drawing, and knitting when the mood strikes. Her sculptures address issues of physical and mental health/illness, memory, class structure, and social interaction. Much of her subject matter is drawn from her family history. Crystal’s artwork has been published in Sculpture and Craft magazines. She was awarded the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award for 2006 and was subsequently selected as the recipient of ISC’s artist in residency program at Art-st-urban in Switzerland. Since then, she has repeatedly returned to make new sculptural works, which are featured in a permanent solo exhibition at Art-st-urban. In 2009, Art-st-urban awarded Schenk with the institution’s first Emerging Sculptor Award. Crystal’s work was represented at the Oregon biennial, Portland 2010. She is currently working on a public commission for Division Street in Portland, Oregon with her collaborator Shelby Davis.

 

February 2013

Jason Baker grew up in Rogue River, Oregon and attended Reed College in Portland. In 2011, he earned a MFA in poetry from Hunter College where he received the Begonia and Hertog fellowships. He has studied with Meena Alexander, Jan Heller Levi, Donna Masini, Maxine Scates, Lisa M. Steinman, and Mark Strand. Jason’s work has appeared in Dislocate, Explosion-Proof, New York Quarterly, Pax Americana, Poet Lore, Poetry East, and others. Tom Sleigh nominated him for Best New Poets 2011. Additionally, he helped edit the poetry anthology Why I Am Not a Painter (Argos Books, 2011).

Helen Dennis is originally from the United Kingdom and now resides in Brooklyn, New York. Her public art installations have been awarded by the Downtown Alliance of New York and NoLongerEmpty. Helen has participated in various exhibitions worldwide and in the US with the support of the Queens Museum, Queens Council of the Arts, QMAD, Kent County Council, New Jersey State Council of the Arts, and South East Arts UK. She has participated in international art residencies with organizations in Beijing, Cyprus and Iceland. In 2007, Helen was a Creative Capital Strategic Planning Fellow in the Emerge 9 program at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art. Helen earned her BA(Honors) at the University for the Creative Arts in the United Kingdom, and received her MFA from Hunter College in 2005.

Oregon native Laura Gibson  grew up in the rural town of Coquille. Her work is often drawn from the geography and history of Oregon. She is a singer-songwriter with three albums: If You Come to Greet Me (2006); Beasts of Seasons (2009); and La Grande (2011), which was named for a northeastern Oregon town described by Gibson as a place that “people usually pass through on their way to somewhere else, but which contains a certain gravity, a curious energy.” Gibson has worked with many other musicians, including Laura Veirs, Danny Seim, and Rachel Blumberg and has also collaborated with The Portland Cello Project. Gibson covered “Edelweiss“ from The Sound Of Music for American Laundromat Records charity CD “Sing Me To Sleep – Indie Lullabies.” She is a graduate of Linfield College.

 

Elsbeth Pancrazi studied poetry at Vassar College and New York University. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her poems and  book reviews have appeared on BOMBlog, Bookslut, Boog City Reader, Forklift, Ohio, H_ngm_n, Paperbag, and elsewhere in print and on the web.

Roger Peet is an artist and printmaker in Portland, Oregon. Much of his work addresses themes of ecology and environmental collapse, focusing on narrative and polemic images exploring predator/prey relationships, the intersection of culture and nature, and the global crisis of biodiversity. He is a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative (justseeds.org), a group of North American artists producing socially and environmentally engaged artwork and has exhibited and collaborated internationally with activists, artists, and scientists across the globe. He prints at the Flight 64 studio in Portland, where he is the president of the board of directors.

 

Joanna Priestley has directed, produced, and animated 24 films that explore abstraction, botany, landscape, aging, and human rights. She has had film retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland, REDCAT, Stuttgart Animation Festival, American Cinematheque, and the Walker Art Center. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Film Institute, MacDowell Colony, Fundación Valparaíso, and Creative Capital. Priestley teaches animation workshops worldwide, was founding president of ASIFA Northwest, and has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1992. Her films are available on DVD from www.primopix.com or Microcinema International. 

 

March 2013

Hayley Barker makes work about the body, psychological and emotional states, nature, and visionary experience. She uses literary and historical texts as frameworks for investigating specific landscapes. Her focus is on experience that is primarily contemplative, religious, feminine, and embodied. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, the Oregonian, Willamette Week, Art Ltd., and Visual Arts Source online. Hayley’s work has appeared in regional and international venues, New American Painting magazine, and the Drawing Center’s Viewing Program. She received her BA from the University of Oregon (1996) and her MA and MFA in Intermedia, from the University of Iowa (2001). She lives and works in Portland, Oregon where she is represented by Charles A. Hartman FIne Art.

 

Lydia Conklin is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, the Astraea Foundation, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University. Her fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine, New Letters, The New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. She has drawn graphic fiction for Gulf Coast, Salt Hill, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

 

Craig Goodworth is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice lies on the boundary between landscapes of theology and poetics. Working in sculpture, drawing, installation, performance and prose, core themes in Craig’s art are the experience/idea of the body and place. Enjoying walking, manual work, and travel, Craig, his wife and son reside in Oregon. Craig holds master’s degrees in sustainable communities and fine art and has received Fellowships in art and writing as well as serving as an artist-in-residence in various contexts.

 

Jeff Leake,  a California bay area native, holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from University of California ­– Davis. For the past 10 years, he has been exploring relationships between nature and humans. His current body of work attempts to shift the traditional perspective of dominion over nature to one that comes from the point of view of the natural world where our human presence is a distant but pervasive element. Along the way, he has shown nationally and internationally and is now in numerous private and public collections throughout the country. He is represented by Gallery 114 in Portland, Oregon where he also works and lives in Portland with his wife, kids, and three dogs.

 

Multidisciplinary artist Karen Yates works within the performance arena, as a creator, director, writer, and actor, and she has worked with Chicago companies such as the Lyric Opera, TUTA, Red Tape, Oracle, and American Theater Company, among others. Her work investigates issues of class, gender, sex, power, and cultural Otherness. She also makes sound-text pieces that complement her theater work. She is the Associate Artistic Director of the adventurous hybrid opera company, Chicago Opera Vanguard. Yates received an MA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Columbia College.

 

April 2013 The Ford Family Foundation’s Golden Spot Award – East Meets West Residency

Ryan LaBar grew up in Great Falls Montana. He received a degree in Biology and Art from Gonzaga University in Spokane Washington. In 1999, he moved to Helena Montana and set up a studio. He has worked as a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation, the LH Project, California State University Long Beach, including international residencies in China, Bali, and Poland. He assisted workshops at the Bray, Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and Haystack in Maine. In addition, he spent time at the Kohler factory in Wisconsin. He was an intern at Enrique Martinez Celaya’s studio during the summer of 2008 in Santa Monica California. In the spring of 2010, Ryan received his MFA at the University of Nebraska Lincoln and was the topic of Nebraska Television’s Nebraska Story. Currently, Ryan is the program director of the LH Project, a prestigious residency program in Joseph Oregon.

Former Associate Professor at Eastern Oregon University, Terry Gloeckler is currently instructing online, hybrid, and intensive weekend courses for Central Oregon Community College and Eastern Oregon University.  Terry’s artwork is exhibited and awarded both regionally and nationally. Workshops, lectures, and critique seminars have been presented upon invitation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Tulsa University in Oklahoma, Elon College in North Carolina, Whitman College in Oregon, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and University of Arkansas. Gloeckler’s work is in numerous private collections, in addition to public collections at Oregon State University, Tulsa University, and Kassitar, Iceland.

For two decades Dana Lynn Louis has maintained a  studio practice that engages architectural space, glass, light and shadow among numerous other materials. The results fluctuate between intimate domestic-scaled pieces, to interdisciplinary performance collaborations, and large-scale public works that energize and alter ones experience of their environment. Louis is conceptually inspired by the timeless and fascinating systems of the body, the natural and constructed worlds, and their interconnectedness. In the last ten years Louis’ work has also been profoundly affected by her experiences traveling through West Africa and helping to create Ko-falen, a cultural center in Bamako, Mali. Louis’ work is also influenced by her practice and study of yoga. Her work explores the connective layers in all of these experiences. Louis’ work has been exhibited and collected Internationally. In Oregon Louis is represented by The Laura Russo Gallery. Articles about her work have appeared in Sculpture Magazine, Artweek and the German periodical Glashaus, among other periodicals. In addition to awards from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Louis is a recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation grant.

Andrew Myers received his undergraduate art degree from Eastern Oregon University in 1995 and an MFA from Portland State University in 2003 and has taught drawing courses at Portland State University, the Art Institute of Portland and the OSU/University of New Mexico Rome program in Rome, Italy. He currently teaches drawing at Oregon State University and Linn Benton Community College. Myers’ work has been showcased in Art in America, the Portland Modern, Portlandart.net, Creative Quarterly and the Eugene Weekly. He has participated in exhibitions at the Art Center (Corvallis, OR) Eastern Oregon University (La Grande, OR), Froelick Gallery (Portland, OR), Maude Kerns Art Center (Eugene, OR), Ogle Gallery (Portland, OR), Oregon State University (Corvallis, OR), and the Satellite Gallery (La Grande, OR) and recently completed a drawing installation as part of the Art Center’s Art in Rural Storefronts project. He is also part of the viewing program at the Drawing Center in New York.

 Whitney E. Nye is a painter, sculptor and installation artist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work is deeply affected by the texture, hues and sensations of the world that surrounds her. Working in different mediums and sizes, Nye consistently examines patterns of repetition. She explores the rhythms and pauses of our natural world, becoming a conduit for their character. Her art explores both entropy and renewal. Whitney Nye is a graduate of the University of Oregon, a former Artist-in-Residence at the Oregon College of Arts and Craft and was a member of the Regional Arts and Culture Council’s design roster from 1998 to 2002. She is currently represented by the Laura Russo Gallery in Oregon, the Julie Nester Gallery in Utah, and the Cumberland Gallery in Tennessee.