Open Residencies

Sabine Reindel

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist , ,
Sabine Reindel

Sabine Reindel is a German-born fine art painter, whose work concentrates on cityscapes. During her six-weeks residency at Rimbun Dahan she will continue her series of cityscapes she has started to create while she was practicing law as an attorney in the United Arab Emirates. Thereafter she continued working on cityscapes in San Francisco where she earned her master of fine art at the Academy of Art University, in New York where she studied at the New York Academy and the Artist Students League of New York, and in artist residencies in Thailand, Singapore and France.

My art is about journeys, exploring new places and making them my own. My work concentrates on cityscapes of the United Arab Emirates, where I practiced law for the last eighteen years, San Francisco, where I received my education in art, New York, where I took classes at the New York Academy of Art and the Arts Students League of New York, Thailand, Singapore and France where I had artist residencies over the last two years.

My first calling has not been art. I went to law school in Germany and then worked as an attorney in the Emirates of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Over the last two decades I moved a lot and I lived in thriving places that changed and still change a lot. With my paintings I try to explore the similarities of these places, but mostly concentrate on the differences. Each place has its unique architecture, which reflects its own unique location on the globe, its special light, its one of a kind flora and fauna. Seeing what make each place so unique makes painting for me so exciting.

Richard Orjis

Syar S. Alia Asia New Zealand, Open Residencies, Resident Artist ,
Richard Orjis

Richard Orjis is a multimedia artist based in New Zealand, as well as a PhD student from the Auckland University of Technology. He will be at Rimbun Dahan for a three month residency from February to April thanks to a grant from Asia New Zealand Foundation. To find out more about him and his work, you can visit his website.

My artistic research is driven by an interest in the garden and how I might understand place through these green spaces. I see gardens as exciting and complex intersections of art, nature and culture. They can offer insight into how a culture views the natural world, aesthetics, politics, religion, gender and class.

The proposed project for my time at Rimbun Dahan will be the production of publication containing photographs, text and drawings which be created in response to the green spaces of area. The project will encompass the breadth of the local environment, from the manicured to the accidental, from the civic to the domestic. It takes the premise that a city like Kuala Lumpur could be perceived as a vast garden with a functioning ecology of people, animals, plants and elements.

Grass Circle, a concrete edged circle of grass permitted to grow for one year at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts addressed the perception of suburb and notions of control.

The Apron, a temporary art project “exploring the history of meadows and wildflowers and how they can change the way we think about urban green spaces.” Commissioned by Tauranga Art Gallery for the Bay of Plenty Garden and Art Festival.

Walking In Trees, a two-storey scaffolding bridge and staircase erected between a pair of historic Moreton Bay Figs in Albert Park examined notions of perception.

Veronika Neukirch

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist , , , , , ,
Veronika Neukirch

Veronika Neukirch is a German artist born in 1986 in Duesseldorf. She completed her Art & Design Foundation in 2010 and graduated with a BA (Honours) Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2013. She has been based in Kuala Lumpur since 2014 and has been exhibiting across Malaysia as well as abroad.

As an object-based artist concerned with developing new roles for pre-designed objects, Veronika creates compositions that strive to represent and utilise the pluralistic nature of contemporary art and contemporary life. The combining and finding of a new balance between various selected and handmade components run through her entire practice, consisting predominantly of sculpture, assemblage, collage, installation. The tension between artificial, functional, and ready-made elements and the organic shapes of intuitive material experimentation offers wide haptic diversity.

The rich local flora and fauna will be the starting point of her collaborative residency with local artist Haffendi Anuar. Veronika will be in residency at Rimbun Dahan for four months starting in February.

Sterile Jungle (2014) – published in Make8elieve #8, Horror Plants, USA/Switzerland

Granny Smith’s Table (2015)  and Apples & Pineapples (2015) – exhibited at:

  • 2015: ‘RIPEN AT HOME’ (solo), Minut Init, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
  • 2016: ‘Extending Ideas’ (group show kindly supported by Goethe Institute Malaysia), Feeka, Kuala Lumpur & Museum Negeri Pulau Pinang, USM, Penang, Malaysia

 

 

Carol Brown

Syar S. Alia Choreographers Residency, Open Residencies, Resident Artist , , , ,
Carol Brown

I am an inter-disciplinary choreographer working in sustained collaborations with artists and experts from other fields. My research-led practice attends to the creative potentials in working between the cracks; between histories, temporalities and disciplines. Nourished by creative collaborations that explore diverse spaces, places and body memories, my choreographies take multiple forms, as dance installations, inter-media events, site specific performance and theatre dance, and have been presented internationally.

My current research, which I will pursue at Rimbun Dahan involves choreographic writing that negotiates the page, the stage and the ‘outside’. This will lead to a book I am developing on how performance remains rather than disappears through the transmission of body archives and the staging of performance cycles connected to the rhythms and ecologies of place.

I visited Rimbun Dahan in 2015 as part of an Asia New Zealand Performing Arts Tour and am very pleased to be returning with my partner Russell Scoones (musician / sound designer) and children, Rafe and Cass. This visit is part of a period of research leave from the University of Auckland, Creative Arts Industries Faculty where I am an Associate Professor in Dance Studies.

Find out more about Carol’s work at her website.

Laura Wills

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist , ,
Laura Wills

Laura Wills is an Adelaide based visual artist. She has a multidisciplinary practice and a strong interest in using found materials, collaboration and basing projects on social/ environmental themes. She is represented by Hill Smith Gallery Adelaide. She will be in residency at Rimbun Dahan for 5 weeks until mid-February.

At Rimbun Dahan I will be developing a new series of works on maps. My research will be drawing and painting based and also involve exploring the local environment to inform the development of new works, particularly the Taman Sari, vegetable and spice garden. I am interested in the social relationship and connection people have to it. I would like to continue in this line of thinking about intimate relationships, memories and habits we have towards culinary plants and nature.

For more information on Laura’s work, visit her website, Instagram, or Hill Smith Gallery’s website.

 

Grace Blake

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist ,
Grace Blake

Grace Blake is a visual artist working between Canberra and Sydney. She is currently completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts in printmaking and drawing with a Bachelor of Arts art history from ANU.

Her fascination with the virtual landscape manifests in works that map the line between real and simulated. Blake acts as a cartographer of boundless digital space where the tension between the natural dimensions has been compressed into binary logic.

Currently Blake’s studio practice is working to examine ecologies, resulting in attempts to parallel dense natural ecologies with those that exist in data centers and online. Trans-humanism and future predictions of dense mega-city infrastructure lead toward an interest in arcologies. Various Archo-structures will be examined across animation, installation and interactive web platforms with using both recorded-footage and 3D generated material.

Blake was recently included in group show ‘My Feet Would Hurt If They Still Existed’ at Alaska Projects, ‘Personal Geographies’ at the ANU School of Art Foyer gallery and ‘SafARI 2016’.

She is currently on the Australian New Colombo Plan Scholarship studying and interning in Thailand and Singapore and will undergo a three month residency at Rimbun Dahan from August to October.

Soraya Abidin

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist , , ,
Soraya Abidin

Soraya Abidin (b. 1971) is a textile artist based in Sydney, Australia. The subjects and materials she uses to create her works are born of a love for the Primitive and Spiritual practices within her Malay cultural heritage. Soraya embroiders in natural raffia representing matter from the jungle and embellishes with gold leaf, as a mark of status and the prestigious gold culture worn by her aristocratic ancestors. During as recent visit to Malaysia, where her father is from, interpreted inquiries of her family members revealed her art making practice as an inherent genetic trait directly traceable to her Malay culture, which the artist expands on below:

“I am an Embroidress, the only member in the entire family that has inherited the passion for Benang Emas Sulaman from my Opah (grandmother). I have studied my parents wedding photos for many years, loving and attempting to recreate the motifs seen on all the wedding decorations. I had no idea these works even still existed, till I showed copies of the wedding photos to my family and the next thing I knew these incredible items where in front of me, in my hands to touch and marvel at the perfection of each piece. It was then that I learnt all the embroidered pieces in the photographs had been made by my Opah.

I never could have imagined what this information would do for me, so astounding that I am finally able to make this connection. Now I understand my passion for Embroidery has a strong thread directly linked to my inherent bloodline. This may seem simple but to me it provides powerful and auspicious meaning to the medium I have always instinctually gravitated towards as an artist. Now I have found the origins of my practice and that I am the one to carry on the family tradition.

During the residency I would like to study the use of motifs in traditional Malay textiles, Tekat and Songket, and gather motifs and their meanings to create a glossary for reference in my artmaking. I would like to create an artwork representing my cross cultural parentage, by use of the Traditional Quilting practices of my Australian mother, layered and embedded with embroidered Islamic Arts motifs of my Malay father.

The work will be embroidered with natural raffia and pure white silks and embellish with gold leaf, metallic threads and glass beads. My focus will be on the selection and placement of motifs that are layered over a quilt top created by my mother. The base cloth will be embellished with a combination of appliqued silks motifs then layered with interconnecting embroidered Malay motifs, intentionally leaving gaps and spaces to create a cross cultural conversation in both the positive and negative space.

The intention of the work is to portray a new found clarity and definition in my identity. Through the layering of motifs and utilisation of the powerful meanings in their symbolism to bind together the genetic behavioural traits of my two cultural heritages.”

Soraya will be in residency at Rimbun Dahan for the month of August. You can find more of Soraya and her work on Instagram.

Lucy Marinkovich

Syar S. Alia Asia New Zealand, Choreographers Residency, Open Residencies, Resident Artist ,
Lucy Marinkovich

Lucy Marinkovich is a Wellington (NZ) based professional contemporary dancer, choreographer, and the founder of multi-disciplinary performance collective the Borderline Arts Ensemble. Lucy choreographs regularly for Footnote New Zealand Dance Company and is a guest tutor at the New Zealand School of Dance and Toi Whakaari. She trained at the New Zealand School of Dance before joining Footnote Dance Company, touring New Zealand extensively and internationally. Lucy was awarded “Best Emerging Female Artist” by Tempo Dance Festival in 2010, “Best Female Dancer” in 2011, and has been awarded the Eileen May Norris Dance Trust Scholarship and the Creative New Zealand Tup Lang Choreographic Award.

In 2013 Lucy studied Gaga technique with Batsheva Dance Company and in 2014 undertook performance and research projects in Germany, Spain and Austria and was also was invited to dance in the World Dance Alliance’s International Choreolab in France. She returned to New Zealand to choreograph works for Short+Sweet Dance Festival, Tempo Dance Festival, and the Wellington Dance Festival. In 2015 Lucy created a durational five-day performance art piece, The Bosch Box, for The Performance Arcade ‘Container Series’.

In early 2016 Lucy created Centerfolds, her third dance work on Footnote Dance Company, and Good Good Fortune, a performance installation for INSTINC Art Gallery in Singapore. Lucy is now undertaking a Choreographic Residency at Rimbun Dahan in Malaysia thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand and the Asia New Zealand Foundation. While in residence she will collaborate with local dancers to make a new work for Penang Dance Day Festival. In late 2016, the Borderline Arts Ensemble has been invited for a Choreographic Residency at the Mediterranean Dance Center in Croatia.

 

Sarah Jane Parton

Syar S. Alia Asia New Zealand, Open Residencies, Resident Artist , ,
Sarah Jane Parton

Sarah Jane Parton (Omoka, Tongareva, Avaiki-raro) is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and curator who works across performance art, installation, moving image, drawing, photography, creative writing, and ephemera. She creates work that operates as social commentary, and consistently engages with the politics of being, often through collaboration.  She is based in Wellington, New Zealand and is a lecturer in the School of Art at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts.

She studied Design and Fine Arts at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts, graduating with an honours degree in Time-based Art in 2003. In 2012 she completed a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters.

Sarah achieved success straight out of art school when her single channel video work, she’s so usual (2003), was included in Telecom Prospect 2004: New Art, New Zealand – an inaugural survey of contemporary art at Wellington’s City Gallery. Since then she has featured in multiple group shows and public screenings both nationally and internationally, and has held six solo exhibitions, including Guidance at The Physics Room, Christchurch, and The Way at The City Gallery Wellington, both in 2007. From 2010 to 2014 she curated the visual arts component of the boutique music and art festival Camp a Low Hum. She is a member of the feminist art-rock collective, Fantasing.

Sarah currently lives in Wellington with her partner, musician Luke Buda (The Phoenix Foundation), and their two sons, who will be joining her for her three month residency at Rimbun Dahan from March to June, via a grant from the Asia New Zealand Foundation.

(Text adapted from CIRCUIT and Massey University’s website)

Bruce Pashak and Janet Langdon

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist ,
Bruce Pashak and Janet Langdon

Bruce Pashak is a multidisciplinary unrealist artist who uses imagery, text and technology to create abstracted anti-narratives that both affirm culturally-encoded associations and break free of these limitations. The images become an experience, a slippery personal tour through existentialism where the meaningful is unhinged and the meaningless finds its private value. He creates art forms as playgrounds for the imagination. Pashak calls them, “riddles that you might try to puzzle out but never need to solve”.

A masters graduate of the University of Calgary, Bruce Pashak continues his theoretical inquiries into the construction and dissemination of perception with a studio practice that includes combinations of painting, drawing, sculpture, mixed media and 3D lenticular technology. Pashak has had over 40 group and solo shows throughout Canada, the USA and Europe, including the Toronto Art Fair and most recently the Miami Art Fair, Dec 2015 with Back Gallery Project. He has an upcoming solo show in Nov, 2016 at Back Gallery Project in Vancouver, BC. Pashak was a professor in the Faculties of Fine Arts at three Canadian universities for a culmination of 16 years. His works are in private and corporate collections, including the University of Calgary, University of Lethbridge, Nickle Arts Museum, Vancouver General Hospital and the Art Hotel in Calgary. He is represented by Back Gallery Project in Vancouver, BC, Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary, AB, and Buckland Merrifield Gallery in Saint John, NB.

Pashak has recently formed the creative collaboration “PLACE” (Pashak Langdon Affirmative Common Experience) with textile artist Janet Langdon. Langdon studied serigraphy at Langara College and textile design at Capilano College and ran her own furniture upholstery business in Vancouver for 10 years. Her textile background brings the element of pattern design into the art works, aligning itself with the philosophy of the neopatternist theory of connections.

Bruce and Janet will be in residency at Rimbun Dahan from February to end of March 2016. For more information on Bruce’s work, you can visit his website.