Jules Rochielle:
Portable City Project’s Artist in Residence
@ Grand Central Art Center
March – May 2012

With artist collaborative partners:
Carmen Montoya
Paige Tighe
Christina Sanchez
“Owen Driggs” – Janet Owen Driggs and Matthew Owen Driggs
Silvia Mantilla Ortiz
Jamie Crooke
Yevgeniya Mikhailik

During this initial phase of Jules Rochielle’s Grand Central Art Center Artist in Residence, the artist will be inviting several other artists to share her residency in order to create a “think tank” that will allow the team much needed time and space for collaborative artistic research. This time spent together creates the potential for the collaborative design of a larger collaborative project.

The creative team will use models of community-based research, public outreach, interviews, community resource mapping and community building to investigate the topics of work, labor, food and immigration. The discoveries made during the research residency will be presented in the form of a web-based archive and this information will be used to launch a larger collaborative project. The group of artists involved in the initial stage of this residency and the creation of this “think tank” will be:

Jules Rochielle
Carmen Montoya
Christina Sanchez
Paige Tighe
Owen Driggs
Silvia Mantilla Ortiz
Jamie Crooke
Yevgeniya Mikhailik

The time and space offered through this residency platform will also allow Jules Rochielle structured editing time to refine her archive of interviews collected through (SPAN) The Social Practice Art Network. These interviews will be transcribed and they will be presented to a broader audience at Open Engagement 2012. During this event, the artist Jules Rochielle will continue to interview the community of socially engaged artists forming at Open Engagement 2012.

Additional Links:

Social Practice Art Network
Open Engagement

About the Collaborators:

Jules Rochielle has held artist residencies at LACE (Los Angeles), Knowles West Media Center, (Bristol UK) and with The Sequoia Parks Foundation, (Visalia, CA). In March 2012, she will be in residency at Grand Central Art Center, Cal State University Fullerton (Santa Ana, Ca). In May 2012 she will present her work at Open Engagement in Portland, Oregon. Recently selected to participate in Creative Times’ Living as Form, the Social Practice Archive. Founder of (SPAN) the Social Practices Art Network, and Portable City Projects and a co-founder of Miscellaneous Productions. Also a consultant that specializes in community arts, community organizing and non-profit sector issues. She has worked with the following groups and organizations: Native Public Media, Public Art Review, Metabolic Studio / Farmlab, Otis College of Art and Design, Freewaves, Access to Media Education Society, Vancouver Moving Theatre/Heart of the City Festival, Full Circle First Nations Performance, Vancouver International Fringe Festival.

Maria del Carmen Montoya is a new media artist working in performance, sculpture and installation. Her studio practice explores the personal, emotional and utterly irrational tendencies of technology. In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious Rhizome Commission for New Media for I Sky You, an installation wherein the quiet of a room is intermittently broken by erratic bursts of chemically synthesized light and electronically generated resonant tones. Her ongoing international collective, Ghana ThinkTank, was shortlisted for the Cartier Award and won the Creative Time Open Door Commission in 2011. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including SIGGRAPH, PERFORMA, State X New Forms, New Museum Festival of Ideas, ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art, and Visiones Sonoras in Morelia, Mexico where she cofounded an artist residency program for multimedia performance art. She holds a Masters Degree in Digital Media from Rhode Island School of Design.

Christina Sanchez was born in Woodland, a farming town in California’s central valley. In 2002, she completed her undergraduate degree in Studio Art from San Francisco State University. From 2002 to 2010 she worked at a small inner-city private school in Oakland, California. During that time, Christina took on various roles: she taught Kindergarten, mentored teachers, served as Vice Principal, and organized the school’s first art program from the ground up. She now lives in Los Angeles and will receive her Masters in Fine Arts in Public Practice from the Otis College of Art and Design in May 2012.In 2011, Christina initiated the Break/Pausa project as a dialogical investigation into the lives of immigrant restaurant workers living in Los Angeles. In particular, Break/Pausa is aimed at engaging the most hidden and marginalized people of this workforce: Back-of-House workers. Through informal interviews, performative interventions, and partnerships with advocacy organizations, the project seeks to uncover and archive worker histories as well as raise public awareness about pertinent workers rights and quality of life issues.

Tighe Paige is currently exploring the boundaries of public and private meditation with a concentration in disruption. This manifests in her collaborations in postmodern dance with Christine Suarez and the mentoring of Hana von der Kolk. She has danced at MOCA, beaches, the Hammer, public parks, buses, and RedCat. She is a part of Pedestal & the All Girl Band that is a mobile karaoke unit and a public art persona. Her favorite media are dancing and video, sometimes together, sometimes not. She is the inaugural post grad curatorial fellow at the Ben Maltz Gallery under the tutelage of Meg Linton. The artists received her MFA in Public Practice from OTIS College of Art and Design in 2010.

Silvia Mantilla Ortiz is a transnational individual with constantly expanding roots. Her notions of home and belonging continuously swell in order to include the many places where a piece of her being resides; these include Bogotá, Colombia; Edison, NJ; Providencia, Colombia; Williamstown, MA; Giron, Colombia; and now, Los Angeles, CA. The artist received her BA from Williams College, Cum Laude and is currently a MFA Public Practice Candidate at Otis College of Art and Design.

“Owen Driggs” is the collective identity of Matthew Driggs and Janet Owen. Individually experienced artists, educators and curators, Janet and Matthew began their professional collaboration in 2007, after the spectacular success of their first major work, their son Theo. Together, as Owen Driggs, their practice focuses on the production of space and the impact of spatiality on action and discourse.

Janet Owen Driggs is a writer, artist and curator who has exhibited her work internationally, including in the United States, Europe, Scandinavia and Brazil. She has curated exhibitions and screening programs in the United Kingdom, United States, People’s Republic of China and Mexico. A member of the Metabolic Studio team, Janet is the editor of “Not A Cornfield: History/Site/Document”. Her writings have been published most recently in: Artillery, ArtUS, Strawberry Bulletin, The Guardian, and Art Review , in addition to the volumes “How Many Billboards? Art In Stead”, “Hammer Projects 1999-2009”, and “Heike Baranowski – Kolibri”.

Matthew Owen Driggs is an artist, curator and educator, Matthew Owen Driggs lives and works in Los Angeles. Previously Exhibition Designer at the University of Southern California’s Fisher Museum, and a curator at both RAID Projects and Edward Giardiana Contemporary Art, Matthew is currently an adjunct professor at Cypress College. His work has been exhibited at national and international venues including: Kyubidou Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Vegabond, Palmer, Alaska, USA; MOP (Modes of Production) Sydney, Australia; Cynthia Broan, New York, NY, USA; Laguna Beach Museum of Art, Laguna Beach, CA, USA; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Jamie Crooke is an artist working in the discipline of fine arts through project-based artworks that are participatory in nature, which utilize performance, installation art, drawing, social sculpture and event planning as formats for her artwork. She currently has two on-going projects that exist online, through art objects and performative events: Save Yourself and Pulse and Parcel. Her artwork is reflective of value and worth, as seen through her service-based model in many of her projects. Some areas of investigation include the intersection of interior body space and exterior constraints, be it land, policy or social services. Throughout her projects she aims to create cathartic moments of relief and reflection for individuals and the collective through the use of pedagogical models, poetics and public practice.

Yevgeniya Mikhailik was born and raised in Russia and relocated to the US in 2000. She is currently working on her MFA in Illustration at California State University, Long Beach. She has exhibited at the CSULB Art Museum, Gallery Nucleus, Grand Central Art Center, Phone Booth Gallery, The Box, Hibbleton, and the CSULB art galleries. Yevgeniya’s work as been on the pages of local and international publications, online publications and blogs. 

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