SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Artpace San Antonio announced the Summer 2022 International Artists-in-Residence, selected by guest curator Andy Campbell, Associate Professor of Critical Studies at USC's Roski School of Art and Design. Resident artists Hellen Ascoli (Guatemala City, Guatemala / Baltimore, Maryland), Jonesy (Los Angeles, California), and Betelhem Makonnen (Addis Abeba, Ethiopia / Austin, TX) began their residency on May 23, 2022, and will live and work at Artpace until July 25, 2022.
Hellen Ascoli is a weaver, a word that encompasses art, craft, pedagogy, and transition. To move differently can make us think and feel different. Using the back-strap loom, Ascoli extends her body into a tool–material–and connects to site, listening to its embedded and embodied knowledge. By situating herself within this specific knowledge production and transmission of the back-strap loom, Ascoli creates open works that engage sensation, memory, and poetry.
Jonesy is an artist and filmmaker working in Los Angeles. Jonesy’s work is populated by queer collaborators of various ages, racial and ethnic backgrounds, gender identities, and body types. His work forefronts the expressive language of inclusion, power, belonging, and representation among subcultures, including the queer community of which he is part. His installation at Artpace San Antonio in 2022 will create a cruisy space of connection, experimentation, and intimacy where queer play is forceful and unruly. Austin-based dancer, choreographer, and visual artist, Lindsey Taylor, is Jonesy’s collaborator on this project.
Betelhem Makonnen is curious about perception, presence, and place in affiliation with time and change. Her practice is informed through her relational observations of being in the world and grounded in her personal history and the collective histories of Africans and Africans in the diaspora. Through a process of (re)search, (re)combinations, (re)configurations, and experimental play, Makonnen makes works that take form in the in-between spaces existing in paradoxes, feedback loops, and sites of connection.
An in-person Welcome Dinner will be held on Thursday, June 9, 2022, from 6–8pm. The artists will discuss their past work and plans for their Artpace residency. Artpace will provide a light meal on this casual evening of food, friends, and the future as we talk to the new residents about their practice. Doors will open at 6pm, and presentations begin at 6:30pm. This event is free and open to the public.
During their residency, the artists will host Community Collaborations, offering an opportunity for the public to connect with them while in residence at Artpace. Community Collaborations may range from workshops or lectures to studio visits, film, or performance nights. The 2022 Summer Resident Artists will open their exhibitions on Thursday, July 21, 2022, from 6–9pm.
