Past Residents
Past Resident2010: North Rhine-Westphalian State Chancellery
Nadja Verena Marcin
Nadja Verena Marcin (Germany) is a performance artist who lives and works in New York City and NRW, North Rhine-Westphalia. Internationally recognized as an emerging New Genre artist, her work focuses on human behavior, elemental emotions, and psychological responses linked to role-playing through video, performance and photography. Sourcing autobiographical experience, Marcin drives situations from ordinary to absurd while probing beneath the surface of human interaction. Inflated by playful, vigorous images, poetical texts, and handmade props, she exposes ambiguities depicting the constructive/deconstructive potential of man’s characteristic, often dialectic moods. Marcin confronts elemental emotions and unleashes psychological mechanism, exposing truths about morals, history, gender and politics inherent to Western culture. Her practice reveals a sharp analytical distance, correlating with high subjective empathy, condensed in a rigorously conceptual form.
Born in Germany, Marcin holds a MFA from Columbia University, New York, and graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts,
Münster, Germany. Her work is widely exhibited in museums, art spaces/galleries and distinguished collections worldwide, including: Qui Vive? Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow MOMA, Russia; Salon/Screening, ICA Philadelphia, PA; Uncontrollable Flesh, Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Short-Term Deviation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; Kaunas Biennale, National Museum, Lithuania; Videonale 11 & 10, Kunstmuseum, Germany; Mediations Biennale, Poland; Models of Self-Reflection, AZKM, Germany; European Attitude, Zendai MOMA, China; FIFA-Festival pour Film sur L’Art, Quebec; EJECT-Ex teresa arte actual, Mexico; and Jumpnights, Ludwig Museum, Germany.
Nadja Verena Marcin, Everything Is Nothing, 2008, HDV video/film, 12:24 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Nadja Verena Marcin, Elephant, 2009, HDV video installation, 1:97 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Nadja Verena Marcin, Hotel, 2010, HD video/film, 12 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Nadja Verena Marcin, Nadja By Breton, 2010, Performance, 23:48 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Nadja Verena Marcin, Street, 2007, HDV video and performance, 6:02 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Residents from Germany
Magnus Thierfelder
In his work Magnus Thierfelder uses various methods such as drawing, installation, sculpture, photo and lets components primarily taken from the cityscape become metaphors in a narrative rebus where lamp posts, pipes, cables, paving-stones etc., constitute elements in a symbolic realm that talks about enigmatic regularities, order and disorder, resistance, and creativity.
“Drainpipes, bricks, cables and lamp posts. With these simple construction elements from without, Magnus Thierfelder creates his personal order within. The starting point seems to be the limited intentions, the details, and the interplay of every day occurrences, and the paradoxical realisation that these have the power to overcome us, by confronting us with the results of actions that carry their own underlying structure. Thierfelder’s restrained, formal language and subtle sense of humour, become what is often barely distinguishable disruptions on social norms and everyday experiences. By simply displacing these tangible objects, he obstructs “normality”, and reveals things that could have gone wrong.” Extract from Underneath Everyday Normality; The Work of Magnus Thierfelder by Marianna Garin.
Magnus Thierfelder lives and works in Malmö, Sweden. He received his MFA from Malmö Art Academy. He has exhibited nationally and internationally both separately and in group exhibitions at Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Araba, Spain; Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden; Ar/Ge KUNST, Bolzano, Italy; Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden; Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland; Malmö Art Museum, Sweden; Coleman Projects, London, UK; Rooseum – Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö; The Breeder, Athens, Greece; Mucsarnok/Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary; Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen, Denmark; 1a Space, Hong Kong, China; Galleria Alberto Peola, Turin, Italy and Kumo Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia, among others. He is one of the founding members of the non-profit art space Signal in Malmö and was on the Board member between 1998 and 2002. He is represented by the galleries Elastic in Malmö and von Bartha Garage in Basel, Switzerland.
Magnus Thierfelder, Disintegration, 2008, Painted MDF, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and von Bartha Garage, Basel.
Magnus Thierfelder, Visionary, 2006, Plastic pipes, epoxy mold variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.
Magnus Thierfelder, Resistance, 2008, Pipes and rubber, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and von Bartha Garage, Basel.
Magnus Thierfelder, Still Life, 2009, Brick stones and lamp post. Courtesy of the artist and Perspectives - Art in Urban Spaces, Malmö, Sweden.
Magnus Thierfelder, Fountain, 2004, Installation with water. Courtesy of the artist and Coleman Project Space, London.
Residents from Sweden
Past Resident2011: Artadia
Michael Jones McKean
Michael Jones McKean’s work plays with the poetic potential in objects, materials and their arrangement while pointing toward the possibility of a larger narrative or allegorical structures. His sculptures skid across time, organizing disparate objects into unifying constellations that make appeals to the imagination while also seeking a re-articulation of our ancient involvement with forms, meaning, representation, and poetics.
A recipient of numerous awards, McKean was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010 and recently a Nancy Graves Foundation Award and an Artadia Foundation Award. McKean has participated in numerous residencies including The Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, RI; The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, NE; Central Michigan University as the Stephen L. Barstow Fellow, MI; The Archie Bray Foundation in Montana and ThreeWalls in Chicago, IL. His work has been shown extensively nationally and internationally including the Quebec City Biennial, Grand Arts in Kansas City, MO, DiverseWorks in Houston, TX; The Bemis Center in Omaha, NE; Horton Gallery in New York City, Project Gentili in Italy and Berlin and ThreeWalls in Chicago, IL. McKean is currently an Assistant Professor in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Michael Jones McKean, Certain Structures And Predetermined Sequences, 2008, Hand-knotted Persian wool rug circa 1968, cardboard, tar, wig, pine tree branches, popular wood, burlap, paint, wax, and glitter, 204 × 168 × 60 in. (518.16 × 426.72 × 152.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
Michael Jones McKean, The Wake, 2008, Pine, 1000 pounds of clay, orchid flower arrangement, glass vase, formed sheet metal, paint, insulation foam, canvas, plaster, gold leaf, paper mache, and 1970’s camping back pack , 780 × 156 × 204 in. (1981.2 × 396.24 × 518.16 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
Michael Jones McKean, The Possibility Of Men And The River Shallows, 2007 , Plywood, dimensional lumber, foam board, paint, 800 gallon acrylic water tank, 10 horsepower special effects fan, 1986 J1 Super Jumbo Promax boom box, fragments from the Teignmouth Electron (a boat involved in a failed attempt to circumnavigate the earth), brass, chainsaw cut/first aid kit, flashlight, night lights, florescent lighting, freezer, fog machine, custom spring, plexi-glass, house plants, grow lights, jet pump, 2 sump pumps, 60 gallon water tank, misting nozzles, water filters, pressure gauge, exhaust fan, industrial dehumidifier, carpet, one ton of clay, 5000 watt sound system, 12 volume reference library, VFD drive, 2 iPods, 1983 Ocean Pacific wind breaker, gold leafed papier-mâché conquistador helmet, sword, jug, spoons, banjo, and harpoon, dismantled papier-mâché river raft, papier-mâché helm, anchor, cemetery stones and barrels, hand made clothes and death/theater masks for Donald Crowhurst, Hernando DeSoto and Albert Ayler, Hall and Oates’ LP H20, Hall and Oates’ One on One (1982), and Albert Ayler’s Love Cry (1967). Courtesy of the artist.
Michael Jones McKean, She Hangs Above To Spit And Sing, 2010, Wood, paint, gold leaf, aluminum, paper, conch shell, and magazine cutout, 83 × 64 × 22 in. (210.82 × 162.56 × 55.88 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
Michael Jones McKean, Other Progress, We Hope This Will Work Too, To Be Clear To Others, 2010, Digital print from a larger installation which included: 50 acres of land purchased in Abitibi, Quebec, Canada, framed inkjet prints, upright piano, 5000 year old Campo del Cielo meteorite from Argentina, petrified wood from Arizona, United States, plastic spectral prism from China, 1970’s rug from Qatar, bags of dirt, cans of mussels, wood, paper mache, package of tissues, velvet, medicated ointment, Nivea skin lotion, and bottles of orange juice and water. Courtesy of the artist.
