Daniel AnTon Johnson - December, 2019
Daniel AnTon Johnson is an artist with a diverse practice based in photography, language, film, and video. His work examines how technology shapes notions of identity within popular culture and contemporary visual media.
“Between the house, the views, and the community, there's something really special about Surf Point.”
Daniel AnTon Johnson is an artist with a diverse practice based in photography, language, film, and video. His work examines how technology shapes notions of identity within popular culture and contemporary visual media. Focusing on authorship and representation, Johnson’s practice explores cultural and visual literacies and how they form worldviews. He has shown nationally and internationally in group exhibitions and video festivals in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo (JP), Berlin (DE), Tel Aviv (IL), and Bratislava (SK), among others. Johnson has taught and lectured at School of Visual Arts, Adelphi University, Rutgers University-Newark, and Columbia University, and mentored teens at ICP and The Harlem School of the Arts. Johnson holds an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, and an MA in English from Washington College. He currently resides in Brooklyn.
BARRACK OBAMAS: I FEEL BLACKEST AGAINST #FFFFFF
More of his work can be seen at danieljohnson.net.
Anna Hepler - December, 2019
Anna Hepler is a sculptor based in Greenfield, MA. She comes from a family of botanists and beekeepers who structured their lives around the unpredictable movements and challenges of the natural world.
“I dove into a state of full immersion in the studio, and was held there by the relentless pounding waves (the drum beat of the Atlantic edge), savoring the chance to focus without interruption, and cared for in such a way that risk taking became inevitable.”
Anna Hepler is a sculptor based in Greenfield, MA. She comes from a family of botanists and beekeepers who structured their lives around the unpredictable movements and challenges of the natural world. This life, collaborating explicitly with forces beyond one’s control, establishes a dynamic of flexibility and acceptance, or respect for the unknown. It is this same dynamic that drives and guides her work. Though she has been based in New England for several decades, she has also spent fruitful periods in Seoul, South Korea, in the Netherlands, Italy, and Cyprus, and within the US on both coasts, in cities, in the desert, and in the mountains. Living within unfamiliar cultures, surrounded by the sounds of different languages, and in varied landscapes, she learns to let go of knowing, understanding, and controlling her experience.
The Referee, 2017, plywood, paint, ink, 8 x 6 x 4 feet
Hepler earned a B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A former Henry Luce Foundation fellow in Seoul, South Korea, she has completed residencies at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, the Tamarind Institute, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and the Archie Bray Foundation. In 2016 she was awarded a fellowship by United States Artists, a grant from the Harpo Foundation in 2018, and most recently a Nancy Graves Foundation grant. Hepler has exhibited widely, and her work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Modern in London, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.
More of her work can be seen at www.annahepler.com.
Kathleen Kolb - November, 2019
Kathleen Kolb is interested in the action and meaning of visual light on everyday surroundings and in the intersection of emotional experience with what we see.
“My residency at Surf Point gave me solid, expansive, productive, creative time in an elemental setting that grounded the work. The other residents enriched my experience, broadening my mind, and my network. In three short weeks I came away with finished work for exhibition, and new peers I look forward to maintaining connections with.”
Kathleen Kolb is interested in the action and meaning of visual light on everyday surroundings and in the intersection of emotional experience with what we see. As a painter, her work is based in observation. The primary theme in all her work is light. In addition to light, her work is about attachment and place. She is drawn to rural landscape and to the formal qualities of the geometry of traditional New England architecture, looking for inspiration in rural landscape, wilderness, and small town New England. Her aim is to evoke a time and place in our shared world, and a corresponding emotional experience. Her method is to spend time paying acute attention. She searches out subjects that are visually arresting and that evoke riveting emotional energy.
Back Steps - 2012
More of her work can be seen at www.kathleenkolb.com.
Jibade-Khalil Huffman - November, 2019
Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s practice encompasses writing, image making and where these two meet somewhere in the middle.
“Surf Point was a game changer for me in terms of time and space to finish a long in the works piece as well and refocus moving forward. I feel lucky to have had the opportunity.”
Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s practice encompasses writing, image making and where these two meet somewhere in the middle. In 2008, he published his first book, "19 Names For Our Band,” and has continued working in this fashion--making books of poems, up to and including the more recent, “Sleeper Hold” (2015). Currently he is working on a book of essays (about hip-hop, cinema and art to be published in 2020) that double as, or veer into, poetry. His visual practice spans photography, video and sculpture. More recently, he has been making multi-layered light boxes. These works distill many of his interests: layering, the juxtaposition of text and image and the sculptural use of images.
He is also very interested in appropriation and making work that is reflective of image overload and generative in its own use of medium and message. Finally, all or much of the above intersects in installation, performance and interventions combining site, text and experience. In performance, as in his videos, he typically works with performers though occasionally uses his own body in various investigations of African-American masculinity. While his performances typically make use of a singular voice, performing a text, addressing an audience, the installations utilize multiple projections and overlapping soundtracks that surround viewers to suggest a complicity in this spectatorship.
More of his work can be seen at anatebgi.com/cpt_artists/jibade-khalil-huffman.
Cynthia Barton - November, 2019
Cynthia Barton makes both policy and textiles. She is trained as an architect, and much of her work deals with post-disaster housing and community recovery.
“My time at Surf Point enabled me to do some of the most focused, intense work of my career. It was a privilege to have the company of excellent new colleagues, and inspiring to have the ocean nearly part of my studio.”
Cynthia Barton makes both policy and textiles. She is trained as an architect, and much of her work deals with post-disaster housing and community recovery. She works on textile projects for the same reason she is interested in climate change resilience: the problems are difficult. Whether the constraints are political or material, they require going forward in uncertain conditions, improvisation, and patience. As an artist, she engages questions of displacement, of what it means to lose one’s home in the larger sense, and how one regains a place in the world. For over a decade, she has been deeply invested in the study of textiles and embroidery, art forms found in the most provisional circumstances. In both practices, she is interested in fitting the resources at hand to unintended purposes. Using well-worn fabrics, she makes talismans that bring comfort and pleasure, and are inevitably linked to vulnerability. As soft objects that can wrap the body, textiles offer a unique and intimate form of relief from crisis. Her pieces to date have all been dedicated to specific people at moments of dramatic change in their lives. In many ways they provide both refuge from and connection to the environment.
More of her work can be seen at cynthia-barton-textiles.squarespace.com.
ShiaoPing Wang - October, 2019
ShiaoPing Wang immigrated from Taiwan and has a MFA from Queens College, City University of New York. Using various painting media, Wang aims to invent her own language from different cultures to bridge intuition and knowledge.
ShiaoPing Wang immigrated from Taiwan and has a MFA from Queens College, City University of New York. Using various painting media, Wang aims to invent her own language from different cultures to bridge intuition and knowledge. Her paintings have been exhibited widely in the US, Europe and China. She has received many awards and has taken part in residencies in the US, France, Spain, and Canada. Wang works at her studio in Rollinsford, NH, and is represented by the Furchgott Soudiff Gallery, VT, the Barn Gallery and George Marshall Store Gallery, both in Maine.
More of her work can be seen at Shiao-Ping.com.
Caleb Cole - October, 2019
Born in Indianapolis, Caleb Cole is a former altar server, scout, and 4-H Grand Champion in Gift Wrapping. Their work addresses themes such as belonging and loneliness, unrealized desires, and imagined queer histories and futures.
Born in Indianapolis, Caleb Cole is a former altar server, scout, and 4-H Grand Champion in Gift Wrapping. Their work addresses themes such as belonging and loneliness, unrealized desires, and imagined queer histories and futures. They are a 2015 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, 2013 Hearst 8x10 Biennial Winner, 3-time Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Winner, 2011 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award winner, and 2009 Artadia Award winner, among others. Caleb exhibits regularly at a variety of national venues and has held solo shows in cities including Boston, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Newport Art Museum, Davis Art Museum, Brown University Art Museum and Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. They are represented by Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
More of his work can be seen at CalebColePhoto.com
Bryan Graf - October, 2019
Bryan Graf received an MFA from Yale University in 2008 and a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2005. His work has been exhibited internationally; most recently at Atlanta Contemporary, where his solo exhibition, Landlines, is on view through December 22, 2019.
Bryan Graf received an MFA from Yale University in 2008 and a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2005. His work has been exhibited internationally; most recently at Atlanta Contemporary, where his solo exhibition, Landlines, is on view through December 22, 2019. Graf was a 2016 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. His work has been featured and reviewed in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harpers, Blind Spot, Details, Fanoon Center for Printmedia Research, among others. He has published four books: Wildlife Analysis (Conveyor, 2013); Moving Across the Interior (ICA@MECA, 2014); Prismatic Tracks (Conveyor, 2014); and Debris of The Days (Conveyor 2017). His photographs and books are held in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Portland Museum of Art, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Harvard University, and the Tokyo Institute of Photography.
More of his work can be seen at BrianGrafStudio.com.
Daisy Nam - September 2019
Welcome to Daisy Nam, pilot curator in residence at Surf Point.
Daisy Nam comes to Surf Point Foundation as the pilot, pre-opening resident, helping to transform our beloved building from its original use as a duplex home into a cultural facility. Most recently, Daisy was Assistant Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Before then, she was Assistant Director of Public Programs at Columbia University, and Individual Development Coordinator at the Guggenheim Museum. Daisy will work on several curatorial projects while in residence at Surf Point. Welcome!
