STONELEAF RETREAT

2017 ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE

2017 STONELEAF RESIDENCY ARTISTS: LEAH DIXON, MACON REED and MIA TAYLOR

The inaugural STONELEAF RESIDENCY took place August 19 - September 3, 2017 and culminated with the STONELEAF SUMMER FÊTE on Saturday, September 2, 2017.  The first artists to take part in the residency were LEAH DIXON, MACON REED and MIA TAYLOR and guest critics included, Marina Garcia-Vasquez, Editor-in-Chief of the Creators Project, Larry Ossei-Mensah, an independent curator and Caroline Ramo, Executive Director of Artadia.

LEAH DIXON

Leah Dixon is an artist working in sculpture, performance, and social architectural interventions. She lives and works in New York City and Berlin.

Dixon builds her sculptures completely by hand, and often works site-specifically. Her work addresses labor, formalism, and social geometry via sculpture and interactive spaces. Leah's projects are often durational, culminating in interactions with constructed physical objects and architectures. Her work responds to inconsistencies that have shaped the consumption of socio-political events as an American woman. Dixon reconfigures monuments-- questioning ideas that have been obscured by nostalgia, nationalism, and propaganda. She works as a one-woman making machine, designing, hand-cutting, arranging, sanding, and warping materials. Dixon’s work is often interactive- referencing games, toys, and public meeting places, as she invites the audience to playfully engage and protest these perceived ideological mistranslations. 

Additionally Leah began and currently co-owns a bar and curatorial platform in the Lower East Side/Chinatown called Beverly’s. The bureaucracy and pace involved in running a ground-floor, seven days a week business in Lower Manhattan, led her to further examine her understanding of events, as a young adult who formulated a worldview in a media-saturated America. 

Leah Dixon received her MFA from The School of Visual Arts, her BFA from The Ohio State University, and has attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Ludlow 38 MINI/Goethe Institut in New York, and two person exhibitions at SORT Gallery in Vienna, as well as Aunt Linda's Space in Berlin. Her work has been included in recent exhibitions at Edel Assanti Gallery in London, and The Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles. Dixon was a participant in both the 2014 and 2016 Nicaraguan Biennials of Contemporary Art, both as a solo artist, and as part of a collaborative group between New York and Managua-based artists. She recently completed a site-specific project in Newburgh, New York- commissioned by The Columbia University Masters in Architecture program. Dixon's work has been highlighted in Art In America, BERLIN ART LINK, Artspace, Kuba Paris, HYPERALLERGIC, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary, The Miami Rail, Papermag, New York Magazine, and The New Yorker. Dixon is a current nominee for the 2018 United States Artists Fellowship.

MACON REED

Macon Reed’s work seeks to expand the agency of our collective imagination in response to the growing apathy and isolation inspired by late capitalism. She understands the imagination as an emotive, theoretical, and corporeal realm of transformation. Motivated by human relationships within evolving queer and intersectional feminist frameworks- her projects recognize that aesthetic form and social engagement are not mutually exclusive but rather, deeply intertwined. Reed’s work reflects on intersections of trauma and healing, sacrifice and transcendence, and what it means to belong. Responding to the gravity of these subjects, she activates humor, relationship, and pleasure in her process wherever possible. Most recently, her practice has evolved towards creating immersive sculptural environments that serve as public sites for dynamic inter-community conversation and transformative ritual. She understands her work as an act of creative resistance.

Macon Reed is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, radio documentary, painting, and participatory projects. Her work has shown at venues including PULSE NYC Special Projects, BRIC Media Arts, ABC No Rio, The Kitchen, Art F City FAGallery, Chicago Cultural Center, Mana Contemporary, Roots & Culture, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, ICA Baltimore, and Athens Museum of Queer Arts in Greece. Reed completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a University Fellow in 2013 and received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. Additionally she studied Radio Documentary at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and Physical Theater at the Dah International School in Belgrade. Most recently Reed was an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and a Research Fellow at Eyebeam Center for Art+Technology.

MIA TAYLOR

Mia Taylor is an artist based in London, with an interdisciplinary practice that includes writing, video, sound, painting, object making, installation and performance.

Mia's work addresses concepts of distance and the mapping of narrative and information over time and space, with a focus on technology, the natural environment and people. She is interested in forms of storytelling as means to speculate, obfuscate and communicate histories that are subjectively as well as objectively charged. Writing and imagery is often research based and draws upon language, design and symbolic systems from a broad range of sources such as astronautics, oceanography, geology, alchemical symbols and ideograms. Taylor is interested in how different disciplines describe the natural world and the potential for disorientation within specific and seemingly fixed language systems. Recent work considers the wilderness in relation to ecological change and human and non-human activity within it.

Mia Taylor has shown work extensively in London at Jerwood Visual Arts, Whitechapel Gallery, Lethaby Gallery, A.P.T., Standpoint, Fieldgate Gallery, London Print Studio and Purdy Hicks. She has also exhibited at NADA Miami, PULSE Contemporary Art Fair New York, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin and had solo shows at Toomer Labzda gallery, New York. She has been involved in a number of collaborative projects including Metaphonica, Central Saint Martins and at Camden Arts Centre, both London. Taylor is a member of Five Years, an unfunded artists’ project where programming maintains a direct relationship to practice and she is also part of Glap Collective, an experimental writing group. Residencies include with Signal Fire Arts, Oregon, 2017, at Sydney College of Arts, Australia, 2011 and joining oceanographers on their research cruise into the sub polar North Atlantic, 2016.