Beyond Campus
Elliot Vredenburg, originally from Toronto, now lives in Los Angeles. He holds an MA in Aesthetics and Politics from Calarts, and his written work emerges largely as an extension of his training at OCADU, where he studied graphic design. Currently, his research investigates the human implications of technological high modernism, the political consequences and capabilities of the digital image, nature made by people, and the weird intersections of branding and marketing practices with social control and surveillance.
Emerson Whitney is the author of Ghost Box (Timeless Infinite Light, 2014), and Nascent Body (forthcoming). His work has appeared most recently in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, Cream City Review, Bombay Gin, Jupiter 88, ENTER>text: 3 years, and &NOW AWARDS 3: The Best Innovative Writing. Emerson is a kari edwards fellow and a professor at Los Angeles City College.
In residency at the REEF, Emerson will host a durational, text-based project and performance that he has planned in collaboration with the CalArts-founded, LA-based art collective, “Best Friends Learning Gang.” They will create a pop-up psychic shop that is not a “shop,” but actually, a book in progress about Emerson’s Romani (Gypsy) ethnicity, exoticism and mythos around occult practices, and around ideas of outsourcing intuition. Experiences from the “shop” will become source for the text.
Emerson will also work to complete a large prose experiment in autobiography that takes on questions of identity and its relationship to childhood occurrence, to nurturing and its failures, to the formation of a queer/trans body.
Danielle Bustillo is part of neverhitsend, a group of artists that performs and discusses issues around communications ideology; a member of the Best Friends Learning Gang, a pedagogical initiative that explores collective, decentralized learning; and a co-host of L.A. crypto events, designed to unpack the ideologies embedded in encryption with classes and guest lectures from artists and privacy activists. Danielle is interested in power, anonymity, and deception tactics. Danielle holds an AA from Miami Dade College, a BA from Hunter College and an MFA from the Art & Technology program at California Institute of the Arts.
During this residency, Danielle will coordinate a series of events: several ‘Amateur Hours’ with the Best Friends Learning Gang, crypto talks, and workshops. Danielle will use this time to further current research on the erotics of war; namely the similarities between unconventional warfare and unconventional sex, in light of medieval folklore and witchcraft. In practice, this might mean a lot of letter writing, maybe a grimoire, and possibly some sex toys.
Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain is a Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Jewish multi-media artist. Her work explores her mixed heritage and history through various lenses. She has shown nationally and internationally and will have films screened on occasion of the Venice Biennale this year. LaFountain is a co-op member, film teacher and curator at the Echo Park Film Center. She holds a BA from Hampshire College and graduated from CalArts in 2014 with an inter-school dual MFA in Photography/Media and Film/Video.
During her REEF residency she will be working on her Waabanishimo (She Dances Till Daylight) series, which will be installed in a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico this fall. This multi-media project investigates indigeneity, ceremony, tradition, landscape, spirits, light, and photographic mediums in the contemporary world. LaFountain performs dances with lights for cameras, which create ghostly images, using long exposures to burn the pathway of the dance into the frame. Other images use long and multiple exposures of landscapes in which the movements of celestial bodies are traced on the film. Along with the images and films she is also developing mutli-projector collaborative performances that deal with similar ideas. Most of the titles are Ojibwe (her tribe’s traditional language) with English translations. LaFountain is extremely honored to be selected as one of the inaugural CalArts Alumni REEF residents.