Beyond Campus
Beatriz Cortez is an artist and a writer. She was born in El Salvador and has lived in the United States since 1989. Her work explores simultaneity, the existence within different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war, the experience of immigration, and in exploration of possible futures. She has exhibited her work in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts and a doctorate in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She teaches in the Central American Studies Program at California State University, Northridge. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
During her REEF Residency she will produce a video installation titled Camera Obscura that will metaphorically turn the building into a travelling vessel that will move through different time/space virtual realities. This installation will denaturalize the spectator’s traditional understanding of reality and question how we conceptualize, interpret, and assign meaning to an image, as it will invite the viewers to see the world as difference, as a manifestation of other possible worlds.
Stephanie Deumer is an artist from Toronto, Canada, who currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She completed her BA at the University of Guelph in 2011, and her MFA at CalArts in 2015. Her work has been exhibited in Ontario, Nova Scotia, California, and New York.
As artist in residence at the REEF residency, Stephanie Deumer will be focusing on site specific and process-based video installation. Her installations are informed by the physical boundaries of the space in which they are exhibited, and she employs strategies that reveal the equipment, architecture, and audience that create it. Deumer intends to create an installation that acts as a room in a room and a room of a room, constructing a layering of space that is both rooms and neither room at the same time. She aims to create an environment where the objects, subjects and space shift indefinitely, blurring their definitional boundaries.
Meg Whiteford is a writer from New York now living in Los Angeles. Her book, The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies, was published by Plays Inverse in November 2015.
Her writing for performance has appeared at REDCAT Theater, MAMA Gallery, Pieter Performance Space, Coaxial, Last Projects, and 356 Mission in Los Angeles; Pocket Utopia in New York City; Living Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark; and The Institute for Sociometry in San Francisco. She is also an active member of several Los Angeles feminist communities, maintaining ongoing collaborations with The Women’s Center for Creative Work and Barbara Grossman’s Breakfast Club. She is currently a visiting writer and educator for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, a Los Angeles critic for Artforum, and is working on a book about female contortionists.
During her REEF Residency, she will develop her second book, a movement-based work written from the perspective of a remote control flipping through TV channels. The goal is to write a novel that is enacts the vaudeville format: a series of unrelated acts on the same bill, yet, together form a story. In addition, she plans to develop a long form radio play from her shorter produced pieces from KCHUNG while also planning the production of her first published work, The Shapes We Make with Our Bodies, a bacchanalia dark-comedy exploration of mischievous women.