Beyond Campus
Claudia Grigg Edo (Critical Studies MFA 19) is a writer and theorist from London, currently based in Los Angeles. She received a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University and an MA in Aesthetics & Politics from CalArts. She wrote her thesis on correspondences between desire and the intelligibility of bodies, interrogating the stakes of resisting legibility (as a tactical or a pleasurable maneuver). She was awarded the 2019-2020 CalArts Critical Studies Teaching Fellowship, and is currently teaching undergraduate classes on the politics of desire and refusal. She is also Adjunct Faculty at AMDA College of the Performing Arts, teaching ‘Visual Art and Human Experience’. As well as reading at the WHAP series in West Hollywood and taking part in the Critical Studies panel on Art & Pedagogy at CalArts Weekend, she has delivered papers at conferences at the School of British Columbia and San Diego State University. She describes her current work as conspiratorial, proposing adjacency as a critical method, and taking seriously the (provisional, situated) act of rereading. She is working on a piece of writing that reads conspiracy against consent. The Reef residency will offer her the space and resources to further her research, and expand it through collaboration and curation.
Kelly Wall (Art MFA 19) is an LA-based artist. She received her bachelors from Otis College of Art and Design in 2012 and completed her Masters at Calarts in 2019. The subjects of Wall’s work vary as much as the medium in which they are portrayed, but more often than not utilize humor to usher in and make palatable themes of solitude and social performance. Wall’s installations take influence from the occult, mundane realities, and mythologies, creating parallel worlds in which to view everyday normalcies from behind a new filter. A multimedia artist whose work includes sculpture, video, performance, and sound, her work is introspective while leaving ample space for the viewer to enter.
Lucinda Trask (Art MFA 19) graduated from The California Institute of the Arts MFA Art program in 2019. Before attending CalArts, she worked at Zac Posen and Isaac Mizrahi as a designer, and founded LIKE-clothing, a yearly collection of couture garments. The language and craft of garment making continues to inform her art practice. Lucinda creates landscapes for the body out of plaster, wood, fabric, foam and text by applying draping and patternmaking—and their subsequent systems of notation—to new materials. She explores the politics of care by using construction methods that emphasize sustainability, reuse and modularity. She explores the politics of intimacy by creating new relationships between the body, objects and the earth. Her work takes many forms including installation, performance, sculpture and writing.
Molly Jo Shea (Art MFA 19) is an artist, performer and curator living in Los Angeles. Interested in the blending of documentary and speculative fiction, Shea often plays with expectation and reality. Research is a pivotal part of her practice, as it is a jumping off point for fabrication, creating characters and weaving narratives. Last year she travels to Australia and Tasmania from the Felix Gonzalez- Torres travel grant to do research on living archives visiting sites like the Seed Bank and Museum of Human Disease and deextinction laboratories. For REEF residency she will be working in creating a matchmaking service to unite artists and scientists in an endeavor called the CRISPR institute, named after the gene editing software. She looks forward to creating co-minglings, collaborations and explorations with artist and science in honor of Donna Harraway’s ideas surrounding the Chthuluscene.
Yuxin Zhao (Critical Studies MFA 19) was born and raised in China, finished BFA and MFA degrees in the US, and is now happily teaching the most basic level ESL class to a handful of housewives at Rosemead, CA. Yuxin writes experimental prose, performative pieces, personal essays and everything in between inspired by living between multiple languages, being the queer yet alien self in the US and the closeted but at-home daughter in China. Yuxin is also interested in how creative writing in English as a non-native language can potentially disrupt linguistic colonialism.