2020 Collider artists
Catalina Tuca — New York, USA
Catalina Tuca (b. Santiago, Chile) is a multidisciplinary Visual Artist, educator and independent curator, born and raised in Santiago, Chile. After earning a BFA and a degree in Visual Arts Education, she developed her career in Santiago, showing her work in solo and group exhibitions since 2004. She worked on public education for more than 10 years teaching Visual Arts from Lower to High school, creating the school art programs, supervising other teachers and teaching Latin American Film in higher education as well. In 2012 and 2014 she co-founded and co-directed Oficina Barroca Gallery and CANCHA_Santiago Residency Program. She participated in several art residencies abroad in Japan, Colombia, and the US. Following these experiences, in 2016 she moved to the US to pursue an MFA at Rutgers University from where she graduated in 2018. She was a member at NEW INC, The New Museum Incubator Program, a resident at NARS Foundation 2019, and a fellow at The Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program, NY, 2020. She is co-founder and co-director of CABO Residencies in Santiago, Chile. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Cherrie Yu — Chicago, USA
Cherrie Yu (b. Xi’an, China) emigrated to the United States and studied English Literature at the College of William and Mary when she was 18. Towards the end of her study, she became more interested in art making and performance. In 2017, she moved to Chicago to study and work with members of the former Goat Island Performance Company. She now makes dance films with strangers, and fabricates functional objects from found trash. She is interested in the idea of self defense and homemade weapons for those living in a precarious country at a precarious time; she is also working on a larger writing project exploring contemporary narratives about romance, sexuality and power. She has shown work at Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Links Hall and Comfort Station. Cherrie Yu is also a performer outside of her own practice, and has studied with choreographers such as Molly Shanahan, Keith Hennessy, Tere O’Connor, and the Trisha Brown Dance Company. In Chicago, she has performed in various projects with Eglé Budvytytè, Elise Cowin, LiMing Hu and others. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Dawn Weleski — New York, USA
Dawn Weleski (b. Pittsburgh, USA) co-founded and co-directed Conflict Kitchen (with Jon Rubin), a take-out restaurant that served cuisine from countries with which the U.S. government is in conflict, which has been covered by over 900 international media and news outlets worldwide and was the North American finalist for the Second Annual International Award for Public Art in 2015. Her art practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by repurposing underground brawls, revolutionary protests, and political offices as transformative social stages. She has exhibited at The Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; Anyang Public Art Project, South Korea; The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Project Row Houses, Houston; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Festival Belluard Bollwerk International, Switzerland; The Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh; Arts House, Melbourne; and 91mQ, Berlin; has been a resident at The Headlands Center for the Arts, SOMA Mexico City, and The Atlantic Center for the Arts; is a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow. Currently, Weleski is NEH Visiting Assistant Professor of Art & Art History at Colgate University. In collaboration with Central New York residents, she is investigating the aesthetics and dramaturgy of historical and contemporary mutual aid societies, which will culminate in a participatory, public initiative that highlights how mutual aid contributes to belonging and othering and will problematize definitions of resiliency, community, and the rural radical.
Huidi Xiang — Pennsylvania, US
Huidi Xiang (b. Chengdu, China) received her B.A. in Architecture and in Studio Art from Rice University in Houston, Texas, USA, in 2018. She is currently a second-year Master of Fine Arts in Art candidate at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. In her art practice, Huidi combines the language of cartoon animations and that of architecture design to create mixed media installations, cultivating a playful yet forensic gesture to dissect the transformative power structures associated with ubiquitous pop-cultural imaginaries in late capitalism. Huidi’s artwork and design work have been exhibited at venues internationally, including Powder Room in Pittsburgh, USA, Center for Architecture and Design in New Orleans, USA, South London Gallery in London, UK, and Yiiie Gallery in Chengdu, China. In 2016, she participated in Project Row Houses Summer Studios Residency Program in Houston, Texas. Huidi has also been the recipient of several research grants and fellowships, which include the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Microgrants from The Studio for Creative Inquiry.
Matthew Waddell & Laura Anzola — Calgary, Canada
Matthew Waddell (b. Calgary, Canada) & Laura Anzola (b. Bogotá, Colombia) have been working together for the last six years, creating work under their own names and through their collective Axis Z Media Arts (AZMA). During this time they have realized over 15 projects that explore the relationships between human interaction and digital media. Their work has been presented at festivals, galleries and theatre spaces across the country. In 2015 and 2019 they were awarded prizes for outstanding theatrical design.
Matthew Waddell is interested in examining the ways technology manipulates our understanding of the world as well as our cultural and individual identities. Through a process that is both organic and synthetic he creates im- ages, animations and interactive software programs which aim to distort the analog world through a digital lens. The results are uncanny - familiar yet otherworldly. Recently his work has been shown at the Alberta Gallery of Art in Edmonton, Eastern Bloc in Montreal, and the WRECK CITY Residency in Calgary.
Laura Anzola has a degree in Visual Arts with an emphasis in Audiovisual Expression from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia and a MFA in Media Art and Design from the Bau- haus Universität-Weimar, Germany. She participated in a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2012 and worked for a year in the Animation Department as a practicum in 2017. They are both based in Calgary, Canada.
Orsolya Gal — Cluj, Romania
Orsolya Gal (b. Cluj, Romania) completed her education at the faculty of architecture, followed by a masters in fine arts. The experience she gained during her Erasmus Placement scholarship in scenography, in Italy, and her collaboration with the scenographer Enrico Pulsoni in setting up the exhibition of Maria Signorelli's puppets in Rome, inspired an interest in puppetry. Looking for an alternative education in this field, in 2015 she became the student of Stathis Markopoulos, puppeteer and automata builder in Athens and graduated with her participation at the Kilkis Festival, in Greece, with a show using no puppets but gloves, to present a love story. This collaboration with Stathis Markopoulos and the architect Tiberiu Bucsa, led to another project: building and designing of six automatas with wooden puppets, called Selfie Automaton, that represented Romania in the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016. In 2017, June Orsolya participated at a one month workshop with Bruno Leone, Naples, where she helped produce the show, Pulcinella's Insomnia, which has traveled from Romania, to Hungary and Nairobi ,Kenya. A workshop in 2018 on the theme of traditional shadow puppetry in India, Karnataka, gave birth to her new show for adults, Short Essay on Uncertainty which received a special prize at the Festival Incanti in Torino for image and sound design. This same experience connected her research in shadow theater with her experimental work started in 2014, on plants in motion, a project which includes the observation and documentation of plants in movement, with the desire of creating a multidisciplinary work, involving fine arts and narrative in movement, essencial in the field of theater. She is based in Cluj, Romania.
Rhonda & Trevor — New York, USA & Toronto, Canada
Rhonda Weppler (b. Winnipeg, Canada) and Trevor Mahovsky (b. Calgary, Canada) have worked collaboratively since 2004. Both artists have MFA degrees from the University of British Columbia, where they met in 1996. They have created community collaborative projects in Canada, England, Scotland, San Francisco, Boston, and New York. Weppler has run community outreach programs at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and was an artist-in-residence at ProjectArt NYC, working with underserved inner-city youth in Brooklyn. They have exhibited in galleries including the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, LABoral in Gijon, Dos de Mayo in Madrid, the Power Plant in Toronto, Tokyo Wonder Site, and loop-raum in Berlin. Weppler’s work has also been exhibited at the Palazzo delle Papesse in Sienna and COCA in Seattle. Mahovsky’s work has been shown at the Queens Museum of Art in New York, and he has written for catalogues and journals such as Artforum and Canadian Art. Their work is represented in public collections, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montreal and the National Gallery of Canada. They are based in New York and Toronto respectively.
stephanie mei huang — Los Angeles, USA
stephanie mei huang (b. Wisconsin, USA) is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist currently completing her MFA in Art at the California Institute of the Arts (2020). She received her BA from Scripps College (2016). Within the first six years of her life, she moved from Wisconsin to Indiana, then to Yokohama, Japan, and to Shanghai, China. Through this diasporic upbringing, her work finds its roots in globalization and the role of cultural fragmentation and displacement in changing perceptions of nationhood, loss, and identity. She explores these subjects through a diverse range of media and strategies including film/video, installation, performance, sculpture, writing, and painting. She is the recipient of a Getty Foundation grant and has taught at non-profits such as the Marfa Studio of Arts and Venice Arts. She has participated in residency programs at Millay Colony of the Arts, Austerlitz and Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions (ACRE), Steuben. Her work has recently been shown at the Official Marfa Film Festival, Marfa; Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Gimpo; University of California Los Angeles New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles; Lyon College Kresge Gallery, Batesville; The Neon Heater, Findlay; Millard Sheets Art Center, Pomona; and Root Division, San Francisco. She is based in Los Angeles, USA.
Vishal Kumaraswamy — Bangalore, India
Vishal Kumaraswamy (b. Bangalore, India) is a New Media Artist and Filmmaker with an MA in Photography from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. He is the programme director at Walkin Studios, anindependent multidisciplinary art studio and project space. He is also an independent curator currently showing the project www.the-lack-of.com which exclusively showcases works of South Asian artists on a web platform along with a recently concluded series of weekly film screenings as a part of The Wrong Biennale, an online only art biennale held across multiple platforms and geographies. Vishal is the founder of the international artist collective Now You Have Authority (www.nyhacollective.com) through which he has had the opportunity to design and deliver workshops including at the Tate Modern in London and curated exhibitions and residencies as a collaborative practice.
Vishal’s works have been showcased at multiple national and international exhibitions including The Venice Biennale, Athens Digital Arts Festival, Birmingham Art Summit, the Apex Art Exhibition Savdhaan – Regimes of Truth, WNDX Festival of Moving Image in Winnipeg with an upcoming group show at The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and a solo commission with Furtherfield and the Royal College of Art in London. He was previously an artist in residence with the US Consulate General Mumbai in 2017 and has been conducting a workshop on digital publishing methodologies at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore. He is based in Bangalore, India.
Yotam Peled — Berlin, Germany
Yotam Peled (b. Kibbutz, North Israel) has since childhood practiced fine arts, athletics, and Capoeira. At the age of 21, after finishing service in the Israeli defense forces, he began dancing, and then pursued higher education in contemporary circus. In 2015, Yotam relocated to Berlin, where he has been working as a freelance performer with several European choreographers, among them Maura Morales, Yann L'hereux, Troels Primdahl, Jill Crovisier and Mitia Fedotenko. Alongside performing he has been creating his own choreographic work, touring festivals and venues in Israel, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, France, The Netherlands, Norway, North Macedonia, Luxembourg, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam. His solo performance ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ has received awards from Awaji Circus Art, Wurzburg tanzSpeicher, MASDANZA, Gdansk Dance festival and Corpomobile Rome. His first ensemble work ‘Entropia’ was created in 2018, as part of ‘THINK BIG’ - a collaboration of the city opera of Hanover and TANZtheater International festival.
In 2018, Yotam was selected to the prestigious TalentLAB platform in the Grand Theatre of Luxembourg, to create 'ALPHA', with his ensemble ‘Yotam Peled & the Free Radicals’, in a residency mentored by choreographer Hofesh Shechter. In November 2019 he was a resident choreographer in Skopje Dance Theater and created ‘The Tragedy of the Tiger Beetle’, with the 13 members of the company. Over 2020/21 he will create new works for the graduates of EDCM, Canada, and Frontier Danceland, Singapore.