We are excited to introduce you to the five Los Angeles-based artists participating in our 2022 Research + Development Program: Beck+Col, Jasmine Orpilla, and Nina Sarnelle and Selwa Sweidan.
We received 34 interest forms from artists this year, and all proposals were reviewed by previous R+D artists DaEun Jung and Marsian De Lellis, along with our Communications Associate Vy Nguyen, Producer + Director of L.A. Programs Patricia Garza, and Executive Director Miranda Wright.
Artists will each receive $1,600 in cash support for early research and development toward a new project, plus additional resources ranging from access to rehearsal space, collaborator stipends, equipment, and producing consultations. Each project’s development is self-guided, and tailored specifically to each artists’ projects needs.
In the coming weeks, each artist will share a taste of their process and new work in development.
Beck+Col
Cyber Forest
“Cyber Forest considers a future that is overlapped by the past. For this project, we will be developing an installation and performance surrounding a cyberpunk forest. We want to draw the connection between a for-profit system that is not in our best interest as a species, and the depletion of essential natural resources that has directly led to the current climate crises and loss of biodiversity.”
Beck+Col are a Los Angeles based artist duo who have been working exclusively in collaboration since 2014.
Beck+Col have performed at numerous venues including the Hammer Museum, REDCAT, and JOAN Los Angeles. They have had multiple solo exhibitions at Human Resources and their work has been exhibited worldwide including the Royal College of Music in Sweden, Colección AMALITA in Buenos Aires and at Biquini WAX EPS in Mexico City. Beck+Col have received multiple FCA grants and were nominated for a Rema Hort Mann Emerging artist grant in 2019. They have been invited to host art education workshops and lectures with the Hammer Museum, the Craft Contemporary Museum,18th Street Art Center and the City of Santa Monica. In Spring of 2020, Beck+Col were the artists in residence for the San Diego International Airport Performing Arts Residency and represented LACE at the Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair. They were the Spring 2021 Artists in Residence at UNLV.
Beck received an MFA from CalArts in 2019 and Collin received an MFA from CSULA in 2014.
Jasmine Orpilla
ORASYON (in-progress title)
“ORASYON: A multilingual experimental operatic installation, sung and simultaneously danced in solo, sound-activated courtship choreography, inspired by the poetry of my grandmother’s Ilokano call & response dallot love-song tradition and the protective incantations of my albularyo-practicing grandfather from the Philippines.”
Jasmine Orpilla is a multiplicitous Ilokana/x-American vocal performance artist and experimental composer of theatrical sound installations in which she activates her lifelong practices of folk ritual, dance, combat systems and music of the Philippines, against the contemporary American framing of the 1st-generation, imperialist military culture of her own childhood. Unlimited by “soprano” nor so-called classical beauty, her unfiltered voice-in-motion exorcizes eurocentric performance structures from her muscle memory, while remaining accountable to the oral legacies and languages of the Indigenous Filipino musical systems she, her family and community remains indebted to today.
While centering the voice of the Filipinx-American body within her energetically intense solo practice as a research-based multi-instrumental/multilingual performance artist, over the decades the true stories woven throughout Jasmine Orpilla’s work humanize and honor the intersectionality of the Fil-Am body in agency.
Touch Praxis Ensemble
“Touch Praxis is an ongoing research process that revolves around touch as a creative, time-based medium. It considers touch in today’s context of high stakes touching—elbow-bumps, contactless delivery, lethal choke-holds—how can touch both articulate and press us beyond the boundaries of the self? For us, touch provides a way of working with others in which ‘every body’ is engaged in the performing/making/knowing. We also use it as a method for feeling one’s way through complex issues related to access, inclusion, consent, subjectivity, power, entanglement and alterity.”
Nina Sarnelle & Selwa Sweidan are artists based on Tongva/Kizh land often referred to as Los Angeles. Their independent practices have circulated around touch and haptics for a long time. They began working together on this collaborative touch praxis at the beginning of the pandemic in Spring 2020. Together they’ve developed a research methodology consisting of workshops, prompts, interviews, reading, discussion and collaborative writing. They are deeply engaged in the performance scene in LA, having worked with NAVEL, Pieter, Culture Hub, Human Resources, FCCW, HomeLA, the Getty Center, Virtual Care Lab and other local organizations as performers, workshop leaders and/or curators.
Nina Sarnelle is a founding member of the Institute for New Feeling, with degrees from Oberlin College and Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has been shown at New Museum (NY), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Hammer Museum (LA), Getty Center (LA), Ballroom Marfa (TX), MoMA (NY), Black Cube (Denver), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), Fundacion PROA (Buenos Aires), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Mwoods (Beijing) and many others.
Selwa Sweidan is an artist and researcher of emerging technologies. She has co-curated exhibitions and symposia including Beyond Embodiment, Performative Computation, STACKED Expo, Super Radiance and Clustering. She’s been published in the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Journal and the Design Research Society; and exhibited at Bevilacqua Gallery, Center Du Pompidou, HomeLA, Spring/Break LA and UC Irvine. She holds degrees from Smith College and ArtCenter College of Design, and is currently an Annenberg PhD Fellow at the University of Southern California.
https://ninasarnelle.com/ | https://instagram.com/ninasarnelle/ | https://facebook.com/NinaSarnelle/
