We are pleased to announce the Rising: Climate in Crisis Residents for 2023-2024: Kate Cheka, paris cyan cian, Ian Gerson, Omar Mendoza Linares, Laura Tanner, and  Ashley Teamer. Rising: Climate in Crisis Residencies invite artists to examine the severity of the climate crisis and be agents of change to guide our collective understanding, response, and vision as we shape our shared future.

Kate Cheka (Wiltshire, UK) is an artist, writer and comedian whose primary creative medium is human emotion, either trying to make people laugh (comedy) or think (philosophical musings) or feel (storytelling). She has traveled extensively, studied in four countries and performed stand-up in seven. Having lived in Berlin and Buenos Aires, as well as Delhi and Dar es Salaam her primary focus is always the human lived experience – the best art walks with you through life, reflecting back our intimate feelings as well as (hopefully) providing inspirational impetus for revolutionary acts. While in the Woods, Kate will use comedy as a tool for reflection on the climate crisis. The project is a series of workshops for joke-writing and comedic storytelling to culminate in a live show/video series/podcast of a humorous performance themed around climate change and environmental justice. One that centers the perspectives of marginalized groups and derides corporations and colonial structures using green-washing and other actions that continue to perpetuate environmental harm.

paris cyan cian (New Orleans, LA) is a Black girl playing and composing with devotion, through an embodied ceremonial practice in nature and beyond. As a movement architect, educator, and curator working with and through various interdisciplinary forms of dance, drawing, film, photography, and sound, cyan’s creative work mobilizes embodied memory and ecological play into a worldmaking practice. While in residency, Paris will keep working on her performance called “modjeskamodjeskamodjeska”. It is a multisite durational multidisciplinary performance installation investigating the embodied activation of prayer, calling attention to the erosion of our coastlines due to rising sea levels and Hurricanes. In this installation, she honors the restorative practice of the oyster body as a tool for ancestral protection of land and memory. Our effort to explore and recall methods of grief and celebration through land honoring is an embodied memorial practice. 

Ian Gerson (Houston, TX) is a queer and trans interdisciplinary artist and educator who has shared work across US and Mexico City art spaces. Using discarded materials found in local waterways, Ian will weave a series of wearable sculptures and then facilitate a queer and trans-led fashion show on the banks of the Mississippi River. His project ‘Transing the Future’ harnesses the emancipatory potential of queer nightlife to envision climate survival through a trans lens.

Omar Mendoza Linares’ (Tlahuac, MX) art is rooted in a poetic vision of color and life. Through his pictorial work, he seeks to recover a renegade visual language and a knowledge of ancient Mexican pictorial techniques as an act of poetic and political resistance. While in residency, he will develop a series of paintings using inks and pigments of natural origin that link our cultural regions that share similar ancient cosmovisions symbolically.

Laura Tanner’s (Boca Raton, FL) creative works act as sites of inquiry into the revisionist histories that reinforce systems of inequity. Spanning drawing, installation and social practice, she works with historical institutions and local communities to collect documented and oral histories that shed light onto the extraordinary contradictions between the perceived and experienced narratives in America. While in the Woods, she will collaborate with local communities in different regions across North America. Tanner is collecting oral histories from food providers and consumers about preparing and presenting classic regional recipes and the accompanying conversations around local gathering tables. The drawings that result from these discussions act as a visual archive of their stories and, in turn, highlight the unique economies, social structures, and political leanings of each community. The project will examine the ways in which rising waters due to climate change have affected local wildlife and agriculture and contributed to the increasing instability of national food systems.

Ashley Teamer’s(New Haven, CT)collages explore the relationships between the body, nature, space, and time. She uses painting, sculpture, photography, and sound to creatively intervene with indoor and outdoor architecture, revealing the malleability of our built environment. Through layering images, Teamer charts invented landscapes where dialogues between divergent moments and relationships are bridged. While in residence, Teamer will work on “A World Without Levees,” an exhibition of large-scale collages that combine archival imagery with present-day photographs to show what New Orleans would look like if levees were transformed into structures that allowed us to live more harmoniously with water. Her project proposes that before the public can collectively and effectively demand the drastic changes needed to prepare for climate change today, we have to imagine what the future will look like. Her goal is to photograph every major levee, canal, and water management structure in the city; learn more about the history of the levee system through archival research; and discuss her works in progress with friends, family, artists, scientists, and the wider ASITW network.

While we are limited in the number of residencies we can award, we would like to recognize the following semifinalist artists for their strong applications and commitment to their practice. We would also like to sincerely thank our jurors for their thoughtful work in selecting this year’s residents.

SEMIFINALISTS
Gabriela Tully Claymore and Anna Curtis.

JURORS
Felici Asteinza, MILAGROS Collective  and Former Resident Artist
Frederick “Wood” Delahoussaye, Chief Creative Officer, Ashé Cultural Arts Center
Michael Esealuka, Filmmaker and Climate Crisis Organizer, Break Free From Plastic 
Anya Groner, Novelist and Former Writer in Residence
Sukari Ivester, Senior Professor of Practice, Humanities and Social Sciences, Tulane University
Toccarra Thomas, Director, Joan Mitchell Center
Rachel Lin Weaver, Director of Cinema Reset and Former Artist in Residence