In June 2004, Artist Trust awarded $54,525 in Grants for Artist Projects (GAP) to 40 outstanding Washington State artists. The GAP program provides up to $1,400 to individual artists for various projects. In 2004, Artist Trust received 675 applications from artists working in all disciplines across Washington State.
The information included in each grant recipient profile below is based on each recipient’s application materials submitted at the time of application.
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
INTERDISCIPLINARY
Julia Cole, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to aid in the purchase of materials and equipment necessary to construct a “Poetry Machine.” An invention of the artist’s, the machine would interactively “empower individuals to enjoy language as a constantly shifting resource.” With the flexibility, ambiguity, and imprecision of communication via the spoken word in mind, the artist will construct a booth the size of a human body, allowing a person to enter the structure and simultaneously be surrounded by a bank of sensors. Movement near these sensors elicits a verbal response from a computer with a pre-recorded vocabulary of several hundred words, while also providing the visitor with the selection of a variety of color and texture combinations that provide varying emotional intensity. “I envision the final structure being durable and portable and moving outside the gallery into a public sphere.” www.juliacole.net
________________________________________________________________
Perri Lynch, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to assist with professional development through upgrading dated photographic equipment—including digital camera conversion—and covering tuition for an audio production class, as well as studio time with a sound engineer. Because the synthesis of digital imaging and sound is central to the artist’s studio work, this support will ensure that “my existing efforts will be enhanced by further production knowledge and increased familiarity with the necessary tools for the development of new work, focusing in particular on the viewer’s connection to their own individual perceptions of place.
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
LITERATURE
Suzanne Bottelli, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to defray research costs, writing time, and travel to New Jersey in order to complete a series of poems entitled Buildings That Are No Longer Here, to be included in a book length manuscript. “These poems will address my relationship to places I remember from growing up in New Jersey. The manuscript is informed by a variety of spaces and structures that stand in my memory but no longer exist, or no longer exist as they once did. I would like to return to New Jersey for a brief time in order to research, visit, and respond to these sites.”
________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Boyden, Walla Walla, Walla Walla County, ($1,400) to take a two-month sabbatical from teaching and help defray living expenses while spending the summer in a cabin near the Rouge River wilderness region. The cabin will provide an environment for the author to complete a series of essays related to her daily walks through a nature reserve near Walla Walla, as well as begin a new body of essays related to the Rouge River region. Walking and Other Celebrations of Place: An Essay Series will, “explore observations of the external landscape and how it creates and informs an internal landscape” Contemplations about how we encounter and move through place and ideas generated by a dedication to these walks will form the structure and theme of this project.
________________________________________________________________
Jana Harris, Sultan, Snohomish County, ($1,400) for the production of a CD of the scripted musical production We Never Speak of It: Idaho Wyoming Poems, 1889-90. Harris’s work focuses on the lives of women and children from the pioneer era and We Never Speak of It is a collaborative project done with Miscellany, a group of musicians who play instruments and music authentic to the 19th Century American West. The poems from the collection will be read in conjunction with a musical presentation of period songs, hymns, and work songs, depicting “the real life stories of frontier women and children who were stranded or settled along the trails of the great Western Migration.” www.janaharris.net
________________________________________________________________
Natalie Kusz, Spokane, Spokane County, ($1,400) to defray living costs while continuing to research and write Dodek: A Literary Memoir, which tells the story of Julius “Dodek” Kusz, the author’s father and his childhood experience in World War II Poland. Only five when the Nazi’s invaded his home town in Poland, “Dodek suffered capture, imprisonment, escape and recapture, all the while, as he said later, ‘dying a little everyday.’” The book begins in 1990’s America when Dodek is sick and dying, this time from pulmonary fibrosis. The trauma of this gradual demise brings vivid flashbacks to old horrors, and the book is about both—Dodek’s early, slow death and his ultimate passing—including how the two experiences intertwine and inform ‘dying’ as a theme.
________________________________________________________________
David Lombardi, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to help subsidize the cost of studio space for several months while continuing to complete a collection of short stories entitled The Neon Fruit Supermarket. Included in this collection is ‘That’s the Sound of Industry’, a story which takes place in a Michigan auto plant and explores “the ideas of class and power and how they collide when a naïve and idealistic college student is introduced for the first time to the world of blue collar work and workers.
________________________________________________________________
Ted McMahon, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to aid in the publication and distribution of a new group of poems based on his dreams, which he has been regularly transcribing for the last three years. This will be a follow up book to his first full-length collection of poetry, The Uses of Imperfection, which was published in 2003. The new group of poems will be published in chapbook form in an edition of 500.
________________________________________________________________
Derek Sheffield, Leavenworth, Chelan County, ($1,400) to cover expenses while he travels Washington for what he refers to—using Richard Hugo’s phrase—as “Triggering Towns.” Retracing many of Hugo’s visits around the State in the 1960s and 70s, Sheffield will travel to the Olympic Peninsula, Buick Montana, and other locales in order to create a collection of poems reflecting the towns, rivers, and landscapes of this region. Sheffield’s project will be published as a compliment to another of his collaborative projects—a collection of poems written in response to the Columbia River.
________________________________________________________________
Laura Simmons, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to aid in the purchase of materials and supplies to produce the first four issues of a literary journal to be entitled Rinse and Repeat. This journal is “devoted to working-class artists and artists who have full-time jobs (artists “who must create art on the side”) and particularly to female and minority artists in the greater Seattle area. The first issue will reflect on challenges faced by artists in a depressed economy. Each of the first four issues will include a small author reading/exhibit at a Seattle venue where contributors will be able to showcase their work.
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
MEDIA
Jenny Anderson, Lake Forest Park, King County, ($1,400) to put toward the purchase of supplies related to the re-location of a current work-in-progress. The film, now a year and a half in the making, documents the life of a 26 year-old paraplegic and offers a “visceral glimpse into his life.” The film’s subject has recently received an offer to travel to Burkina Faso at the end of this year, which will provide the film’s creator the opportunity to “take this collaborative project in an unplanned direction, from the everyday to the extraordinary.” The artist will travel along on this journey to Burkina Faso and use funds to appropriately convert equipment beforehand in preparation for several days of shooting in a village with no electricity.
________________________________________________________________
Serge Gregory, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to help defray completion costs of the fictionalized documentary film Tientsin, including talent fees for the voices-overs of two characters and the narrator, original music fees, and audio recording and final mixing sessions. The film’s images, which will be shot on mini-DV, include photo stills belonging to the artists’ family and taken in China during the 1930’s and 1940’s. The story follows the lives of Dmitri and Natasha, Russian exiles who grew up in China during a civil war, but remained safe and protected in a rare Western enclave within China. After the Japanese invasion of the Chinese mainland, their idyllic life proves harder to protect. “The intent of the film is to recreate, through the story of Dmitri and Natasha’s courtship and marriage, the lost world of Westerners in Revolutionary China.”
________________________________________________________________
Sarah Jane Lapp, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to cover the purchase of ergonomically correct drafting and animation equipment she will use to complete the thousands of drawings necessary for the latest of her thirteen films, Chronicles of A Professional Eulogist. The film’s animation is hand-drawn using India ink, gouache, and wax in combination with live action photography and audio interviews. The interviews, conducted with real life members of the clergy “explore the efficacy of social nostalgia and the role of those who care for the soul. Structured as a journey, the film follows a fictitious ‘dying eulogist’ as he seeks the perfect place to rest his own head, while also collecting a community of prospective protégés and establishing the University of Eulogy along the way.”
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
PERFORMING
Corrie Befort, Seattle, King County, ($1,200) to assist with post-production costs for What Remains—an evening length dance performance—including final payments to contributing artists and residual space and equipment rental costs. What Remains premiered in May of this year at Seattle’s Velocity MainSpace Theater and featured the choreography of Befort in collaboration with Seattle composer Tom Baker who created the score. “What Remains is about the stories our bodies hold. Events and relationships that shape identity are exposed and unraveled through hyper-articulate physicality.”
________________________________________________________________
Amy Denio, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to supplement the artist’s own time and expenses while producing print-ready masters of three collections of music compositions. “I have been composing music for much of my life, and have been operating a publishing company, Spoot Music, since 1990. Periodically, I receive requests for scores of my music. Few of my compositions have been formally prepared as sheet music.” The resulting project will entail a minimum of 200 hours of work devoted to setting and editing scores. Included among the scores will be a 20 sax quartet composition, basic charts for 20 song compositions, and a 10 song cycle ‘Non Lo So, Polo,’ as orchestrated for chamber octet and four voices. www.amydenio.com
________________________________________________________________
Paul Mullin, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to help defray expenses related to the revision of an original theater manuscript and its production, including the payment of small stipends to contributing artists. The production, currently untitled, tells the true story of the recent and highly controversial race to sequence the human genome. The revision process will be executed in collaboration with four actors, a director/dramaturg, and a designer. “The culminating event of the development process will be a staged reading of the play incorporating rough design elements and staging. www.paulmullin.org
________________________________________________________________
Bill Moyer, Vashon, King County, ($1,400) to offset artist fees for the production of Hotel Study, a performance piece debuted in late March of this year as part of the Composer / Choreographer Performance Series at Velocity. The production, a collaborative work between Moyer and choreographer Laura Curry is presented to the audience as a three-dimensional, 360-degree performance. “Hotel Study explores the dichotomy of personal and public space through the context of a hotel room. Temporary occupants inhabit a space that is, over time, simultaneously shared by many.” An installed ‘hotel room’ is defined by fluorescent tubing which provides the environment that the dancers then inhabit. Sonic accompaniment provided by Moyer helps to individuate the inhabitants and place them within a shared physical context.
________________________________________________________________
Haruko Nishimura, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to cover the registration fees for attending two workshops with master Butoh dancer Carlotta Ikeda and dancer Ruth Zapora (founder of Action Theater) respectively. Nishimura’s own choreography and performance style borrows from both Asian and Western avant-garde techniques and combines these elements with a commitment to physical theater and live experimental music. These workshops will “help expand my vocabulary and skills to meet the demands of new projects.” www.degenerateartensemble.com
________________________________________________________________
Amelia Reeber, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to defray costs associated with a solo work of choreography, Frank Hayes, recently performed at On the Boards; and to further develop works in collaboration with the music group Stasis. Funding will go toward lighting fees and the rental of rehearsal space related to the development of new work.
________________________________________________________________
Eryn Young, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to help cover the materials costs for an upcoming piece by Foot in Mouth (a collective of two dancers and two composers) to be performed at On the Boards in Seattle. Young will be working on the musical composition and building a quadraphonic context that allows for the live and recorded music to come from in front and behind the audience simultaneously, thereby allowing for “an opening up of the possible textures and perception of space during the performance.”
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
VISUAL
Nils Benson, Lopez Island, San Juan County, ($800) for material costs associated with the presentation of a series of new oil paintings to be shown at the Lopez Island library. www.nilsbenson.com
________________________________________________________________
Sarah Bergmann, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to purchase a digital camera and cover the costs of printing photographs for an upcoming exhibition addressing the “kinds of built environments that humans create for themselves, and how these environments affect our reality.” The genesis of this project was observing a father and son playing basketball underneath a freeway in Oakland, CA and led to a series that explores people’s ability to adapt to inhospitable environments.
________________________________________________________________
Buddy Bunting, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to finance travel, documentation, and materials for a series of paintings documenting the penitentiaries of the high deserts of the Northwest, and also extending into Montana and California. The project, entitled Scablands, is a comment on the modern correctional facility and the western landscape it occupies. “I am interested in the light, space, and topography of these regions and like to spend time observing each prison from different aspects, times of day, and under changing weather conditions, which has proven difficult on a tight budget.” www.buddybunting.com
________________________________________________________________
James Cicatko, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to help defray material costs related to the completion of two complimentary series of paintings, Studies with Heads and Little Monsters. Studies is a gestural, largely improvised series depicting human heads and resulting in large-scale pieces. Conversely, Little Monsters is a series of tightly constructed, highly worked, and built up paintings. Together, the two series “act as an effective foil to one another and are mutually refreshing as a kind of doubling effect.”
________________________________________________________________
Chris Engman, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to purchase a large format camera, lens and tripod in order to complete a series of constructed landscape photographs. “These images are records as much as they are photographs of enigmatic construction built in remote landscapes, including the rigorous and meditative labor involved in creating them on site and then finding the ultimate composition.”
________________________________________________________________
David Gackenbach, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to purchase a commercial-grade polishing motor and dust collection system for use in metalsmithing. These tools will enable the artist to continue working on his silver hollowware in a more efficient and healthy working environment.
________________________________________________________________
John Grade, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to aid in completing a video narrative of his sculptural process and underscore how the labor-intensive pieces are constructed in stages not visible in the finished object. As such, Grade’s sculptures are an exploration of “temporary supporting structures, ad hoc tools made to reach and bend, and hanging devices.” This video will create a dialogue between the sculptural process and the finished art object. www.johngrade.com
________________________________________________________________
Tom E. Hall, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to help defray the cost of materials, travel, and lodging for a two week stay in Portland, Oregon while completing and expanding on an existing series of large-scale bridge drawings. Created on-site along the Willamette and Columbia rivers, the artist will complement this series by deriving source material for an adjacent series to be based on the shadows cast by these same industrial bridges. Working from photographs and fabricated models, the cast shadows themselves will be painted on the planes of neutral interiors. Once the images are competed the models will be removed, leaving only the afterimage. “Removing the subject, the viewer then has the opportunity to reconstruct it.”
________________________________________________________________
Blake Haygood, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to offset costs involved in the production of an upcoming show, including wood panels, paint, mediums, varnish, and brushes. In addition, funding will cover the cost of truck rental and transport of the pieces for documentation and installation, as well as marketing costs, including postcards, mailing lists, and documentation in slide and large print photo formats. “The finished acrylic paintings on panel will range in size from smaller works to pieces as large as 4’ x 5’ ”. www.blakehaygood.com
________________________________________________________________
Tina Hoggat, Issaquah, King County, ($1,275) to cover travel, living, documentation and printing costs for the collaborative illustration of My Jim, a novel by Nancy Rawles. “The story is one of a family living during and after the Slave trade in America, and is told while the narrator sews a quilt with her granddaughter.” With assistance from accomplished quilt maker Nancy Gibson, a woman in her 90’s working within the African American tradition, Hoggatt’s book illustrations will be created in black and white for the book itself and later printed on vintage fabric to be incorporated into a finished quilt. Cover and some interior illustrations will be taken from the finished sewn work.
________________________________________________________________
Amanda Knowles, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to help defray the cost of maintaining a studio and home in Seattle while taking part in two residencies, at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington for one month, and at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska for two months. As a printmaker who has recently expanded into drawing and mixed media, her work at these residencies will focus not only on printmaking, but the incorporation of photography and sculpture into her two-dimensional pieces. “My work is a personal response to science. The work pieces together scientific data and abstract shapes, the raw material, creating a visual language that interprets the processing of ideas.” www.amandaknowles.com
________________________________________________________________
Margie Livingston, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to help defray expenses while undertaking a four-week residency this summer. The residency will help to develop and expand current work into new and different directions in preparation for an upcoming solo show at Greg Kucera Gallery. “Having uninterrupted studio time is crucial to identifying and developing new ideas. I’ve slowed down the painting process—committing to each stroke and its relationship to the whole before moving on to the next. I’m trying to make each daub of paint contain location, drawing, gravity, color, and light—studying how each mark informs the rectangle. My work is a search for equivalencies and resonance.“ www.margie.net
________________________________________________________________
Robert Lyons, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to help offset the cost of creating work prints from which final photographs will be selected for his forthcoming book, Intimate Enemy. The book and its images are concerned with the ideas of genocide and human rights issues as they pertain to Rwanda in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide. “I have been working in the field since 1998 photographing and collecting information for the project. Co-authored with Scott Strauss, who is a PhD Candidate from UC Berkley, the project is underway and we are attempting to collect all the material, photographs and actual interviews in order to find the right design format for the book.” The projected release is early 2005.
________________________________________________________________
Barbara Noah, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to purchase a new transparency scanner to continue a series of digital prints referencing how “interests and influences are filtered through images that deal with emotional and physical phenomena, from fear to euphoria and from the cellular to the celestial.” Noah’s metaphoric use of surrogate symbolism is “influenced by the longing and desire for transcendence in contemporary culture.” Amalgamations of geologic references are present on the resulting digital prints that are then output onto paper and found objects. www.colorcarbonprint.com (click "Gallery" and then click "Barbara Noah")
________________________________________________________________
Allan Packer, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to cover the expenses while completing a series of “Vacuum Form Prints” in an edition of 25 each. A hybridization of printmaking and sculpture, these prints will utilize vacuum form plastic to produce limited edition prints in bas-relief. These two prints will be part of a new series entitled Diorama, and “each vacuum form print is an exact three dimensional topographic depiction of an historical geographical site, defined by its longitudinal and latitudinal axis.”
________________________________________________________________
Chauney Peck, Olympia, Thurston County, ($850) to defray material costs related to her Momento Mori II series. The work is an evolution of a recent painting project, Momento Mori: Birds, which “asks questions about the subtle and sensual aspects of death.” Priceless Works Gallery in Seattle will host Momento Mori II, a series of backlit paintings on semi-opaque vinyl, in an upcoming exhibit. www.chauneypeck.com
________________________________________________________________
Michael Schultheis, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to cover the documentation expenses for two upcoming solo painting exhibitions at The National Academy of Sciences in Washington and the Rotunda Gallery. This grant will be used to document the work through slides, prints, digital images, and archival CDs. www.michaelschultheis.com
________________________________________________________________
Alex Schweder, Seattle, King County, ($1,400) to purchase a digital projector and associated wiring for use in a piece that will be part of an upcoming solo show, Lovesick Buildings, at Howard House Gallery in Seattle. For this piece in particular, Schweder has been filming food with the help of gastroenterologist Jim Wagonfeld’s endoscopes. The resulting DVD footage will be projected on a large sculpture of polyester resin with two digital projectors. The piece and the entire show will examine the relationship between bodies and buildings. “Lovesick Buildings conflates architecture and food as a means of exploring the complicated and dissolving emotions of love.” www.alexschweder.com
________________________________________________________________
Donna Stack, Ellensburg, Kittitas County, ($1,400) to enable the purchase of a digital video camera and other materials necessary to complete a trilogy of video pieces revolving around her Asian heritage and how she has felt the need to “reinforce and authenticate ‘Asian-ness’.” Influenced by Hans Christian Anderson’s The Princess and the Pea and Edward Said’s Orientalism, Stark intends to create “a body of work that revolves around the pea and the idea of real(ness), whiles still incorporating an Asian aesthetic.” www.donnasuestack.com
________________________________________________________________
Bernadette Vielbig, Spokane, Spokane County, ($1,400) for the purchase of equipment necessary to complete a series of sculptural pieces scheduled for exhibition at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center this coming fall. As a part of the Ready to Wear invitational exhibition, Vielbig is in the process of completing “a life cast ‘skin suit’ created by casting latex rubber into a series of life molds, a dress created by sewing MRI and X-ray images taken from the body, and lastly a pair of go-go boots fashioned from 1960s & 70s educational film strips that will incorporate a soundtrack element as well.”
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
