Research Residencies
The Research Residencies at Stanford Arts support the relationship between art and research by providing artists of any discipline with the space and time to work on a nascent project, offering access to the intellectual and archival resources of Stanford University. Artists can meet with Stanford professors, dig into special collections, explore labs, write, and create. During their visit Stanford Arts offers the artists the opportunity to show their work in progress at the Bing Studio.
The Research Residencies are sponsored in part by the Drs. Ben and A. Jess Shenson Fund and by Stephen and Roberta Denning.
Upcoming Artists:
Hope Mohr
Stanford Arts Research Resident, choreographer and writer Hope Mohr will research the intersection of artmaking and ideology through the genre of artist manifestos.
- Performance: Stay: A Choreographic Response to Francis Bacon - 10/2/15
- Public Lecture: Hope Mohr Guest Lecture & Demonstration - 10/28/15
Master Class for Creative Thinkers
Friday, Oct 16 | 3 PM-6 PM
Location: AOERC 112
A studio workshop on the role of rules in collaborative creative process. We will write, improvise and compose together. How do we bring individual creative content into collaborative process? What are our unspoken rules of engagement? What happens when we articulate, disrupt or reject those rules? How can constraints take us deeper into our creative desires?
Master Class for Dancers
Tuesday, Oct 20 | 4:30 PM-6 PM
Location: AOERC 112
How can constraints take us deeper into our creative desires? Class will feature full-bodied technical dancing using vocabulary anchored in a set of physical rules. Students will have the chance to reflect on bigger questions related to the role of rules in dancemaking and composition.
Guidelines for all Master Classes:
- Open to Stanford students from all disciplines, who are open to creative physical expression.
- Classes are drop-in, not cumulative.
- Wear loose-fitting clothing and bring writing materials.
- Students must confirm they can attend the whole master class, from beginning to end, in order to secure a spot on the master class list.
- Space in the master class is limited to 30 students. A wait-list will be created once all of the open spaces have been filled.
To request a spot in one or both of these master classes, please contact:
Ashley Kennedy (kennedya@stanford.edu) by Thursday, October 8th.
Stanford Arts Research Resident, choreographer and writer Hope Mohr will research the intersection of artmaking and ideology through the genre of artist manifestos. Manifestos are future-oriented visions. Improvisation is creative thinking in the present. How do these two approaches to art intersect? What is the role of rules in the creative process? Can rules co-exist with intuitive ways of creating? How can we create productive constraints or scores for artmaking? This work continues Mohr’s ongoing interests in placing contemporary dance in historical and political context and in making work about the creative process itself.
Hope Mohr founded Hope Mohr Dance in 2007 after performing in the companies of a number of pioneers of modern dance, including Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, and Margaret Jenkins. She trained at San Francisco Ballet School and on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Studios in New York. While in New York, Mohr also performed with Liz Gerring, Douglas Dunn, Trajal Herrell, and Pat Catterson.
Mohr has enjoyed artist residencies at ODC Theater; Montalvo Arts Center; and Jennifer Monson’s Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance. She was named one of the YBCA 100 in 2015, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' annual nationwide compilation of artists posing important questions about contemporary culture. She was a two-time participant in Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange, a program of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, with mentor Dana Reitz (2014) and Molissa Fenley (2009). In 2015, she co-directed Anne Carson's Antigonick with Mark Jackson for Shotgun Players in Berkeley; in 2005 she assisted Lucinda Childs on Dr. Atomic for S.F. Opera. Mohr and poet Brenda Hillman were nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for their text for Mohr’s Far From Perfect (2010). Mohr’s article The Language of the Listening Body was published in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. In 2015, she has a research residency at the Stanford Arts Institute.
Mohr has taught dance around the world, including at the London School of Contemporary Dance, P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, and the Trisha Brown Studio. Mohr studied theater at Yale and then transferred to Stanford, where she earned her B.A. in women’s studies. She earned a J.D. from Columbia while dancing professionally.
Since her 1994 choreographic debut in ODC’s Pilot 13, Mohr has presented her work throughout the country, including at the Alvin Ailey Center and Judson Church in New York, Velocity in Seattle, and The Mouth in Portland. Her work has been presented and/or commissioned by: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco International Arts Festival, West Wave Festival, Montalvo Arts Center, ODC Theater, Stanford University, Motion Pacific, Lines Ballet BFA Program, and the S.F. VA Hospital’s Office of Patient Centered Care and Cultural Transformation.
Sources of institutional support for Mohr's work include San Francisco's Grants for the Arts, the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Lighting Artists in Dance/Dancers' Group and CA$H/Theatre Bay Area. HMD is currently a company in residence at ODC.
In keeping with HMD’s mission to not only create, but also to foster outstanding dance, HMD’s Bridge Project brings notable master teachers and choreographers to the Bay Area. Past and current Bridge Project artists include Deborah Hay, Jeanine Durning, Stephanie Skura, Simone Forti, Anna Halprin, Liz Gerring, Dusan Tynek, Molissa Fenley, and Susan Rethorst.
Previous Artists:
Alyson Shotz
Alyson Shotz will be researching the visualization of waves, particle motion, the glacier movement, and crystalline structures and making sculptural studies based on this research.
At Stanford I will be meeting with scientists in various fields such as astrophysics, materials physics, oceanography and glaciology, in order to collect examples and understand how they visualize their work. I’m interested in the shape and behavior of various types of waves, the motion of subatomic particles, the contour and movement of glaciers, and crystalline structures. With that research I plan to make sculptural studies in the materials lab that may inspire further and larger scale sculptures later on. In addition, I’d like to meet with members of the Stanford Photonics Research Center and the Center for Advanced Molecular Photovoltaics, to consider the aesthetics and possible solar applications for outdoor large scale sculpture. Lastly, I hope to do some research and testing of material properties of common objects: is it possible to compress something with significant materiality into something very small. How small? Conversely, how much can we stretch or pulverize an existing object and still sense the past history of that object. What energy or presence does this new object have? I hope to work with material scientists to test some of these conjectures.
Much of my practice is about trying to visualize invisible forces like gravity, space and light. For the past few years, I have been looking at these fundamental forces from various vantage points through the lens of my work. Space and light are two of the primary materials a sculptor can make use of, in addition to mass, volume and line. Questions about what the universe is made of or how it works are primary to what I believe sculpture should be about. At Stanford I look forward to the opportunity to exchange information with and learn from scientists in fields such as: astrophysics, materials physics, oceanography and glaciology. I’m often inspired by the graphic representations scientists use to explain or visualize their work. Collecting as many diverse examples of this kind of material is going to be a large part of my research. In addition, I’d like to work collaboratively on materials experimentation across a broad spectrum, towards the fabrication of future sculptural objects.
Alyson Shotz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She was recently included in the exhibitions The More Things Change, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Contemplating the Void and The Shapes of Space at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Light and Landscape, Storm King Art Center, Sculpture Biennial, Borås Konstmuseum, Borås, Sweden, and Living Color, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. She has had solo exhibitions at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, and Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, among others. Shotz was a Stanford University Sterling visiting scholar in the Department of Chemical and Systems Biology in 2012, she received a Pollock Krasner Award in 2010, the Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2007, and was the 2005-2006 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at Yale University Art Gallery. Her work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, among others. In 2013, the School of Medicine at Stanford University commissioned a piece to honor former dean Philip Pizzo, MD. The sculpture, Three Fold, hangs from the ceiling of the Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge.
Michael Friedman
Composer Michael Friedman will be researching the history of American popular music for his new musical American Pop, about the power of pop songs – why we write them, why we sing them, and where they come from.
When composer/lyricist Michael Friedman was commissioned to write a show about an important period in American History, he began to look at the sheet music he had inherited from his great-grandparents. American Pop is a show about popular music in the sheet music era. From 1846, the year Stephen Foster wrote O Susanna, to 1923, the year of Bessie Smith’s triumphant first record. From the beginning of music copyright to the end of public domain. It is about the power of pop songs. Why we write them, why we sing them, where they come from. When sheet music was distributed, and sold, and played in homes all over the country. And, inevitably, it is about the people who write popular music, and the people who perform it. And within this interrogation of the power of popular song in the sheet music era, Friedman explores his own inheritance, and the ways in which cultural appropriation seems to be inevitably an act of violence, and ways in which capitalism leads, inevitably, to people being paid to do things that are degrading or destructive. “A lot of these songs turn out to be more powerful, in a frightening, terrible way, than the people who wrote them or the people who performed them, and these songs destroyed people, even as they made money. People don’t transcend songs, it seems, try as they might. The songs survive.”
Michael Friedman has written music and lyrics for The Fortress of Solitude, which recently played at the Public Theater; Love’s Labour’s Lost and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (both with Alex Timbers); Here’s Hoover, Saved, The Brand New Kid, The Blue Demon, and, with The Civilians, for Canard Canard Goose, Gone Missing, Nobody’s Lunch, This Beautiful City, In the Footprint, The Great Immensity, as well as music for Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns (a post-electric play) and the company’s 2012 TED Talk. He is the co-author of Paris Commune (with Steve Cosson). He has been a MacDowell Fellow, a Princeton Hodder Fellow, a Meet The Composer Fellow, a Barron Visiting Professor at the Princeton Environmental Institute, and an artist-in-residence at Spring Workshop Hong Kong. He has written for the London Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review. His recent TEDX talk, “The Song Makes a Space,” is available on YouTube. An evening of his songs was featured in Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series, and he received an OBIE Award for sustained achievement.
Michael Friedman’s visit is made possible by a gift from Ron and Cynthia Beck.
Paulina Borsook – My Life as a Ghost
To develop the performance/installation, My Life as a Ghost, Paulina Borsook will be researching the psychoneurological consequences of traumatic brain injuries, drawing from her own experiences and interviews with other individuals living with TBI.
Research
Interviews with TBI ghosts will lead to themes, gestures, metaphors, images, and phrases. Great lighting and feature-film quality will be integral to these interviews.Archival investigations through journals, diaries, and letters, as well as medical case-histories and texts, will hunt for traces of TBI ghosts.
Installation
The first and primary aspect of the project is a walk-through installation, evoking a circumnavigation of the internal perimeter of a cathedral. In this immersive mixed-media environment one locus might reflect the NFL-concussed while another might refer to bicycle flipovers. There will be approximately a dozen stopping points.A workstation will be set aside for TBI ghosts to describe their experiences, contributing a crowdsourced component.
Performance
Consonant with the rest of the project, an opening-night performance will evoke the ethereal, the ambiguous, and the haunted and will not be about emoting across a stage. The performance will involve a choreographer, theater technicians, and a composer/sound designer. It will be recorded and then run on a continuous loop in a corner of the exhibition space.
Film
The movie will combine interviews with philosophers, neuroscientists, theologians, and TBI ghosts. As with the rest of the project, the goal is to be suggestive and not didactic.
Documentation
A videoed fly-through of the installation will be made available online, as will the recording of the opening-night performance.A catalog will include stills from the installation and interviews, as well as essays from some of the same kinds of people as will be involved in the film. Included also would be the source document for the project, which will be read/presented at Stanford in October 2013.
Aaron Landsman – Perfect City
Perfect City will be a performance and installation about the formation and reformation of modern urban cities and the intersection between the planners and the inhabitants.
