Artist-in-Residence Program
Our residency program supports Columbus based experimental musicians and digital artists working at the forefront of the local creative music and art fields. This residency has two purposes. The first is to provide these musicians and artists with a flexible, functional space, a platform, and a network to help develop their work and careers. The second is to expose other Columbus-based practitioners and audiences to a variety of processes and working methods through a series of performances, and to encourage an exchange of ideas and approaches that will have a long-term impact on the local scene.
Our 2024 artist-in-residence program is led and curated by VR/AI/moving image artist Krista Faist. Krista’s physical work is largely comprised of watercolor crayon and reductive wax paintings on decorative plate glass, as well as intricate sculptures made from found objects and junk store items. With both mediums, she has sought to represent aesthetic over-stimulation that leads to expansiveness of imagination and wonder, much like that experienced in childhood when one visits a candy shop. As a child, she had a strong desire to see all colors and textures at once, including colors never seen before. With each project, she sets out to re-capture this feeling of simulated desire and satisfaction. She believes that this desire to satiate our hunger for wonderment with consumerist impulses is innately human, and her aim is to bring this incongruence to light via her new works in virtual reality.
Virtual environments composed of her paintings, photogrammetric replicas of original works and kaleidoscopic reflections will further enforce feelings of overstimulation and surreality, while calling to mind Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra: “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real (Baudrillard).” Here, the copy that has been reproduced beyond recognition replaces the real, much like our childhood sense of desire for the fantastic becomes replaced by consumerism, and our capacity for wonder and limitations of reality constrict.
The wholly contained virtual viewing environment references Plato’s Cave, or concept of a limited and shrinking reality which merely provides distorted reflections of what is, and a fraction of a sliver of a window into the expansive nature and possibilities within our world: “In every way, then, such prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shadows of those artificial objects (Plato).”
For this residency, Krista will be collaborating with the following musicians and spoken word artist/poets: Gerard Cox, Alek Lee, Alex Burgoyne, Mitchell Kennedy, Adam Chalk, and Timmy Reed. For each of these collaborations, Krista will create midi-controlled immersive visuals and/or audio-reactive animations to accompany live performances, sound tracks, and live readings of long form poetry.
2024 dates of our artist-in-residence program performances are:
- Saturday, March 16 @ the Old First Presbyterian Church
- Saturday, May 18 @ the Old First Presbyterian Church
- Saturday, July 20 @ the Cultural Arts Center
- Saturday, September 21 @ the Cultural Arts Center
- Saturday, December 28 @ the Cultural Arts Center
Our 2024 Artist-in-Residence program is supported by the mediaThe Foundation. Additional information about each performance can be found in our calendar of events.