LISA LAPINSKI – sculpture, installation - Houston
Lisa Lapinski, who earned a BA from UCSD and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004, lives and works in Houston, Texas and is currently associate professor of sculpture at Rice University. Lisa creates dense, formally complex sculptures utilizing the languages of traditional craft but threaded with found material and poignant semiotic, philosophical and historical references.
During her residency, Lisa brought her hallmark wry, whimsical and conceptual approach to a mixed-media, gesamtkunstwerk-style installation engaging with the notion of the Rebekahs, the historically female auxiliary to the International Order of Odd Fellows. The 3rd floor studio became a mashup of the generic office with an imagined worship space that lies somewhere between a baby’s room and a bake sale, replete with colored-cement cakes, ceramic-and-tobacco-leaf rat trophies and pastel binders. The nondescript is “feminized in a babyish way,” the artist says, “creating a ritual space for these women who were like this side club to the Odd Fellows.” Drawing on found objects and craft processes, the installation operated “like a diagram for a ritual,” bringing the notion of play to an historical reality, bridging past and present and invited the guest to enter and interact. kristinakitegallery.la/artists/lisa-lapinski
MAMIE TINKLER – painting - New York City
Over the past decade, Mamie Tinkler has evolved a still-life practice that merges photography, painting, and theatrical staging to produce scenes that border on the surreal, provoking both the frisson of familiarity and the uncanny haze of the unreal. Born in Memphis, Tennessee and currently living and working in New York City, where she earned degrees from Columbia University (BA) and Hunter College (MFA), Mamie moves fluidly between media, drawing on the languages of each to complicate questions of perception, staging, and representation. Long attentive to mirrors, doubling, and other devices of visual displacement, she works within the porous boundary between the constructed and the perceived, revealing how an image can be both precise and unstable at once.
During her residency in Corsicana, Mamie turned toward the surrounding town, exploring its landscapes and built environment through oil and watercolor. She found herself drawn to the architectural specificity of its storefronts—brick structures whose hues, chosen a century ago, now bear the patina of the long, slow sunlight that creates distortions in single-pane windows. A cropped view of a rusted gas pump or nighttime holiday displays become studies in slippage: the surface remains precise, yet the image hovers on the edge of recognition. Throughout this new body of work, Mamie approached the town with an almost archaeological sensitivity, allowing its quiet pace of change to fold into her expanding visual vocabulary, enriching the perceptual ambiguities at the core of her practice. mamietinkler.com
SHAAN SACHDEV – creative nonfiction - New York City
A writer and essayist based in New York City, with a master’s degree from NYU’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism program, Shaan Sachdev covers a range of subjects that include philosophy, political bias, queer urban life, the military-industrial complex, and the intersections of intellectual and popular culture. His work recently won a Pushcart Prize, and his advising enriches the University of Chicago’s Program for Public Thinking. Recent writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The Point, Slate, Salon, the Los Angeles Review of Books and New England Review, among others.
While at 100 West, Shaan divided his time between two projects. One applies more than a decade of work in prominent mainstream newsrooms to a narrative, literary nonfiction book—blending creative nonfiction, political analysis and memoir—that unpacks the psychology of mainstream journalists. Tentatively titled Unconscious Politics: Chronicles of Slant and Sciolism Inside the American Newsroom, the book investigates the language and unconscious biases of broadcast and print journalists and situates today’s atomized media landscape within a century-long history. The second project is a novel, recently embarked upon during a year of residencies, which is set in New York and engages a series of literary portraits as a way to parse the writer’s own complicated relationship with the successes and shortcomings of his peers. sachdev.com
