CLAUDIA HAUSFELD - Reykjavík, Iceland - 2nd floor studio
In her practice, which explores photography and its relationship to reality, Claudia Hausfeld creates ghostly works that conjure ethereality and otherworldliness. Born in East Berlin, Claudia studied photography at Zürich University of the Arts and visual art at the Iceland University of the Arts. She has been on the board of several artist-run initiatives in Iceland, Denmark and Switzerland, among them the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík. She has exhibited widely in Iceland and elsewhere, and was photolab workshop manager at the Iceland University of the Arts, during which time she reconfigured and expanded the darkroom and taught courses in experimental photography. Often gathering and incorporating materials—everyday artefacts, humble relics, daily detritus—she employs assembly as a form of experimentation and play.
Throughout her residency, Claudia has found myriad ways of “conjuring the spirits of this place.” Through large-format cyanotype “collages” on fabric; prints of bricks made on the residency’s intaglio press (one brick always a ghost of the other); and small, colorful collages of magazine cutouts (here, too, “strange little occurrences and structures come up”) Claudia has found herself interacting with dimensions of time and place. Employing a large-format camera and developing film on site, she also used the room as a camera on a scale she had not before. Throughout, she questions utility/functionality while mirroring her surroundings in a way that harnesses photography’s alchemy. claudiahausfeld.com
SIMON PETEPIECE - Montréal, Québec, Canada – 3rd Floor Studio
Simon Petepiece’s work lies outside of time, both ancient and futuristic. A self-taught artist with a Masters degree in architecture (Carleton University, 2018), Simon works with construction materials and processes, exploring how architectural spaces reflect and manifest our cultural beliefs. The objects he creates exist between sculpture and two-dimensional media. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Galerie Nicolas Robert (2024) and Espace Maurice (2023) in Montreal, and his work can be found in the City of Ottawa Art Collection.
While at 100W, Simon worked on two large, sculptural pieces: one wall-mounted and the other the miniature of a fragment of a cloister he had previously drawn. The work explores the interconnected relationship between painting, sculpture and architecture in devotional spaces, and pushes further into the domain of architecture, claiming space while questioning and probing its edges and valences. Additionally, a series of small drywall paintings—slightly sculptural and reminiscent of iconographic devotional work—drew from a range of sources to create depictions of interior spaces. In translating back and forth between two- and three-dimensionality, he creates poetic visual palimpsests and symbioses. Some of this work will contribute to an upcoming duo show with Jennifer Carvalho at Gallery 12.26 in Dallas, TX in spring 2026, exploring the ways in which historical narratives shape our contemporary experiences. simonpetepiece.com
MISHA RAI - India / Sewanee, Tennessee – Writing Studio
Misha Rai is a fiction writer based in Sewanee, Tennessee. Misha is Contributing Editor of the Kenyon Review and Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sewanee: The University of the South. Her prose has been supported by the Kenyon Review Fellowship Program, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, Ucross, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Dana Award in the Novel Category. Her short story “Twenty Years Ago” is a Distinguished story in the 2021 Best American Short Story anthology. Set against the backdrop of political unrest and fermenting environmental disaster, her short novel in progress, The Finish, examines how a group of fifteen-year-old boarding school girls copes with the psychological and physical ramifications of a brutal final exam they must complete before leaving the mountain upon which they are sequestered.
About her 100W Writing Studio’s two desks, Misha says: “When I look out the window at Corsicana, what I see is the expanse of the novel. When I’m facing the wall, I think of the constraint of the short story.” In Corsicana, Misha had the task of adapting—from the first section of her novella in progress—a short story destined for the editors of a major international magazine. A conversation with a fellow resident ultimately led to a creative breakthrough regarding point of view and timeframe. Concurrently, Misha has worked on the third and fourth acts of The Finish. On the Texan prairie, the “sensation of being on the edge” has lent her work what she calls an “eerie” quality: “the voice in the short story is about being on the edge,” she says. She will read from her new material for Open Studios. misharai.com
RETURNING ALUMNI
W. J. LOFTON - Atlanta, Georgia, 2022 Alumnus
2022 spring alumnus W.J. Lofton’s poetry collection Boy Maybe was published March 25, 2025 with Beacon Press. Several of the poems were written while in residence, and W.J. (“Will”) remarks that his friendship and continuing conversations with fellow resident Scott Myles informed this work, particularly the introductory poem about a car crash, which was sparked by the painting Big Car. “Scott painted this huge, orange car. And subconsciously, it stuck with me,” Will says. “And then one of Scott’s paintings says ‘boy’ on it. I guess when you see the word ‘boy’ blown up so large, it sticks in your thinking.”
The preface begins thus, offerings its own definition:
“boy maybe: a queer artifact/anti-colonial weapon/survival psalm that signals my location in thought/soul/body. boy maybe: a hymn for hands who have known the pleasures and pains of touch and its absence.”
And the opening poem—“Here today, gone today”—presents the car crash:
the ditch
spits
back the body.
the body
decides
trying is prayer.
About the collection, Will says, “Boy Maybe delves into black queer identity and also the wonders and the tensions of boyhood. I also think about the impact of touch, how I have participated in touch and how I have been touched, not only intimately via flesh and human touch, but also touched via the state and via what we know as imperialism.”
In 100 W’s Writing Studio and the residency’s spaciousness, “I was able to insert space and gaps inside of the poems to allow for this feeling of distance and arrival,” Will says. Other questions circled around the crash: “What are the remnants of that crash, what is the work of the reader, what is the work of the speaker to confront the crashes? And the crashes are these attempts at intimacy. In retrospect, I realized I had been in conversation with [Scott’s] work ever since I left Corsicana,” Will says. During the book rollout, “I’m thinking about who are the passengers, who has been in this car, who has been in the wreckage, who has been throughout the debris with me?” Will says. “I know that Boy Maybe is devastating, but I don’t leave the reader without oxygen. I wanted to present a body back to a person. Whether that is a body politic, a physical body. Whether it’s to access peace. I want it to be a gift.” The gift is the devastation and oxygen of reading Boy Maybe.
A. KENDRA GREENE - Dallas, TX, 2019 Alumna
Alumna A. Kendra Greene completed her mesmerizing nonfiction book The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, published by Penguin Random House, while in residence in 2019. Now she joins alumnus W.J. Lofton to speak about and celebrate their latest works. Greene’s second book, No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity, published by Tin House Books on March 4, 2025, has drawn critical acclaim. Charming, whimsical illustrations accompany twenty-six brilliant essays that remind us of life’s microcosms and macrocosms and how they connect in the most unexpected ways.
OPEN STUDIOS - April 26, 2025
