Smack Mellon Open Studios Susan Graham, Liz Magic Laser, Esperanza Mayobre, Cheryl Molnar, Rachelle Mozman, Tobaron Waxman, and Tyler Henry

Artists’ Reception: Saturday, March 17, 5-8pm

Open Studios: Saturday, March 17, 12-8pm and Sunday, March 18, 12-6pm

Smack Mellon is pleased to offer the unique chance to enter the private studios of our six 2011-2012 fellowship artists, plus our work exchange artist. The artists will have work on display that they have made over the course of their 11-month residency at Smack Mellon, and visitors will have the opportunity to meet the artists in their studios all weekend. The studios are located in our lower level at 92 Plymouth Street.

The 2011 panelists that selected the artists were: Janet Biggs, Artist; Heather Darcy Bhandari, Director, Mixed Greens Gallery; and Kathleen Gilrain, Executive Director, Smack Mellon. Preliminary panelists were: Sonya Blesofsky, Michael Paul Britto, Kirsten Hassenfeld, and Karina Skvirsky, Artists.

About Smack Mellon’s Studio Artists: Susan Graham describes her work as fragile, sometimes ephemeral, and time-oriented, using materials such as sugar and porcelain. Her projects explore anxiety and fears (of guns, natural disasters, and the encroachment of technology upon nature, for instance) as well as reflect on the culture and landscape of the American Midwest where she grew up. Liz Magic Laser’s performance and video projects intervene in semi-public spaces such as hospitals and banks; and involve collaborations with actors, dancers, surgeons, and motorcycle gang members. Esperanza Mayobre creates fictive laboratory spaces using a variety of media, in an ongoing investigation of urban problems in cities as contradictory as Caracas and New York. In her recent wall drawings, with the simplicity and economy of a pencil, she draws structures that are in continuous construction and de-construction. Since her childhood in suburban Long Island, collage and multimedia artist Cheryl Molnar has been attuned to the tension between human progress and nature. Her work finds similar development patterns in the mixed-use neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where she has lived and worked for the past ten years. Rachelle Mozman’s video and photography practice combines documentary, narrative and performance. Fascinated by ethnography, she engages themes around family, class and gender divides. Tobaron Waxman’s work investigates ways in which concepts of citizenship make moral and ethical claims upon our bodies. His strategies have included: performance, photography, video, voice, sound, tissue engineering, internet, biofeedback processing, and choreography. Work Exchange Artist/Media Systems Manager Tyler Henry has worked extensively as a videographer and video archivist, video installer, collections manager, and IT administrator. He is currently working with immersive projections and other forms of video.