B180 Residency Artist Spotlights
Read More About Our Residency Artists and Join Us For An Evening of Art & Activism!
Please join Building 180 and Agapolis in Portola Valley, CA on Sunday, July 28th at 4:30pm for an evening of Art & Activism!
Tickets can be purchased on Eventbrite (Password: AB180). More
information about the artists is below.
All proceeds go towards supporting future residency programs and events. Light snacks and beverage will be provided. Hope to see you there!
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Johnna Arnold
Johnna is an artist, photographer, educator, and urban farmer based in Oakland, CA. Johnna’s work revolves around her interest in the infrastructure that supports our post-industrial lifestyle, and how a small, fleshy human such as herself can relate to this vast system. Her project at Agapolis, Imagination is Everything, straddles the line between photography and social practice. She is designing and building a hut to facilitate meditation exercises. After participants experience a guided meditation, she collaborates with them to capture a photo that reflects their mental state during the meditation. In an era when we are continually deluged with information, re-creating participant’s imagined spaces creates a portal for working in reverse; solidifying otherworldly ideas and unrealistic imaginations.
Taliesin Gilkes-Bower
Taliesin is an interdisciplinary artist who works in video, photography, sculpture, and sound art. His work investigates how communities respond creatively to oppression and seeks to outline complex power structures in new ways. He is currently working on a project about the relationship between the DEA, CIA, dancehall, and Jamaican political violence. Entitled Orion Sound Station (17° 58' N 76°48' W), the project is a multichannel video, photography and sculptural sound system installation that explores the intersection of Jamaican dancehall culture and the DEA and CIA’s history of intervention into endemic Jamaican political violence. The installation also serves as a platform for live musical performances, and pre-recorded audio pieces from a globally diverse group of artists engaging complex narratives about the intersection and complexity of African and Afro-Diasporic culture with state violence.
Taro Hattori
Taro is an installation artist and teaches at California College of the Arts, originally from Tokyo, Japan and currently lives in Richmond, CA. His recent works focus on relating sculpture and human interaction, incorporating music and/or conversations as integral parts of the creative process. In tribute to Ohlone culture, Taro's current project is a participatory project in which the audience will be able to listen to traditional Ohlone songs while underwater in a swimming pool. He is interested in creating a poetic experience to help understand the history that lies beneath the ground and the land we live on.
Ala Mohseni
Ala Mohseni was born in Tehran, Iran. His career began in the theater and then advertising, in the early 1990s, before moving on to filmmaking in 2004 with his first film “The Life” about a pioneer of Iranian cinema. At Agapolis, Ala is producing RED minus 2, an experimental multimedia performance staging based on the life of Reza Abdoh, an avant-garde Iranian playwright and director, who died of AIDS in 1995 at the age of 32. This project is the first stage of a development plan for an experimental feature-length film about Abdoh. The project will be a contemporary performance by three to five performers inspired by Iranian traditional theater genres including Ta’zieh, Takht-e Hozi, Zoorkhaneh rituals, etc.
Hope to see you there!
-The Building 180 Team