Watermill Center Announces Artists in Residence for the Fall
The Watermill Center has announced its Fall 2012 residency artists. Each year, the organization invites artists to use its buildings and grounds as a laboratory for their visual and performance art practice and projects.
Selection committee members included, among others, Marina Abramovic, Jonathan Safran Foer, Alanna Heiss, Albert Maysles, John Rockwell, Taryn Simon, and Robert Wilson, the artistic director of the center. The 12 artists selected for this year’s fall and spring programs were chosen from over 140 international applications. The four artists in attendance this fall are Katharina Schmitt, Bridget Leak, Rachel Libeskind, and Nova Jiang.
Ms. Schmitt, who is from Germany, will develop a performance installation designed by Marsha Ginsberg and inspired by a 1978-79 performance piece where the artist locked himself in a cage in his studio for a year. In this work, the artist is interested in the role and work of the actor and questions the relationship between performer and the audience’s expectations.
Ms. Leak, an American, will work on “Rhapsodies,” a play dealing with violence on school campuses. It incorporates theater, improvisation, opera, dance, and monologue in a loose and evolving narrative structure. She and Ms. Schmitt will be in residence through Oct. 23.
Ms. Libeskind, also an American, will be in residence with Street Corner Society and Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden to explore the surrounding woods, beaches, and farmsteads of the center. In doing so, they will investigate “the myth of the rural, the poetics of haunting, and the dimensions of nightmare space.” The group will be here from Oct. 25 to Nov. 15, taking advantage of the Halloween period to examine “pagan rites, satanic rituals, and haunted hayrides,” to develop “NightScapes,” inspired by Elie Wiesel’s memoir “Night.”
Finally, Ms. Jiang, an installation artist from New Zealand, will design costumes and props for her interactive project “Ideogenetic Machine,” which transforms participants into the protagonists of an algorythmically generated comic book. Her residency will last from Dec. 3 to Dec. 22.
As in previous years, there will be open rehearsals, lectures, and demonstrations presented free to audiences in Long Island and New York City.