Alex Brown in his studio, Des Moines, Iowa, December 27, 2018. Picture: Polly Watson.
The Des Moines-based Alex Brown Basis has introduced the 5 contributors of its 2024 residency program. Fatma Belkıs, Woohee Cho, Mark Joshua Epstein, Anjan Modak, and Rodriguez Remor, a collective comprising Denis Rodriguez and Leonardo Remor, will every occupy Brown’s former studio within the nonprofit Mainframe Studios, a refurbished Nineteen Seventies telecom constructing close to downtown Des Moines. The residencies are versatile, various in size from one to 3 months, with contributors receiving lodging, airfare, and a $1,000 month-to-month expense allowance.
Belkıs, who lives and works in Istanbul, makes use of textual content, video, and printed matter to look at private relationships, each romantic and platonic, and the way these intersect with the bigger dynamics of public political engagement. She is at present at work on an set up and publication titled Your Worst Good friend, which appears on the affect of childhood expertise on grownup relationships. In Des Moines, she’s going to work on Overreaction, a bit of docu-fiction exploring rage and worry.
The Seoul-born Cho, who’s at present primarily based in Los Angeles, is a visible artist, experimental filmmaker, and performer. His present work, 10987YOU654ME32US1, interrogates the methods tech corporations announce new merchandise utilizing numbers, giving the phantasm of progress and objectivity, whereas additionally using customized messaging. Throughout his residency, Cho intends to discover features of queer intimacy by numerous lenses.
Epstein, a painter residing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, investigates queer decoration and graphic extra by the lens of cultural inheritance. In Des Moines, he’ll discover the historical past of Jewish immigration to Iowa courting again to the mid-ninteenth century, creating work that attracts on influences of Japanese European Jewish design motifs adorning native structure and proven in photographic documentation of buildings within the area.
The West Bengal, India–born Modak lives and works in Kolkata, the place he creates large-scale works centering the lives of city guide employees, corresponding to migrant building laborers. Primarily drawing on paper, utilizing densely spaced strains and minimal colour, Modak foregrounds clean fields in his works as consultant of the areas occupied by these denied a spot in historical past. He’ll use his time in Des Moines to proceed this undertaking inside a brand new context.
Rodriguez Remor, a pair of artists, researchers, and curators residing in Bahia, Brazil, carry to bear a important view of coloniality; usually working in clay, they search to develop ideas of sustainability past the logic of consumption and productiveness and in help of other modes of residing. Throughout their residency, they may proceed current work delving into Indigenous North American materials tradition and ceramic traditions.
The residency program was established in 2020 in honor of Brown (1966–2019), a Des Moines native who established his profession as a painter and as a guitarist in hardcore bands Gorilla Biscuits, Aspect by Aspect, and Undertaking X in New York earlier than returning to his hometown to work there over the course of twenty years. The residency welcomes artists working throughout all types of media and in numerous phases of their careers. Contributors usually are not required to provide work, however solely to expertise “the working situations Brown present in Des Moines—the power to make the work you need to make, free from the day by day affect of being immersed in a significant metropolitan scene however with out the isolation of a rural residency, in an distinctive studio setting and a relaxed and nice residing setting,” in line with a basis press launch.
