FIRST DRAFT RESIDENCY
Est. May 2020-June 2022
Our residency program welcomed artists to occupy REVOLVE’s physical gallery space in Asheville to create and curate their own work and interactions for the public over the course of one - two months. Participants in the residency had the opportunity to host weekly virtual “studio visits,” and coordinate a community engagement events hosted by REVOLVE. This residency was created in response to the pandemic, to keep our space utilized and supportive for our creative community. See our past residents below.
Mike Durkin
MAY-JUNE ‘22
Mike Durkin (He/Him/His) is a large-bodied multidisciplinary social practice performance artist residing in Asheville. Mike was born in Boro Park, Brooklyn, and has lived in Philadelphia for the last 10 years before moving back to NYC. Mike is guided by the intersection between art and the everyday. With his performance group, The Renegade Company he has created site-responsive social practice productions exploring houselessness, food access, place, and gentrification. He is currently developing a performative cookbook that looks at the role recipes play in communities incorporating dance, video, and communal meal making. Mike has held residencies with Revolve Art Gallery in Asheville, NC, Space at Ryder Farm, Drop Forge, and Tool, and the Hambidge Arts Center in Rabun Gap, GA. Mike’s work has been presented at the Brandywine River Museum, Barnes Foundation, Mt. Moriah Cemetery, the Life Do Grow Farm, and in parks, churches, and fields, along the streets in Kensington, virtually, and most recently with The Performance Studies program at Texas A&M University. Mike is part of the 2017 MFA in Devised Performance class with Pig Iron Theatre Company/University of the Arts.
For more information, check out: https://www.mikedurkin.info
Instagram: @MikeDurkinProjects
PREVIOUSLY
Moses Sumney
APRIL ‘22
Raised between Ghana and Southern California, Moses Sumney is a singer, writer, and multidisciplinary storyteller. Since emerging in 2014 with a self-released cassette EP, Sumney has ridden waves of word-of-mouth praise, arresting visuals, and dynamic live performances alongside forebears like Sufjan Stevens, James Blake, and Solange. His 2017 debut album Aromanticism topped the end-of-year lists of tastemaker hubs like Bandcamp, the New York Times, NPR, and Pitchfork. It explored themes of solitude and lovelessness. In 2019, Sumney received a SXSW special jury award for his music video work and was awarded a Macdowell Fellowship. In 2020, his first published essay, "Stateside Statelessness," appeared in Fight of the Century (Simon & Schuster), an immigration-centric anthology edited by Ayelet Waldman and Puliter-Prizer winner Michael Chabon. Sumney's 2020 sophomore double album græ has received top marks from Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, and The Guardian, to name a few. Described as a "conceptual patchwork about greyness," it's his first work to be released since he relocated to North Carolina from Los Angeles. In 2021, he premiered his feature-length performance film Blackalachia at the Perez Art Museum Miami during Art Basel. Directed by Sumney, the film and accompanying live album were recorded entirely outdoors in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Jen Murphy
MARCH ‘22
Jen made her first puppet in 2003 as a way to bring creativity and visual impact to a weekly peace vigil in Los Angeles. She is now the founder of the Street Creature Puppet Collective and helps manage the Puppet Clubhouse, a community art space in Asheville, NC. “I love making giant puppets, shadow puppets, lantern parades, crankies and more. I also teach puppetry to kids and community groups.” One of Jen’s mottos is, “Create things you wish existed!” You can check out more of the work Jen is involved in here: Puppet Clubhouse, Asheville Fringe Festival, 12 Baskets Cafe, Society of Saint Andrews Gleaners, the West Asheville Garden Stroll, and the Joyful Revolution.
Angela Davis Fegan
JAN-FEB ‘22
Angela Davis Fegan is a native of Chicago’s South Side. A graduate of Chicago’s famed Whitney Young High School, she received her BFA in Fine Arts from New York’s Parsons School of Design and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Angela has mounted shows at Galerie F, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, the DePaul Art Museum, The Center for Book Arts (NY), the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Hyde Park Art Center, SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries, Columbia’s Glass Curtain Gallery and SPACES (OH). Her work has been selected for book covers including The Truth About Dolls by Jamila Woods, Secondhand by Maya Marshall, and All Blue So Late by Laura Swearingen-Steadwell. Her MFA thesis, and on going practice, the lavender menace poster project, has been written up by The Offing (LA Review of Books), Hyperallergic, Chicago Magazine, the RedEye, Go Magazine, Pop Sugar, the Chicago Reader, and Newcity.
Stephen Parks
DECEMBER ‘21
Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, Stephen Parks is a designer and artist living and working in Boone, NC. Stephen received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018.
His work fluctuates between computational mediums and lived experiences that utilize installation and book-making as primary channels. Since 2018, Parks’ has worked to understand the rise of mega-fulfillment centers, the gig economy, along with social and consumer intimacy, and how these subjects are linked to whole earth systems.
Check out more at parksstephen.com
Lori Park
NOVEMBER ‘21
A current MFA candidate at WCU is occupying the First Draft space to prepare an installation involving sculpture, video and movement. Here’s a word from the artist herself, “Welcome to my MFA candidacy show. This is the time where Western Carolina University and I decide if we want to stay together. My work is an attempt to have a conversation between real and pretend, serious and absurd. The silliness of trauma, as well as the somber-ness of childhood. The duality we navigate on a daily basis. My focus of this show? This is on nocking the arrow. The feel of the string against my fingertips. The feel of the strength of my back and the tired in my shoulders as I draw back the bow. But mostly, it’s an effort to not give a damn about the bullseye.”
Check out the work by appointment only by reaching out to Lori at lmpark1@catamount.wcu.edu or be sure to stop by November 19th from 6-9pm.
More about Lori: lorenacrowepark.com
More about the WCU MFA Program: wcumfa.com
Gina Cornejo
SEPT-OCT ‘21
Raised by a professional jazz dancer from Chicago (+ a mathematician educator from Michigan), Gina’s captivation with the arts began in her bloodline. She believes our distinct path of artistic expression is based on the risk of venturing out to seek within; that there is a pinnacle of honesty to be revealed by curating private autobiographical moments for our universal collective healing. Writing, solo performance, and sacred travel serve as her guides to cultivate this style of exposed storytelling.
For more please visit ginacornejo.com
Peter Speer
JULY ‘21
Peter Speer is an artist and sound designer based in Asheville, NC. His work explores the quiet stillness at the center of loud fast things. Working with both paper-based collage and voltage-based soundscapes, his work celebrates the ongoing and endlessly evolving symphony of the everyday.
"Slow Return" is a collection of new and in-progress sound installations created during the First Draft Residency of July, 2021. These pieces explore and amplify the voices of discarded objects— turntables, overhead projectors, floorstanding speakers— activating the gallery space with their collective drone.
Speer received his MFA through the Sound Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently the Media Coordinator at Make Noise, a local synthesizer manufacturer.
Website: https://www.peterspeer.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.speer/
Wyatt Grant
MAY/JUNE ‘21
My name is Wyatt Grant. I'm an artist and musician based in Asheville, North Carolina. I received my BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, specializing in Painting and Fiber & Material Studies.
Often taking form as paintings, prints, and sculptures, my work operates in an accessible, "graphic" realm that frequently makes detours into intimate, cerebral narratives. I like to investigate the many ways art and design vocabularies coalesce; considering the profound, subliminal levels in which we interact with both realms.
My time at REVOLVE will give me the chance to physically expand my painting practice and further investigate these themes. I'll be drawing from a body of images I've been generating from the past year including portraits, landscapes, patterns, and plans for designed objects and sculptures.
IG: @wygrant | website: HERE
WCU MFA
APRIL ‘21 (part two)
FICTION OF THE REAL | April 20th - May 4th
The title of the show is a quote from Avery Gordon’s book Ghostly Matters. The artwork in this show is a response to the ideas in Gordon’s book and to “the ways in which our stories can be understood as fictions of the real.”
Includes work by:
Mo Kessler, Jen Gordon, Perry Houlditch, Eli Blasko
Seth Echlin, Lori Park, Kyle Kelsey, Kate Chassner, & Susan Alta Martin
WCU MFA
APRIL ‘21 (part one)
an interactive installation by Lex Turnbull + Non Nulla
April 7th - 19th at Revolve Gallery
Value Space aims to provide a space for you to ruminate (room-inate) on how the body acts as a boundary, specifically when navigating a space of anti-objects and non-places. The sculptures that surround you in Value Space have been carefully constructed to be an antithesis of commonplace forms. Value Space also interrogates the utility of products. Namely, discarded products that are unusable. By upcycling them into fungible art objects, we give away the game like a political cartoon: naming things to restrain their function.
Value Space exists to provide you with pause + anonymity as you contemplate your value as a boundary (body) and take up space.
Rose Wind Jerome
MARCH ‘21
Originally from Germany, Rose was raised in Orlando, Florida, and has lived in London, England, Brooklyn, NY, and Woodstock, NY. She currently resides in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
“My work has grown from an interest in the power of relationships and people’s need for intimacy, communion, and kinship. I am especially interested in the way photography can be used not simply to capture, but to shape our ideas about how a family is formed and functions.”
During my First Draft Residency I will be preparing and
installing an exhibition of photographs from my series Black Mountain.
I am eager to commune and will have multiple opening evenings
(due to capacity limitations) The dates are tbd the first week of the residency, but will most likely be Thursday evenings. I hope to facilitate conversation and connection about anything from vibrations to photography to dirt. Wherever we feel inclined to go.
I'm there to talk and listen and I can just step back and read or fiddle with my phone or play with my child while you and your group view the work. I will not play the ukelele.
There will be guided tours and discussions and HOME SCHOOL will also facilitate a panel discussion with myself and another female/mother photographer. The discussion will revolve around the intersections of family and photography and how we use photography differently to explore our role as parent/mother/artist.
Jess Speer
FEBRUARY ‘21
Jess is a sound and radio artist, and is the Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow for 2020-21. During her residency, she will be researching and reporting on radio artists as she adds them to the Wave Farm Radio Art Archive, and will be composing her monthly broadcast of the Radio Witch Moon Hotline program. Limited spaces will be offered for Radio Witch tarot readings on the New Moon on Feb 11, and a live listening session and ritual for the Radio Witch Moon Hotline broadcast will be held virtually on the Full Moon on Saturday, Feb 27. The week of Feb 15, Speer will lead a youth radio workshop centered on performance and radio artist Jacki Apple's 1992 piece, Redefining Democracy in America, Part 6: Leap of Faith
The week of February 15, Jess will be leading a youth radio workshop via Zoom. Jess will also focus on using the space and time to develop the edition of the radio art piece (Radio Witch Moon Hotline) that will be broadcast on that month’s full moon, as well as producing short introductions to radio art pieces by various artists selected for the Wave Farm Radio Art Archive. Each week, Jess will host a studio visit to share about the artists she’s researching that week and their work. She will also share drafts of compositions for the full moon piece on social media. In addition, Jess will host a live listening session of the Radio Witch piece as it’s broadcast on the full moon as well.
Parallel Project
JANUARY ‘21
Isa Bowser and Josh Finck present a collaborative performance endeavor; Parallel Project for the month of January. SUPPOSITION is a series of interactive, immersive, disorientations and reality distortions.
Performances:
Dead Ringer - January 9, 10, & 11
Tiger In The Museum - January 23, 24, & 25
Sense Restraint - January 30, 31, & February 1
Elisa Faires
NOVEMBER + DECEMBER ‘20
Elisa Faires is a composer and performer of music, sounds, voices and all things aural. In her residency at Revolve, she will be facilitating a laboratory of exploring sonic and visual manifestations of transmutation and alchemy. Artists, fellow musicians, performers and other trusted and responsible friends and persons will come and collaborate safely and socially distance within the space.
Spectral Habitat (Elisa Faires + Meg Mulhearn)- Election Day Drone
On November 3rd, Spectral Habitat prepared a series of relaxing virtual environments for FIRST DRAFT - Watch below:
WCU MFAs
OCTOBER ‘20
“Hope is a Horizon that human beings can permanently fabricate” will be a WCU MFA exhibition experiment of mapping hope. The Project Space at REVOLVE will be transformed into a map of various physical expressions of hope. As we experience shifts that forever change how we move through life, we begin to understand just how fluid hope is. The constructed horizon of hope is not universal, we all hold space for hope differently. As we build hope on the horizon line within ourselves and our communities, we are engaged in the sharing and building of space. The title of the show was pulled from an interview with Alexander Kluge, but the concept was equally inspired by a quote from Don DeLillo’s, White Noise:
“out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.”
Coco Villa
SEPTEMBER ‘20
Coco Villa is an Afro-Colombian interdisciplinary artist. Villa was born in New York and raised throughout the United States, South America, and the Caribbean. She grew up dancing salsa, merengue, and cumbia, and started sewing as a child under the influence of her grandmother, a wedding dress designer at the time, and her mother, who worked in upholstery and furniture design. In her late teens, she began to explore modern dance and performance art, and experimenting with film photography and self portraiture.
Coco’s residency is also supported by our friends at Engaging Collections
IG: @engagingcollections
More about Coco:
https://wwwcasadecoco.space/
IG: @_casadecoco_
Liz Williams
AUGUST ‘20
Through means of photography, digital mixed media, and graphic design, Liz seeks to collaborate with her community and create uplifting artwork and conversation reflective of the LGBTQ identity and the nuances of it. In doing so, she hopes to create work that is a catalyst for empowerment and positive change.
More about Liz: https://makemesomeart.com/
IG: @makemesomeart
Take a tour of the work made during the residency with @engagingcollections (Lydia See) and Liz Williams.
Lex Turnbull
JULY ‘20
Lex uses art as a tool for exploring and exploiting various false notions of safety, with all of their comedy and tragedy. Lex's time in this residency will be split working on art and Printed (still) Matters. P(s)M will be an annual self-published publication about self-publishers and zinesters who use printed matter to utilize or navigate independent presses and self-publishing to bridge gaps in communities.
You can see more of Lex's work + projects at lexturnbull.com.
Tom Ashcraft
JUNE ‘20
Tom Ashcraft is an inquiry based artist who navigates in and out of the public realm with purposeful wandering. His diverse practice is rooted in object/place making and the curiosities and rituals of everyday life. Tom is also a founding member of Workingman Collective, a rotating group whose membership, goals and mission change with each project.
Tom and Workingman Collective are represented by Hemphill Fine Arts, D.C. , Tracey Morgan Gallery, Asheville NC, and have exhibited + produced work in the U.S., Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Molly Sawyer
MAY ‘20
Molly is a collector of things botanical. Not of houseplants but of the parts of nature that the earth leaves behind as evidence of the changes it continually moves through. You can find more about her HERE.
Follow her IG @mlsawyerart
