New Year, New Stuff

As 2012 begins, I'm looking forward to new opportunities and savoring some of the brighter spots of last year. 

Big news first: I'm excited to announce I have been selected as one of two 2012 Regional Emerging Artists in Residence for the winter/spring at Artspace in downtown Raleigh. I'll be as much of a fixture there as time allows from January to June. My studio will be on the second floor, adjacent to the other Artist-in-residence, Sarah West. This residency, truly, is an honor, and I hope I can do it justice. Many of the artists who have held this residency in the past are folks I respect a whole lot.

I'm also involved in two shows happening now, one of which opens Friday at the beautiful new VAE space on W. Martin Street. Contemporary South should be a rad one — it was juried by Xandra Eden of the Weatherspoon in Greensboro, and the theme is near and dear. 

Meanwhile, a selection of work from the past three years is on view in a two-person show with Luke Miller Buchanan at the Betty Ray McCain Gallery in the Performing Arts Center in downtown Raleigh. If you're there to see the symphony or another performance, I hope you can check it out — it runs through February.

A couple other recent things worth mentioning — Neill Prewitt and I collaborated with The Hot @ Nights at Flanders Gallery. Matt Hedt helped us document it, and the videos are pretty durn good. The Hot @ Nights are a fantastic band, and super dudes, and Flanders was really sweet to put this on.

Yuxtapongo worked on video projections for the ultra-Halloween bash at CAM in October:  

X-tra fun night. 

But a huge part of 2011 for me was the Dream Acts community art project I did with Neill Prewitt and Eleanor Blake. We've just finished a documentary video about the project, which was made possible by a grant from the Town of Chapel Hill. (We presented a rough cut of this doc at the Visualizing Human Rights conference in November.) Through course of the project we made friends, contributed to alliances, and, I think, brought a little light to an extremely vital community too often misrepresented and overlooked. It was a hugely rewarding project and I think this work will continue in various ways. In fact, Eleanor was asked to join the Board of the Human Rights Center, so she's now a part of the very group that was our crucial liasion to the Abbey Court community.   

That's it for now — happy new year!