Meet January’s Artists in Residence
Baris Gokturk, Juan Jose Cielo and Miguel Braceli
This month’s residency is generously sponsored by Shepard Broad Foundation.
Baris Gokturk
Baris Gokturk is interested in the potential for change in the political realm, the shape-shifting possibilities within the aesthetic language, and the way these two realms relate to each other. He reconstructs documents about current and historical events or individuals existing within or against the dominant paradigms of power in three-dimensional layers, hybrid fragments and installations that oscillate between drawing, painting and sculpture. He rebuilds the photographic image as a physical surface first, and then peels it off as a displaced piece of skin that is then reapplied to other found or sculpted objects. This layered process leads to an archeological network of contemporary culture while exposing, dismantling and restructuring existing relations between the larger scale of history and the intimate sphere of the individual.
Baris is a Turkish artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He teaches at John Hopkins University, Parsons School of Design and Columbia University. Gokturk has shown his work internationally in US, Germany, Spain, France, Korea, Turkey and Puerto Rico. Recent museum exhibitions include Pera Museum in Istanbul and SECCA in Winston-Salem, NC. He recently completed a mural for Columbia University!s Butler Library and a commission by the Public Art Fund as part of Art on the Grid. His solo exhibition Public Secret could be seen at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.
Juan Jose Cielo
Juan Jose Cielo creates simulations in painting where futuristic technology is a force to experience the sublime. He creates space where Latino myth/folklore are part of the visions of a futuristic world, and combines American dreams with his Colombian heritage. In these scenes, people use technology and futuristic ships as vehicles for cultural expression. The paintings reenact timeless moments that recur in the life of immigrants, like family reunions and funerals. The work considers how diaspora communities maintain identity in a new place, and how this changes over generations. The futuristic vehicles, their decorations and their placement in rural landscapes are all symbols of transformations in family, language and how we relate to our heritages over time.
Cielo has exhibited at The Coral Springs Museum of Art, the Consulate of Colombia in New York City, XVII Festival Internacional de la Imagen in Manizales and The Alliance Française in Bogota. In 2017 Cielo was an artist in residence with scientists at a full-scale Mars simulation program: the Mars Desert Research station in Utah. His work has been featured on Univision 41 evening news, National Geographic Traveler magazine, El Heraldo Newspaper and ARTnews. Cielo is the winner of YoungArts’s $25,000 Jorge M. Pérez Award 2022.
Miguel Braceli
Miguel Braceli is an artist, architect, educator. He works with large-scale participatory projects based on collective learning and making. They are site-specific works that bring together communities, schools, and organizations in the development of Proyectos Formativos (Formative Projects): community-based projects whose main medium is education. Addressing social-political issues, these projects happen in public space to create communal responses from, with and for specific communities. He works at the intersection of art, architecture, and social practices; exploring geopolitical and local conflicts.
Most of these projects have been large-scale works developed in Latin America, Europe, and the United States; exhibited in galleries and institutions through photography, sculpture and film. He has led educational projects with institutions such as Documenta Fifteen, MoMA, Washington Projects for the Arts, Matadero Madrid, among others. His most recent participations and recognitions include Skowhegan (2022), Art Omi (2021), AIM Bronx Museum Fellow (2022), Future Architecture Fellow (2019), and Young Artist Award of the Principality of Asturias (2018). In 2021, he founded LA ESCUELA___ together with Siemens Stiftung International. In 2022, he received a commission by the Percent for Art program for a permanent public artwork in New York City. He is currently a Fulbright Scholar working and living in New York.
