Charline von Heyl, Matt PorterField et al. Receive 2012-13 Wex Artist Residency Awards

The Wexner Center has announced the 2012–13 Artist Residency Awards recipients: in visual arts, painter Charline von Heyl; in film, Matt Porterfield; and in performing arts, two ensemble groups-Bebe Miller Company and Palissimo, both dance theater companies. Check out a video about the residency program here.

Celebrating more than 20 years of vital collaboration and direct support to artists, the center's
Artist Residency Award program offers significant resources for innovators across all creative disciplines, selected each year by the center's curators and director. These unique residencies include considerable financial resources, along with the technical, intellectual, and staff support, along with (mental and physical) space in which to develop new work and engage with Ohio State classes and the Columbus community. A total of $200,000 annually is earmarked for distribution among the Artist Residency Awards.

Notes Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin, "These highly "artist-centric" residencies underscore the center's core commitment to fuel the creative expression of our time, while complementing Ohio State's mission as a leading research institution. Indeed, we believe the Wex Artist Residency Award program is distinctive for its multidisciplinary nature and flexible design, as well as for the breadth and magnitude of resources that are regularly brought to bear. Residency artists at various stages of their careers are allowed the freedom to experiment and sometimes explore entirely new directions in their work. At the same time, their presence on campus and in the community provide for many points of meaningful interaction among the artists, university students and faculty, and the public at large."

Frequently, work produced under the auspices of the Wex travels on to major national and international venues, putting both OSU and Columbus on the global culture map. And several Wexner Center Artist Residency Award recipients have gone on to receive MacArthur Foundation fellowships, National Medal of Arts awards, Tony Awards, "Bessie" Awards (New York Dance and Performance awards), Oscar nominations, Cannes Film Festival awards, Film Independent Spirit awards, and the Wexner Prize, among other recognitions. Frequently, the work produced under the auspices of the Wex travels on to major national and international venues, putting both OSU and Columbus on the global culture map. Recipients have hailed from four continents and numerous countries, including China, Argentina, France, Germany, Iran, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, and the United Kingdom, in addition to the United States and Canada.

MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE 2012-'13 RECIPIENTS:

VISUAL ARTS: CHARLINE VON HEYL
With her Artist Residency Award, New York-based painter Charline von Heyl will be developing an ambitious suite of new work for inclusion in the Wexner Center's fall 2013 exhibition Facture and Fidelity: Painting Between Abstraction and Figuration, 1945-2010, a major group show co-organized by Wexner Center Chief Curator Christopher Bedford and New York-based art historian Katy Siegel.

Facture and Fidelity considers the work of a broad-ranging group of American and European painters whose practices reflect an equal investment in representational strategies on one hand, and abstraction/materiality on the other. In doing so, the exhibition offers a fresh theory of contemporary painting, surveying a range of artistic approaches-from affinity to erasure, and from the hyperbolic to the ineffable-that describe something fundamental to late modern painting, but also to contemporary life.

Her works are in the collections of the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others.

FILM: MATT PORTERFIELD
Matt Porterfield makes exquisitely shot narrative films that employ surprising documentary techniques to create portraits of working-class life. With the Artist Residency Award, the Wexner Center will support a new film currently in development. As part of his residency activities, Porterfield will do post-production work at the center's Film/Video Studio. He will also engage with local college and high school students and screen his work a public program.

His feature, Putty Hill (set in his hometown of Baltimore), which Porterfield introduced and screened at the Wex last year, is one of the most acclaimed American indie films of recent years. Called "extraordinary" by New Yorker film editor Richard Brody, it received many "best- of" mentions for 2011, and was also included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Porterfield's first feature film, Hamilton, was released theatrically in 2006 and continues to tour festivals, museums, and repertory theatres around the world. He's in the final stages of post- production on his third film, I Used to Be Darker, which is expected to premiere during the 2012 fall film festival season.

Porterfield, who also recently received a coveted Creative Capital grant, lectures on screenwriting, theory, and production in the Film & Media Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University.

PERFORMING ARTS: BEBE MILLER COMPANY and PALISSIMO
Ohio State dance professor Bebe Miller and her award-winning company will premiere the dance theater work A History September 27–30, 2012, following a series of creative Wexner Center residencies with her team of collaborators. Both reflective and forward- thinking, the evening-length duet involves mining the creative processes she has closely developed with dancers Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones, and dramaturgical collaborator Talvin Wilks. In particular, they have delved into the past decade of works such as the Bessie Award-winning Verge (2001) through to Landing/Place (2005-also a Bessie winner), and Necessary Beauty (2008)-all of which were also supported by the Wexner Center. Amplified with video by Lily Skove that juxtaposes their live and virtual bodies, Miller and the dancers reveal the nuanced interpersonal dynamics that informs their creative quests. As The Washington Post has written, "Bebe Miller is a cartographer of human emotions, mapping the landscape of the passions of her dance with luminous intelligence." And the the New York Times writes, "What makes Miller's choreography so moving are the sudden moments of mystery...coolly thoughtful yet dispatched with consummate ease."

The premiere of A History will be presented in conjunction with the exhibition Bebe Miller: Tracing History which will be on view downtown at Ohio State's Urban Arts Space in downtown Columbus August 25–September 29, 2012. Curated by the Wexner Center's Jerry Dannemiller, this exhibition will provide further insight into Bebe Miller's trajectory as one of the leading choreographers of her generation. It will also feature a new video installation by Maya Ciarrocchi that will tour nationally with the performance A History as a companion piece.

During their Wexner Center-sponsored residency, Bebe Miller and her collaborators will offer a series of discussions, workshops, open rehearsals, and post-performance talks connected to both their performance and the exhibition that will be of particular interest to OSU dance students, the local dance community and her avid Columbus audience.

Bebe Miller was recently selected as one of first class of 21 Doris Duke Artists which extends direct funding of up to $275,000 to outstanding performing artists. She is also the recipient this year of the Ohio State's Sphinx Award, which recognizes outstanding faculty and staff members who have been role models and inspirations to Ohio State students.

This Artist Residency Award affords the New York City-based dance theater company Palissimo, led by Czechoslovakian-born artistic director and choreographer Pavel Zus?tiak, the opportunity to rehearse and mount all three full-length sections of its enigmatic and atmospheric Painted Bird Trilogy for the first time in sequence. The trilogy (Bastard, Amidst, and Strange Cargo) is inspired by the classic Jerzy Kosinski novel of the same name set in wartime Eastern Europe, in which a brilliantly painted bird, mistaken for an imposter, is violently killed by its own flock. Zus?tiak's ambitious project excavates the tale's themes of identity, otherness, displacement, and transformation in three separate, uniquely staged performance events. Each section of this tour-de-force features live music by composer Christian Frederickson (well-known to Wexner Center audiences as a former member of the chamber-rock band Rachel's).

Audience members can attend either a pairing of two sections or come on the final day of performance for the full three-part experience, which will utilize both the Performance Space as well as the Black Box on Mershon Stage in novel configurations. The residency begins September 4, and performances are September 12 (parts 1 and 2), 13 (parts 2 and 3), and 16 (all 3 Parts).

While in residence, the company will also work with a large group of local volunteers who will perform in Part 1 of the trilogy (those interested in volunteering should contact Sarah Swinford at 614 292-6190 or sswinford@wexarts.org), as well as offer a master class and discussion for dance students at Ohio State and members of the Columbus dance community.

The Painted Bird Trilogy is a Palissimo production co-commissioned by Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, Stanica Zilina in Slovakia, La MaMa, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and Performance Space 122.

For more information, go to www.wexarts.org/about/residencies.