JOHNNY DEFEO
Taos, New Mexico - 100W 3rd Floor Studio
Johnny has lived a majority of his life in places with easy access to vast unmolested landscapes. He’s noted a lack of access to public lands in this region of Texas, or at least a lack of immediately notable ones for someone who is not familiar with the area. Thinking about what those areas provide in terms of visual pleasure, recreation and connection to the land, I have spent time here considering what not having access to these spaces can mean for the people of a region. / At 100W I challenged myself to recalibrate my definition of what might be considered ‘magic’ in the natural world toward smaller revelations — a budding tree in a drainage ditch, crocus poking through the soil beneath a brush pile, sun rays beaming through a live oak in the middle of the cemetery. My work at this residency has set me on a course towards working with the more archetypical and essential elements of the landscape, and composing them into paintings that illustrate the mythical and magical qualities of the wilderness removed from the idea of specific place altogether.
MATHILDE LAVENNE
Lille, France - 100W 2nd Floor Studio
Mathilde Lavenne's practice investigates the notion of the invisible as it appears across scientific, philosophical, and historical realms. The complex vocabulary of images that make up her work, from still works on paper to 3D renderings to digital film combine multiple methods that span the technological spectrum. / During her residency in Corsicana, she was able to expand and develop her research into light and its connection to the history of cinema. At the center of this project is a film in which natural objects, including plants from a 16th century herbarium and fossils millions of years old, are illuminated by different wavelengths of light, causing subtle shifts and movements depending on their inherent luminescence. The footage suggests that matter contains living memory, and emphasizes the animistic possibilities of cinema. A related series of watercolors, based on 19th century archival engravings of the sun, mark a return for Mathilde to an earlier form of making. / Using a digital rendering of a cotton flower as a symbolic starting point of a cultural memory, Mathilde has also turned her lens toward the origins of Corsicana, collecting numerous narratives from local residents in what she hopes will become a continuing project.
ELISSA ALTMAN
Newtown, Connecticut - 100W Writing Studio
Elissa is the James Beard Award-winning author of the memoirs Motherland, Treyf, Poor Man’s Feast, and the upcoming On Permission. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Connecticut Book Award, and Maine Literary Award for memoir, Altman’s work has appeared in Orion, On Being, O: The Oprah Magazine, LitHub, the Wall Street Journal, Dame, Lion’s Roar, The Guardian, and the Washington Post, where her column, Feeding My Mother, ran for a year. Altman writes and speaks widely on the intersection of sustenance, nature, and the creative spirit, and has appeared live on the TEDx stage and at the Public Theater in New York. The 2023 Barnswallow Writer-in-Residence in Maine, she teaches the craft of memoir at the Fine Arts Work Center, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, College of William and Mary, and internationally. She lives in Connecticut with book designer Susan Turner, and their small suburban herd of animals. / In Corsicana Elissa is at work finishing her fourth book, On Permission, which is a hybrid craft book/memoir coming from Godine Books in 2024. Elissa is was working on her second draft.
LEIGH N. GALLAGHER
Philadelphia - 100W Writing Studio
Leigh’s fiction concerns itself with quests for meaning, integrity, and connection amidst the atomization and destabilization of contemporary American life. Under the influence of affect theory, art history, and poetics, she’s interested in fiction that grapples with human experience at its most mystifying, and endeavors to write generous, multipronged narratives that foreground the evocative possibilities of language and syntax. Her first novel, Who You Might Be, was published by Henry Holt in 2022, and her short stories and nonfiction have appeared in both traditional publications and experimental formats through collaborations with artists and musicians. / While in Corsicana, her focus is on an early draft of a new novel set in California, where she grew up, about the cultural descendants of a legendary poet and their various claims on San Francisco's disappeared bohemianism.
MARTIN JACKSON
Berlin, Germany - 100W Writing Studio
Martin Jackson is a UK-born, Germany-based writer of poetry, fiction, and art texts. His poetry received an Eric Gregory Award, and the inaugural 'Collections Grant' from the International Literary Showcase. A pamphlet, ‘I find I felt’, was published this summer by If a Leaf Falls Press. He also collaborates with artists around the world to write exhibition and catalogue texts. In residence Martin is writing poetry that infiltrates, occupies, and repurposes digital technologies.
