Video by documentarian & alum Trey Burns, underwritten by the Corsicana Visitors’ Bureau.
KELLI RAE ADAMS - North Adams, Massachusetts – 2nd Floor Studio
kelli rae adams creates installation-based works that examine prevailing economic systems and probe our existing relationships to labor, currency, and value. With an MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Visual Arts and Spanish from Duke University, kelli studied ceramics intensively in Japan, where she apprenticed over a period of five years with Tetsuro Hatabe, a master potter in the Karatsu tradition. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally at venues including MASS MoCA (currently: Forever in Your Debt), the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University and the Museum of International Ceramic Art (Denmark). / While in Corsicana, kelli created an added dimension of her project, Forever in Your Debt, a multiyear endeavor visualizing the student debt crisis in the U.S. Over 900 white stoneware bowls (referencing the offering bowl, the household change bowl) represent the average individual U.S. student debt—currently $37,000—in volumetric form; each bowl holds one pint of coins (or about $40 worth), their red glazed interiors representative of the proverbial red ink, slowly obscured when they are filled with change from participants. Newly made vessels will represent accrued interest on this principal sum for an upcoming exhibition in Chicago. Inspired by the printing press made available to her, kelli was also working on designing a limited-edition, large-scale print to commemorate Forever In Your Debt, as well as securing venues in key locations along the campaign trail through November 2024. www.kelliraeadams.com
DANIEL MELO MORALES - San Francisco, California – 3rd Floor Studio
Daniel Melo Morales is a first-generation interdisciplinary artist whose works reveal phantasmatic and material relationships embedded among architectural signifiers, acoustic systems, and microhistories. He researches these elements to make new works in the domains of constructed photographs, photo-sculptures, and sound. Daniel received an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. As an experimental and self-taught multi-instrumentalist as well as an interdisciplinary artist, his practice has involved installations, performances, fellowships (including a 2023 Community Action Fellowship at Blue Sky Center), and interventions. Conceptually, he investigates non-linear notions of time and the possible origins of sound outside purely physical factors. A resulting rich palimpsest includes digital and analog sound recordings, and he holds in high regard the physicality of sound as received by an audience. Among his aims is to spark new experiences through intentional decontextualization. / In Corsicana Daniel explored how 100W produces, absorbs, and responds to sound, including outside a strictly physical—meteorological and temporal—context given its history as a meeting place for Independent Order of Odd Fellows. He also worked on a series of large-scale and layered photographs that explored the archive of his great-grandfather in Medellín, Colombia, an architect commissioned for notable works which still stand today. Some of the architect’s constructions had been turned over to the state and are in use for the public good, such as for a community theater and another for a neighborhood recreation center. Daniel began researching these constructions which specifically were handed over for the good of the community. Interested in the public transformations and augmented public conceptions of space for community, Daniel made over ten large-scale constructed photographs which he installed with a sound installation on the third floor of 100W. www.danielmelo.com
JANNINE HORSFORD - Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago – February Writing Studio
Jannine Horsford is a storyteller who is interested in the compression of poems as narrative vessels. Her poetry has been published in The Caribbean Writer, Caribbean Quarterly, The Manchester Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Moko Magazine, Magma, and others. In 2016, she was shortlisted for the Small Axe Poetry Prize. In 2021, she was longlisted for the Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers’ Prize. Most recently (April 2022), she won the Bocas Emerging Writers’ Fellowship for Poetry. Drawing inspiration from the oral narrative-weaving traditions of family as well as the oral and literary history of Trinidad and Tobago, Jannine crafts poems with a strong sense of character and place, in which clarity and liveliness of imagery are vital. Embodying the poet as listener, Jannine is attuned to the cadences of language as well as to the material she can mine from dreams or from words spoken in earshot. / While in Corsicana, Jannine was at work finalizing her first poetry collection, which places focus on two years spent in rural England as well as on her native island of Tobago as distinct from Trinidad. She was extracting poems for a chapbook to be published with Peekash Press this spring. Finally, she was planning and honing themes for her second poetry collection, which centers on home.
SAIBA VARMA, PhD - San Diego, California – January Writing Studio
Saiba Varma is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. Her first book, The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir won the Edie Turner First Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association. She is also the co-editor of Decolonizing Bodies: Stories of Embodied Resistance, Healing and Liberation, under contract with Bloomsbury Press. Saiba received her PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University and has conducted ethnographic research in Kashmir for more than fifteen years and published dozens of academic articles in major peer-reviewed journals in anthropology and related disciplines. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Nation, Al Jazeera, Salon, Truthout, The Millions, Scroll.in, and The Wire. / While in Corsicana, Saiba finished her nonfiction book titled This Information May Kill You. Part memoir, part cultural commentary based on years of research, the book comes out of family history and grieving that melds with a politico-culturally apt investigation of how one grasps reality in the face of mis- and disinformation. How do we know what we think we know amid the intentionally disorienting layers? How do we form relationships of trust despite and within this landscape? Global in scope but deeply personal, the work describes the ambient yet terrorizing effects of psychological warfare (psyops) on populations that are its putative targets.
https://anthropology.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/faculty-profiles/saiba-varma.html