E1: Contemplating Process
JULY 17 – AUGUST 14, 2004
Featuring painting, photography and video by:
Esther Hidalgo, Lara Oliveira, Katherine Radke, Christopher Saah, & Dylan Scholinski
The Exercises for Emerging Artists is a mentorship program created by Transformer to support artists at critical points or crossroads in their growth and development. The program is designed to connect artists eager for a foothold in the Washington arts community to each other and the community while creating and discussing new work. Artists participating in this inaugural program enjoyed an opportunity to develop a series or body of work under the mentorship of Transformer's Exercises Advisory Council (Ken Ashton, Jayme McLellan, Dan Steinhilber, and Trish Tillman). The participants received nurturing feedback in bi-monthly meetings, held over the course of four months in Transformer's project space. Each session served to stimulate peer critique and dialogue among the artists about their work and their future plans.
E1: Contemplating Process refers to the overall thread consistent within each meeting. Time and again, the focus of each session referred back to the process of creating work. The sessions also touched upon technique, inspiration, hopes, and obstacles of sustaining a career in the arts. This public exhibition is the culmination of work created throughout the program, and serves to help the artists develop a community of support for their continued growth and development. Please join us in supporting the next stage of their careers.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Esther Hidalgo was born in Washington DC and raised in Langley Park, MD where her father ran a photo studio/business out of their basement. Growing up in a commercially photographic environment and its accouchements, she was mildly indifferent to this medium and never seriously considered it as a creative outlet or career choice, only sporadically picking up one of his cameras out of boredom. A former creative writing major, it wasn't until she sought to relieve a devastating period of writer's block, that she grasped a camera in an attempt to address all she was feeling when words were simply insufficient. She is recently graduated with a BFA degree in Photography from the Corcoran College of Art & Design.
Lara Oliveira: Born in S"o Paulo, Brazil, Oliveira grew up in Brasilia and then moved to the U.S. At the age of 19 she moved to Switzerland to pursue her education in art and design at the Art Center College of Design, Europe. After two years she moved back to the U.S. to finish her undergraduate degree in Communication Design (BFA 1997) at the Art Center College of Design in California. Oliveira worked as an art director in San Francisco and Los Angeles before returning to the D.C. area where she completed her MFA at George Mason University in Fine Arts (2004). She is currently an adjunct instructor of digital media at GMU in Fairfax (VA), and she continues her work in multimedia projects and in painting.
Katherine Radke is a recent graduate from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, where she studied photography and video. Her work has also been exhibited at The Hosiery, Fusebox and Signal 66. Katherine is currently researching Mid-West ghost/medium conferences with her fifteen year old cousin for an upcoming trip to North Dakota.
Christopher Saah currently works as a freelance graphic / interactive designer, and has been involved in projects at the National Museum of American Art, the American Film Institute, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His personal work extends to various forms of imaging including photography, film, as well as print and motion graphics. He has actively worked in all of these media since graduating from St. Mary's College, Maryland, in 1998 where he majored in Philosophy and minored in English. He recently received a scholarship to the Maryland Institute College of Art, and will begin attending the graduate program in Photography and Digital Imaging this fall.
When Dylan Scholinski was 15 years old, the artist born Daphne Scholinski was diagnosed as "an inappropriate female" and locked up in a mental hospital. Scholinski spent the rest of her high school years undergoing extreme femininity training. At 18, her insurance ran out and she was discharged. Now 37 years old, Dylan Scholinski resides in Washington D.C. and is a distinguished artist, author, and public speaker (The Last Time I Wore a Dress: A Memoir Penguin/Putnam). Dylan has appeared on 20/20, Dateline and Today to discuss his experiences and has been featured in a variety of newspapers and magazines. His work not only portrays the anguish of his hospital years but also his ultimate triumph. Dylan received his BFA in Minnesota in 1990 and an MFA from Pratt Institute in 1992.