Artist in Residence

Adriana Gramly is a media artist focusing on the goofy, beautiful, and joyous realms of animation and textile design. Each of her textiles, films, drawing, and writings reflect a search for home and human connection in an overwhelming world. Her biracial experience is often an in-real-life exploration of finding home and getting a taste of it in sometimes contradicting places. It’s the search for these contradictions that lends her work to be made in an intuitive, found object, and collage driven spirit. In 2019, with degrees in Film/Animation/Video and Textile design, Adriana graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her films 1927 and Midden have been included in festivals internationally and she is now a artist in residence at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY.

Emma Safir (b. 1990 she/her/hers) is a Brooklyn-based artist who holds a BFA in Printmaking from RISD and an MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale School of Art.

Emma Safir’s work navigates the opacity of intersubjective experience and the transience of memory. Through the material exploration and manipulation of weaving techniques, smocking, lens-based media, rasterization, upholstery, among other methods, the objects she makes function as screen simulations, proxies and portals. Simultaneously convex and soft, absorbing and emanating light, the work employs illusion in order to both disorient and placate. The softness is deceptive. Although inviting, Safir’s pieces are resistant to being made sense of—creating an enticing object that cannot and will not allow itself to be understood.

Jia Sung uses the familiar visual language of folklore to examine and subvert parameters set around the humanity of women, queer people, and those considered ‘other.’ As a Singaporean Chinese queer woman born in Minnesota, raised in Singapore, and now based in Brooklyn, her experiences of transplantation and coming-of-age in the west have pushed her to question what it means to reconnect to inherited stories without reenacting dynamics of fetishization and orientalism. Drawing on motifs from Chinese mythology and Buddhist iconography, she decenters the cisheteronormative values embedded within these archives by reinterpreting them through a queer feminist lens. Her recent work spans paintings, zines & artist books, poetry, and tapestries incorporating embroidery and beadwork.

Linda Sok is a Cambodian-Australian artist focused on investigating the culturally and personally significant period, the Khmer Rouge Regime, which forced her family to flee Cambodia. Her practice navigates the complexities of the trauma embedded in the Cambodian diaspora and aims to shift its legacy from one focused on genocide to one of healing.

With careful considerations for cultural objects, rituals, traditions and their materiality, her practice often manifests in sculptural installations. By accessing fragments of the past, she attempts to re-contextualize lost traditions and culture to allow living descendants to process the traumatic history experienced by older generations.

Creating a life for myself, far from home, has allowed me to observe my culture and family dynamics from a distance. Recognizing my family’s emotional baggage and how trauma is passed down from the other side of the world can be a relief and a curse. There are certain subjects that are only discussed in Spanish and others in English. It seems like my debauchery, sexuality and gender identity exists in the US while my childhood fragility and raw emotions still remain in Chile. The process of knitting or weaving, is a self-reflective, meditative exercise that culminates in an object. This object then becomes a vessel for those emotions. Everyone has a point of entry to textiles, whether it be fabrics, soft objects, clothing, home goods, etc, the familiarity that is inherently present.

Melika Abikenari is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Her work explores the enduring and evolving nature of experience and memory. Her main concern, both practical and theoretical, is the nature and function of memory, how it is constructed and reconstructed, which is to underscore its contingent and persistent character. Her practice comprises a wide array of mediums including sculpture, installation, video, performance, research, documentation, and drawing. She holds a BA from UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture (2017) and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2021). She is a recipient of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center 2020 Scholarship Partnership Program, and the Meredith Beau CAA ’97 and Scott Beau Materials Fund.

Tashiana St. Aude is a biracial Haitian American textile and fashion designer, whose main interest is to create statement pieces and everyday wear while keeping textiles waste from landfills in third world countries. She recycles clothes to design new clothing through textiles processes.

What is a pair of jeans? What do they do? What are their characteristics? How does a pair of jeans act? What if we took many pairs of jeans and envelope all of them into these characteristics? What if a pair of jeans only has half of those characteristics? Do you consider it a whole pair of jeans, or is it only half? One jea? Are you even comfortable asking that question? Why? So why ask?

Tinglan Huang is a mixed-media sculptor who was born and raised in the south of China and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art; and her BFA in animation at LuXun Academy of Fine Arts, China.

She focuses on considering the personality’s transformation invoked by social contradictions and changes in self-being. Also, she experiments with an archetype, which can reveal an individual's sub-consciousnesses. Using lines with various materials, like steel stick, wire, hemp rope and yarn, she creates the different structure of her being, from a spot to a line, then to a surface, finally a complex form. Her previous work was large scale and expressed by intensive layout.