Lighthouse Works Shorts

Johannes James Barfield is a multimedia artist from Winston-Salem, NC who works in sculpture video and sound installations. His work is centered around the Black American experience. Johannes received his MFA from VCUarts in Richmond, VA and his BFA from University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the recipient of several fellowships and residencies including the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, MASS MoCA Residency in North Adams, MA; fully funded by VCUarts and ACRE Residency, Southeastern US Equity Scholarship, in Steuben, WI. His interests revolve around the black experience in America and how building materials used in institutions, the road, automobiles and media correspond to the amplification and nullification of blackness. He is also interested in exploring the psyche of those who are affected personally or vicariously by pervasive influence, joy, generational trauma, violence and nostalgia.

Simon Benjamin is a Jamaican artist and filmmaker living in New York whose work includes experiential installations, photography, film, and sculpture. Through research, oral history, and critical fabulation, he calls attention to the contradictions entangled in the enduring myths and images of the Caribbean as a tropical paradise. This carefully constructed imaginary replaced the harsh reality of the exploitative plantation. To move beyond critique and point to systems and power – he creates open-ended poetic moving images and objects, which bring together the immaterial and the tactile. Rethinking the relationship of margin to center in archival representation, vernacular materials, such as cornmeal and fish traps, become sculptural elements, embedding multiple temporalities and narratives.

His work has been included in the Kingston Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica (2022–forthcoming); Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, Trinidad and Tobago (2021) NYU Gallatin at Governors Island, New York (2021), NY; The 92nd St. Y, New York, NY (2020); Brooklyn Public Library, New York, NY (2019); Hunter East Harlem Gallery, New York, NY (2019); the Ghetto Biennial, Port Au Prince, Haiti (2018); Jamaica Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica (2017); Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA (2019); New Local Space, (NLS) Kingston (2016); and Columbia University, New York, NY (2016). Simon will be an Artist-in-Residence at Light Work in 2022, and has participated in residencies at Shandaken Projects and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artist The Arts Center, both on Governors Island in New York City.

Andy Cahill (b. 1985 Amherst, MA; lives and works in in Brooklyn, NY) graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (2008) and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2010). Solo exhibitions include Home at Safe Gallery, NY (2017), Icons and Rituals at Document, Chicago (2017), Anthem of the Sun at Canada, NY (2016), CHARACTER at V1 Gallery, Copenhagen (2016), and Poor Richard Scumbag at Paris London Hong Kong, Chicago (2015). His work has been presented in group exhibitions including MOVES THINKS REPEATS PAUSES at Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago and High Density, Oblique Function at Proxy, Providence.

Zachary Fabri is an interdisciplinary artist that mines the intersection of his personal life and the local community, with concerns surrounding cultural commodification, gentrification, and public space. Often complicating the boundaries of studio research, site-specific performance, and social practice, Fabri has immersed himself in environments such as Target stores, the Trump Soho Hotel, and the streets of Harlem. This context specificity often yields work that includes drawing, photography, video, performance, installation, and sound art. Awards include The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and the Colene Brown Art Prize. Fabri’s work has been exhibited at Art in General, The Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, The Walker Art Center, The Brooklyn Museum, The Barnes Foundation, Performa, the Museum of Modern Art, the Sharjah Biennial, and Pace gallery. Fabri lives and works in Brooklyn.

Anna Garner’s work examines landscape, architecture, and social patterns, considering how visual and behavioral standards form ideological constructs of spatial organization. In photographs and videos, she creates fictional spaces for the camera that challenge the truthfulness of these constructs through either spotlighting the fiction or performing to alter and deconstruct the space. Born in New York (1982) and raised in San Diego, Anna currently splits her time between Los Angeles and Mexico City. One person exhibitions of her work have been presented at ltd los angeles, Los Angeles, CA (2019); and Phoenix Center for the Arts, Phoenix, AZ (2015). Anna’s work has been included in thematic exhibitions at Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp, Belgium (2019); The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2019); and Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ (2016). In 2015 she was a recipient of The Phoenix Art Museum’s Contemporary Forum Artist Grant. Anna has also participated in artist residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Art OMI.

Born in 1992 in Nanchang, China, Kunlin He, currently lives in San Francisco, CA. His work focuses on redefining Asian identities, territories, borders, nationalisms, as well as Chinese masculinity in traditional art and philosophy, in his visual and media-based conceptual art. He is also interested in revealing the hybridity and heterogeneity of Chinese identities in the context of globalization, using the resources of East Asian traditional cultures and culture studies.

He received a BFA in Environmental Design from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China in 2014, an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2016 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018. He is a graduate fellow and affiliated artist at Headlands Center for the Arts (2017-2019). His work has been included in exhibitions at the Drawing Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, Seattle Art Fair, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, Pennsylvania State University, among others. He has participated in several residencies including Ox-Bow School of Art; MASS MoCA; Atlantic Center for the Arts; Elsewhere Museum; and Santa Fe Art Institute. He has been selected as one of the finalists for the 2019 SFMOMA SECA Award.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman's photo and video works are experimentations relating archives and collage to nostalgia and memory. His recent and forthcoming solo and group presentations include Swiss Institute, Anat Ebgi, MoCA Detroit, The Jewish Museum and ICA Philadelphia. Huffman is the author of three books of poems and was recently an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He lives and works in New York.

Erin Johnson's (50) short films and video installations interlace documentary, experimental, and narrative filmmaking devices to interrogate notions of collectivity, dissent, and queer identity. In her shape-shifting videos, site-specific performances by artists, biologists, and film extras address the legacies of science and imperialism. Johnson received an MFA and Certificate in New Media from UC Berkeley in 2013, attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2019, and recently completed residencies at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY), the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL), Lower Manhattan Community Council (NYC, NY), and Surf Point (York, Maine), and Hidrante (San Juan, Puerto Rico). She is an Assistant Professor of Film and Video at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Sara Magenheimer was born in 1981 in Philadelphia, PA, and lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR (2017); the Kitchen, New York (2017); Art in General in partnership with kim?, Riga, Latvia (2016); the Center for Ongoing Research & Projects (COR&P), Columbus, OH (2016); JOAN, Los Angeles (2015); and Recess, New York (2015). Her works have also been included in the group exhibitions “Body Language,” the High Line, New York (2017); “CCCC (Ceramics Club Cash and Carry),” White Columns, New York (2015); and “Amy Sillman: One Lump or Two,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and Aspen Art Museum (2013–14). Her videos have been screened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (2017); the New York Film Festival (2017, 2015, 2014); Images Festival, Toronto (2017); Anthology Film Archives, New York (2016); EMPAC, Troy, NY (2016); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2015).

Erica Molesworth was born in Sydney, Australia and completed undergraduate studies in Political Economy and Media Arts at the University of Sydney in 2009. She completed her MFA at California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2015 and now lives and works in Brooklyn. Solo exhibitions include Firstdraft and Gaffa Galleries in Sydney. Recent group exhibitions were held at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), Contemporary Jewish Museum, Southern Exposure and SOMArts in San Francisco; University of Nevada; University of Massachusetts; Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography; and Channels Video Festival, and the John Fries Award in Australia. Recent residencies include Studios at Mass MoCA, NARS Foundation, Kala Art Institute, and Hill End Australia. She was a resident at Bay Area Video Coalition and a YBCA fellow in 2017-18, and has received an Australian Postgraduate Award, a CCA graduate merit scholarship and teaching fellowship, and the Australia Council’s ArtStart grant. She was also founding co-director of Oakland’s women/nonbinary-run artspace CTRL+SHFT Collective (ctrlshftcollective.com) and recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Alternative Exposure grant for the project.

Duke Riley is fascinated by maritime history and events around urban waterways. His signature style interweaves historical and contemporary events with elements of fiction and myth to create allegorical histories. His re-imagined narratives comment on a range of issues from the cultural impact of over development and environmental destruction of waterfront communities to contradictions within political ideologies and the role of the artist in society.

Riley has had solo exhibitions at Magnan Metz Gallery, New York City; the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; and the Havana Biennial (2009 and 2015), among other venues. He has received numerous awards and commissions, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, the U.S. State Department’s SmARTpower Program in China and the MTA Arts For Transit commission for the Beach 98th Street Station renovation. In spring of 2016, Riley partnered with Creative Time and the Brooklyn Navy Yard to produce the public art sensation, ‘Fly By Night’, which was again produced in 2018 by 1418 Now and the London International Festival of Theater. Born in Boston, he received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, before moving to New York, settling in Brooklyn, and earning his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute.

Danya Smith lives and works in Richmond, VA as a multidisciplinary visual artist. She studied Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, receiving a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in 2015. Since graduating, Danya has attended the Lighthouse Works residency in Fisher’s Island, New York, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, and The Shandaken Project in New Windsor, New York. Her work incorporates sculpture, video installation, as well as painting and sound installations.