Session (38) Welcome Reception and Artist Talk

We are pleased to welcome our Session 38 Fellows Katrina Carrasco, James Benjamin Franklin, Ilana Harris-Babou, Coral Saucedo Lomeli, and Jasmine Dreame Wagner to Fishers Island. They will be in residence from October 22 to December 3, 2019. We hope you'll join us in welcoming our Fellows to Fishers Island!

Katrina Carrasco

*Katrina Carrasco is queer and Latinx, with roots in Southern California and home in Seattle, Wash. Katrina received her MFA in Fiction in 2015 and has had stories and essays published by Witness, Literary Hub, Autostraddle, and other outlets. Her debut novel, THE BEST BAD THINGS (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is a finalist for the 2019 Washington State Book Award. She is writing a new novel set in the late 1800s that explores the country's first opiates epidemic, the rise of sensationalist journalism, and the queer subcultures that disrupted race and class divisions in the Pacific Northwest.

James Benjamin Franklin

Loosely constructed shapes and unwieldy textures combine in my work to form a style that is untethered by traditional narrative. Shape, texture, and palate flow into one another overlap, and expand in dynamic compositions liberated from the confines of a canvas. I have found solace in the ambiguity of sculptural painting with shapes born from wire, and panels from objects found in my studio. The forms became unwieldy, even awkward, but are no less vibrant and exciting for it. Their lack of balance implies a kineticism and propulsion echoed in their push into three dimensions.
The work engage a dialogue that questions the nature and expressive potential of creativity & how our subrational responses dominate decision making, how our trust in them opens up creative possibilities to expose not only the power of our intuition, but our vulnerability to it. I encourage the viewer to meditate on the basic framework of craft, exposing evidence of his process layers, splatters, drips, the underlying structure in plain sight.

Born in Tacoma, WA, James Benjamin Franklin received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in 1999. In 2017, he received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Franklin currently lives and works in Detroit, MI, and his artistic influences include Shirley Jaffe, Thornton Dial, Richard Diebenkorn, Alexander Calder and Agnes Martin among others. Recent exhibitions include the FRONT International, The Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI, Reyes | Finn, Detroit, MI, Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City.

• Ilana Harris-Babou

• Ilana Harris- Babou's work is interdisciplinary; spanning sculpture and installation, and grounded in video. She speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor as a means to digest painful realities. Her work confronts the contradictions of the American Dream: the ever unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom. She has exhibited throughout the US and Europe, with solo exhibitions at 80WSE, The Museum of Arts & Design, and Larrie in New York. Other venues include Abrons Art Center, the Jewish Museum, SculptureCenter, the De Young Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

She has been reviewed in the New Yorker, Artforum, and Art in America, among others. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, and a BA in Art from Yale University.

• Coral Saucedo Lomeli

• *Coral Saucedo Lomel was born in Mexico City. Her work is influenced by personal and poetic visual experiences that make up the “everyday.” She investigates displacement, ad-hocism, making do, and a solution based on lacking. Utilizing these frameworks, her work aims to redefine the layers of cultural and architectural history that make up her surroundings. Saucedo Lomeli completed her undergraduate studies in fine art at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena and her MFA at Yale University. During her time in Los Angeles she worked as an art fabricator and production manager assisting in the ideation and fabrication of projects like the Current: LA Public Art Biennial. She did a residency with the Architectural Association School of Architecture in Xilitla (2016), with Jacobo and Maria Angeles in Tilcajete, Oaxaca (2014), at a construction site in San Borja #928 in Mexico City (2018) as well as SOMA Summer (2019). Saucedo Lomeli wants to continue to seek out human interventions in new urban landscapes, and explore how they can be reframed as unique poetic moments.

*Jasmine Dreame Wagner

• Jasmine Dreame is the author of On a Clear Day (Ahsahta Press), a collection of lyric essays and poems deemed "a capacious book of traveler's observations, cultural criticism, and quarter-life-crisis notes" by Stephanie Burt at The New Yorker and "a radical cultural anthropology of the wild time we're living in" by Iris Cushing at Hyperallergic. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Beloit Poetry Journal, BOMB Magazine, Colorado Review, Fence, Guernica, Hyperallergic, Indiana Review, New American Writing, Verse, Witness, and in three anthologies: The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press), Lost and Found: Stories From New York (Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood Books), and We Like It Fast: Writing Prompts and Model Stories from the Editors and Contributors of NANO Fiction (NANO Fiction).

In 2019, Wagner was awarded a WPR Creative Grant from Harvard University to create new sound and broadcast works drawing from the Woodberry Poetry Room's audio archives. Wagner's poetry has earned her an Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and fellowships and residencies from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Marble House Project, The Millay Colony for the Arts, Villa Barr and Michigan Legacy Art Park, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), and The Wassaic Project. She holds degrees from Columbia University and the University of Montana.