Session (48) Artist Talks, Part 1

We are pleased to welcome our Session (48) Fellows, Evan Halter, Valerie Hsiung, Sarah Pater, Alyssa Songsiridej, and Tim Wilson to Fishers Island. We hope you will join us in welcoming our final session cohort of 2021! For those wishing to join online, please email [email protected].

Evan Halter (b. 1990) combines strategies from Renaissance theories of perspective with an interest in the modern vocabularies of abstraction and surrealism. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he completed the New York Studio Residency Program in 2011. In 2013, he graduated with a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and attended the Advanced Painting Intensive at Columbia University, in New York City. Halter received his MFA from Rutgers University in 2016, and afterwards attended the thematic residency “Still Alive” at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada. Halter’s work has been shown in one-person presentations including Reflections, The Gallery at W83, New York, NY (2020); Vanitas, The Java Project, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Partitions, Clay St Press, Cincinnati, OH (2018); Thresholds, Mom’s, New York, NY (2017); The Aesthetics of Perfection, Neon Heater, Findlay, OH (2014); and Metamorphism, YES Gallery, Cincinnati, OH (2012). His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, such as the two-person presentation The New Iconographies, Spring/Break Art Show, NY, NY (2021); Community, Glass Rice, San Francisco, CA (2021); memoirs, Pablo’s Birthday, New York, NY (2020); The Hawt Show II, Rolando Anselmi Gallery, Atina, Italy (2020); The Barn Show 2019, Johannes Vogt Gallery, East Hampton, New York (2019); 11 Under 30, Ille Arts, Amagansett, NY (2017); STAY, Dress Shop Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2016).

Valerie Hsiung is a poet, writer, interdisciplinary artist, and the author of several poetry and hybrid writing collections, including To love an artist (Essay Press, forthcoming 2022), selected by Renee Gladman, hummingbird et partygirl (Essay Press, forthcoming 2023), outside voices, please (CSU, 2021), Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners, 2020), YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books, 2020), and e f g (Action, 2016). Her poethics is concerned with thresholds (btw speech & song, the literal & the symbolic, the private & the mythic, the ecologic & the cosmic, the political & the metaphysical, the scientific & the incantatory, the heavy & the petty, and Mackey’s orphic & orphan), the deformed and the incorrect and the off and the lag and the jetlag as they exist within eco-crip time, modes of decomposition, and ongoingness/chronicity. Her work can be found in places such as The Nation, The Believer, New Delta Review, The Adroit Journal, Ghost Proposal, Black Sun Lit, The Rumpus, Chicago Review, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, and beyond. She has performed at Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance, The Poetry Project, Poetic Research Bureau, and Shapeshifter Lab, and her writing has been commissioned by Montez Press Radio, Hyle Greece, and Downs & Ross. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives between nowhere and somewhere.

Sarah Pater (b. 1987, Wilmington, DE) is a painter based in Philadelphia. Her work blurs the aesthetics of boredom and attention with daily experiences, painting tropes, and office-leisure-domestic design. Her paintings have been included in exhibitions at Orgy Park, Brooklyn; Brennan & Griffin, New York; FJORD, Philadelphia; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; 808 Gallery at Boston University, Boston; and RISD Museum, Providence, among others. Her work was featured in New American Paintings and she has been awarded residencies at the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Ora Lerman Charitable Trust, and others. She received an M.F.A. in painting from Rhode Island School of Design and a B.F.A. from Boston University.

Alyssa Songsiridej is a writer from the Midwest who now lives on the East Coast. Her first novel, Little Rabbit, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in May 2022. Her short fiction can be found at StoryQuarterly, The Indiana Review, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and has been honored and supported by numerous institutions including Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the VCCA, VSC, Ragdale, MassMOCA’s Assets for Artists program, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is also an editor at Electric Literature.

Tim Wilson (b. 1970) is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and holds an MFA from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from The Virginia Commonwealth University. He has been awarded residencies at Offshore Residency, Sol LeWitt Studio, Shandaken Project’s Paint School and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space. Most recently, his work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Nathalie Karg Gallery (New York, NY), Fahrenheit Madrid (Madrid, Spain), and Alfred University (Alfred, NY) among others. He has been included in several group shows, including, The Flag Art Foundation (New York, NY), Jack Hanley Gallery (New York, NY), and Harper’s Books (East Hampton, NY). His work has also been reviewed in such publications as Art Forum, The New Criterion, Juxtpoz, and The Brooklyn Rail.