Session (48) Artist Talks, Part 2

We are pleased to welcome our Session (48) Fellows – Philip Anderson, Simon Benjamin, Emma Copley Eisenberg, Anna Garner, and Morteza Khakshoor – to Fishers Island. They will be in residence with us from March 15 to April 26, 2022. We hope you will join us in welcoming our first cohort of 2022.

Philip Anderson has an MFA from Columbia University where he taught creative writing. His work can be found in Bull, Martha’s Quarterly, and Archways. In 2020 he was the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Emerging Fiction Fellow. He currently teaches writing at a community college and lives in Los Angeles with his husband and two cats.

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.

Emma Copley Eisenberg is a queer writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Esquire, Guernica, The Washington Post Magazine, and others. Her first book of nonfiction is The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia which was a NYTimes notable book of 2020 and nominated for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Bouchercon Award. Raised in New York City, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-directs Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts. Her next two books, a novel and a collection of short stories, are forthcoming from Hogarth (Penguin Random House).

Anna Garner’s work combines performance, sculpture, photography, and video to construct fictional spaces and performances for the camera. Born in New York (1982) and raised in San Diego, Anna currently splits her time between México City and Los Angeles. 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 Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY (2021), 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’s work has also been supported through residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2016), and Art OMI (2019).

Morteza Khakshoor (b. 1984 Iran) currently lives and works in Southern California. He moved to the US in 2010 to continue his education in Fine Arts. He received his BFA from Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 2015 and completed his MFA at The Ohio State University in 2018. He has been exhibiting his work nationally and internationally since 2011. Solo exhibitions include ‘Forty-One Drawings and Prints’, University Art Gallery, California State University (2018) and; ‘What Has Become Of Your Strength’, George Mason Atrium Gallery, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA (2016). Group Exhibition include, ‘Strange Paradigm’, Young Space Views, (2021); ‘Humoral Theory’, (3-Person Exhibition), BEERS London, UK (2020); ‘Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair’, London, UK; ‘Art on Paper Fair’, The Tunnel, NY (2019) and; 2018 Edition Artists Book Fair (E/AB), New York, NY. He is the recipient of many awards, including The Inaugural Emerging Artist Award given at the Editions/Artists’ Book Fair (E/AB) in 2018. His works are in several public and private collections, most notably The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice in New York City.