With the 2019-2020 SHIFT Residents: Hernease Davis, Asha Ganpat, Guido Garaycochea, Joy Garnett, Ginny Huo, Jordan Lord, Shona Masarin, Monika Wuhrer; Moderated by Maya Suess, Managing Direction of Flux Factory, Visual Artist and Former SHIFT Resident

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A virtual discussion with our current 2019/2020 SHIFT Cohort to discuss their time during the residency, challenges faced participating in a residency during a pandemic, and their upcoming exhibition.

Maya Suess is an artist, writer and arts administrator from unceded Coast Salish Territories now based in the Lower East Side. Her videos and performances have been exhibited internationally. Maya also works as a “radical arts administrator” as the Managing Director of Flux Factory, where she oversees an Artists-in-Residency program hosting over 40 artists annually, manages extensive programming in the public exhibition space, and wears many other institutional hats. Maya is a former Shift Resident and will be curating the SHIFT 2019/2020 exhibition, Permissions, scheduled to be open on November 18th, 2020.

Hernease Davis earned her M.F.A from the International Center of Photography–Bard College (ICP-Bard). Her current body of work uses photograms, cyanotypes, performance and craft to explore notions of her internal empathic process. The solo exhibition of her series, A Womb of My Own (Mistakes Were Made in Development) opened at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY in May, 2018. Her work was selected for Photography Now 2016 at the Center of Photography at Woodstock and was included in The Surface of Things at the Houston Center of Photography, an exhibition featuring photographers working with camera-less techniques. She has also exhibited with the International Center of Photography, Foley Gallery, Rush Arts, Java Project and Spaceworks as an Nfinit Foundation Artist-In-Residence. Hernease is on faculty at the Visual Studies Workshop and has served as a Visiting Lecturer at ICP-Bard where she lead a course exploring empathy through art practice.

Asha Ganpat is a Trinidadian-American conceptual artist, born in Trinidad. Ganpat works in a wide range of traditional and non-traditional media including paper, lace, metal, gold, light and sound. Her work was cited as one of NYC’s top 10 art installations of 2012 by Complex Magazine. In 2017, Ganpat spoke at the Asia Society on the keynote panel of the South Asian American symposium "Fatal Love: Where Are We Now?" where she represented both Indian and Caribbean diaspora. Ganpat has shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Exit Art, Noyes Museum, Queens Museum, Jersey City Museum and Nathan Cummings Foundation. She is alumnus of Aljira's Emerge, Gaia’s Wonderwomen, the New Jersey Book Art Symposium, Chashama North, Chashama, and Trinidad's Alice Yard residency. Ganpat is a professor at Montclair State University, an independent curator, and co-founded Red Saw Gallery of Newark, NJ 2005–2008.

Guido Garaycochea, born in Peru, is a Latino immigrant artist who works at the Queens Museum as the manager of the program for New New Yorkers. Guido moved to the United States in 2004, taught from 2004 until 2016 at Mitchell College in New London, CT, University of Connecticut, Three Rivers Community College in Norwich, CT, York Correctional in Niantic, CT, etc. He is the co-founder, curator and Artist in Residence Program Director of Expressiones Cultural Center in New London, CT, a nonprofit organization exclusively educational in nature. Guido moved in 2013 from Connecticut to NYC to resume art studies, graduating in 2015 from SVA with an MFA. Since then he has been an Artist in Residence at More Art / Engaging Artist in 2015 at that time focusing on volunteering and working with immigrant elders while participating in group exhibitions between CT and NYC.

Joy Garnett is an artist and writer in Brooklyn, and the Arts Advocacy Program Associate at the National Coalition Against Censorship. Her multidisciplinary work deals with the archive in its various forms. She has exhibited at the FLAG Art Foundation, MoMA–PS1, CUNY Graduate Center (NY), the Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland (OR), Boston University Art Gallery, the Bristol Art Museum (RI) and the Witte Zaal (Ghent, Belgium). Her art and writings have appeared in an eclectic array of publications, sometimes side-by-side, including FULL BLEDE, Rusted Radishes, Art21 Magazine, artnet, and in Virilio and Visual Culture(Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook (powerHouse Books, 2016). She has been awarded grants from Anonymous Was a Woman, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Wellcome Trust, and The Chipstone Foundation. She is working on an illustrated family memoir of Egypt.

Gi (Ginny) Huo is an interdisciplinary artist collaging photography, sculpture, sound and video in her work—reimagining experiences into abstracted allegorical stories and reconstructed landscape to dissect gaps in language; belief and disbelief, and the violence formed from religious dogma. How does one trust and why? Ginny was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and lived in various places within the United States and South Korea. She received her BFA at Brigham Young University (Provo, UT) and MFA at the Maryland Institute College of the Arts (Baltimore, MD). She currently serves as the Senior Teen Programs Coordinator at The Studio Museum in Harlem and Adjunct Professor of Senior Thesis, Writing at Parsons, The New School. She is also a Visiting Guest Lecturer at The School of Visual Arts.

Jordan Lord is a filmmaker, writer, and artist, working primarily in video, text, and performance. Their work addresses the relationship between framing and support, historical and emotional debts, documentary and description. Their performance and video work has been shown at venues including Artists Space, Performance Space NY, DOCNYC, and Camden Arts Centre, and they have been in study with the group No Total since 2012. They are currently working on an MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College.

Shona Masarin-Hurst is a multi-disciplinary artist working primarily in analog film and photography. Her current body of work explores the relationship between landscape, architecture, filmic space, and abstraction. She has received funding for her work from the Jerome Foundation, The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes in partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts, the Australia Council for the Arts, and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust. Her work has been presented at Danspace Project, Dance on Camera Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Crossroads Film Festival at SFMoMA, and the Knockdown Center, amongst others. She holds a BFA in film and video from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.

Monika Wuhrer is the founder and executive director of Open Source Gallery and KoKo NYC. Originally from Austria, she received her MFA in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Monika founded Open Source Gallery in 2007. She has given talks at NURTUREart, Rutgers University and Hunter College. She has received awards and grants from the Austrian Cultural Forum, Austrian Federal Chancellery, Puffin Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. Monika has exhibited in the US, Norway, Austria, Italy, Thailand, Finland, France, Switzerland, and Japan.

About Shift

SHIFT: A Residency for Arts Workers was inaugurated as a project of EFA Project Space in August 2010 to provide studio space and peer support for practicing artists who also work as arts professionals (administrators, curators, directors, and others). Each year, outstanding artist/art workers from the NYC area are selected to participate in the residency. SHIFT honors these individuals' longstanding commitment to supporting fellow artists—one that necessitates a sacrifice of time and flexibility—with a unique environment to build on their own art practices.

Past SHIFT exhibitions have included Temporary Island (2019), Seven Senses (2018), Past Live (2017), No Atlas (2016), Double Visions (2015), and A Necessary Shift (2013). For more information about the SHIFT Residency, read the FAQ.