Studies for Making and Unmaking
Video Still from 15' loop
Krista Caballero (USA) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring issues of agency, survival, and environmental change in a more-than-human world. Moving freely between traditional and emerging media, her work creates situations for encountering alternative ecological and social landscapes.
In 2010 she created Mapping Meaning, an ongoing project that brings together artists, scientists and scholars to explore issues of ecological complexity and long-term sustainability through experimental workshops, exhibitions, and transdisciplinary research.
Caballero received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University and in 2009 attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been presented across the United States as well as internationally in exhibitions and festivals such as the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Dubai, “Paradoxes in Video” at Mohsen Gallery in Tehran, Balance-Unbalance International Festival in Australia, and the Futurescapes Symposium in Norway. In 2017 Caballero was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship for her work on Birding the Future, a collaborative project with Frank Ekeberg.
Caballero is currently the Co-Director of the Center for Experimental Humanities and Artist in Residence at Bard College in New York.
Trudi Lynn Smith (Canada) is an artist, media anthropologist and curator who focuses on practices of photography with an interest in the invisible and under-represented.
Trained as an anthropologist and artist, (Interdisciplinary PhD, Anthropology and Visual Art, University of Victoria, Canada), over the past 15 years she has theorized photography as event through academic research and writing, art installations, and performance.
Her visual research into contested territories of parks and protected areas in North America explores the affective force of photography by following fleeting moments and shifting visualities to account for the fundamental impermanence of life. Recent publications include "Collaborating on the Fly: a manual in 10 easy steps" (with Coleman Nye and Mike Fortun) Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology, (2017); “The Anthropology of Historical Photography in a Protected Area: Life and Death in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta” in Anthropologica (2013); and recent presentations of her work in Canada and internationally include Residue: Proximal Interactions (collaboration with Kate Hennessy, curated by Julie Libersat at 500x finding aid (Southern Alberta Art Gallery); Portable Camera Obscura at site-specific locations across North America.
Since 2009, she has been a member of the curatorial collective Ethnographic Terminalia, an experimental research project that curates group exhibitions in North American cities, demonstrating how contemporary artists, anthropologists, and institutions are engaging with ethnographic methodologies and art.
She is currently the artist in residence in the Making Culture Lab in the School of Interactive Art and Technology at Simon Fraser University.