Studies for the Perfect Moment is a collaboration between Krista Caballero and Trudi Lynn Smith. 

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 craft and emerging media, her work creates situations for encountering alternative systems of knowing and perceiving.  

In 2010 she created Mapping Meaning looking for collaborative approaches to engage questions of mental, social and environmental ecology. Inspired by a photograph from 1918 depicting an all-female survey crew, the project is rooted in five-day experimental workshops that take place biennially.

She 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 and internationally in exhibitions and festivals such as the 2014 International Symposium on Electronic Art (Dubai), “Paradoxes in Video” at Mohsen Gallery (Tehran), and the 2013 Balance-Unbalance International Festival in (Queensland).

Caballero is currently the Associate Director of the Design Cultures & Creativity program at the University of Maryland in College Park. This honors program brings together students from all majors to explore emerging technologies and their impact upon the world.


Partners

Rebecca Clark is an American artist who works primarily in pencil on paper. Clark makes drawings of the natural world, transient moments of grace and beauty in an age of disappearance. Inspired by plant and animal studies of the Northern Renaissance, Netherlandish devotional panel paintings, and nature mysticism as expressed through various forms of art, music, poetry and prose, her art acknowledges interconnectedness in nature and our loss of connection with the sacred. She received her BA in Art History from Swarthmore College and studied painting and drawing at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. She has exhibited in numerous venues, including: Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Hillyer Art Space, Washington, DC; Arlington Arts Center, VA; The Arsenal, New York, NY; Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD; Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, Augusta, GA;  and The Old Sorting Office, London, UK.

IOP site: Virtual


Hali Felt teaches writing at the University of Alabama.  She received her MFA from the University of Iowa and has completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and Portland Writers in the Schools. In the past, she has reported for the Columbia Journalism Review and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Her first book, Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor, was published in 2012 by Henry Holt & Co.

IOP Site: Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park, California


Katie Hargrave is a multi-media artist interested in the production of American identity through politics, history, mythology, and narrative. Her work elevates stories from popular culture, those hidden in the archives, and the everyday conversations from passerby’s and participants. Originally from Chicago, Katie received an MA in Cultural Production from Brandeis University and a MFA in Intermedia from the University of Iowa. Her work has been shown at Proof Gallery in Boston; Gallerie Analix in Geneva, Switzerland; the Manifesta Biennial in Murcia, Spain; The Philadelphia Art Alliance, and the Athens Institute of Contemporary Art, to name a few. 

IOP Site: Oregon Desert Trail (Southeast OR) 


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), over the past 15 years she has theorized photography as event through academic research and writing, art installations, and performance.

Her visual research explores the affective force of photography by following fleeting moments and shifting visualities to account for the fundamental impermanence of life. Smith has published in ctheory,  Imaginations, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropologica, Public, and Visual Anthropology. Recent presentations of her work include Breath Camera (site specific); Residue: Proximal Interactions (with Kate Hennessy at 500x); finding aid (Southern Alberta Art Gallery); Portable Camera Obscura (site-specific locations in North America).

She is a member of the curatorial collective Ethnographic Terminalia.

She is currently Artist in Residence in the Making Culture Lab in the School of Interactive Art and Design at Simon Fraser University.

 


Sharon Mansur loves dancing. And creating experiences where active viewing and imagination are welcome. Working and playing with others. Experimenting. And finding ways to support and build the creative ecology within a community.
She is a multi-media dance artist. Identity, mutability and ambiguity are essential themes that thread through her projects. She's a creative opportunist who enjoys inserting her performance, improvisations, visual art, film, photography, installations, curations, collaborations and art conversations whenever & wherever. Originally from Boston, MA, Sharon has an MFA in Dance from George Mason University, a BA in Dance & English from Connecticut College, and is a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst (CMA).

IOP site: Virtual


Emily Nilsen is a poet and non-fiction writer who is fond of edges, precipices, tipping points and in-between places. In 2015 her work was long-listed for the UK National Poetry Prize and short-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize. She recently completed her MFA from the University of British Columbia where her SSHRC-funded research explored the coastal subconscious. Her first book of poetry is forthcoming in Spring 2017. Born and raised in Vancouver, Emily now lives in Nelson, British Columbia.

IOP Site: City of Rocks Natural Reserve, Idaho


Ebony Rose is a contemporary artist working in installation art, sculpture and watercolour. She is interested in the back and forth nature of the viewer’s body response versus the viewer’s analytical response. Through simple interventions she instigates contemplative quiet spaces for people to slow down proffering a renewed discovery into natural phenomenon and the things that surround us. A major theme in her work is how material intersects with the immaterial as this intersection relates to life and death cycles, time and continuations.  Materials are altered and inserted into environments in such a way that the trace or gesture of the hand brings about experiences of remembering, imagining and being present. Ebony Rose received her training from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (BFA 2008 Painting and Sculpture) and the University of Victoria (MFA 2015 Installation under the mentorship of Lynda Gammon). Ebony has been awarded artist residencies in Germany and Colorado. She has exhibited in Canada, Germany, Greece and the United States.

IOP Site: City of Rocks Natural Reserve, Idaho