Looking forward to Fall 2019 Project Fellowships
We are very much looking forward to the Siena Art Institute's Fall 2019 Project Fellowships, with the collaborative duo Bik Van der Pol and our returning resident artist John Kenneth Melvin.
John Kenneth Melvin is an American born multi-disciplinary artist producing work in the public realm. Melvin has a strong commitment to a material investigation guided by conceptual practice. Centered in this investigation is his intent to distill a meaning of ecology relevant to culture.
Melvin came to the Siena Art Institute as a resident artist in the Spring of 2018 and was invited back as a Project Fellow for the Fall of 2019, with a proposed project to nurture community dialog on themes of nature and culture. Key parameters guiding the design of the project are public art, community involvement, iconic place making, ecologically sensitive practices, and cradle to cradle design methodology.
Since 1995, Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol work as Bik Van der Pol. They work and live in Rotterdam (NL). Through their practice they aim to articulate and understand how art can produce a public sphere and space for speculation and imagination through which ‘publicness’ is not only defined but also created. By setting up the conditions for encounter they develop a process of working that allows for continuous reconfigurations of places, histories and publics. Their practice is site-specific with dialogue as a mode of transfer; a “passing through”, understood in its etymological meaning of “a speech across or between two or more people, out of which may emerge new understandings”. In fact, they consider the element of “passing through” as vital. It is temporal, and implies action and the development of new forms of discourse. Their work is both instigator and result of this method.
