Pilot Apartment Residency

The Stelo team is excited to announce the creation of a Pilot Apartment Residency that offers the space, time, and resources needed to make new work, from concept to completion. In this instance, it is a low residency program that connects the invited residents, Joy Feasley + Paul Swenbeck, to our community through partnerships with fabricators, materials suppliers, and other creatives, with the intention of installing 3-4 restrooms between our Camp Colton and Park Block campuses.
In 2020 we acquired a residential apartment above our Park Block space. The apartment has invited us to think collectively about what a residency space needs, and more importantly, what the artists need within that space. How can a space be responsive, generous, alive, and supportive? What residual energy, objects, concepts are infused in place when one guest leaves and another arrives?
We are most concerned with the human experience, and are thinking of the residency space more like a home than a hotel. We believe this type of co-creation can contribute to harm reduction, community building, and transformation of relationship between our institution and the creatives with whom we engage.

The Pilot Apartment Residency artists were invited to complete initial site visits this fall and plans are underway for the creation of three to four ADA accessible restroom spaces. Having recently completed the installation of two custom washrooms at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, we’ve asked Joy and Paul to utilize leftover/discarded materials from their Kohler projects and to give them a new life in Stelo’s spaces. These custom made ceramics are being repurposed so that they don’t end up in a landfill, and there is potential for other local offcast materials to be integrated into the final restroom designs. The artists will also create additional custom site responsive elements for the project.

In addition to thinking through ideas around reuse Joy and Paul are focusing on reexamining what the potential of a restroom space might be. Can it be infused with magic and inclusivity? How can the spaces speak to the natural world? You can get updates on the project on the Stelo website and social media pages as we document the process of the residency.

ABOUT THE INVITED ARTISTS

Joy Feasley combines painting and installation creating environments steeped in alternative belief systems (the occult, the Shaker religion, the dreamworld) that reinterpret ideas of the sublime, depicting nature as both ominous and life-affirming. Moving between abstraction and representation often in the same work, Feasley’s paintings incorporate sacred geometries as well as personal narratives. She often works collaboratively with her husband, Paul Swenbeck. In 2018, Feasley and Swenbeck created a large-scale environment for the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, titled Out Out Phosphene Candle and in 2021 they were commissioned by the Kohler to create restrooms based on elements of this exhibition for the museum’s new building.

You can view recent work from Joy at Adams and Ollman gallery through December 18, 2021.

Paul Swenbeck's work combines sculpture, painting, and photography to create installations that filter craft, the occult, and spiritual themes through his own idiosyncratic perspective. Swenbeck grew up in Salem, Massachusetts—a town synonymous with the witch trial hysteria of Colonial America. His work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Morris Gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Fleisher/Ollman and Vox Populi, all in Philadelphia; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; LUMP Gallery and CAM Raleigh, both Raleigh, NC; and Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston. His work is in the West Collection, Oaks, PA, and the Altoids Curiously Strong Collection at the New Museum, New York, NY. Swenbeck was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2013.