Meet the Artists Selected for Our Upcoming Gender – Fluid Residency!

We are thrilled to share an update regarding the “Gender – Fluid” residency. The response has been nothing short of extraordinary, and we are deeply grateful for the immense talent and diverse perspectives shared by all applicants.

We are delighted to introduce the exceptionally talented artists who are joining us in Chiang Mai from May 13 to June 9, 2024. But if you missed the deadline, fret not – we have just opened up the second round of applications! Hit us up at studio88artresidency@gmail.com to find out more!

Rachel Chapman, Australia

Rachel (they/them) is an emerging interdisciplinary artist working across video, sound, collage, photography and painting. Their work explores themes of community, queerness, gender, home and love and is informed by their decade-long experience working as a a campaigner, community organiser and facilitator. Their residency project will focus on showcasing how queer and trans communities transcend the constraints of the gender binary.

Jonathan Armour, Ireland/UK

Jonathan (he/him) is an Irish artist based in London, blending Engineering and Fine Art. His work, a fusion of oil painting and time-based digital media, aims to make pixels more visceral. His focus is on the body and human condition, particularly the skin—a bridge between the inner self and the external world. Through digital collaborations, he explores the essence of individuals, celebrating ‘non-normative’ bodies and investigating the human form in diverse, abstract ways.

His idea for the residency is to craft silk garments using texture maps of real people, aiming for a collaborative choreographed performance, inspired by the flowing silk movements akin to ‘whirling dervishes’ dance. The goal is to delve into the external expression of gender identity.

Duo textbytexture: Kim Liyoun & Kim Sono, South Korea

Poets Kim Liyoun (she/her) and Kim Sono (they/them) work with images as poetic objects, using language as their primary material, but as collaborators, they have also participated in various projects in which visual media are exchanged or translated into linguistic media and vice versa. Textbytexture is a queer collective and project where the two creators plan and practice the entire process of this exchange and translation, while looking into the questions that are generated based on their interaction.

Textbytexture will prepare for their first exhibition in Seoul during their residency, recording and collecting things they see every day in visual language (flat mediums) with a physical body, such as video, painting, and photography. In this process, they see their queer identities operating in an important and meaningful way within their unconscious.

Dr. Tobias Wiggins, Canada

Dr. Tobias Wiggins (he/him) is an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada. His research program centers transgender health and sexuality, queer visual culture, arts-based methodologies, and psychoanalysis.

Broadly, Tobias’ work aims to address the continued pathologization of gender variance and to support trans- competent care and social advocacy. His arts-based practice has spanned multiple mediums, including documentary film, experimental video, digital storytelling, zines, and most recently, ceramics. At Athabasca University he developed and coordinates the “Trans Lab,” which is an arts-based research lab that produces affirming, intersectional, and anti-oppressive qualitative research.

In the past year, Tobias has begun to develop a project on “transphobic countertransference” – or the ways that unconscious prejudice against transgender people is felt and potentially acted out. During the residency, he will work on developing the arts-based components of this research programme. In particular, he will explore different artistic mediums for the qualitative study of the phenomenon of transphobic countertransference, including ceramics, poetry, storytelling, photography, and digital video.

Tobias writes: “Arts-based research, or “research-creation,” has the capacity to draw us into the intermediate space of what psychoanalysis calls the uncanny. The uncanny is an affective register where you sense that something is deeply familiar, yet is also, somehow, totally unrecognizable. As a researcher using multi-media art, I am able to explore the aspects of transgender experience that, although deeply familiar, are also strangely unreachable through the traditional written forms in academia. “