SPRING RESIDENTS
INVERSE spring residency, hosted by the Momentary, brings together a select group of artists for a week long intensive based on collaboration and research through an exchange of daily workshops, performances, dialogue and shared meals.
JESSICA BLINKHORN
Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn is an Atlanta based artist whose work educates and advocates on behalf of the disAbled and LGBTQ+ Communities. In her performances, Blinkhorn focuses on intimacy and disability, accessibility, identity politics, and social and financial inequalities that plague the communities she seeks to represent. "My Momma has always said 'Jessie'laine, you gotta big mouth!' In the past I used it to get attention. Now, I use it to promote change...and still get attention!"
ANA SOFÍA CAMARGA
Ana Sofía Camarga is a conceptual artist based in Panama City, Panama. Her work is rooted in her personal experiences as a young woman of color from and based in what is known today as Latinoamerica. Through her performances and installations, Camarga uses diverse media to recreate domestic objects, actions, and/or scenarios that have been decontextualized from their intended function. Camarga has been known for biting clay, mopping paint sewing underwear into quilts, and most recently for posting private nude self-portraits intended for her cybernetic lovers. Camarga has exhibited in the United States, in various collective shows in Northwest Arkansas. Among which, stands out her participation at the Inverse Performance Art Festival. In her home country, she has exhibited at Arte Nómada Exhibition (2018), and Subasta MAC (2019), the annual auction of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá. “He Sentado Cabeza,” her latest exhibition and installation, was a solo show presenting her bachelor thesis and latest work at the apartment she rented along with two more people.
LENA CHEN
Lena Chen (San Francisco, 1987) is a Chinese American artist, writer, and activist whose practice encompasses performance, installation, poetry, moving image, and socially engaged art. Named “Best Emerging Talent” at the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image in Frankfurt, Chen has performed and exhibited at Transmediale (Berlin), Museum of Modern Art (Antwerp), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Färgfabriken (Stockholm), Tempting Failure (London), and Bloomsday Festival (Dublin), among many others. Chen is the co-founder of Heal Her, which works with artists, activists, and survivors in six countries to convene storytelling circles for collective healing from sexual violence. She has been invited to speak at Oxford, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, SXSW, and re:publica. Her work has been featured in international media (including The New York Times, CNN, The Independent, VICE) and funded by the Puffin Foundation and the Burning Man Global Arts Fund. As a member of Maternal Fantasies (an interdisciplinary group of artists/mothers), she is a recipient of the Arthur Boskamp Foundation Advancement Award. Chen holds a B.A. in sociology from Harvard University, and is currently pursuing her MFA at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art.
SHAWN ESCARCIGA
Shawn Escarciga (Brooklyn, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist who uses language and the body to generate collage and create new paradigms around performance. Shawn makes work that questions and subverts normative power structures and the institutions that enforce them, especially those that perpetuate strict hierarchies and value systems around class, gender, and intimacy. They seek to establish parallel structures and queer understandings of joy, power, and control, while pushing against the rich-kid-narrow- career-trajectory-commericalism of the art world. Shawn uses objects that are readily accessible and usually low-fi to make work about access, monotony, and struggle. Shawn is the founder and co-organizer of the NYC Low-Income Artist + Freelancer Relief Fund and the former Assistant Director of NYC arts non-profit Culture Push.
JR
JR is a Bay Area based wordsmith with a deep fascination with anatomical oddities and risque potentialities. He derives artistic insight from eclectic sources — where nature is culture, when bodies traverse binaries, and why people love prejudices. JR's primary materials have been airplane seat belts (that he cannot return to the seller), syringes of all stripes (that he should not return to the seller) and, most importantly, Asian diasporic silences (that he must somehow return to the seller). He has performed live in SOAS, London (2019) and Venice International Performance Art Week (2020).
LELA WELCH
Lela Welch graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s Art and Design department with a BFA in 2018. She has since participated in Inverse Performance Art Residencies in 2018 and 2019 and done durational performances in Los Angeles, Los Osos and San Luis Obispo. She uses performance and object making to create a bridge between artist, action and object as well as uses personal histories of addiction and generational semiotics to explore visibility, relevance and power.