PearlArts

Staycee Pearl is a life-long dance-maker/visual artist, committed to the creation and exhibition of multi-media works that are indicative of the human experience. She strives to give as much attention to interpersonal relationships as to global concerns, demonstrating multiple thematic viewpoints and a wide range of emotion. With intense passion for people, art, community, and culture, she encourages and participates in truthful and inclusive creative experiences. Staycee's movement and visual arts experience is centered in contemporary and secular movement styles while incorporating both traditional and conceptual processes. She is currently working on her BFA in Studio Arts at the University of Pittsburgh.

Herman Pearl (aka Soy Sos) has been obsessed with music and recording since his first tape recorder at age 10. His broad range of experience includes internationally acclaimed record releases, film soundtracks, TV advertising jingles, music libraries and radio spots. He has also done sound design for theatrical and dance productions and served as front of house live sound engineer. As a guitarist he has appeared on national TV and toured throughout the US and Carribean.

His production esthetic can best be described as deep, clean, dirty, and dubbed out. He has a broad understanding of many popular dance and electronic music styles including Dance Hall/Reggae, Hip Hop and Deep House.

Soy Sos is a co-founding member of Soma Mestizo, 3 Generations Walking and MKL vs. Soy Sos.

Below/abajo: PearlArts.

Carolina Loyola-Garcia

Carolina Loyola-Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and educator. Her work reflects upon such issues as cultural dis/placement, language, post-colonialism, and the environment offering a critical view and questioning current notions of corporate economic development. She works primarily in media arts, including single-channel video art, video installations, digital printmaking, and most recently in documentary, and has also ventured into performance through theater and dance. Formally, she explores the possibilities that digital media offers for layering and compositing, as a mean to communicate various levels of discourse. Her work has been exhibited internationally in biennials, art shows, and film festivals such as the 10th Havana Biennial; InteractivA'07, Mexico; Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Thailand; Three Rivers Film Festival, USA; Bienal de Video y Nuevos Medios, Chile; among others. She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and is currently a professor of Media Arts at Robert Morris University.

Carolina Loyola-Garcia es videasta y artista de medios de origen chileno quien actualmente trabaja en los Estados Unidos. Su trabajo refleja su interés en los temas del biculturalismo, lenguaje, tecnología y postcolonialismo, entre otros. Ha desarrollado proyectos en video, instalaciones, performance y arte visual digital, y ha mostrado su trabajo en festivales de video, bienales y galerías de arte en diversos países, incluyendo Estados Unidos, Brasil, Tailandia, Chile, Canadá y México. Formalmente, le interesan las posibilidades que los medios digitales ofrecen para crear distintos niveles de expresión tanto en lo visual como en lo temático. Recibio su Master en Bellas Artes de Carnegie Mellon University y actualmente se desempeña como profesora de Media Arts en Robert Morris University.

Below/abajo: Fragile. Carolina Loyola-García

T. Foley

T. Foley is a video artist and media literacy consultant who shares strategies and techniques for using digital media consumer tools as a means for creative expression and community reflection. She received her BA in English Literature from Duquesne University, and studied filmmaking, video production, and Balinese painting and woodcarving techniques as an independent student. Her motion pictures have screened internationally, and she has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Pittsburgh Foundation.

Below/abajo: Hazardous Materials, 2004. Running time: 4:30

Video featuring a hazmat worker action-figure, an important post 9/11 cultural artifact, an odd and distant relation to toy soldiers or G.I. Joe. Shot and edited in slide-show, film strip and animated sequences, Foley paired text about hazmat workers from a career web site with photographic images of the hazmat figure out in the actual world.

Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga approaches art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces. Having been born of immigrant parents and grown up between Nicaragua and San Francisco, a strong awareness of inequality and discrimination was established at an early age. Themes such as immigration, discrimination, gentrification and the effects of globalization extend from highly subjective experiences and observations into works that tactfully engage others through populist metaphors while maintaining critical perspectives. Ricardo has established a socially investigative creative practice that utilizes whatever media possible to present content in a manner that may generate interaction and discussion by others.

Ricardo has a Masters of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor of Arts in Practice of Art and English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. He is based in Brooklyn, NY and is an Associate Professor of Art at The College of New Jersey Ricardo’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include:
Return to Function, 2009 Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; Im_polis, 2007, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; Russia: Significant Other, 2006, The National Center for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia; FALLOUT: What’s Left, 2005/06 Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY, USA; inSite_05: Tijuana Calling; Time Shift Ars Electronica 2004, Linz, Austria; Digitafogia, tactical media festival at Museum of Image and Sound, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Counter Culture at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC; artport, gatepage web initiative of the Whitney Museum.

Ricardo has also been awarded several awards and honors including a New York Foundation for the Arts 2007 Fellowship, Tides Foundation Lambent Fellowship (2006-2009), Turbulence Commission, New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. Commission (2004); Future of the Present Artist Fellowship from Franklin Furnace (2003); Artist in Residence at Harvestworks Media Center (2002); Electronic Media and Film Program, New York State Artists Grant Award (2003).

Below/Abajo: Carreta Nagua, Siglo 21

Carreta Nagua, Siglo 21 (2007) In the colonial park, Alameda Central located in the historical center of Mexico City, I offer free rickshaw rides. Once the passengers settle into the rickshaw, they watch an animation that tells a tale of immigration, aging and cultural and familial loss. It is an animation based on the current reality of my parents. Carreta Nagua, Siglo 21 is commissioned for the festival TRANSITIO_MX02.

Daniel Peltz

Daniel Peltz is a conceptual artist who creates works that combine installation, intervention and performance strategies. His most recent projects have been staged at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, a glass mill in Reijmyre, Sweden and in the capital city of Yaounde, Cameroon. Peltz was a 2007-08 Fulbright Scholar/Artist-in-Residence at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Konstfack in Stockholm and in residence in the fall of 2008 at The School of Arts and Communication [K3] in Malmo as part of the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden [IASPIS]. When not escaping his home country, he lives happily in Pawtucket, Rhode Island where he is an Assistant Professor of Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Below/Abajo: Cameraless videos / 2008 / Stockholm, Sweden

Lately, I've been making video installations, performances, and interventions that explore the socially mediating character of live-feed video. I'm trying to figure out what video is and what kinds of knowledge it can generate about the social world, not as an abstraction but as a force of very real transformation. I have increasingly little faith in abstract understandings, I am seeking embodied knowledge. My material is myself and the interactions I have with others in real time, the live-feed. I offer this material to video, as a gesture of good faith, that I might be worthy of the knowledge it contains. I've been thinking of these things I make as media machines in need of human performers. I don't build them for anyone but myself. If you catch me claiming to, don't believe me.

Ayanah Moor

Ayanah Moor completed her BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA at Tyler School of Art-Temple University. She is currently Associate Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Moor has been awarded residency at Vermont Studio Center, Women’s Studio Workshop, Blue Mountain Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Recent exhibitions include: Wexner Center for the Arts, Van Brunt Gallery, Wellesley College, Duke University, The Print Center, Columbia College-Chicago, and the Erie Art Museum. Her work has been addressed in publications such as: Critical Inquiry (University of Chicago Press); Home Girls Make Some Noise: A Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (Parker Publishing); Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip Hop Generation (Cleis Press) Black Women, Gender and Families (University of Illinois Press) and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (Indiana University Press).

Ayanah Moor’s work addresses contemporary popular culture through an interrogation of individual and group identity, gender and vernacular aesthetics. In Moor’s view the everyday—subject mater from the vernacular landscape—provides ample material from which to draw, from hip hop culture and politics, to black talk and women’s football. Moor creates works that contribute to, generate and enrich the discourse surrounding visibility, invisibility, code and appropriation. Her artwork involves a process of research, experimentation, play and execution. These ideas frame the conceptual basis of Ayanah Moor’s performance, video and print-based art.

Below/Abajo: Ayanah Moor & April Martin, For Sha Rock, 2008, video.
Installation view at PNC Park in Pittsburgh, PA, 2008