The IMSS Artist Residency Program provides artists with extended and in-depth access to artifacts from its collection, working space within the Museum, and support to present exhibitions that introduce additional perspectives to the institutional depiction of medical history. As artistic practice occupies an increasingly pluralistic field, The International Museum of Surgical Science believes that artists are uniquely equipped to extrapolate on Museum collections in innovative ways. Artists-in-Residence present a capstone exhibition at the end of their residency.
Current Artists-in-Residence:
Carrie Olivia Adams (Spring 2017 Resident) lives in Chicago, where she is the communications specialist for the American Medical Association Foundation and the poetry editor for the small press Black Ocean. She is the author of “Operating Theater” (Noctuary Press 2015), “Forty-One Jane Doe’s” (book and companion DVD, Ahsahta 2013), and “Intervening Absence” (Ahsahta 2009) as well as the chapbooks “Grapple” (above/ground press 2017), “Overture in the Key of F” (above/ground press 2013), and “A Useless Window” (Black Ocean 2006). She has an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College and a BA in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia.
Past Artists-in-Residence:
Anatomical Theaters of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) (Spring/Fall 2016 Residents) are a provisional collective exploring forensics, anatomy, and 21st century embodiment through performance, language and emerging technologies. Participants include Mark Jeffery (choreography), Judd Morrissey (text and technology), Justin Deschamps and Christopher Knowlton (collaborators/performers).
Learn more about the artists’ capstone exhibition at the Museum here.
Marisa Zanotti (October 2016 Guest Resident) is an award winning artist-researcher. Her directing and writing practice is informed by her background in performance, choreography, theatre and installation practice.
Over 25 years she has consistently explored new technologies and the body, initially in relation to their role in live work and most recently in trans-media work The Pan’s People Papers. She is a specialist in adapting and directing dance for the screen and has adapted work by Lea Anderson and Ben Wright. In 2012 she developed the UK’s first choreographic Web App for phones and tablets. Marisa’s film work is regularly screened in festivals, recently her documentary Edits Film adapted from Lea Anderson’s work Edits was shown in July at the Curious? Festival at BALTIC in Newcastle. Marisa will be an artist-in-residence at The International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago in October. She is based in the dance department at University of Chichester. Her practice-led doctoral research argued for screen adaptation as away of revealing unique thinking by choreographers. Marisa has a long term collaboration with the editor Ian Ballantyne. She is currently working with composer Matthew Whiteside and Magnetic North on an AV collaboration We are All Made of Stars.
ATOM-r hosted Zanotti at the Museum as part of an exchange program with the University of Chichester, where they were in residence Summer 2016.
Ryan M Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz (Fall 2015 Residents) are collaborators that live and work in Chicago. Drawing on their research into prehistoric & ancient art, eroticism, and esoteric traditions, their works synthesize concerns of sex, death, myth, transformation, and alchemy. They view the act of collaboration as the dissolution of individual identities and union of oppositions as a new, harmonized whole.
Learn more about the artists’ capstone exhibition at the Museum here.
Vesna Jovanovic (2013/15 Artist in Resident) is a Chicago-based visual artist who specializes in conceptualizations of the human body. Using spilled ink as groundwork, she creates drawings that often formally resemble medical illustration while concentrating on what is usually left out: how it feels and what it means to have a body as well as how the body is socially constructed and culturally perceived. With drawing as a bodily act and medical illustration as a visual trope, Jovanovic brings embodiment, biopolitics, phenomenology, and various other ideas and theories of the human body into her work.
To learn more about Vesna’s project, please visit her blog here or watch a video between the artist and the Museum’s past Curator here.
Learn more about the artist’s capstone exhibition at the Museum here.
Upcoming Artist-in-Residence:
Terri Kapsalis (Fall 2017 Resident) is the author of Jane Addams’ Travel Medicine Kit (Hull-House Museum), The Hysterical Alphabet (WhiteWalls) and Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Duke University Press). Along with John Corbett and Anthony Elms, she co-edited Traveling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, the Astro Black, and Other Solar Myths (WhiteWalls) and Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn, and Chicago’s Afro-futurist Underground (WhiteWalls) and co-curated the touring exhibition Pathways to Unknown Worlds.
Her writing can be found on Literary Hub and in such publications as Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, Parakeet, The Baffler, New Formations and Public. She is a founding member of Theater Oobleck and serves on its artistic board. Since 1991, she has been a collective member of the Chicago Women’s Health Center. She is Adjunct Full Professor in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
