March 7 ,2024 - April 20, 2024

Applied Arts

Opening Reception: Thursday, March7, 5-8PM Gallery Hours: By Appointment on Saturdays, 12-3PM

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Specialist presents Applied Arts, a group exhibition of performance scores, weave drafts, karaoke prompts, DIY instructions, and algorithmic byproducts by Jesse Malmed, Mitsu Salmon, Etta Sandry, Meredith Waddell, Ilana Zweschi. 

About the artists:

Jesse Malmed is an artist and curator working in video, performance, text, occasional objects and their gaps and laps over and under. Various pre-occupations include: Infinite Gesticulator, Disorganizer, Paranoiac Research Assistant, Choir Conductor, Cosmic Concierge, Junk Shop Salesman, Re-Titler, Poet-Comedian, Traffic Caller, Obstinate-Minded Professor, Bootlegger, Idiot’s Idiot, Pro Bono Closed Captioner and Imaginary Television Host. He is an Assistant Professor at UWM, Provost Harum at Jetsy Merchblatt and the lead singer of The Fucs (a Fugs cover band), etc.

Mitsu Salmon creates visual and performing works that fuse multiple disciplines. Creating in differing media—translating one medium to another—is connected to the translation of differing cultures and languages. Her work draws from familial and personal narratives and then abstracts, expands, and contradicts them. Her current projects investigate familial histories, nature, imperialism, and archives. Salmon received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and BFA from NYU. She has participated in artist residencies such as at Taipei Artist Village (Taiwan), Incheon Art Platform (Korea),  Guildhall (NY) and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. She has presented work at places such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Chicago Cultural Center. She has received the Midwest Nexus Touring Grant, Chicago Dancemaker’s Lab Grant, Utah Performing Arts Fellowship, and grants from Salt Lake City. She is currently an assistant professor at Brandeis University.

Etta Sandry is an artist, educator, and facilitator from the midwestern United States, currently based in Boulder, Colorado. Her material-focused research is rooted in weaving and spans media through sculpture, writing, and installation. Etta completed her MFA in the Fibre & Material Practices program at Concordia University in the spring of 2021. She has exhibited her work in the United States and Canada and was the 2022 Experimental Weaver in Residence at the Unstable Design Lab in Boulder, Colorado. Her work as an educator has recently included positions teaching fibre structures and critical thinking & writing at Concordia. Etta has over ten years of experience working as an organizer and administrator in arts communities. Most recently, this has included roles as a board member at the artist-run centre articule in Montreal and as a volunteer staff in ACRE Residency’s fibre studio in Wisconsin.

Meredith Waddell is an artist based in Seattle, Washington. Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, she graduated with a BFA from the University of Cincinnati’s Design Architecture Art and Planning program. Meredith employs a variety of mediums but favors ink and pencil drawing and sketches. She most often works in these mediums because they are the foundations of her art practice and are exceptionally accessible to both artist and viewer. Playful engagement with the viewer as well as story-telling and repetition appear as regular themes in Meredith’s work.

Ilana Zweschi is an artist working in Seattle, Washington. She attended Skidmore College, graduating summa cum laude in 2011, where she was an Art Major and a Mathematics Minor. In 2014 she earned a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the State University of New York at Albany and received the Departmental Thesis award for her oral defense. She is currently represented by Foster/White Gallery in Seattle and is an instructor at Cornish College of the Arts. Zweschi has exhibited expansively, including a large-scale commission for the Meta Open Arts Program, is part of the Microsoft art collection, and received the DASH artist grant for 2022. Notable group shows include: Tiger Strikes Asteroid in New York, Museum of Museums in Seattle, and Out of Sight: A Survey of Contemporary Art in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been published in New American Paintings, a Youngspace interview, and featured on the opening page of the Culture section of the Seattle Met.