featured resident artists : MARY ROTHLISBERGER & PAUL RICHARDSON

We feature residents artists and long-time pen-pals Mary & Paul together this week.  Although Mary has been in residence since July 15th, Paul and she are working together as a collaborative team for the rest of their stay, through August 15th.  Their artist talk last night wowed us all, and they have been hard at work homesteading the meadow with a hoping machine and cataloging the wildlife that thrives there.

Mary Rothlisberger is a thinker, writer, conversationalist, and relationalist situated in the hinterland of North America. Mary has served as a Collaborative Director of LOOK AROUND, a pop-up artspace and creative playground intentionally located in the small town of Palouse, Washington. She is the founder and facilitator of multiple micro-residency programs, including the Upper Bunk in Palouse, Washington and Outbuilding Discourses in Grand Rapids, Michigan; she has also developed a model for collaborative mobile road-residencies that criss-cross the North American landscape. She serves as the Executive Archivist for the Bureau of Public Recollection, a mnemonic research-based institution and an Editor and Producer for Palouse Palouse Press, an editorial and independent publishing collective specializing in localized production of zines and artist books.  She collaborates as a producer and catalyst for Camp Little Hope and Cabin-Time. Mary Rothlisberger earned a BA in Religion from the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and an MFA in Sculpture from Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Her experimental academic degrees include Honors in Mystic Homeschool Correspondence Courses with James and Janie Washington in Seattle, Washington, and a Masters of Philosophy in Mistakes with a BA (Hons) in Avant Garde from the University of Incidental Knowledge in Leeds, England.

Her creative work is community-specific and socially responsive and thusly takes many different forms. Projects have included building a neighborhood radio station, facilitating a social center on a frozen lake, developing creative living systems within a former thrift store, exploring microcosmic cultural production within interstitial spaces, mystic homeschool correspondence courses, and living intentionally in a small town. She believes in a rational optimism, a compassionate intellect, and unconditional love.  She has recently discovered the wonders of Michigan, where everything is on the way to the beach.

http://bangbangboomerang.com/

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Paul Richardson, born and bred in Baltimore County, Maryland, works with a skewed ratio of accident and intention, and has only recently begun to understand how the former begets the latter.  He rides a bicycle, walks the railroad, and rambles, sometimes, in his run-on thinking. His creative practice involves writing letters, reading out-loud, swimming every day, being considerate, and making small marks, one at a time. These things take time.  His pace and method makes for many ongoing projects, which at present include an in-depth survey of the fifty state flags, an illustrative homage series to his favorite musicians, and a neverending penpalship that's part plainspeak and mostly metaphor.  He is also entering the thirteenth hour recording a Ulysses audiobook and very willing to accept any suggestions on how to manage that upcoming middle portion that's written as a play.  He is happiest in, underneath, or adrift on an oceanwave.  It is all, and will be, afterall, swell.  The tides are tugging at Michigan more than anywhere else that isn't an ocean. In engendering an inner finality, you buoy the boat you're afloat in.  
Paul earned a BA in Communications & Philosophy at Fordham University in the New York Bronx, and went on to study in Mary's Mystic Homeschool.  He has participated in collaborative projects and exhibited work in Pennsylvania, Idaho, Washington, California, Nebraska, and now Michigan.

http://www.paugey.com

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