“DISCOurse #3: Velvet Rope” Studio Video
SUMMER FORUM for inquiry + exchange
I have been chosen as a participant in the inaugural Summer Forum for Inquiry + Exchange residency which seeks to nurture and facilitate conversation and creative exploration through an examination of contemporary texts. Check out and keep tabs on this unique, nomadic, and non-instituionalized residency model out of Chicago.
Participants and invited guests will meet in New Harmony, Indiana for a one-week summer residency, 21 July – 28 July, to engage in an extended dialogue centered on directed readings on the theme of Community, Utopia, and the Individual. The texts are culled from a broad spectrum of materials: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, theory and criticism, comics, blogs, online forums, tweets, etc.
The dialogue generated during the week is the focal point of the Forum, empowering the engaged community and legitimating the spontaneous collaborative scholarship created in the space. The strength of the dialogue lies in the disciplinary diversity of the participants — writers, artists, thinkers, musicians, students, teachers, scientists, consultants, etc. — along with the concerted move away from specialization and instead toward generalized study.
Antwerp Studio Video, November 2011
I took this video from my studio residency in Antwerp (August-November 2011) in the heart of the city’s historic port. AIR Antwerpen is an international residence project for artists, housed in the old lockman’s mansion between the river and port canals. Massive barges from around the world floated by my rooms day and night entering or exiting the lock which lifted or lowered them to river or industrial canal level. Here you will get a glimpse of this and my studio. You will see briefly the video artists Ronny Heiremans and Katleen Vermeir, who live and work in Brussels, and who were visiting that day in order to record my voice reading various texts for their new video, The Residence (A wager for the afterlife) (2012). Residence will have its two-part premier at both Argos—Center for Art and Media in Brussels, and at Extra City—Kunsthal Antwerpen, late January and early February 2012.
Check out their last project, The Good Life (a guided tour) (2009), which made me a huge fan.
Studio Movie, Bradley Wester – 8/11/11
Moving images inside Brooklyn NY Sunset Park studio of new work in progress, August 2011
Artwork from the Islamic series, final part 3 of an eight-year project: “Ephemera & Culture: Italy, Turkey, and Japan—a Trilogy,” three bodies of artwork initiated in three distinct and symmetrical cultures outside the U.S.