During each residency, the resident and a carefully selected interlocutor have a discussion about visual research. Private and free-ranging in scope, the exchange is recorded to create audio files as part of the Monkey Head toolbox. Many researchers integrate key quotes from the talks into their Monkey Head Lab books and some of the ideas from these discussions may also be incorporated in the Project Catalog.
Iteration #1: Martin Gantman
Interlocutor: Kay Whitney
Kay Whitney is a writer and sculptor living in Los Angeles. She has contributed critical articles and reviews to national and international publications. Her essays have been included in several anthologies. Her studio work involves a critique of Modernism and the notion of the gendered object. Aside from teaching sculpture, she has also taught critical theory and Contemporary Art History at numerous institutions including Art Center College of Design, Kansas City Art Institute and the University of Chicago.
MH Iteration #2: Anna Aeryoff
Interlocutor: Dana Berman Duff
Dana Berman Duff holds an MFA in Post-Studio Art from California Institute of the Arts. She works in a variety of media including sculpture and film. Her artworks are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Phillips Collection (Washington DC), Brooklyn Museum (NYC), The Carnegie Museum (Pittsburgh), and a number of private collections. Her works in film and video have been screened in dozens of festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (Geneva), Edinburgh International Film Festival, ExIS (Seoul), Antimatter (Vancouver), San Francisco Cinematheque, Cairo International Film Festival, Dortmund/Cologne International Women’s Film Festival, and at LaborBerlin (Berlin). Duff is a professor at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
MH Iteration #3: Antoinette LaFarge
Interlocutor: Susan Green
Susan Green holds degrees in English literature from the University of California Santa Cruz, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the University of Washington. She has worked in library and museum publishing for thirty-five years, serving as editor of the Huntington Library Quarterly beginning in 1992. The journal ranges widely over the cultural history of the early modern period, and has published a number of special issues featuring the visual arts, from the illumination of medieval manuscripts to scientific illustration.
MH Iteration #4: Greg Cohen
Interlocutor: David Schoffman
The orthonym David Schoffman is a vagrant, liquid, waggish literary orphan who paints. He may or may not have been born in Brooklyn and probably has an expensive degree from a prestigious New England art school. He is in constant conflict with the heteronyms Micah Carpentier, Currado Malaspina, Dahlia Danton, Faun Roberts, Orestia Shestov, Spark Boon, Clement Digby and Sophia Lagrimar. The real David Schoffman, the puppeteer and impresario of this circus of contentious characters is redundantly credentialed, irrelevant and arrogantly unimpressive.
MH Iteration #5: Christian Smith
Interlocutor: Will Dunniway — POSTPONED
Will Dunniway has been a American History re-enactor for the past 25 years. It was while re-enacting the 125th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, that he watched with fascination as John Coffer and Claude Levet worked their collodion magic. He talked with John and in the summer of 1990 apprenticed under him and later under Claude Levet. Since 1990 Will has practiced this art of collodion primarily on the west coast working in the Gold Rush, Old West and Civil War events. He has also worked with Columbia Pictures making ambrotypes for Francis Ford Coppola in the movie ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ and made tintypes for the ‘Peanuts’ Schulz families wedding of Charles eldest son, Monte. Now he has branched into the world of art/photography using this wet collodion process to make his views of western landscapes. He also teaches this wet plate collodion process around the world.
MH Iteration #6: Christel Dillbohner
Interlocutor: Ray Keating
Ray Keating has been making films, videos, holograms and other optical variable devices since 1976. These range from music videos and experimental art films to a documentary on the Trilateral Commission. As a performer Ray was a member of the industrial band CPD who released a CD titled “Surveillance”. During the 1990’s Ray was a member of the Dutch performance art group “Instituut voor Betaalbar Wanzin” (Institute for Affordable Lunacy)”. The group toured Europe multiple times and performed in the 1997 Documenta. Recently, as the chief engineer, Ray led a team to develop a new way of making holograms that can be multiplexed and photoshopped.
MH Iteration #7: Pam Posey
Interlocutor: Melissa Lo
Melissa Lo writes about paradoxes of visual representation and their histories. She received her master’s degree from MIT’s program in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art, and her PhD from Harvard’s department of the History of Science. The Fulbright Foundation and the Council on Library and Information Resources awarded her fellowships to research the pictures that constituted Descartes’s natural philosophy throughout the seventeenth century. The book manuscript based on that research is nearly complete, and an article based on the manuscript’s first chapter is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Ideas. Since July 2014, she has served as Dibner Assistant Curator of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
MH Iteration #8: Amy Kaczur
Interlocutor: Bonnie Porter
Bonnie Porter is Education Program Coordinator for Gallery Tours at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, CA.
** Each interlocuter bio was written by the participant about him/herself and submitted to the ICI for the purpose of this page or copied from their professional artist website. **