← Exhibitions

Residency Projects: 2006-2007 Kala Fellowship Exhibition Part II

Kala Fellowships are awarded annually to eight innovative artists working in installation, video, digital media, printmaking, and book arts. Fellowship artists are selected from a competitive field of applicants from the United States, South America, Europe, Africa, Australia and Asia. Recipient artists receive a financial award and up to six-months residency at Kala’s studio facility followed by an exhibition of their new work. The Kala Gallery is proud to present the second of our three-part exhibition series, Residency Projects, featuring work by our 2006-2007 Fellowship artists.

Activist artist and provocateur Packard Jennings is known for works that combine equal parts humor and cultural criticism. His witty and ironic works range from ad hoc installations and video animations to signage, pamphlets and prints that have been slyly placed in the public domain. Packard is represented in Residency Projects II by several works including his most recent video animation titled Which Way up? This non-linear animation features a series of colorful vignettes that explore ideas about the future, the afterlife, rebellion, Utopia and distopia. Packard created the animation from his hand drawn illustrations and assembled the drawings into an animation using the Flash program in Kala’s media center. Packard’s work has been recently presented in the Bay Area at Southern Exposure, Catharine Clark Gallery, the Oakland Art Gallery and the Di Rosa Preserve in addition to venues in Chicago and Geneva, Switzerland.

Scott Kildall employs a wide variety of technology-based approaches to projects ranging from video installations and projections to sound architecture and electromechanical sculpture. Scott’s sophisticated use of technology is counterbalanced by his subtle exploration on the themes of dislocation, transition and emotional upheaval. His most recent project titled Paradise Ahead is based on his interest in Second Life, an online community where participants create avatar personas that populate a virtual 3-D world. Scott treats Second Life as a social space for the recreation of landmark performance art events such as Chris Burden waiting to be shot, Yves Klein leaping into the void and Yoko Ono having her dress cut away one piece at a time. The Second Life project is realized with a series of digital prints created at Kala. Scott recently moved to the Bay Area after receiving his MFA in Art & Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and the Gosia Koscielak Gallery in Chicago in addition to local venues including the San Jose Museum of Art, Mission 17 and The Lab in San Francisco.

Stephanie Syjuco’s recent works are influenced by an eclectic combination of speculative fiction, Afro-Futurism, product piracy and concerns about global power structures. Stephanie will be presenting several new works that explore self-created “fictions” including The Village (Small Encampments), an eight minute slide projection work that blurs the boundaries between the domestic home and the idea of exotic homeland by using tiny cutout images downloaded from the internet. The tiny images are inserted into her own living space and photographed as a means to examine the ambivalence in how one can be both complicit and participatory in what they seek to critique. Born in Manila, Stephanie lives in the Bay Area and has an extensive resume of international exhibitions. Most recently her work has been seen at the Mills College Art Museum, Southern Exposure, PS1 in New York and University Studios Gallery in Beijing, China.

The third in our Residency Projects series will present the work of Karen McCoy, Daniel Ross and James Sansing from August 30 – October 6 at the Kala Gallery.

Kala Art Institute location:
1060 Heinz Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94710 (510) 549-2977

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Friday, Noon – 5:30pm; Saturday, Noon – 4:30pm

Exhibitions are free and open to the public.