18th Street's International Artists in Residence Exchange program facilitates creative inter-cultural collaboration and experimentation among artists. In addition we strive to build a critical forum and context for the examination of such work by forging new relationships with arts agencies and centers around the world. Now in its 13th year, our program has hosted over 80 residencies with fourteen arts organizations in twelve countries, including Australia, Cameroon, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, South Korea, Sudan, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.
(Eligiibility for our International Program is limited to cooperative partnerships with foreign government agencies and private foundation funding programs.)
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Peter Atkins
(Australia)
Artist
May - August 2008
This new series of work titled ‘readymade abstraction’ sees a return, after a decade, to the use of tarpaulins as the support for my paintings. The shift that has occurred also sees a less painterly approach to the work leaving instead the untouched tarpaulin to act as the ‘ground’ for my painted floating forms. What attracts me most about these used tarpaulins is the encoded history, built up over time, sometimes years, of a narrative that is literally embedded in the surface of the material. The stains, creases, faded canvas and repaired seams and tears , impossible to fabricate, become remnant reminders of lives lived and journeys undertaken.
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Marcos Castro
(Mexico)
Media Artist
April 2008 - June 2008
Atrocious and monumental, the capacity for cynicism through the cartoon.
The play in Castro's drawings poetically relates the ambiguities between the story of an event and the manifestation of cynicism as an essential way of transmitting these states. Looking through these images forcibly gives the sense of satisfying the need for surprise at the unusualness of the event analogically caricatured by animals.
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Marko Tadic
(Croatia)
Artist
April 2008 - May 2008
In the recent works of Marko Tadic, urban myths relying on the aestheticism of punk rock, fanzines, comic books, manga, and B-movies, are merged with art-historical references, fairy-tales and literary quotations, into an organic unity. Tadic does not recoil from arranging these realities on to the surface of wooden souvenirs, paper plates, or wooden boards. In addition, he does this playfully, almost childishly, by using techniques with which many among us used to dirty our small fingers in our early childhood - felt-tip pen or ink. In this way, he constructs multileveled, phantasmagoric stories with only a hint of narration. As in all boyish drawing, be it doodles or graffiti on school tables or bedroom furniture, and evident on the wooden boards of Tadic in his latest body of work, it is possible to perceive a modified hero, or at least - a robot. But when the boyish passion for drawing is combined with the curious investigation into abandoned objects and a fetish for insignificant human traces, such as an abandoned address book, diary, or simply a notebook, imaginary beings find themselves in a rather overpopulated neighbourhood. Heroes taken from the remnants of everyday life evolve in accordance with the precarious rules and whims of that small, mythical world; while the rebus-like landscapes, with their inevitable subtext of transition, conceal the laws of creation of new mythical heroes.
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