Studios > 2008 Residents

Norene Leddy
Norene's work combines video, sculpture and installation and has been shown internationally. She has received several awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship. In 2001, Sanctuary re-activated the Sanctuary of Aphrodite in Paphos, Cyprus. A series of large-scale video projections and audio installations throughout the sanctuary used the Aphrodite of antiquity as a starting point and combined her with images of contemporary Cypriot domesticity: local supermarkets and the home-life of Cypriot women.
In 2006 Aphrodite Project: Platforms was developed during an artist's residency at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in Chelsea. Norene earned an M.F.A. from Parsons School of Design in New York, and currently teaches drawing and video at Parsons and Kean University.
Aphrodite Project: Platforms is an interactive artwork that combines the rich mythology of Aphrodite, the priestesses/prostitutes of ancient Greece, with the advertising and safety concerns of contemporary sex workers in the streets, providing technological access to people for whom it would not normally be available. The prototype sandals utilize the latest wireless and GPS technology in order to ensure safety while working. The sandal prototype are embedded with an LCD screen, GPS receiver, radio beacon, speakers and wireless capacity. They are also customizable.
For more information visit http://www.nobetty.net/platforms
In addition to continuing her highly community-oriented work with the Aphrodite Project, Norene plans to create a new series of drawings that extend her more individualized fine-art practice.

Beth Ann Morrison
Beth Ann Morrison will be working on a project in collaboration with Arts Unbound and Walsh Gallery.
Individuals living with developmental, physical, or mental disabilities will be creating a large-scale sculptural installation to be exhbited at Walsh Gallery as One Breath, an "encompassing, organically-formed fabric environment. The floors will offer drifts of upholstered seating options, colored lighting will reflect the motions of visitors, multi-tonal sound will subtly drift through the space and the translucent walls will reveal the images of many people’s ideas of healing space."
She will begin by gathering donated and/or recycled fabrics and inviting groups of people to visit and create their contribution to the piece. She will be fabricating these elements into walls, as well as creating the floors, ceiling and foam pockets. The supporting structure will be created with found bamboo that will need to be soaked and shaped.

Margaret Murphy
Margaret
Murphy was born in Baltimore, Maryland in the working class
neighborhood of Hampden. Living now in Jersey City, NJ
for eleven years she claims it reminds her of Baltimore. Much of Margaret's work over the years has been
influenced by working class beliefs and values, feminism, kitsch,
religion and politics.
Professional awards and recognition include a 2008 New Jersey Print and Paper Fellowship, Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions, Rutgers University, a Puffin Foundation
Grant, Change, Inc. grant, a MacDowell Colony Residency and travel
award, Virginia Center and Vermont Studio Center residencies, Cooper
Union Summer residency, two project based grants from the city of
Chicago, Aljira EMERGE 2000 program participant, and was an
Artist-in-Residence at the Newark Museum. She was also a yearlong
Visiting Artist at Weir Farm in Wilton, CT.
Ms. Murphy has exhibited widely in galleries and Museums nationally.
Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Cheryl McGinnis Gallery
in NY (Good Girls/ Bad Girls), Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia (The Ballerina Project), and Margaret Murphy: Guest Artist to the Permanent Collection at the Jersey City Museum (Sept.-Dec. 2005). Group exhibitions include Women Artists
at HPGRP Gallery in NY and Tokyo, and numerous group exhibitions in the
NY, NJ, Boston, Philadelphia areas. Museum exhibitions include The Feminine Mystique exhibition at Jersey City Museum (Sept. 2007), Cultural Exploration: New Jersey Arts Annual at the Morris Museum, SKIN DEEP at The Islip Museum in NY, Montclair Museum of Art, and The Newark Museum.
In addition to making and exhibiting work Margaret Murphy is a curator
in her exhibition space The Garage in Jersey City.

Ryan Schroeder
Ryan's
first project at Aferro will be the construction of a miniature wooden
oil tower (approximately 9’ tall) with 5-7 interchangeable platforms.
On each platform a basin, made from beeswax, will house frozen
sculptures made from casein paint. The forms of these paint-sculptures
will resemble gas cans.
His work offers a "critique of
materialist philosophy by making the unseen incarnate and
dematerializing objects found within the immediate environment. The
violence inherent in the depreciation of visualization is called into
question in order to strategize new ways of being..."
In recent
projects, vessels (milk cartons, wine bottles, etc.) derived from the
artist's own consumptive practices have been cast
in frozen casein
and encaustic and displayed as disappearing still lifes in the streets
of New York City. As the sculptures dissolve, they begin to suggest
monochromatic paintings, transforming the dross of the world into a
subject of meditation.
"This act of recycling underlies the ambivalent relationship between object and image. As the ubiquitous, commercial vessel
loses
its formal status and cultural significance, it simultaneously becomes
material for a less distinct, yet more complex, referent."

Sara Wolfe
Sara Wolfe's
abstract paintings reference a childlike sense of space. She will be
working on murals within her studio space utilizing rejected mixed
house paint from the local Home Depot and independent hardware stores,
in a process that she believes "ties local residents to the mural."
"As infants learning to draw make
figures with twenty arms, they express a new awareness of their limbs
rather than a representational observation. My act of painting
similarly involves capturing our physical experience of existing in the
world, and memories of those heightened moments of awareness.
My interest lies in memory: how we re-create, embellish and merge it with other experiences. I reference a physical experience from a moment ago and a tangential childhood memory in the same image. My work ultimately reveals a sense of play and a longing to re-create that state of innocence."
Sara's previous residencies include Creative Center, New York, NY, Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, Woodstock/ Byrdcliffe Guild, Woodstock, NY and Vermont Studio Centers, Johnson, VT.
