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.