2019 Hotbox Residency
Payasa and Zoe Berg
07/19/2019 - 08/24/2019
MASS is pleased to present the artists selected for the 2019 Hotbox residency program this summer: Andie Flores and Cynthia Muñoz, working as the artist team Payasa (Austin, TX), and Zoe Berg (Austin, TX).
MASS will transform its gallery space into a working studio for two artists/artist teams this summer. The seventh annual Hotbox residency program will take place over a 5-week period and will give selected artists the opportunity to explore new ideas or practices, while allowing them to engage with the Austin community. Taking advantage of the prime production time of the summer months, MASS hopes to nurture projects through this program that would not be realized otherwise.
Each artist accepted as a Hotbox resident is obliged to participate in MASS’s public engagement series, Close Encounters. Close Encounters is a program designed to provide new methods of engaging the public’s curiosity. Open and broad, this prompt can be approached from a multitude of ways: performance based, passive, or completely radical in execution or thought. This program is a challenge to an artist’s current practice and designed to provide audiences with a new way of encountering and understanding the creative process.
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About the Artists
Payasa
Andie Flores and Cynthia Muñoz are two multidisciplinary Austin-based artists who create self-portraiture work together as Payasa, an ongoing narrative exploration of vibrant and twisted images where two shapeshifting clowns boldly insert themselves into isolated landscapes. As clowns, Flores and Muñoz grant themselves permission to behave outrageously and reframe the viewer’s understanding of rote spaces.
For the Hotbox residency, Payasa plans to explore worldbuilding on a grander scale in an installation tentatively titled, Your Presence is Requested, in which the studio transforms into the site of decades’ worth of remnants from elaborate, unattended birthday parties thrown for an absent honoree, where the clowns have been repeatedly hired to perform in a more traditional form of clowning.
Zoe Berg
Zoe Berg was born on a fall morning in Austin, Texas, where she currently resides. She combines video, objects, and audio to make installations that are stages for performance. Her work celebrates and features her mother, grandmother, and Norwegian great-grandmother. Acting as a tour guide, she invites the viewer to take a road trip through crisscrossing generations and locations. Projects can be found at www.zoeberg.net.
During Hotbox, Berg will focus on creating a multi-channel video installation and complementary performance, centered around the “chorus.” This is represented through instrumental covers of pop songs, multiple voices that narrate, and synchronized swimming routines. The videos will collage footage from aqua-musicals, documented performances inspired by the choreography of these aqua-musicals, and audio of text read by a chorus. This project will tie into programming at Independent and Assisted Living communities here in Austin in an effort to collaborate with the residents to document movement exercises for wellness and balance.
