SANTA MONICA—The city of Santa Monica revealed in a press release the 2022 Camera Obscura Art Lab (COAL) resident artists. Six Los Angeles County-based artists were chosen by a panel of artistic peers to spend 14 weeks in two studio spaces overlooking the Pacific Ocean. This year’s artists work in film, animation, installation, mixed-media, performance, photography, puppetry, and sculpture. Selected artists will get a stipend and opportunities to share their work in an online format.
For two years, the program evolved to respond to the needs of artists during this critical time. Changes include an increase in outreach efforts and upgrade to a broader artistic community, an increase in artist stipends, and adjust to exhibit final work online. The program is part of a network of artist opportunities offered by Santa Monica’s Cultural Affairs Division that served over 200+ artists across disciplines.
The Camera Obscura Art Lab artists-in-residence for 2022 are:
-Zach Dorn zachdorn.com is a filmmaker and performing artist who creates miniature melodramas that explore the underbelly of childhood nostalgia through the disappointed eyeballs of adulthood.
-Melissa Ferrari melissaferrari.com is a nonfiction filmmaker, experimental animator, and magic lanternist. Her practice engages the mythification of pseudoscience, phantasmagoria, and fraudulent histories of the supernatural.
-Andre Keichian andrekeichian.cargo.site is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, video, and sculptural installation. Their personal history as a queer, transgender, Argentine-American operates as an indexical relationship that expands to interconnected subjects.
-Lua Kobayashi luakobayashi.com focuses on the stories behind everyday objects, places and people we believe we are familiar with; she illustrates these anthologies with miniature scenes/sets.
-Dakota Noot dakotanoot.com is a multi-disciplinary installation and performance artist who explores the complexities of our diet and animal-human relationships through installations (made with drawings mounted on free-standing foam core) or wearable art taped to the body.
-Diane Williams dianewilliamsartist.com is a Pilipinx interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Williams creates woven objects and structures, combining cultural detritus as collected materials pulled from diverse sources: friends, family (in US, Philippines, and abroad), and her immigrant communities in Los Angeles.
To view the artists’ work click here. For more details about the arts in Santa Monica, visit santamonica.gov/arts.
