Kira Houston + MJ Gamelin | November 10-20, 2026

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We are so happy to welcome Kira Houston + MJ Gamelin to Lamplight’s Residency at 821! Merging collage and devised theatre, Kira and MJ present‬‭ Trip to Planet Paperclip‬‭, a‬ collaborative worldbuilding project.

Throughout the residency, Kira and MJ will create work set within the world of Planet Paperclip, a universe where objects take on new meanings. Community workshops are the heart of this residency—through these events, Kira + MJ invite the public to participate in their creative process, combining techniques from devised theatre with guided collage creation to collaboratively tell imaginative, far-out stories. MJ will facilitate these worldbuilding experiences, while Kira will document the stories in his ongoing body of Planet Paperclip collages. Each workshop is set within an immersive installation, a mysterious storyteller’s lair. On Thursday, November 19th, we invite you to join us for a closing reception celebrating what we have all accomplished together.

Community Events:

Friday, November 13, 2026 at 6:30PM – Trip to Planet Paperclip Workshop

Saturday, November 14, 2026 from 4PM-8PM (Ongoing) – BOOM BOOM BARNS Satellite Installation

Sunday, November 15, 2026 at 12:30PM – Trip to Planet Paperclip Workshop

Sunday, November 15, 2026 at 6:30PM – Trip to Planet Paperclip Workshop

Tuesday, November 17, 2026 at 6:30PM  – Trip to Planet Paperclip Workshop

Wednesday, November 18, 2026 at 6:30PM  – Trip to Planet Paperclip Workshop

Thursday, November 19, 2026 from 6:30 – 8:30PM – Closing Reception

Artist Bios:

Kira Houston is a visual artist and writer. He is interested in how unlikely materials can shape meaning in written and visual works, chasing a sense of play and embracing alternative narrative structures. His recent body of work “Planet Paperclip” comprises collage-poems set in an imaginary world full of enigmatic plastics, exuberant scraps, and mysterious little drawings. Kira is also an art historian and curator.
MJ Gamelin is a theatre artist focused on community engagement, queer narratives, and ensemble storytelling. He is interested in breaking down hierarchies in the standard theatrical process. Collaborative decision making is central to his philosophy. As a director and facilitator, MJ focuses on creating a supportive environment for actors and storytellers to bring ideas to the table.

Audrey Doh, Jiyou Park, Rachel Shin, Amelia Yang | Oct 17-Nov 7th, 2026

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We are happy to welcome Audrey Doh, Jiyou Park, Rachel Shin, Amelia Yang to the residency! They are a collective of four Korean artists working across new media, interactive art, and installation. At Lamplight AVL, they will create House of Wish, a participatory light installation inspired by Korean traditions of wishing and communal rituals, alongside a series of hands-on workshops inviting the community to create, experiment, and contribute to a shared space.

 

“During our residency at Lamplight AVL, we will develop House of Wish, a collaborative exhibition exploring Korean traditions of wishing, light, and communal ritual. Drawing from practices such as making wishes with lanterns and playing with light and shadow, we bring together traditional materials and interactive technologies to create an evolving space shaped by collective participation.

From October 16–22, we will prepare and install our works, develop interactive light sculptures, and refine the exhibition through hands-on making and experimentation. Visitors will be invited to participate in shaping the installation, from creating hanji lampshades for imagined light-bearing beings to exploring the relationships between light, movement, and emotion.

Alongside the exhibition, we will host three public workshops led by members of Bappul, sharing the materials, techniques, and ideas behind our work. Small works created during these workshops will become part of the exhibition, allowing the installation to grow through contributions from the local community. We will conclude the residency with a closing reception featuring a performance by Hebin Shin and Audrey Doh, gathering and honoring the wishes accumulated throughout the exhibition.”

Community Events:

Public Workshop Series –  Saturday, October 24, 2026

Opening Reception
Sunday, October 25, 2026, 5–6:30 PM

Public Exhibition: House of Wish
October 25–30, 2026, 11 AM–9 PM

Closing Reception & Performance
Friday, October 30, 2026, 7–8 PM, with Hebin Shin and Audrey Doh

 

Artist Bios: 

Bappul is a New York-based collective of Korean artists working across new media, physical computing, and interactive art. Drawing from Korean culture, materials, rituals and its themes of diaspora, Bappul considers how cultural practices change as they move across languages, generations, and places. Their work brings traditional forms and contemporary technology into conversation, creating spaces for shared making, play, and cultural exchange.

 

 

 

Audrey Doh, Bappul Collective

Audrey Doh is a new media artist who works with physical computing, embedded electronics, and digital media to explore the tension between scientific measurement and human meaning-

making. Drawing on vernacular traditions of interpreting nature, she builds interactive systems in which environmental data, non-human agencies, and chance shape algorithmic processes – repurposing technology to reveal multiple, mutable ways of knowing. 

 

 

 

Jiyou Park, Bappul Collective

Jiyou Park is a New York–based interactive media artist and researcher whose work asks when a technological object begins to feel like a living presence. Using physical computing, machine perception, light, and soft robotics, she creates responsive sculptural beings that sense and respond to viewers. Her practice explores how attention, belief, memory, and care give artificial beings a sense of life and presence. She is particularly interested in why some beings are overlooked while others are protected or revered.

 

 

hebin rachel shin, Bappul Collective

hebin rachel shin is a designer and activator who searches collective environments across senses, space, materials, and technology. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amelia Yang, Bappul Collective

Amelia Yang is an interactive artist exploring the invisible relationships that flow between people and space. Combining technology with tactile and sensory elements such as vibration, light, and movement, she gives perceptible form to the emotional traces people leave in space and the subtle connections that emerge between them. Born in Korea and based in New York, she draws from her experiences across different cultural and spatial contexts to examine how relationships are formed, carried, and accumulated within space.

Susan Alta Martin | October 1-14, 202

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During her time at Lamplight, Susan Alta Martin will, over two weeks, transform Lamplight into a stage for a durational performance that uses the idea of a waiting room as a metaphor for the current power structure. With the help of local artists, we will transform the space and shift the metaphor so that the locus of power is the community.


Susan’s Community Events:

October 1-6, 11am-7pm,
“Waiting,”
walk by and watch us wait!
The front window of the residency space will become the stage and inside artists will be “waiting.”

Friday, October 2nd, 5:30 & 7:00
Nora Hartlaub and Susan will perform a sequel to Faith Wilding’s 1972 performance of “Waiting” that she did as part of Judy Chicago’s “Womanhouse.”

 


October 3rd, 5pm-8pm,
“The Funeral,”
Featuring Performances and a Parade
The evening will kick off with a toy theater performance by Stacey Davidson. That will be followed by a eulogy led by Anna Helgeson where people will have a chance to mourn what they feel has been lost during this unprecedented time of attack on social justice issues. Finally, there will be a parade around Haywood Road led by Nancy Asch and Beth Heinberg in support of the long history of social justice causes and the root values that we carry forward.


October 6-9, 11am-7pm,
“Transformation,”
walk by and watch us transform the waiting room
The space will again become a sort of stage and people can come by and watch as Tom Ashcraft and Susan will lead the transformation of the space from a waiting room to an art installation. Area artists will also be bringing in things they have transformed from broken objects.


October 10th, 5-8pm,
“Transform, Not Fix,”

For the second intermission, the public is invited to an opening reception for the art exhibition “Transform, Not Fix.” Based on the idea that the system is too broken to fix, we need to make something new out of what we have.


October 11-13th, 11am-7pm,
“Community,”
A workshop where you can bring your broken objects to the space and the artists will help you transform them!

Other collaborators include:
Dawn Roe, Jeannie Regan, Ursula Gullow. Kirsten Stolle, Nava Lubelski, Kate Chassner, Frances Bukovsky, Nora Hartlaub, Erik Mace, Staj Noell, Lynne Hudson, and more.

 

Artist Statement:
I am a photo-based artist. I work most often in three dimensions, making sculptures out of photographs. I am interested in how socio-economics and power are constructed and how they appear in the landscape (in the expanded sense). Photography’s connection to reality allows me to show those constructions through analogy. I take photographs and form them in ways that reveal the constructed nature of what has been normalized by the powerful. I recently made a miniature waiting room for the Mall R.A.T.S. prompt “Where do we come together?” In doing research for the piece I came across the quote, from the sociologist, Helmut Huff. He wrote: “To wait for someone for prolonged periods is to physically experience their importance through scarcity of access.” It struck me that this is how I feel most of the time – as if I am waiting, waiting for the next horrific news to drop. Recent events have brought issues of governmental power to the foreground and all kinds of crazy ideas have been normalized. I want to use the waiting room as a metaphor for our current power structure but the miniature wouldn’t hold what I wanted to say so for the Lamplight residency and I am changing scale. I am making a full-scale stage set of a waiting room where I — with the help of some local artists — will act out waiting and then transform the metaphor.

Impractical Instruments Interactive Art Exhibit at Lamplight Studios

Impractical Instruments Interactive Art Exhibit
hosted by Lamplight AVL

The Community Garden is a touchable, interactive environment that explores the systems that empower (or disempower) our communities. Engage with these systems through play, movement, music, and peeking into windows. What you water thrives.

September 6th, exhibit opening 2:30pm to 5:30pm

September 12th, exhibit open from 3-5:30pm with musical performance at 5:30pm – Shana Tucker

September 13th, exhibit open 12pm-2pm

September 17th, Game Design Workshop 6:30pm to 8:30pm

September 19th, Diorama Workshop 12pm to 3pm

Elizabeth Ivey | September 1-28, 2026

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During her time in the residency, Elizabeth will complete a series of 16×20 framed fabric collages and develop “Sunday Dinner at Grandma’s House”—a new body of work honoring the kitchen table as sacred space where Black women hold wisdom, stories, nourishment, and intergenerational presence. Working across handmade collage, fabric, embroidery, and found materials, each piece interrogates memory, legacy, and the quiet power of family ritual.

I create as mixed media artist working in collage, textiles, and found materials. My practice centers Black interior life, memory, and generational inheritance through layered narratives. At Lamplight, I will complete intimate-scale framed fabric collages and develop a new body of work exploring the sacred space of family gathering.

 

Elizabeth’s Community events:
Elizabeth will work in the studio throughout her September residency, inviting the community to witness her creative process in real time. Visitors can drop by to see work in progress, ask questions, and experience the studio as a living workspace. No performance or instruction-just authentic creative work on view. This honors the tradition of artists sharing their practice directly with community.

Every Saturday in September, 11 AM – 3 PM

 


Artist Statement:

Through collage and mixed media, I examine the intimate spaces where Black people gather and decide what to hold—the kitchen table, the quiet moment between generations where wisdom moves forward. These are where survival becomes strategy. Where memory becomes legacy. My practice honors Black interior life: how we love, teach, protect, and imagine futures. I layer fabric, photographs, found text, and stitched gesture to hold contradiction—what was inherited and what we reject, what we survive and what we thrive in. I am interested in long-game thinking. What does it mean to make art that honors both the immediate and the ancestral? My work asks this through lived experience—faith, memory, family, the small rituals that hold us. I work intuitively and deliberately at once. Contradiction is not a problem to solve—it is the landscape. Each piece invites you to recognize that Black interior life is not small. It is everything.

Headshot Image by: Amos Moses

ankita sharma | August 24-29, 2026

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During their residency, ankita will be working on “Human, Vermin” – a 48-hour long live-and-livestreamed, interactive, solo endurance performance that investigates surveillance, mistreatment, and interspecies relationships along the human/animal divide. As human, animal, and environmental rights are systematically dismantled, they ask “How are humans treated “like animals?” How are the politics of disgust mapped on to human and animals alike?” “What does it mean to be a human that’s considered a pest?”
This dance-theater theater experiment uses immersive world-building design, audience interaction, maskwork, and animalistic improvisations to tell a satirical pseudoscience narrative about the evolution of humanity. During the residency, ankita and their collaborator, Soren Kodak, will be setting the space up like an indoor terrarium and creating a list of 48 hour-long improvisational scores to follow, during which they evolve from animal to human and back again.
In-person audiences will be invited into the space to observe and interact with ankita’s animal body according to set tasks, if they choose. There will also be surrounding visual and informational pieces about “Human, Vermin” and its concepts in the space. The full performance will also be available via livestream (sign up here!).

Artist Statement:

ankita is a Brooklyn-based experimental choreographer and writer invested in storytelling where content dictates genre and betrays expectations. They create to think critically, unpacking systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in the body and mind. In aesthetic, their performances are grungy, cheeky, character-based works of primal spirit, with movement practices rooted in Contemporary Dance, Dance-Theater, and forms from both the South Asian and the African diaspora. ankita enjoys intense physical transformation, scintillating humor, and getting audience members to laugh or cry (sometimes both!).

ankita’s Community Events:

“Human, Vermin”
48-hour-long research performance:
Thursday, Aug 27th, 11AM-9PM

Friday, August 29th, 11AM-7PM

Sign up for the livestream

Artist Talkback with ankita sharma post “Human, Vermin”:
Friday, August 28th, 7PM

“March of Progress” Movement Workshop
Saturday, August 29th, 1-4PM
Sign up: spots are limited!

J Seger & Nathanael Roney | July 27-August 23, 2026

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Welcome J Seger and Nathanael Roney of Age Cowboy to Lamplight’s Residency at 821! During their residency J and Nathanael will build, install and present a baseball museum-like exhibition. The production aims to study realities around art show, historical education, sports entertainment, and artifact.In the final weekend of their residency, the museum installation will open to the public, and will usher visitors through an orchestrated and produced setting that blends atmospheres of art shows, museums, and baseball parks. Extended hours will allow visitors to continue viewing the works in a museum setting.

Save the Date for: 

Baseball Museum Opening Night | Fri Aug 21 | 6PM
Baseball Museum Extended Showing | Sat Aug 22 | 12-4PM

J Seger is the Rolling Stoner, the Sick Duck, a Marylander who began his musical odyssey in Richmond, VA, continued it in Brooklyn, NY, and lives it now in Asheville, NC. The music is wholly original while the person maintains a respect and reverence for possibility, tradition, and integrity. A writer, a player, and a singer; all genuinely being cool. Aside from music, J has created and collaborated on personal works in many mediums and forms: writing, video, print, sculpture, radio, textile, hardscape.

Nathanael Roney is primarily a visual artist, living and working in Asheville, NC since 2006. Originally schooled as a graphic designer, his frugality has expanded that tool to include original illustration, painting, printing, writing, photography, video and performance. He plays and writes music with J in The Family Swaggards, has an extensive history of exhibiting his work to the public, and writes and publishes what he refers to as “poetry” to simplify expectations and/or premises of consumption.
J Seger & Nathanael Roney present art under the name Age Cowboy.

Zoie Reamer | July 2-July 16

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We are excited to welcome Zoie Reamer to the Residency this July. During her time at the residency, Zoie will be working on oil paintings with corresponding projections, hand dyed soft sculpture, painted lamp pendants, as well as interactive sound installation.

Artist Statement:

Zoie Reamer is a multidisciplinary artist inspired by visual enmeshment of her inner imaginative world with reality, drawing from harmony in faces and sanctuaries in nature. She uses oil painting, illustration, soft sculpture, sound, and projections to create pieces that reflect the connections between these worlds. She often mixes technical, naturalistic rendition styles with process-based abstraction to achieve this connection..

Zaquia Luisa Salinas | April 29-May 13, 2026

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We are excited to welcome Zaquia Luisa Salinas to Lamplight’s Residency at 821 this spring! Throughout her time at the residency she will be working on A Call to Prayer: an immersive, participatory performance project that blends embodied ritual with collaborative installation.

Zaquia will develop installation elements – integrating objects, projections, and spatial design – while inviting community members to participate directly. Visitors are encouraged to contribute offerings to the space and engage in intimate, one-to-one (or small group) performance appointments with the artist.

Artist Statement:

Zaquia Salinas is a dance artist invested in movement-art as an act of reclamation and world-building. She is committed to creating work that forges meaningful connection through personal and collective storytelling. Conceptually rooted in biomythography, her work (re)builds narratives that braid the personal with the communal, expanding how story can be held, alchemized, and shared. Her interdisciplinary constellations operate as portals for communion with body, earth, ancestor, and spirit. At the heart of her work is the desire to create rituals and spaces that help us understand ourselves and each other more deeply.

Help Artists and Asheville Thrive Together

 

SUPPORT OUR CAMPAIGN

This winter, we’re raising $120,000 to support both our ongoing work and our exciting expansion at 2 Westwood Place.

At Lamplight AVL, we believe that artists are the heart of our town. At our home in West Asheville, our residency programs give artists the space, time, and resources they need to create innovative work and share it with our community.

Just down the road, at 2 Westwood Place, we’re building the next chapter of that mission: A new, mixed-use creative space. At the heart of 2 Westwood will be affordable, community-minded artist studios – with several spaces priced below market value to help artists stay and create right here in Asheville. Later next year, a portion of the building will become a community-funded, arts-forward event space. 2 Westwood is being designed as a third space for Asheville’s creative community that will host: open studios, shows, music, workshops, and other arts-centered programming.

This expansion grows directly out of our Recover, Remain & Thrive Program, launched in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Last year, you helped us fund and distribute immediate relief grants to help artists recover and long term sustaining grants to help artists remain in Asheville. Now we‘re raising $120,000 to help artists thrive in our community.

Your contributions will directly support:

• The operation of our new artist studios,

• Development of the community event venue,

• Affordable creative spaces,

• Inclusive, public arts programming,

• And our ongoing residency program.

 

Every contribution helps create a space where artists and the Asheville community can thrive together.

community driven nonprofit for the arts

Lamplight AVL is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization that supports the community through engagement with music and the arts.

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