Lance Johnson | TBD

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PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY

“The foundation of each piece I create is the layering of words throughout each canvas. I feel that words of inspiration are the soul of my work. Words have power and my goal as an artist is to create art that will resonate positively and evolve with each viewing. For me, the most amazing thing about art isn’t the final piece, it’s the creative process that is unleashed when you look at a blank canvas. I’m most passionate about the journey. The process is always most satisfying. For me it’s all about layers and textures. I look at a canvas like it’s a wall on say the lower east side. I try to create layers of history. The way old graffiti is covered new graffiti and urban decay and torn posters create textures.

Also, I was inspired as a young teen by the Harlem Renaissance so collaboration is a major component of my artistry. 

I was born and raised in NY and it has had a profound effect on my art. the energy, vibrance and movement of the city are so inspiring to me. The diversity and soul of the city are celebrated in my work. “

 

Will Iselnogle | April 29 – May 25 2024

We are so excited to welcome the Asheville-based illustrator Will Iselnogle as our artist in residence for late April and May! Will will be creating both visual art and installation work, and he needs you to love him.  He will host an opening on May 17 and a closing on May 24. Check back in for more details soon!

Sarah Louise | April 11-April 14, 2024

Sarah Louise makes music to help people connect with each other and our wondrous planet. Her albums range from Appalachian folk songs, to solo 12-string guitar, to genre-bending electronic journeys that have been called “Mystical” by the New York Times and “In tune with the thrust of existence” by NPR. She lives in the mountains of North Carolina where she forages wild food, makes medicine, wanders off trail and practices using song to communicate with other species. She feels equally a part of the lineages of folk musics and experimental artists like Pauline Oliveros and Milford Graves who practiced deep listening to explore the relationship between sound, body and place. For Sarah, song is powerful medicine. It has helped her heal what nothing else could and has gifted her an ability to create sonic journeys that can unlock grief, spark celebration and help communities tap into their own embodied expression. Music is alive, and there is a song for every moment. The Earth delights in all of our expression!

Alex McWalters | January 16-February 12, 2024

Alex McWalters is a writer, musician and educator based in Asheville, North Carolina. He plays percussion for River Whyless, and is an adjunct professor of Creative Writing at UNC-Asheville. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson and has served as the Warren Wilson MFA Residency Fellow since 2020. He serves on the board of Punch Bucket Lit, an Asheville literary nonprofit. Songs by River Whyless have been featured on, or in, NPR’s All Things Considered, Tiny Desk, World Café, and The Washington Post. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Nimrod International, No Depression, Paste Magazine, The Bluegrass Situation and Asheville Grit. In his free time he likes to rebuild old motorcycles.

Photo credit Molly Milroy

Aliah Lavonne Tigh | June 2024

Aliah Lavonne Tigh is the author of Weren’t We Natural Swimmers, a 2022 chapbook with Tram Editions, with poems appearing in the Academy of American Poets‘ Poem-A-Day, Mizna, Guernica, The Texas Review, Matter: A Journal of Political Poetry and Commentary, The Rupture, and others. Tigh has joined other writers for the Tin House Summer Workshop, read for Houston’s Poison Pen Reading Series and Hess Reading Series, The Brooklyn Rail, and contributed work for a Gulf Coast Journal and Texas Contemporary ekphrastic collaboration and was a grateful Recipient of Idyllwild Arts’ 2017 Bentley-Buckman Writing Fellowship. Tigh holds poetry and philosophy degrees from the University of Houston and an MFA from Antioch Los Angeles, and lives in Houston, Texas.

Cast and Crew of DOLORES | March 11 – April 7, 2024

Starting March 11, our artists-in-residence are Candlewood Collective and the cast and crew of the play DOLORES, by Edward Allan Baker! We are so thrilled to have them in the space to rehearse and build their set; they’ll put up their incredible production over the last weekend in March and the first weekend in April!

Cast and Crew:

Director: Lucia Gray

Producers: Candlewood Collective

Stage Manager: Madelyn Anderson

Cast – Sandra y: Lauren Davis and A.K. Benninghofen

Cast – Dolores: Kim Mako and Emily Tynan McDaniel

DOLORES is a one-act drama about two sisters drawn together by domestic violence. Sandra and Dolores push and pull against one another as they seek to connect with each other and protect themselves.

This unique production has double cast both roles: cast members will trade off throughout the run, resulting in FOUR DISTINCT ACTING PAIRS. Tickets are for specific nights of the production; audience members wishing to see the play in a new cast configurations should purchase tickets for each evening they wish to attend. See below for scheduled performances.

To request tickets, email candlewoodcollective@gmail.com with your name, the performance you wish to see (schedule below), and the number of tickets requested.

*Audience members please note: this play includes references to domestic violence and offensive language. The producers have decided to include the language in its original form because it is true to the timeframe and to the characters, and it represents an important phase in the arcs of both characters.

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE:

SOLD OUT Thursday March 28 at 7pm…A.K. Benninghofen and Emily Tynan McDaniel

Friday March 29 at 7pm………………………………………………Lauren Davis and Kim Mako

Saturday March 30 at 7pm………………………………….A.K. Benninghofen and Kim Mako

Sunday March 31 at 4pm…………………………..Lauren Davis and Emily Tynan McDaniel

Thursday April 4 at 7pm………………………………………………Lauren Davis and Kim Mako

Friday April 5 at 7pm………………………..A.K. Benninghofen and Emily Tynan McDaniel

Saturday April 6 at 7pm……………………………Lauren Davis and Emily Tynan McDaniel

Sunday April 7 at 4pm…………………………………………A.K. Benninghofen and Kim Mako

Lyle de Vitry | February 15 – March 9, 2024

Hailing originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Lyle grew up in a household filled to the brim with music. The now Asheville-based songwriter’s carefully crafted melodies and poetry are imaginative and thought provoking as he explores themes of nature, love, memory, and the passing of time. At the heart of his creative practice, he explores the intimate relationships between sound and our emotional experience – and how music can foster both personal and community healing. A multidisciplinary artist, his body of work is extremely diverse in terms of form, content, and instrumentation. Ranging from lush ensemble orchestrations and arrangements to beautifully subtle musings on the guitar, Lyle’s work does not inhabit one genre sphere. Audiences around the country have found solace in his performances as he flows between introspective instrumental guitar compositions and meditative songs. In 2023, he performed as a finalist in the nationally recognized Telluride Troubadour and LEAF New Song Competitions. His highly anticipated debut album, “Door Within A Dream,” is set to be released this summer.

Swannatopia | December 6, 2023 – January 2, 2024

Swannatopia returns to our space one year after their last full residency, and we are so thrilled to have them back!

Swannatopia’s Experimental Art club will host their second annual holiday light and sound extravaganza at Lamplight AVL in West Asheville this December. “Time is Fake: a Swan Pond Experience” will bring the people together again, to shimmer and shimmy among sights and sounds from the collective’s many large scale installations staged over the past year. Featuring fresh cake works and fashions by Experimental Art Club, a Sunset Surprise, New Psycho Actives Bug Mall Soundtrack music video premiere, a puppet show live scored by a 9 member orchestra, swan song sound bath, and black light dance party by DJ Madbog.

About Swannatopia:
We, of Swannatopia, are a group of experimental artists headquartered in Swannanoa, NC and residing throughout the Southeastern United States. Over the past decade, we have set out to blur the lines between “artist” and “participant”, to defamiliarize the familiar, to nurture an immersive, whimsical and thoughtful experience of empowerment, and offer a glimpse of what is possible.

We believe artistic collaborations are essential to cultivate a healthy community and to maximize creative potential Our installations and exhibitions are mutually supportive endeavors that help us all- individual, group, and participant observers – to dream bigger, together. To date, our multigenerational list of collaborators totals 50+.

To this end, we launched our “Experimental Art Club” in 2021. An experiment in and of itself, Experimental Art Club aims to facilitate the free exchange of knowledge, experience, tools and materials, while bringing the people together to “make stuff for fun!”.

Coco Villa | November 2023

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We are thrilled to announce that Coco Villa will be our artist in residency for the month of November 2023! Tightly wound to identity, Coco Villa leads a multidisciplinary art-research practice investigating relations between body and object. Their work spans across disciplines of dance, photography, fashion design, installation, and film. Villa utilizes material and movement languages to tell autobiographical stories, explore human intimacy and spirituality, and build familial archives through self-portraiture. Driven by historical and scientific discovery, Villa thrives in the dance studio, darkroom, dye kitchen, design lab, film set and library, playfully experimenting and creating by hand.

Image by Antonia Esposito  @espositoni_

Spyrodon: Tara Foley and Alex Theodoropulos | October 23- November 3, 2023

Spyrodon is a sound and visual project: a collaborative entity between husband-and-wife artist team Alex Theodoropulos and Tara Foley.

Tara Foley is an artist, a maker of sounds, a museum educator, gallery worker and a sometimes curator. She is currently living and working in Hudson, NY. Originally from NYC, but spending many years living in California, both in San Francisco and L.A, Tara received her MFA from CalArts in 2013. Much of her art practice has focused on social practice, teaching herself how to make something and sharing that knowledge with a variety of communities over the years, remediating capitalism one handmade item at a time. Her ongoing series “Church of A.I,” started in 2017 where she makes paintings composed of encoded messages involving ethics and the human condition. She has a practice with her partner Alex Theodoropulos called Spyrodon where they collaborate on sounds and visuals. For the residency, Tara will work on a variety of projects related to Spyrodon, from visuals, to clothing, to new sounds.

Alex Theodoropulos is a visual artist and songwriter who has always been drawn to the interaction between visual art and music.  Immersed in the garage/psych rock scene in San Francisco at the start of the 2000’s, Alex has produced animations and music videos for bands coming from the genre, including Thee Oh Sees and Sean Lennon.  Currently, Alex works as an illustrator of album covers and music posters for live shows. As a collaborator with many bands and music projects on both coasts, his current project is called Spyrodon, which is a sound and visual project he shares with Tara Foley. At the residency Alex will work on new songs, blending Tara’s voice and a variety of instruments that will reflect the visual creations Tara will be working on.