Artist’s Statement: “My work explores the layered complexity of time, memory and perception, where  seemingly chaotic fragments coalesce into a larger, more harmonious whole, reflecting the process of accumulation – layers of information, emotions and experiences building upon one another. Relationships between subjects are often unclear or shifting, allowing the viewer to experience multiple interpretations and draw their own connections while offering a space for personal meaning to emerge.”

Zach Cooper is a Grammy award winning composer, producer and songwriter based in North Carolina. He has contributed to works by Leon Bridges, SZA, The Weeknd, Jazmine Sullivan, Jon Batiste, Moses Sumney, Billy Porter, and Helado Negro, among others. Zach is also a founding member of experimental soul group, King Garbage. His work has been featured in Pitchfork, The Fader, Rolling Stone, and Guitar World Magazine, and he’s released records with RVNG Int’l, Styles Upon Styles and Mike Patton’s Ipecac Recordings.


Artist Statement:
I am a musician exploring fluidity and polarity through the musical practices of composing, improvising, recording, and songwriting. I strive to honor all that flows through my channel as myriad gifts of inspiration to be harnessed, shaped, and developed as “my work.” I’m interested in hearing where my work takes me, as it is often a mystery or surprise. I try to equally embrace, but not limit myself to musical habits, genres, mediums, or instruments.

This governing philosophy has sent me across the western musical canon; from collaborating within the Black American Music tradition, and the major-label pop music industry, to composing experimental chamber music, and developing an improvisation protocol. I value rigorous practice and study (in its many forms), and work to cultivate my own unique sounds and ideas to present a fresh and personal interpretation of the traditions that I contribute to (BAM, Pop, American Experimental Music). In this way, I aim to honor the ancestors of these various traditions, create economic and cultural multiplicity, and resist appropriative copycat tropes.

My current focus is two-fold; (1) using a DAW to write, record, and produce “popular music,” and (2) composing music within the RUT protocol. I can’t help but receive harmony, melody and lyrics. They come to me, from where I know not. So I heed these unique gifts by following their threads to completion, the best I can. On the other hand, RUT takes me into a more instrument-focused, abstract and conceptual frame of mind, centered in creating limits around improvisation as a means of composition. These 2 paths don’t necessarily cross or influence one another, but they do complement as parallel creative paths that fulfill me in unique ways.

I see myself in a lineage of Jewish American Composers. John Zorn once said “Jazz music went from Jelly Roll Morton to Cecil Taylor in 40 years, why can’t Jewish music do that?” This notion really interests me, and challenges me to consider my music as innately Jewish, whether I imbue my religious and cultural upbringing into my work intentionally or not. The innate politics of Jewishness also interests me, as I reckon with my ambiently zionist upbringing and the American-funded Israeli occupation and genocide in Palestine. A percentage of the taxes I pay on income I make from my music pays for Israeli weapons used to kill Palestinians. How does that make this Jewish composer feel? Ideally, the answer must be inextricable from the ethos, pathos, and logos of my work. Lastly, but most importantly, I acknowledge my privilege as a white cis-man from the United States, and the innate socio-economic benefits of my identity that have impacted the success of my career, and make it more likely for me to continue to succeed in my field. That said, I aspire to embody an egalitarian, anti-racist, anti-zionist, equity-politic in my immediate and national community as a husband, father, friend, neighbor, voter, and music-maker.

Carly Owens Weiss is an interdisciplinary artist based in Colorado. She received her BAD in Art
+ Design from North Carolina State University and studied crewelwork and goldwork hand
embroidery at the Royal School of Needlework in the United Kingdom. In her current work, Carly
uses hand embroidery, painting and soft sculpture to confront contemporary issues of
womanhood and expectations of gender through a personal and symbolic lens. As an artist, she
is interested in the violence of contrasts and navigating the feelings that arise when the familiar
or mundane is juxtaposed with something unusual or irrational. The tensions between comedy
and tragedy, femininity and masculinity and seduction and repulsion greatly informs her work. In
her pieces, Carly draws parallels between objects, the body and the experiences lived within it
to create contemporary vanitas imagery. Often her work depicts temporal moments, leaving the
viewer in a state of stillness and anticipation of what has either passed or is yet to come.
Carly’s work has been featured in numerous publications including Architectural Digest
(Germany), Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, BUST Magazine, The American Scholar and Frankie
Magazine. She has exhibited work in institutions such as the Museum of Arts and Design (New
York, NY), the Bomb Factory Arts Foundation (London, UK), the Boulder Museum of
Contemporary Art (Boulder, CO) and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE).
She has recently completed residencies at John C. Campbell Folk School (Brasstown, NC),
Penland School of Craft (Penland, NC) and Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), where she
was awarded full fellowships. She will be a National Artist in Residence at Contemporary Craft
(Pittsburgh, PA) in 2025. She is an exhibiting artist with Tracey Morgan Gallery (Asheville, NC)
and her upcoming solo exhibition with the gallery opens November 15th, 2024.

Cecilia Moushey is a poet and artist. They grew up in Asheville and love exploring the intimate areas of life. They are currently working on a degree in Environmental Science, are mediocre at rock climbing, and will tell you all the best swimming holes if you ask them nicely. You can find their work at your local Asheville cafe and on instagram @sleeeppyybunny

Come by the residency this July! Meg Winnecour will run an open art studio for a month, a space in which she will make her work (acrylic nature portraits on panel, watercolor and dye explorations on paper, and free-stitched cyanotypes) in a public way, and invite people to come into the space and make some work of their own, with or without her help. She will work in a new medium each week (cyanotype, acrylic paint on panel or canvas, and watercolor on paper). Her dream would be for her West Asheville neighbors to stop in for an art experience on their way to the bakery or the library, folks out running errands stopping in to see what’s going on and then getting pulled into making a piece of their own, dear friends stopping in for a chat. More than anything, Meg wants to add beauty and connection to her neighbors’ lives through time spent chatting and making a piece of art to take home.

July 2-7… cyanotypes and free-stitching

July 8-14…acrylic nature portraits

July 15-21…watercolor and dye explorations

July 22-26…cyanotypes and free stitching

Meg Winnecour is the founder, director and CLO (Chief Love Officer) of Cloud Collective Residency in Asheville, NC, the city she’s called home for over 2 decades. Meg spends her days running an artists’ and writers’ residency, teaching workshops, making paintings and stitched cyanotypes, and writing poems. She lives in a hundred-year-old house with her husband, teenage daughter, and four bossy but lovable chickens.

While Meg will be the artist in residence Monday-Friday the month of July, she will share the space with author and illustrator Ben Berry, who will be in residence weekends during July.

Ben Berry grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. Ben was taught by his great uncle Tomas Berry, the eco theologian, about the importance of our place in the cosmos.  Our stories are interconnected in an intimate way with the universe.   We are “not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects”  as he would say.

Ben wrote, illustrated, and published his first children’s book 2 years ago with that influence as a key part of my inspiration.  “Where Do We Come From, and Where Do We Go?  A Turtle’s Creation Story.”  It tells the Universe Story and we arrive at the present moment.

Ben’s next book will be an open collaboration with the people of Asheville where he currently lives and works.  It will be called: “I Am Not Myself, Without Everything Else.”

A children’s book, each page will be full of illustrations of the beautiful Subjects of the Universe, created by the people of Asheville. Ben will be in residence at Residency 821 weekends in July and invites all to come in and contribute a drawing to be included in the book.

Ben plans to publish through Amazon and will be distributing them to the local elementary schools in the coming year.

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 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 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 DepressionPaste MagazineThe Bluegrass Situation and Asheville Grit. In his free time he likes to rebuild old motorcycles.

Photo credit Molly Milroy

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.

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