El Toro Wilderness: Art Ranch Residents

Sabana Field Station

Colorado Art Ranch and the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Juan selected the following artists to participate in the Aldo & Leonardo El Toro Wilderness Residency in Puerto Rico. Most of the artists will reside at the Sabana Field Station.

Jon Cohrs is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Often employing humor and absurdity, his work uses public engagement and site-specific interventions to address global issues. Recently, he created OMG I'm on .TV; an analog Pirate TV station that filled the void left behind by the digital transition. OMG TV was used as a reference in a Supreme Court amicus brief on creativity and copyright. He has taught at Parsons The New School for Design, SUNY Purchase in the Film + Media, and Colorado College. He has just completed a fellowship at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center and is currently working on a film about artificial flavoring and the New Jersey Meadowlands called the The Spice Trade Expedition. His work has been shown at Ars Electronica, FutureEverything, 2010 Vancouver Olympics, The Total Museum Korea, Art in General and discussed in numerous publications such as NY Times, Deutsche Welle, Neural Magazine, Make Magazine, Furtherfield, We Make Money Not Art, PSFK, and Gizmodo among others.

Grisha Coleman, Assistant Professor of Movement, Computation and Digital Media at the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the School of Dance at Arizona State University is a dancer, composer and choreographer of live performance and experiential media systems. Her current project, echo::system, has been recently presented at the ArtxScience Festival in Los Angeles and the Triennial of  New Media Art at the National Art Museum in Beijing, China. She is the recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts in Media grant for the development of this work. An invited research fellow/artist-in-residence at Carnegie Mellon University as part of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry [for transdisciplinary work across arts, sciences and technology], she was commissioned by the Robotics Institute at CMU to create a public, site-specific robot in downtown Pittsburgh. Reach! Robot worked as a public sound sculpture, a kinetic installation and a domain for public interaction and participation. Grisha is a graduate of the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, and received her MFA in Composition and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts. Grisha danced as a member of the acclaimed dance company URBAN BUSH WOMEN from 1990-1994. Subsequently, she founded the music performance group HOTMOUTH, which toured extensively nationally and internationally.

Dhara Rivera has developed her artistic work through a wide variety of formats and materials. She completed a Bachelor's Degree in Human Studies (1973) and Visual Art at the Pratt Institute in New York (1980). She completed her MFA from Hunter College and participated in the "Program for Young Artists" sponsored by the Whitney Museum, N.Y.C (1980-83). Her work has focused on the frontiers and fluid connections between the domestic and public, the persona; and social, the memory and present. For over eight years this view has turned to the relationship nature/individual/society, with a special emphasis on water in all its forms. From this body of work, other performing actions were derived in Dorado Beach East, Dorado, El Salto Community from Juanacatlán in Guadalajara, México and at the Quebrada Margarita in San Juan metropolitan area metro. The El proyecto Río y respiro, that was about Río Grande de Loíza, closed in December 2012 after a year of development. Dhara currently works as part of the faculty of the Escuela de Artes Plásticas of Puerto Rico.

Felix Rodriguez-Rosa holds a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts with a major in Photography from the University of Puerto Rico. His works range from action-performance, intervention-installation to drawing, photography and video. Since March 2012 he joined PISO as documenter, improviser and collaborator. He is currently a Fellow at La Práctica 2012-2013, a post-academic study and production program in Beta-Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Noemi Segarra lives and works in Puerto Rico. Noemí was a 2011-2012 Fellow at La  Práctica, Beta-Local's experimental studies and production program in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Segarra holds a BFA from Hunter College and an MFA from Temple University. Segarra has taught at Temple University, Bryn Mawr College, University of Puerto Rico and Inter Metro University. PISO proyecto is her current research project. Initiated in her home studio, PISO has been awarded a 2012-2013 Franklin Furnace Fund to bring the work to the South Bronx in 2013. Currently, PISO is activating a site in the remains of displaced community San Mateo de Cangrejos in Santurce, Puerto Rico. Segarra is committed to pushing artistic forms forward considering our inter-connectedness at an ample scale, while remaining grounded in local and everyday, informal contexts.

The twins, Jaime y Javier Suarez Berrocal, were born in Columbus, Ohio. In 2007 and 2008 they completed a Bachelor's Degree in plastic arts at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus.  They received their Master Degrees in artistic production from the Universidad Politécnica of Valencia, specializing in public art. During their residency in Spain, they started investigating subjects related to minimal intervention in natural spaces, developing concepts and implementation strategies that were in equilibrium with the environment. Today they explore how, through artistic practices, they can rehabilitate ecosystems and, at the same time combine their artistic work with nature's biological processes. They both work in collaboration under a production manifest designated as Vientre Compartido (Shared Womb).

Aline Veillat currently lives and works in Basel. She has an MA and a PhD in Aesthetics, Sciences and Technologies of Arts from Paris 8 University and an MA in Digital Media from Lausanne Cantonal Art School. After a period of theoretical research mainly in art and phenomenology to question the spatial perception in the time of interactive new media, Aline started to work as an artist. Her works have been exhibited in various places in Basel, Zürich, Bern, as well as internationally in Shanghai, Miami and recently in Gent with a nominated work for the New Technological Art Award 2012. She was granted two artist-residencies in China and Canada by Pro-Helvétia and the Christoph Merian Foundation, and received grants for art work production from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture as well as from the cantons of Basel City and of Basel Land.