Artist Residencies
The FOR-SITE Foundation’s residency program supports artists in the creation of work that dynamically addresses various aspects of place, from natural history to cultural heritage and from the geologic to the geopolitical. The 50-acre residency site is located on the edge of the South Yuba River gorge, just outside the historic gold-mining town of Nevada City, California. FOR-SITE collaborates with institutional partners to select artists and present the work created during the residencies, extending these projects into the public realm.
In work that appropriates archaeological and other scientific methods, Mark Dion examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The artist used the FOR-SITE residency to familiarize himself with the natural and social history of California as part of the conceptual development of The Marvelous Museum, an exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California.
Los Angeles–based installation artist Pae White explores issues of site and context while blurring any boundary that may remain between art and design. White’s time at the FOR-SITE residency culminated in an installation at New Langton Arts in San Francisco, In Between the Outside-In, that proposed new paradigms for art and landscape.
Chris Drury creates ephemeral assemblies of natural materials. His work explores the connections between nature and culture, inner and outer, systems within the body and systems on the planet. Drury often collaborates with scientists and technicians from a broad spectrum of disciplines. His FOR-SITE residency was part of a larger collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art resulting in the exhibition Mushrooms | Clouds.
In his FOR-SITE project, Beijing-based photographer Shi Guorui examined the landscape and history of California. He built a camera obscura at various locales, including Alcatraz Island, the de Young Museum, and Donner Pass, and created large-scale photograms of objects from the collections of the de Young Museum and of mining tools associated with the Nevada City area. The resulting exhibition, Reproduction and Refashioning, was presented at the de Young.
London-based sculptor Cornelia Parker has earned a reputation for sculptural installations manifesting the theory that matter is never destroyed, but is merely transformed into something else. She used her time at FOR-SITE to create a work exploring, in her words, “ideas . . . of chance and intention, violence and calm, death, resurrection and the nature of the limbo.” The work, Anti-Mass, was presented in the exhibition New Work by Cornelia Parker at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Distinguished British artist Richard Long has spent his career making art that expresses his connection to the land. Long is recognized for creating a kind of extended sculpture that is informed by his vigorous, solitary sense of quest. His FOR-SITE residency culminated in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Path Is the Place Is the Line.