Alex Elmestad is an artist, curator, writer and Manager of Public Programs and Interpretive Technology at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. He received a BFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Kansas City Art Institute, studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Missouri St. Louis. In 2007, he established a studio in St. Louis, Missouri dedicated to spatial research and sensory design. Collaborating with skilled craftsmen, material specialists, and other practitioners, his studio develops interactive installations, sensory architecture, public interventions, participatory projects, social happenings, and experimental artworks that explore the concept of perception while also questioning the context and meaning of various forms of space. Focusing less on materiality and more on the human experience, his projects evolve around the conversations, relationships, curiosities, self-discoveries, and the social personalities that make up an individual. With this tactic his practice becomes relational and observers frequently become participants. The projects more often than not examine how we perceive our environments and how that interpretation or misinterpretation connects us to each other. www.alexelmestad.com

Kristin Fleischmann was born in Greenville, SC in 1985, and grew up in St. Louis, MO. Fleischmann received her Master of Fine Arts from Washington University in St. Louis in May 2011 where she was the recipient of the Mr. and Mrs. Spencer T. Olin Fellowship for Women. The fellowship is sponsored by the Monticello College Foundation and Washington University in St. Louis for women in graduate studies. She graduated with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Denver in 2007.

Fleischmann is interested in the discourse between painting and sculpture. The works allude to fantasies of beauty, self-consciousness, anticipation, despair, temporality, and question the act of making itself. Ultimately, Fleischmann addresses the overwhelming nature of being, strives to understand how to care for the self, and wrestles with the human condition to find intimacy in the world. www.kristinfleischmann.com

Daniel McGrath is an adjunct professor in the art department at Webster University in St. Louis. In 2005, he received his Master of Arts from King’s College London, University of London. In 2000, he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from UCLA. He is co-director of Isolation Room/Gallery Kit, was co-director of Sweetboy Projects in Los Angeles and has organized exhibitions in St. Louis and the United Kingdom. He is a contributing art writer for Art US, Review Magazine and St. Louis Magazine. He has published essays on the work of Korean artist Fi Jae Lee, local painter Jaime Adams, and book reviews for the Imperial War Museum in London. He has exhibited his work at Hunter College MFA Studios, New York; Office Space, Los Angeles; SweetboyProjects, Los Angeles; Pirate, Burford, UK; PSTL, St. Louis; and the Hunt Gallery, St. Louis. He lives and works between Oxford, United Kingdom and St. Louis, Missouri.

Ann-Maree Walker, born in 1979 in Wichita, Kansas, studied printmaking at Oklahoma State University and received her MFA in Visual Art at Washington University in 2006.  She is a Research Assistant at the Saint Louis Art Museum where she runs the Study Room for Prints, Drawings and Photographs.

Walker’s work is concerned with self-reflection, desire and constraint, and at the heart of these concerns is the body—the interface between an inner psyche and the external world.  The modern body is an active site of social power play and Walker explores the rituals and costuming that are involved in its pageantry.  Through a variety of methods and materials including textiles, performance, video and installation, her work navigates the triumphs and pitfalls of our search for identity and connection. Her residency project, Generate, can be viewed 24 hours a day here. www.annmareewalker.com

 

See: Former Residents