ASC 8

Art School Confidential (ASC) is a quarterly event series at MASARY Studios. We invite 5 regional artists to share a selection of their work for informal peer critique and discussion. ASC is a derivative of the 2006 film bearing the same name, it’s a soft throwback to art school experience.

Episode 8 Artists

MARCEL MARCEL ( THEY/ THEM )

Cake-scape #12
Assorted foods and plants
2023

Marcel Marcel is an emerging video and installation artist based in Boston and born in the former Soviet Union. They work with microbial SCOBYs, experimental cake-scapes, lo-fi sculptural props, performance, sound-scapes, drawing, writing, AR face filters, and digital ephemera. Together, these materials become a polyphonic mode to interrogate fascism, capitalism, surveillance and the fiction of borders and binaries. Hovering between the absurd and the abject, Marcel's work offers a speculative refuge for queer liberatory futures, joy and healing.

WEBSITE: like-design.xyz
SOCIAL: @spandexical01

Kate Conlon ( SHE / HER )

DL-44: In Pursuit of the Perfect Replica
Artist book
2018 / Ongoing

DL-44: In Pursuit of the Perfect Replica is a non-fiction account that follows an international community of enthusiasts as they endeavor to create the first fully screen-accurate replica of the DL-44 Blaster, the weapon wielded by Han Solo in the 1977 film, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

The screen-used prop, a patchwork of antique weaponry components and plastic miscellany, has been lost to time. Evidence of the object’s construction, contours, and dimensions exists only in rare on-set snapshots, film stills, and industry lore. For a group of Star Wars enthusiasts, the quest to recreate the DL-44 prop has amounted to a multi-decade forensic-style investigation. It is a story characterized by obsession and dogged persistence and punctuated with moments of euphoric revelation.

The book was published by Third Object in a first edition of 100. It is designed by Hour Studio and includes illustrations by Richard Blackwell.

WEBSITE: kateconlon.com
SOCIAL: @kate_conlon_studio

Laila J. Franklin ( She / her ) [ProNOUNCED LAY-LA]

Without Any Further Explanation or: Everything and Nothing
Developed in collaboration with Michael Landez, the work is a cyclic solo study on enfleshment, invisibility, and transcience.(Live Performance and Projection, 2019 - Present)
2019 – Present

I am invested in the (in)visibility of lived experience. I use my practice to explore kinetic imagination and explore new possible futures. My work is grounded in the politics of visibility, citation, erasure, and legibility. A cacophony of embodied presence, vibrant in its bursts of physical virtuosity, I am curious about the intimacy and vibration of stillness and silence, juxtaposed by the disorientation and fullness of excess. I am interested in body histories and archives and the process of transforming embodied knowledge into generative movement material. I seek to disrupt the ways we’ve been taught to see, ourselves and others.

WEBSITE: lailajfranklin.com
SOCIAL: @la.frank

Ileana Doble Hernandez ( She / Her ) [ProNOUNCED ee-le-ah-nah ]

Your Fucking Right is My Biggest Fear
Video [ 1:35 runtime ]
2018

As an immigrant, I do not have the civic right to vote, yet my American son is affected by the decisions of those who can. My foreign status informs my opinion about civilians’ use of guns, but I want my audience to remember that I also speak as a mother and that I’m concerned for the danger that my son is exposed to. In the video, “Your Fucking Right Is My Biggest Fear” (2018), what starts as a whisper turns into an outpouring of my deepest frustration. The self-portrait is composed by the audio of my voice and the single repeated phrase, “Your fucking right is my biggest fear.” The phrase moves, grows, shrinks and breaks in an attempt to mimic the emotion of my voice, an action that is reinforced by the font, size and color of the text. I use grey for a whisper, red when I yell and blue when I cry. Fonts are bold when I’m angry and become thinner as I burst into tears. It is a call to people to step into the helplessness I feel every time there is news about children killed by guns.

WEBSITE: ileanadobleh.com
SOCIAL: @ileanadobleh

DANIEL CALLAHAN ( HE / HIM )

MassQ [SERIES] : Ghost, Calendar, Royal, Pac Man
24 x 36" Digital photographs, video [ 7:35 runtime ]
2022

Through my practice I look to  bridge the gap between art, artist, observer and environment. I am passionate about finding connections between cultures, peoples, and ideas and aim to create work that promotes wonder and integrates fine art, education, entertainment and cultural activism.

In virtually all indigenous cultures art is regarded not as objects in isolation, but as instruments for ritual - used to align, balance and relate the mundane with the mystical - the known with the unknown, and the “us” with the “other” in order to bring about meaning, order and harmony to all. In my practice I use ritual as a method; a way in which to approach not only my art, but my life. Through it I look to become a fuller human being and to create work that is deeply informed by, but ultimately transcendent of, time, culture, and geography.

WEBSITE: danielcallahan.com
SOCIAL: @danielpcallahan