Can Serrat Residency, ACHC Grant, & More Art

[Still from GG in Punta Gorda, FL in front of bout sheets]

It seems my boxing-as-art and art in athleticism explorations are still a hot topic. I was recently accepted to the 30-day Can Serrat Artist Residency Program in the Montserrat Natural Park, Spain (Just outside Barcelona). In addition to my acceptance, I was awarded a Support Stipend and have within 1 year to book my stay. I'm extremely excited for this upcoming opportunity! To assist with the remainder of the expenses, I recently applied for an Individual Artist Grant from the Arts Council of Hillsborough County worth up to $1,000. Below are some of my brief responses:

1. Describe the PROJECT for which you are seeking funds.

I am seeking funds to support my recent acceptance to the Can Serrat Artist Residency Program. Can Serrat is a communal artist workshop and residency located within the confines of Montserrat Natural Park, just 25 miles outside Barcelona, Spain. With the assistance of a Hillsborough County Individual Artist Grant and the Support Stipend Can Serrat has awarded me, I look forward to what the future could hold if given the opportunity to attend in order to further develop and advance my creative practice. As a Tampa-based emerging contemporary artist with a Master of Fine Arts degree in New Genres/Performance, my current creative focus and research involves the integration of my artistic practice with athleticism–specifically amateur boxing. I regard boxing as a potent topic in terms of contemporary sports and gender studies, as female boxing is debuting in this year's London Olympics. Coupling gender and athlete demographics while dissolving traditional fields and boundaries, I implement a rigorous artist-turned-athlete training regimen with the aims of exploring the intersection between visual art and the noble art of boxing as an alternative form of performance. To ground my recent contributions to these fields, I am pleased to have been recognized as a prominent local artist at the National Performance Network's recent annual meeting in Tampa, and also recently recognized as the 2012 Golden Gloves Female Middleweight Champion of Florida. With this background and focus considered, my proposed project that Can Serrat has accepted and awarded a Support Stipend involves this interest in athleticism abroad. The project involves documenting a rigorous 21-day stamina and endurance performance that initiates at dawn and concludes when I hike to the summit of Sant Jeroni. This simultaneous conditioning routine and meditative ritual resonates with the history of the surrounding Can Serrat site. Similar to the contributions of walking artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, I plan to document the effect of my presence on the environment and also the environment's effect on me via photographs, binaural audio recordings, and other expanded media. After these treks, my time will be spent in the studios reconciling the data from these hiking excursions into tangible and experiential artworks for exhibit in both countries–Spain and the United States.

2. Describe how the PROJECT for which you are seeking funds will directly impact the Hillsborough County arts community or artists.

The works that I will generate during my participation in the Can Serrat Artist Residency Program will receive public reception not only in the Can Serrat exhibition center, but locally as well upon my return to Tampa. I look forward to contributing to the diversity of the arts culture of Hillsborough County by sharing my creative experience abroad via local public exhibitions, artist organizations, and advocacy. I plan to submit my Can Serrat works to forthcoming group exhibitions, including those hosted by Tempus Projects, an artist-run project space and alternative venue. I have a high regard for group exhibitions and value the opportunity to connect with multiple artists and discuss the relationships between works on display. I am less interested in a solo exhibition of the works, and more interested in relational community correspondence and conversation. This interest will lead me to also submit the works to multiple organizations of the Hillsborough County Visual Artists’ Alliance, including the North Tampa Arts League and the Tampa Realistic Artists. Notably, this alliance and these organizations also lay emphasis on community, and I believe will be receptive to considering the works I generate in Can Serrat for exhibition. In addition to public exhibitions and opening lines of communication across varied local artist organizations, I believe my work advocates a harmonious and balanced perspective by combining art in athleticism. My work on exhibition and promoted online will emphasize a creative mind that is congruent with a physical body. It examines the result the artist produces while also considering the artist him/herself as a tool worth refining, and the process as a journey of discovery. As an artist and recently recognized Golden Gloves Female Middleweight Champion of Florida, my work pushes boundaries regarding artistic medium, takes risks, and empowers the artist as a catalyst for change in the pursuit of one's passions and ambitions. I believe this is an admirable model for all of the Hillsborough County arts community.

3. How does this project advance your development of work/career goals?

The opportunity to engage the Can Serrat Residency Program's site of the Montserrat Natural Park is the ideal environment where my creative practice can benefit and flourish. The investigations I plan to carry out will foster creative and conceptual development while combining my interests in athleticism as an invigorated return to my previous artistic practice. Before my current artistic explorations involving boxing, my work heavily integrated the physicality of my body in other ways, namely through walking as a medium that responded to various environments as a catalyst for reflection and examination. Sites for my walking projects included the desolate Mojave Desert in California and the threatening sites of tension within the urban cityscape of Tampa, Florida. As a long-time resident of Tampa, I generated artworks addressing the pedestrian terrain of borders, barriers, and hindrances that are materialized and dematerialized in the geography and psycho-geography of the city. Through the use of installation, site-specificity, and performative elements, I frequently incorporated my own body in order to generate these works.The mountainous topography that Can Serrat provides access to is a landscape I have yet to explore, where I can continue to broaden and expand my research and practice while collaborating with new artists in a working community. This will advance my explorations of harnessing my body and will directly contribute to my comprehension of walking as a spacial practice–as a form of navigation and transformation. Furthermore, the potential to amplify the walking experience from gentle hikes to challenging treks and climbs offers an outlet to incorporate an element of athleticism as a mode of conditioning and stamina training. I would also delight in the opportunity to ground my creative work not only physically, but spiritually as well, via introspection and access to the historical Montserrat Monastery. It is this unique and natural beauty of Can Serrat's Catalan hills and influence of the Catalan culture that will enrich me creatively, physically, and spiritually as I embark on creating new works during my 30-day residency.

Lastly, my abstract "Artistic Performance, Amateur Boxing, and "A People to Come"" was accepted for the Digital (De-)(Re-)Territorializations Conference, hosted by Bowling Green State University in association with BGSU’s Association for Textual and Literary Analysis Students. I look forward to start shooting this weekend to generate my upcoming mini-doc / academic presentation on boxing and Deleuze for my submission.

It's been a lot to handle lately with continued boxing training, a full-time job, grant proposals and slowly making headway on pending art projects--namely the boxing catalog and a new series of fight-themed, large-scale graphite portraits, amongst other works. Details to come.