Tuesdays, Thursdays & Fridays in August, 2014
1519 Sunset Blvd, LA 90026
We invited WCCW members and women from our network who we admire to be Workers in Residence while we were at Echo Chamber! These rad ladies were each in residence for one day during this casual series doing site specific projects, jamming on their creative works, inviting special guests of their own and hangin’ with our working community!

Friday, August 1st: M. Whiteford
M. Whiteford kept it old school by writing on a typewriter. She clacked away all day, completing a Poolside Play from start to finish!  What’s a Poolside Play, you ask? Why it’s a play to be performed in a pool, of course! She’s currently looking for venues, so hit us up if you know of a pool that could use a little performing arts.
M. Whiteford is an artist and writer exploring the strange, magical, and treacherous realm of communication.  She layers visual, verbal, and physical languages into playful performances and text. Through these orchestrations, she attempts to translate the internal externally, all in the hope of making contact.

Tuesday Aug 5th: Erin Schneider
Erin Schneider showed up in an amazing outfit and proceeded to construct a strange contraption to match it. What was this colorful cone? A custom Echolocator! She took it on a hike of the neighborhood where it was most helpful in the discovery of the various echos of Echo Park.
Erin Schneider is an artist from Los Angeles. Her work is about geography, bodies and space. Recent projects include Utopias of SoCal, a Llano del Rio guide to Southern California’s utopian colonies, and CDAGNCE, a site-specific dance in a giant cage at Materials and Applications. For the WCCW Echo Chamber residency, she invites you to come and look for echoes around Echo Park.

Thursday, August 7th: Sarah Rara
Sarah Rara came in to do a bit of research for a seminar on scores she’ll be teaching at Occidental College this fall. She’ll not only be examining the traditional musical score, but also scores for movement, connection, play and cooking, among other things.
Sarah Rara is a Los Angeles-based artist working with video, film, and performance.  She is a contributing member of the group lucky dragons.

Friday, August  8th: Soyoung Shin
Soyoung Shin recorded her friends talking about their early conceptions of sex and came in to Echo Chamber to film a stop motion animation to illustrate the recordings. There was construction paper pee and pubes made from black string. We can’t wait to see the final piece!
Soyoung is a Korean-American artist interested in utilizing emerging technologies and traditional art forms in her artwork. Her art practice is post-disciplinary and includes sculpture, performance, video, photography, and code. Recently, she has been creating works that are autobiographical, fiercely feminist, and emerge from her relation to the USA. She graduated in 2011 from the University of Washington with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science.

Tuesday, August 12th: Jessica Fleischmann
Jessica Fleischmann came down with her assistant, Ruby the Wonder Dog, to give us branding and event advice. She also found time to work on a banding proposal for a Santa Monica restaurant and organize content for the catalog she’s creating for the upcoming LA Islam Arts Show.
Graphic designer and proprietress of still room, Jessica Fleischmann focuses on socially engaged cultural work from books to branding, collaborating with individual artists, cultural institutions and confectioners. She is a part of Group Effort, with consistent collaborators Rachel Allen (architect) and Allen Compton (landscape architect). She’s currently working on a campaign for the LA/Islam Arts Initiative, a re-brand of Edward Cella’s gallery, a book with Alexandra Grant, next season’s REDCAT brochure, a re-vamped space for Sticky Rice in Grand Central Market, some stuff for Sexy Beast, Night Gallery’s fundraiser for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, and several other top secret projects. Humanizing design, one small project at a time… Long ago, she used to cook for a living.

Thursday, August 14th: Karen Adelman
Karen Adelman came in and helped convince Kate to cut all her hair off at the salon next door. She also knitted quite a few of the 31 “sandpackets” she promised her friend, artist David Horvitz, she would complete for his library project.
Karen Adelman is an artist, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. Through performances, costumes, songs, texts, installations, objects, and videos, she attempts to navigate our world and be of some use. She thinks of herself as a kind of orator, but she’s also a fabricator. She is about to begin hosting events at a small project space she calls WWW in Downtown LA.

Friday, August 15th: Sarah Faith Gottesdiener
Sarah Faith Gottesdiner activated the window seat by setting up a lovely crystal-jewelled nook in which she gave tarot readings. She plans to create a broadsheet of all her findings for each person whose cards she read. We won’t name names, but two Women’s Center members received VERY similar readings. Coincidence? We think not.
Sarah Faith Gottesdiener is a woman currently living in Los Angeles. In the past, in the present, and probably in the future she has/is/will have: made design, music, art, organized, written, given tarot readings, been an activist, presented workshops, published, curated, worked for very large corporations, worked for very small places, worked for non-profits, worked for herself, worked for others, worked for free, worked for the weekend, worked for no outcome at all, and worked very hard with very high hopes of a specific outcome. She is a queer feminist who credits art, feminism, being gay, and punk rock music with saving her life and getting her out of Hartford, CT.

Tuesday, August 19th: Tanya Rubbak
Tanya Rubbak  came down to do some deep cleaning of her hard drive, but she and Kate got to talking and before they knew it it was 6 o’clock! Their rhizomatic discussion concerned unfussy design, pedagogies in design education, and the importance of maintaining multiple perspectives, among many other things. They finished the day, but not the conversation, with beers at the bar across the street.
Tanya Rubbak is an artist, designer, and teacher who lives in Los Angeles. Her work combines graphic design, writing, and curating by taking on forms of publications and installations. She directs Native Strategies, a performance art platform and journal with Brian Getnick and has recently co-designed Made in L.A. 2014 exhibition catalogue for the Hammer Museum of Art. She holds an MFA from CalArts and a BA from University of Pennsylvania, and teaches graphic design at Otis.

Thursday, August 21st: Chrysanthe O
Chrysanthe O arrived with a bag of clothes and hats and a camera, which were soon spread across the floor as she changed into various outfits to portray the many faces of feminism for a Femmercial, or feminism commercial, which she filmed in the space. Many friends came by to help and weigh in. It was a good day of discussion.
Chrysanthe O is a jokestress and a fartist (feminist artist). When she’s not writing cheesy restaurant descriptions for her paying job, she’s organizing feminist and female-fronted art, music, comedy and storytelling events at the Gal Palace. Every Wed at 3, she hosts a weekly kchungradio show ‘fallopianutopia’, which features a mix of funky feminist jamz, origynal music and interviews with women artists. She also serves as general manager at KCHUNGRadio. You can see her do standup at the next Women Warriors Benefit or flow about the awkward parts of sex as one-half of the musical comedy duo the Derpy Dollz. Twitter and instagram @vajamminn

Friday, August 22nd: Gilda Davidian
Inspired by classic Armenian portrait studios, Gilda Davidian set up shop in the space and snapped photos of our friends and community. The ladies from Gal Palace even brought in their chicken Bonnie for a group shot!
Gilda Davidian is an artist living in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2014. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the MAK Center, the Kerckhoff Art Gallery at UCLA, the Korean Cultural Center, Monte Vista Projects and more recently at the Hessel Museum of Art in New York. gildadavidian.com

Tuesday, August 26th: Lake Sharp
Lake Sharp brought in a portable potter’s wheel and threw us a set of custom WCCW mugs! Her pups Vinnie and Jolene came too, but they didn’t feel like throwing anything and napped instead.
Lake Sharp is a ceramicist living in Highland Park. She is inspired by the urban/nature interface that makes LA such an enigmatic city. She bows down to the mountains, the highways and the mighty Pacific by molding pieces of clay into special things to look at, eat from, and wear. www.lakesharpceramics.com

Thursday, August 28th: Claire L. Evans
Claire L. Evans brought in selections from her personal library and set up a pop up feminist science fiction reading nook in the space. She was gracious enough to transcribe the titles below for all the nascent sci-fi feminists among us: 

Joanna Russ: How to Suppress Women’s Writing, The Female Man,  And Chaos Died, We Who Are About To, On Strike Against God, Picnic on Paradise. Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home, The Left Hand of Darkness, City of Illusions, The Word for the World is Forest, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. Rosel George Brown: Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue. Jayge Carr: Leviathan’s Deep. Thomas Berger: Regiment of Women. Ed. Tom Staicar: The Feminine Eye, Science Fiction and the Women Who Write It. Marleen S. Barr: Lost In Space, Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond. Mary Staton: From the Legend of Biel. James Tiptree, Jr.: Up The Walls of the World. Claire L. Evans: High Frontiers. Octavia Butler: Dawn, Parable of the Sower, Patternmaster. Marge Piercy: Woman on the Edge of Time. Sally Gearheart: The Wanderground. Ed. Pamela Sargent: The New Women of Wonder.

 

Friday, August 29th: Akina Cox
As the final Worker in Residence, Akina Cox decided we needed a break and lead us on a facilitated day off around Echo Park. We lunched at The Park, paddle-boated around Echo Park Lake, and stopped ourselves from trying to work every few hours with beers and lovely conversations. Thanks Akina!
Akina Cox graduated from CalArts with an MFA in 2012. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Monte Vista Projects, LACE, and Marine Contemporary.  Her collaborative projects have been exhibited at the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, as well as ForYourArt and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Her artist books have been published by New Byzantium Press and Golden Spike Press, and can be purchased at Skylight Books, Ooga Booga, and the MOCA Bookstore in Los Angeles, Art Metropole in Toronto, and Printed Matter in New York City. She lives and works in Los Angeles.