For his project at 516 Sampsonia, Luke Stettner will engage in a series of nine initial collaborations. Each embedded work contends with the force of the sun – as an agent of growth, keeping time, distortion.
Collaborations include a solar darkroom built directly into the space, where images will be printed using the sun as their sole light source (with Calista Lyon). An adjacent room holding a stained-glass skylight created using dozens of UV filters will be embedded in the ceiling (with Mike Stickrod).
As the exhibition unfolds, more collaborators will be incorporated. These acts of cooperation and observation – between artists, but also with museum staff and goers, who will be engaged in the ongoing making of the work – are at once the exhibition’s strategy and its message.
Marvin Touré is an Ivorian-American interdisciplinary artist who uses fictional narratives and the objects of innocence as a vehicle to interrogate themes of love, loss, and memory. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at The AC Institute in NYC (2018), and Haul gallery in Brooklyn (2021).
In 2020 he was awarded both a Black Artist Fund grant and the Peter S. Reed Foundation grant for Mixed Media/Sculpture. Marvin was also awarded one of two 20th anniversary commissions for the I-Park Foundation’s 2021 Site-Responsive Art Biennale.
Marvin joined Protohaven (Wilkinsburg, PA) and the University of Pittsburgh's Architectural Studies program in the fall of 2022 as a Teaching Fellow and Architecture Instructor, respectively.
Isla Hansen is a Pittsburgh-based artist making objects, tools, toys, sculptures, performances, systems, interactive installations, animations, workshops, and videos that address the ways in which bodies connect to technologies in the world around us.
Isla’s work sets in motion new and sometimes crude means of image-making in order to break down processes of technological mediation and draw attention to the soft or clunky reality of our human bodies.
She combines soft and hard materials, digital fabrication, real time media, and techniques from online DIY culture to blur consumer-producer boundaries and challenge the way in which industrial forms of production displace visible forms of human labor.
Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, is a Sudamerican, Chilean-born visual artist who works primarily with collage, installation, and murals. Their work draws on images, objects, and narratives associated with childhood and explores gender, sexuality, and class.
A recipient of multiple FONDART Grants (Cultural and Arts Development Fund of the Government of Chile), Schliebener Muñoz also received grants from DIRAC (Board of Cultural Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Relations of Chile) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (New York, NY).
In addition, Schliebener Muñoz has extensive teaching experience, from early childhood education to undergraduate education, on topics ranging from philosophy and art theory to art instruction in schools, studios, and museum settings.