Carla Christenson

Foci MCGA welcomes emerging glass artists from the greater Minnesota area to apply for a 3 month glass studio residency to explore, create, and experiment in glass processes. This year’s jurors include Kaylee Spencer, Dahn Gim, and Kristin Thielking.

Carla Christenson is a mixed media sculpture artist whose work is focused in and around glass. Through the use of unsettling imagery, “skin-like” materials, and corporeal forms, Christenson creates installations and sculptures, both uncomfortable and playful, addressing the human experiences of pain, memory, and healing. During her residency, Carla plans to create blown glass forms simulating internal and external parts of the body. The glass forms will be broken and reassembled utilizing a variety of non-glass materials including surgical tools, first aid equipment, and silicone skins. Her residency will culminate in an exhibition and artist talk at Foci MCGA Gallery in Spring of 2023.

Meet The Jurors

Kaylee Spencer

Kaylee R. Spencer is Associate Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, where she has taught Art History since 2006. She served as Department Chair from 2013 – 2016 and has received awards for distinguished teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences. She offers introductory surveys of art history, along with upper-division courses on pre-Columbian, colonial New World, and contemporary art. Dr. Spencer's research centers on the artistic traditions of ancient Mesoamerica. She has published numerous articles and book chapters focusing on Maya spirituality, art, and iconography. She combines approaches rooted in iconography, archaeology, hieroglyphic analysis, and phenomonology to investigate portraiture in ancient and colonial sculpture. In her recent work, she explores how spatial organizations of architectural programs frame viewing experiences at Maya sites in the Northern Lowlands, a region located in the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico.

Dahn Gim

dahn gim is an artist currently based in Minneapolis and Los Angeles. Gim is a co-founder of online art platform, makingout.city (www.makingout.la), an independent curator and an Artistic Director,  FEMMEBIT, a biennial Media Art festival for all-female roster of LA and is currently an assistant professor in Art and Design Department at Augsburg University.

In her studio, Gim contemplates with the idea of adaptation and change within one’s surroundings and self by exploring hybridity both in concept and materials. In the tinkering process, Gim often assembles found objects and upend our relationship in response to the idea of adaptation, temporality, and un/familiarity. Since completing her M.F.A. from UCLA in Media Art in 2015, Gim has been exhibiting at international venues such as BASIS in Frankfurt; GAS Gallery, Steve Turner, Brand Library & Art Center, AA|LA, LAMAG, Human Resources in Los Angeles; Somerset House in London; and Post Territory Ujoengguk in Seoul.

Kristin Thielking

Kristin Thielking is from Long Island, NY and received a BA in Fine Art and Comparative Literature from Brown University, RI and an MFA in Sculpture from University of Wisconsin, Madison. Thielking has taught sculpture at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point since 2001. She has also taught at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, University of Wisconsin, Madison and Penland School of Crafts. She has exhibited and presented on her work widely. Interdisciplinary collaboration is at the root of her practice and she has a special interest in working with language as a material and work that inspires dialogue about the state of the environment and environmental stewardship. She works most often with artist-book maker, glass artist and poet, Lisa Beth Robinson and sculptor Keven Brunett and is a member of the Catching a Wave Collective a group of 6 artists, scientists and writers. She has been commissioned to design and fabricate numerous large-scale public art projects, including permanent and temporary site-specific installations and sculptural design commissions: Wisconsin Percent for Arts commission for the Waukesha State Office Building, Medical College of Wisconsin, Wausau Campus, WI, Marshfield Clinic, Marshfield, WI, Milwaukee’s Third Ward Arts Walk, Dubuque River Walk, Iowa, Bank of Wausau, WI, University of Indianapolis, IA, Magee-Gerrer Museum of Art in OK, Olbrich Botanical Gardens, Madison, WI. She has participated in artist-in-residence programs such as the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry program, WI, Edenfred, WI and the Vermont Studio Center. She has presented on her research at numerous conferences including Society and the Sea, University of Greenwich, London, Art and the Anthropocene, Trinity College, Dublin, College Book Art Association Conference, Tallahasse, FL, Artists Now Series University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Glass Art Society Conference, St. Petersburg, FL.