Satellite Collective's 2021 Fellows Cohort Featured In Online Exhibition Of Worldwide Game Of TELEPHONE

Satellite Collective's Spring 2021 Fellows cohort represents a full circle of collaboration, as the selected artists were hand-picked from their participation in Satellite's worldwide game of Telephone 2 in 2020. The cohorts of Fellows are networked into "Shares" of small, learning groups of eight to nine artists who meet virtually to discuss, perform, and share their art and business plans. Satellite Collective speaks through Sad Blimp TV at satellitecollective.org, featuring "Shares," original live music performances, rogue film, and dance work by the city's celebrated youth.

Spring 2021 Fellowship cohort:

Brittain Ashford, The Lullaby Project

Emma Dickson, Identity and Longing in a Digital Landscape

Flo Art Collective, Art is Transformation

Manon Gage, Exploring Trauma and Empowerment Through Genre Film

Megan Mosholder, Large-Scale, Site-Specific Installations

Emerie Snyder, Crossing Boundaries Between Theatre & Visual Art

David Williams, Southwestern Cinematic Landscape Music

Telephone was first incubated by Satellite Collective with Nathan Langston and now, as a unique organization working on the West Coast, has returned as a mature partner.

Satellite Collective focused on a select group of TELEPHONE artists, launching these Spring 2021 Fellows with the opening of Telephone this April. The Satellite Fellows program will expand from NYC to a national footprint in 2022.

Artistic Director Kevin Draper has said the Fellows program is a direct response to exploitative service providers in the arts. "Satellite Collective has established a reputation for collaboration and creativity since we were founded and we've survived a decade in the highly competitive environment of NYC. What we have learned along the way is that much of the industry in the arts is not as focused on the artist's sustainability as it could be. The Fellows program is a direct answer to that : we believe that things like fundraising tools, marketing capability, and building arts businesses are critical for artists. It's just a natural extension of our collective work."

The Satellite Fellows program is for and by artists, giving artists a chance to form community by providing tools, networks, and financial services. First launched in April 2020, the program is a unique idea for fiscal sponsorships and mentor programs designed and sponsored by Satellite Collective.

• Fiscal sponsorship at a favorable rate for artists

• Mentorship in setting up an arts business and non-profit organizations

• A streamlined, artist-centered finance platform

• An avenue to join Satellite productions and publications

Satellite is based in New York City, with regional homes on Lake Michigan, in the Pacific Northwest, and with artists from around the world. Satellite incubates artists and their programs by helping artists manage their support and grow their organization. Collaborating with artists nationally and virtually, Satellite designs performances, arts exchanges, and publications that allow artists from all disciplines, as well as writers and engineers, to work together.

ABOUT THE GLOBAL TELEPHONE GAME

This game was first played and published at a smaller scale in 2015 and launched in New York by Nathan Langston and Satellite Collective. As the pandemic began to worsen in the United States in March 2020, the time was right to pick it up again, with a new team in the Pacific Northwest. TELEPHONE requires no physical contact and intimately connects individuals in isolation. The project directly engaged with artists in hard-hit countries as the global crisis unfolded and, for decades to come, this exhibition will remain a poignant time capsule of what we have endured and overcome.

More than 950 artists from 70 countries played a game of TELEPHONE, in which a message was passed from art form to art form. The message could become a poem, then a painting, then a film, then a dance, as it was passed 7,177,703 kilometers between 489 cities. An interactive, online exhibition of these hundreds of original, interconnected works debuted to the public for free on Saturday, April 10, 2021 at 9am EST after running for 383 days.

See TELEPHONE at : https://phonebook.gallery/.

Only a handful of staff members knew the original message of TELEPHONE. The participating artists are only aware of the work that directly preceded their own, and do not know how their own work was translated or further translated in subsequent. When TELEPHONE became publicly available, it was the first time that any of the artists got to see the exhibition in full. Participants in TELEPHONE were primarily recruited by word-of-mouth, as well via various international message boards. Approximately 60% are based in the United States and approximately 65% are women. In terms of career, players range from Guggenheim Fellows to newly emerging artists, from high school students and elderly artists just developing their practices to Academy Award and Pulitzer Prize winners. It's possible to consider TELEPHONE as a presentation of nearly 1,000 individual and original works of art. It's equally valid to view this exhibition as a single work of art by people from across the Earth. Regardless, the result is the largest data set of ekphrastic artistic exchange in history. Ekphrasis is the process of translation of one art form into another. This helps us better understand each art form, the neurological processes at work in translation, and how information is passed from person to person. The second half of the game employs synthesis, allowing us to study how artists combine multiple influences simultaneously.

ABOUT THE FELLOWS

Brittain Ashford grew up in Seattle. Her early years spent in the shadow of grunge, she always preferred to err on the soft side. After moving to New York she starred in the 2017 Broadway musical, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, as well as Dave Malloy's Off-Broadway song-cycle, Ghost Quartet. She's released two albums with her own band, Prairie Empire, a solo album of re-tooled show tunes called Drama Club, and most recently an EP with collaborator Matt Bauer, Day Inside a Night. Her forthcoming album, Trotter, will be out in 2021.

Emma Dickson is passionate about using old media formats as a medium. Exploring language and memory they make use of obsolete storage formats in their new media sculptures. In Winter 2019, they were the Toolmaker-in-Residence at Signal Cultures in Owego, NY, where they began to develop a new, multimodal form of slow scan TV (SSTV). This was used to translate found film slides, first into audio and finally into digital images to demonstrate the data loss inherent in dragging old media into the present and how that reflects our experience of memory.

Flo Art Collective creates immersive performances that challenge conventional ways of making and experiencing art. We are collaborative in nature, fluid in membership, and multidisciplinary in form. We promote a holistic approach to working with artists and spaces and encourage the recognition of creativity in all aspects of life.

Manon Gage is a French-American actor, screenwriter, and producer based in Los Angeles, California. A recent Juilliard Drama graduate, Gage currently balances auditioning with developing independent films and television series with collaborators. As a creator, Gage combines her art forms to bring stories about trauma, grief, addiction and mental illness to life by subverting classic genre film tropes and structures.

Megan Mosholder is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design with a MFA in painting and has received numerous awards from institutions such as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences. Her diverse exhibition history includes an installation in Sydney, Australia (2017) a body of site-specific work that spoke of the lasting impression a fully immersive, multi-sensory artwork can leave on an audience. Megan currently resides in Atlanta, GA where she is a Professor at Kennesaw State University.

Emerie Snyder is a Brooklyn-based theatre director and creator of new performance work, focusing on site-responsive theatre, relationships between visual art and theatre, and solo performance.

David Williams is a musician, songwriter, recording artist, producer, film composer, singer, and teacher with a reverence for the process of making art. David is also a gifted and inspiring teacher, and has shared his wide range of expertise with students from all over the US for over 20 years.

ABOUT THE TELEPHONE TEAM

Katelyn Watkins is a writer, consultant, and project manager. She currently enjoys contributing to TELEPHONE as the Director of Operations. She has dual degrees in English and Feminist Studies with minors in Film and Philosophy from Southwestern University, as well as a masters distinction in Finance, Marketing, and Business from the Wharton School. In her spare time, she enjoys thread art, traveling, cooking, taking naps, and watching way too many movies. She was born in Lubbock, Texas to a ranching and rodeo family but now splits her time between Austin, Texas, and Worthing, Barbados. She is currently working on her first collection of short stories.

Matt Diehl is a software engineer and designer at Google, currently living in Jersey City. Before he lost his punk rock cred, he played guitar in a ukelele punk band, Paul Newman and the Ride Home. He has a lovely wife and dog who give him all the attention he needs during pandemics.

Ben Sarsgard is a software engineer in Baltimore and/or New York. He's cat dad to two beautiful girls, Josephine and Shadow, who he'd rather be talking to right now. He can often be found running in circles over and over again to train himself to be able to run in other circles over and over again, slightly faster. Ben enjoys coffee and red wine, but not mixed together.

Kelly Jones is currently living in the Piedmont of NC with their spouse and their 11 year old pit bull (Mr. Beaux Jangles). Kelly embraces all things glittery, loves manatees, and doesn't understand infinity. Lately they've been stress-baking, attempting to keep the houseplants alive, caring for a clowder of semi-stray cats, and daydreaming about summery things. They've got an MFA in Poetry and a Masters in Library and Information Studies, but no job. In the before times, they managed the Outreach & Education Department of a creative reuse non-profit. Sometimes they miss being a "trash art queen," but mostly they're glad to not be interacting with tons of people all the time.

Ramon M. Rodriguez is a UX/UI/Visual designer at HCL Technologies, currently living in the cozy neighborhood of Greenwood, a short 10 minute drive from downtown Seattle. Ramon and his wife Patty have two stubborn Pekingese dog's Sonic and Pepper.

Jennifer Spriggs is a designer living in Seattle. She often escapes to the mountains and islands on her bike and wishes she lived in the forest.

Sergio Rodriguez is a Graphic Designer that moved from Arizona to Seattle in 2012. He's enjoys riding his track bikes around all the steep hills in Seattle. He has a wonderful girlfriend and a beautiful little half Chihuahua half Boston terrier mix pup. Recently he has been wanting to make a career change to UX design and was brought onto the TELEPHONE game by his good buddy Ramon. Since being a part of TELEPHONE he has learned so much and enjoys being a part of an amazing team and is inspired by all the of amazing artists that are involved.

Madeline Hoak is an artist and academic who creates with, through and about circus. She is an Adjunct Professor of Aerial Arts at Pace University (NYC), an Associate Editor for Circus Talk, and a graduate student at New York University where she is designing a degree in Circus Studies with a focus on spectatorship. Madeline initiated the Aerial Acrobatics program at Muhlenberg College where she taught from 2012 - 2017, and is a regular contributor to Circus Syd's Circus Thinkers international reading group. Recent publications include "Teaching the Mind-Body: Integrating Knowledges through Circus Arts'' (with Alisan Funk, Dan Berkley), a chapter in Art as an Agent for Social Change (2020), and "expanding in(finite) between," a multimedia essay in Circus Thinkers: Reflections, 2020. Madeline is honored to be the Editor of TELEPHONE's critical essays. madelinehoak.com.

Sean Tomas Redmond is an artist living in Austin, Texas. He has played in a wide variety of musical projects in Chicago, Austin, and Japan. Recently he has performed shows with artists including Mark Renner, Sean McCann, Sarah Davachi, and Future Museums. He is a designer, an amateur painter and photographer, and the former editor-in-chief of the arts publication fields magazine. You can listen to his music at seantomas.bandcamp.com.

Nathan Langston is a poet and musician, who founded Satellite Collective together with Kevin Draper in New York. He created and led the first game of TELEPHONE with Satellite, which was begun in 2010 and published in 2015. He has toured with bands to almost all the states and works as a software designer. Nathan is a graduate of the University of Oregon, with a focus in literature and poetry, and lives in Seattle with his two boys.

Kevin Draper is an artist and writer, who founded Satellite Collective together with Nathan Langston. He leads the organization as Artistic Director. Kevin has worked with major corporations to advise on corporate strategy and led Satellite Collective to a unique position in the arts, one that is collective in structure, but able to incubate and spin off programs successfully in the arts.