Our Artists
Meryl Williams & Jane Stiles
Fall 2021
Jane and Meryl are a co-directing and co-writing team, residing in Brooklyn, NY. Together they make up They’ve previously co-directed two short films entitled The Love Spell and Dom (*Best Narrative Short at Sidewalk Film Festival 2019), as well as co-produced another short entitled Goldilocks, a 16mm film with animated elements.
Meryl & Jane’s Proposal
As artists in residence, they will continue the development of their feature film script entitled M & Z. The film follows two half sisters with mommy issues who go on an existential quest for a body of water in the desert. In addition to co-writing and co-directing the film, they will also be acting in it -- as sisters.
Emma Binder
Spring 2021
Emma Binder received their MFA in Fiction from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and they are the 2020–2021 Hoffman Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Their fiction and poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Narrative, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. They’re currently working on a novel about wolves, folklore, and the rural Midwest.
Check out some of Emma’s work
Emma Binder’s Proposal
As an artist in residence, I would like to work on my novel titled "The Village Ulf," as well as write poems as part of an ongoing, yet-untitled collection. My novel is about land ethics, justice, folklore, mysticism, queerness, and rural life, following the internal conflicts of a small rural community facing the onset of predatory developers. Primarily, it’s concerned with people who live on the fringes of society, and what happens when someone is exiled from the fringe itself. As a poet, my work concerns slippages between the cosmic and the domestic, queer love and joy, and the opulence of language. I intend to draw inspiration from Cisco’s isolated, artistically enriching environment to work on both of these projects, as well as write new poems about Cisco itself.
Jon Bartels
Fall 2020
Jon Bartels is an artist and craftsman from Milwaukee, WI, whose wide range of mediums include woodworking, tattooing, cement and street art. His inspiration is derived from skateboarding, DIY culture, and his love for reclaiming resources, spaces and materials to create tangible things that everyone can enjoy.
His most up to date work & projects can be seen on Instagram: @bartstattoos //
Jon Bartels’ Proposal
As the artist in resident, I would like to create a large installation or sculpture for the existing land that merges with an abandoned object. Whether that means it adorns an old RV, car, or shack— my objective is for it to include elements of things long forgotten and left to rot. What I build could become a part of something left behind, or be created using features of what has survived human greed and remained unremembered until now. It will be a deserted, lonesome take on modern gentrification.
As a builder I’m influenced by skateboarding and DIY building. For my art installation in Cisco, I’d like to build a serpent taking over a structure on the land. Similar to the serpent: skating is connectedness and movement. I’m using the fundamentals of what I love, to represent what I want to confront. As someone who has chased affordable studio opportunities against the big corporate suits, the serpent will represent the unfatigued, craved suit machos in their quest to kick out the working artists. The serpent is an empty promise in their unfair hunt for class control.
Antonina Clarke
Spring 2020
Antonina Clarke was born in Grand Junction, CO in 1986, 55 miles away from Cisco. While raised outside of LA and Golden, CO, she has lived all over the fine United States including OR, WA, CA, Baltimore, MD and time abroad. She is a generalist to the Nth degree, working for the past ten years as a carpenter, welder, residential construction foreman, stop motion animator, clothing company owner, fabric designer, mural painter and more. She began college as a neuroscience major in 2004, studied permaculture, and graduated with a BFA in Fibers from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012. Her textile work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, while her animation work was featured in the Starz Denver Film Festival 2014. Currently she lives in a hermit crab shell of a camper, outside Denver, CO.
To Learn more about Antonina Clarke check out her website
Antonina Clarke’s proposal
My work is going to be a structure built using semantics of human embellishment in shrines and shelters, but manipulated to create a between space that plays on our expectations of the rules of craft. Taking scraps from Cisco itself, wood and metal remnants from friend’s fabrication shops, paint from landfills; a strucure of material cannibalization will be birthed. I am currently keeping my proposal open to the ever shifting developments in our realities. We are all here in this newness, oddly synchronized, uniquely self reflective, and much can be made in response to that.
Tiffany St. Bunny
Fall 2019
Tiffany St. Bunny was born in Oklahoma in 1982 and received her BA from Oklahoma State University in 2008 and her MA from Indiana University in 2012. She currently lives with her dog in Oakland, CA, where she creates work based on her experiences growing up poor, queer, and trans in the rural South and Southwest. She is a resident artist at Trainhole Studios, and her current projects include Trucksluts Magazine, Western Springs, Tunnel Visionz, and Eternal/Endless.
Through her body of work, Bunny sabotages traditional symbols of patriarchy, masculinity, and manhood via a reversal of cultural theft. Traditional landscapes, images, and brands monopolized and weaponized by the straight, white, All-American man are wrenched from the security of their hegemonic pedestal by transcendent homosexuals and genderless weirdos. In her work, the concept of “Man As The Image Of God” is forcibly perverted, and the resultant decadent divinity is (re)claimed by those resilient freaks. In this new paradigm, it is these paragons of strength and beauty, these survivors of generations of trauma, that hold the power.
To learn more about Tiffany, check out her website
Tiffany St. Bunny's Proposal
While at "Home of the Brave," I plan on shooting for and completing a portrait photography series titled "Eternal/Endless." This series will utilize the seemingly boundless landscape of the high Utah desert, especially locations near the Book Cliffs, as a visual metaphor for eternity. Linearity of time, as a concept, is often not experienced by queer & trans people-- trauma introduces breaks, gaps, and repetition into our timelines. “Eternal/Endless” will explore how we use our bodies and surroundings to modify nonlinear time and space for subversive pleasure and peace of mind."