CIRCA Catalyst - Tomšič and Mayhew

CEC ArtsLink IMDA MFA Program Visiting Artist Neja Tomšič of Slovenia and Fulrbright Scholar and IMDA alum Jaimes Mayhew discuss their work, and the role that exchange has played in their creative lives and communities.

Jaimes Mayhew will present his current body of work, The Autonomous Energy Research Lab, which started as a project for a Fulbright Grant in Iceland in 2011. While Mayhew worked in Iceland, he discovered a connection between the landscapes of Iceland and those of the southwestern US that awakened his interest in the relationships between queer bodies and landscapes, memory and rural culture. Mayhew will present the work made while on his Fulbright grant, and share how those experiences inform his current work.

Neja Tomšič is a Slovenian artist, and the first CEC ArtsLink artist-in-residence hosted by UMBC’s IMDA MFA Program. Tomšič will discuss the Museum of Transitory Art  (MoTA), a multidisciplinary platform dedicated to the research, production and presentation of transitory, experimental and live art forms. Two of MoTA’s recent ongoing projects- The DarkStar and MV Monchegorsk will be highlighted. The DarkStar project is a semi-utopian monument to the moon and the stars for public space. The project is designed as a platform for technological, architectural, sound and graphic innovations and experiments. The MV Monchegorsk is a project which explores the rather mysterious incident of one of the biggest non-war related explosions in human history, the Evangelos Florakis Naval Base explosion in Cyprus in 2009.