Wesley Fawcett Creigh

Sharp + Soft

Sharp + Soft was created during a 2024 artist residency at Oracle State Park. This invitational residency was offered by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and Arizona State Parks. During my 3 weeks in residency I interviewed volunteers and staff about their favorite “sharp” and “soft” features of the park. I then edited these interviews into the accompanying audio track and created an animation of each response. The resulting animation was screened via projection mapping on this historic Kannally ranch house located in the heart of Oracle State Park. Thank you to all staff and volunteers who participated in this work, and to Arizona State Parks and Arizona Commission on the Arts for making it possible.

Model Home

I spent 6-weeks in Fergus Falls, MN in January and February of this year (2018) as part of a Hinge Arts residency offered by Springboard for the Arts. This video is a result of the community project I facilitated called “Model Home” that examines the concept of home, how we think about it and how we visualize it. During my time in Fergus Falls I was invited to host a series of workshops at A Place to Belong, a social club for individuals with ‘chronic or persistent mental health challenges’. These workshops explored different ways to visualize and depict ‘home’, ‘community’, and ‘identity’ and also produced a collaboratively constructed ‘model home’ sculpture which is recreated digitally towards the end of the video. The audio is from my interviews with the club members. This project has received support from Springboard for the Arts, the Otter Tail County Historical Society, and A Place to Belong social club.

Protoype

“Prototype” is the result of an interdisciplinary, conceptual arts collaboration among local artists, educators, and youth groups that explored in-depth the themes of MOCA Tucson’s fall exhibit entitled Nothing to Declare: Transnational Narratives. The museum’s weekly after school program of 8-11 year olds collaborated with a Pima Community College Border Cultures class and a Tucson High School Art Appreciation class in the creation of an animated video work exploring the themes of borders, identity, and cross-cultural pollination. The student participants contributed the visual, audio, and textual elements to this project. This project culminated in a public presentation of this animated video and its accompanying components at MOCA Tucson. This event showcased an experiment in collaboration across age groups that tackles the complex topics of border culture and politics. "Prototype" was selected for the Sharjah Film Platform in Sharjah, UAE and the Borderland Film Festival in Nogales, Sonora, MX.