Category: Artist in Residence

Reborn: A Conversation with Artist-in-Residence Eden Rayz

Reborn: A Conversation with Artist-in-Residence Eden Rayz
March 16, 2024

In 2023, we welcomed seven Artists-in-Residence to create original works inspired by their experiences at Mount Auburn. Meet composer and musician Eden Rayz. [above photo by Artist-in-Residence Billy Hickey]

You are a composer, cellist, and freelance private music teacher with a Master’s degree in music composition and theory from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. You are also an extreme vocalist, cellist, and lyricist for a death metal band. How would you describe your work as a musician?

Right now, my work is centered around expanding the functionality of listening experiences as individual and community rituals. With the musical death awareness meditation “Nothingness is Impossible,” listeners are invited to meditate on their own relationships with death and dying. With “Aboriginal Sensible Muchness,” there’s another invitation to walk, notice, and question why our judgments exist. I judge this oak tree as beautiful, but this dead bird as ugly. Why is that? With “Lux Aeterna (which translates to eternal light),” the work I’m currently writing, the construct of time and our relationships with it will be examined.

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Wisdom of the Trees: A Conversation with Artist-in-Residence Resa Blatman

Wisdom of the Trees: A Conversation with Artist-in-Residence Resa Blatman
November 17, 2023

In 2023, we welcomed seven Artists-in-Residence to create original works inspired by their experiences at Mount Auburn. Meet visual artist Resa Blatman.

You are a multi-disciplinary artist who uses painting, drawings, and mixed media as tools for creative expression. How would you describe your work?

Artist Resa Blatman

Informed by a rich history of painting and contemporary artmaking processes, my projects also call on poetry, science, and nature. Using craft practices combined with delicately painted moments, I make paintings, drawings, and mixed-media, wall-mounted installations about the shifting climate that is unpredictable, yet captivating and beautiful. Beauty is a key ingredient in my toolbox, and I blend it with my reverence for, and humanity’s conflict with the natural world to make work that is both contrary and compelling; work that seemingly complements and opposes itself. This is highlighted through my use of materials that are made of the Earth, such as gold leaf, ink, and oil paints, and human-made materials, such as plastics, all of which underscore our human contradictions and vulnerabilities. However, my work also provides a positive encounter through its meditative mark-making, stunning color, subject matter, texture, and the striking way that art can subconsciously reach us to foster greater inspiration, compassion, and love for our environment, communities, and beyond.

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Apply to Mount Auburn’s Artist-in-Residence Program!

Apply to Mount Auburn’s Artist-in-Residence Program!
November 1, 2023

Our next application deadline is February 1, 2024 for 2024-2025 residencies.

The 2024 application form will be available starting November 1, 2023. The grant must result in a deliverable product, program, or event that is unique to Mount Auburn Cemetery. All projects will be presented to the public (how and when projects are presented is to be determined by the artist and the AiR Program manager).

Learn more about the program and past artists.

For questions, please contact Julie-Anne Whitney at jawhitney@mountauburn.org.  

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