Jack Straw New Media Gallery

Jeff Rice is a Seattle-based journalist and sound artist with a long-standing interest in natural soundscapes. He has produced multimedia for museums, television, film, theater and the Web, and his work as a field recordist has been featured in media outlets ranging from Outside Magazine to The Los Angeles Times. In 2018, his recordings of the Pando aspen grove appeared in The New York Times Magazine’s Ellie Award-winning issue “Listen to the World.” He is the co-founder of the Acoustic Atlas at Montana State University where he curates a collection of thousands of natural sound recordings from around the Western United States.

New Media Gallery 2023-24: Pando Suite

Brigid Kelly is a documentarian and artist from the Midwest. Her wanderings through rural and urban America spawn projects that explore missing histories and the contributions of overlooked activists, artists, and everyday people. Her work has appeared on NPR’s Code Switch, KCRW’s All Things Considered, PBS, and other networks. Presence, a documentary-based collaborative work, appeared in the Crossing The Line Festival in New York City.

New Media Gallery 2023-24 (with Susie Kozawa and Alex MacInnis): Tokio Florist Is an Instrument

Susie Kozawa, a sound artist, composer and performer, works mostly with sound collages and site-specific installations, in which the gathering of sounds is a primary activity. She explores different acoustic spaces using musical instruments she makes out of found objects, kelp, modified toys and human voice. She creates live sound design for dance and theater productions. She was a founding member of Aono Jikken Ensemble.

New Media Gallery 2023-24 (with Brigid Kelly and Alex MacInnis): Tokio Florist Project

Artist Support Program 2008 (with Erin Shie Palmer): Recorded letters written by Asian American immigrants for a permanent sound and sculpture installation for the new Wing Luke Asian Museum.

More on Tokio Florist:

“Tokio Story” (2018) by Yuka Murakami

“This narrative doc film by Yuka Murakami sponsored by Japanese American National Museum (JANM). It was the last documentation of our family place before things were taken apart and dispersed.”
–Susie Kozawa

“On a Visit to Tokio Florist” (2019) by Giovanni Jance

“This is a 30-minute film by Giovanni Jance about our family home and flower shop. Tokio Florist was started in 1929 by my grandmother Yuki Sakai on Los Feliz Blvd in Los Angeles. We moved our residence and business to the Silverlake area in 1960. My mom (Sumi) officially closed the business January 1 2006 when she turned 90. Giovanni Jance started making this film February 14 1999 and completed ‘On a Visit to Tokio Florist’ February 14 2019. Sojin Kim is the off-camera interviewer. At the time Sojin was a curator at JANM and is now at the Smithsonian Institute.  Besides seeing and hearing my parents again, it is wonderful to see my Aunt Rose who helped in our family Tokio Florist flower shop.”
–Susie Kozawa

Alex has been doing experimental documentary audio and video for over two decades, working in media from podcasts to IMAX films, and covering topics including: Virgin Mary apparitions, the poetry of Rwandan architecture students, the history of accordions, cats reciting Marcus Aurelius, and global climate change. He’s the creator of the Los Angeles history podcast series Valley of Smoke, and editor and technical director for Bill Viola’s traveling live opera installation The Tristan Project and Peter Sellars’ collaboration with early music group Sequentia, Roman de Fauvel. He’s the composer and sound designer for the podcasts The Big Hit Show (Higher Ground), Strangeland (Audiochuck), and Alphabet Boys (IHeartMedia). He also performs with The Ukelele Orchestra of the Western Hemisphere (sic).

New Media Gallery 2023-24 (with Brigid Kelly and Susie Kozawa): Tokio Florist Is an Instrument

nawa a.h., widely known as Moonyeka (they/he/she) is a chimeric creator who takes shape in and beyond containers of interdisciplinary performing art, writing, and brujxeria.

With roots sprawling up and down the west coast, Moonyeka has produced and performed an abundance of events, spotlighting bakla-chimeric perspectives that conjure experiences of the queer erotic, eco-sensual animism, Filipinx-Ilocano imagination, and movement-based research. Moonyeka’s artistic-collaborative processes center kapwa, maarte and kilig as a compass to imagine worlds where their communities can thrive.

Currently they’re developing an upcoming work, Harana for The Aswang. Harana for The Aswang is an audio-visual-performance work centered on queering harana, a Filipinx serenade song form rooted in courtship and grief rituals.

Moonyeka’s past interdisciplinary performance works have been presented in a spectrum of “high” and “low” brow art spaces and contexts that span festivals, living rooms, museums,  queer night clubs, in diaspora and beyond. They have been the recipient of the George Newsome Humanitarian Award, Mary Gates Research Award, Arc Fellowship Grantee, Tina LaPadula Fellowship, Seattle Dances’ DanceCrush, Powerful Voices’ “Year of the Answer”, Precipice Fund Award and represented Seattle in KQED’s If Cities Could Dance docuseries.

Moonyeka’s dance and movement foundations found roots in the Street Styles Communities of South King County and Seattle where they engaged in cypher practices and freestyle forms such as Popping, Tutting, and Animation. They studied modern dance, improvisational methods, and dance ethnography at the University of Washington where they hold an Honors B.A. in Dance Studies with an emphasis in DXARTS production. Moonyeka is proud to be raised by PNW’s QTBIPOC show girl, burlesque and nightlife community.

Pre covid-19 Moonyeka directed WHAT’S POPPIN’ LADIEZ?! (a femme & woman centered street styles festival), LIL BROWN GIRLS CLUB (a movement based mentorship program for young girls of color), and organized (e)merge: a movement based healing intensive for dance communities and beyond. They continue to serve as an art educator for youth with programs like Young Choreographer’s Lab in the PNW uplifting pedagogy that connects ancestral skills, boundary setting, and choreography as a tool to liberation.

In her authorship, nawa applies QT performance methodologies to the page. Their writing performs text in a way that drags genre,  conjures icon-myth-legend states, and subverts power through showgirl tactics. You can find them expanding through genres with their hybrid, biomythoraphic approach to form. nawa was recently published in smoke and mold, a 2Spirit and Trans digital journal, featuring their multiverse world of waling-waling orchids. Their work, am i hot enough to kill?, an excerpt of (w)horrific hybrid prose, will be featured in The Holy Hour anthology, by Working Girls Press in Spring 2024

Amongst a variety of collaboration, Moonyeka has the honor of being the Artistic Director of The House of Kilig and finds home at  Paruparo – a qtpoc haven in Portland, OR.

House of Kilig is a Trans + Queer diaspora centered collective that utilizes and as a compass in pursuit of interdisciplinary art creation, teaching artistry, and community organizing that manifests a world where QT folx across diaspora can thrive. The House of Kilig brings forth embodiment practices and divine performance technologies to center joy, celebration, and generative containers. Kilig is a Tagalog word that describes the somatic experience of feeling butterflies in one’s stomach when met with exhilaration, elation, excitement towards a person, idea, place or thing.

New Media Gallery 2023-24 (with The House of Kilig): flourish like an ocean’s grief.

Romson Regarde Bustillo’s layered works and immersive collaborations are tied to his Philippine lineage, South Seattle-PNW upbringing, and research travels. Carving his own path, Bustillo integrates a printmaking foundation with a transdisciplinary practice. He populates spaces with images, sound, and concepts that explore and question how place, context, and various cues modify, enhance, and divert meanings.

Bustillo was awarded the Seattle Print Arts Larry Sommers Art Fellowship in 2016. In 2017 he was co-recipient of the Garboil Grant established by the late artist Sue Jobs. An award that considers artists “…engaging audiences outside the aesthetic industrial complex.” He received Arts-Individual Projects Grants from 4Culture in 2018 and 2020 in support of his immersive installations and collaborative interventions. He is the recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship(2019), the Artist Trust Innovator Award(2020), and a Northwest Film Forum (NWFF)’s Collective Power Fund “New Work/Projects” category(2022).

New Media Gallery 2023-24: Proximity Modifer No. 49: Dukkha, Liberation, and Tranquility