The Lopez Library Fresh A.I.R. Program (Artists in Residence!)
This year-long program has the goal of creating high quality artistic content communicating the Lopez Library’s Strategic Mission: Where Possibilities Thrive: Nourishing Minds and Strengthening Community. AIR’s will be creatively embodying the Vision: To be the trusted heart of the community; inspiring wonder, fostering connections, and empowering individuals to thrive through lifelong learning.
Our 2025 cohort of Fresh A.I.R.’s are below.
Each A.I.R. will offer a free public workshop/class/lecture during their residency, and be a featured exhibiting artist for one of our monthly First Saturday Art Walks.
Dana C Brentson is an author who has independently published 3 short stories and two novels in the high fantasy genre. She is currently working on editing another novel, as well as drafting the third in her main series. When not writing, she hones her world building skills as a dungeon master for friends playing Dungeons and Dragons.
Project: In drafting my fourth novel, I have often found blocks in creating side characters, or even ideas for how to move my plot forward. One tool I’ve found useful is the multitude of inspiring material from Dungeons and Dragons. Their Dungeon Master’s Guide offers building blocks in creating campaigns to take players through, which often translate into ideas for where my stories could go next. In the Player Handbook and other supplemental books, there are random tables to inform your character’s background and characteristics. These are also useful in inspiring me with similar ways to flesh out my characters. I’d love to help anyone, from TTRPG Game Masters to players to authors who struggle with writer’s block, use alternative media to break past the roadblocks in their creative journeys.
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Rachel ZableUsing a plain envelope as a canvas, I like to create a collage with magazine clippings, vibrant, silly lettering, and other fun adornments like wax seals, stickers, and stamps. The idea is to elevate the mundane into the magical, giving a sense of life to an otherwise lackluster operation that is the US postal service. My goal is for the recipient to feel like they are receiving a special gift and to experience a moment of wonder.
Jack Tronsdal is a playwright and writing editor. He’s fueled by a determination to teach people of all ages, and has a passion for working with children. Jack is a frequent collaborator of Northwest Playwright’s Alliance, Beyond The Stage Youth, and Skagit Passage.Project: I will facilitate community-driven playwriting workshops, utilizing the library’s offerings to inspire writers and group learning. By incorporating relevant games, and improv, we can move toward a better understanding of our BIG IDEAS, and own creative potential as writers; all in a relaxed, welcoming environment.
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Elena Zubulake
My body is my primary creative canvas. The journey of embodiment, listening, and homecoming have always been very important to me.
I am artist with a lowercase a. I weave the creative through my life these days with poems, dances, breath, ritual, spontaneous sound and song, and healing practice.
My herStory has included masks, clowns, giant puppets, queer circus, coffin weaving, pilgrimage, dancing on mountain tops, dunes, and beaches, contact improvisation, and storytelling feasts.
I grew up in the Midwest with Greek refugee immigrants and my mom died when I was a kid. I think ancestral displacement and being orphaned made me into a curious wanderer for most of my “grown up” life, always looking for and recreating home. I have many homes now, but love calling Lopez home for the last 9 months, and since arriving have felt a deep grateful body rightness of being here. This is a very special place.
Project: “Island Time”
My intention for my time in creative residency is to utilize the library as a starting place for diving into the lore and ecology of Lopez. From there, I will be creating mini performance rituals around the island. I will invite the community to participate in some of these offerings as movers or witnesses, and my intention is that the experiences will be a gift to one another and mostly to this sacred living place.
Through the body, I hope to forge a way to connect that speaks a more ancient language and is more akin to the languages of flora and fauna. Creating art in unusual places evokes the ridiculous, the holy, the magical, and the everyday. To celebrate, grieve, and embrace our lives within the larger landscapes of the movement and breath of nature is healing to the disconnections of modern life and body.
Some of these offerings will be woven into the lopez fringe festival which is happening the end of May.
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Parlin Shields is an experimental multimedia artist who performs under the name “jim mouse”. In their work, Parlin utilizes movement, sound, image, and language. With a foundation in opera, early music, and jazz, they sing and play a variety of stringed instruments. Parlin loves animals, mood lighting, and long walks on the beach. And comedy.
Project: Since a spinal injury in 2023, I’ve become more intentional with my creative and physical practices. I have learned that working in partnership with disability brings opportunities for innovation. I’ll continue to incorporate my findings in poetry, performance, visuals, movement, and sound.
In addition to making new work, Fresh A.I.R. will be an opportunity to collaborate with co-resident, Adam Brock. Inspired by both our imaginary and natural world, I’ll choreograph, write, and make pieces for our compositions, sourced from Lopez Solid Waste. We will perform our new work with and for the community during the summer of 2025.
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Adam Brock is a musician who has written Dairy Queen jingles and taught Timothee Chalamet to fake play bass. He studied jazz guitar in Portland, where my indie-pop band Old Wave performed and was featured on NPR. He worked as a commercial composer and producer in L.A. before moving to Lopez Island in 2023.
Project: In 2025 I will be collaborating with my partner Parlin Shields to write and record a song and make a music video every month. We will present and perform our new work during a July/August residency. I will utilize the library’s instrument collection to compose a score and collaborate with local musicians. In addition, I will lead a workshop that demonstrates my music writing and recording process. Attendees will be able to hear the role of instruments in an arrangement, how the recording process affects our perception of sound, and how the writing process evolves from an initial idea to a finished production. I’m looking forward to marking the passage of the year on Lopez with music and art 🙂
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Maggie Mannell
MVM is a living example of dilution, migraines and errors. She’s been (like most people) making art and not doing art for a long time in a variety of places mostly without people and sometimes with them. But I mean, seriously, what’s next. How do we unpack this crapstack and see what’s real? Build it maybe? Touch it maybe? Feel it flushing thru our … channels? Forget about what we can’t remember? She’s been writing and writing and writing, but we all know words are never the thing itself
Project:
Of late I find myself in the canyon of air between the immaterial and the political. The library is a critical plant in this canyon. It is one of the last remaining truly public spaces (inherently political) and it is full of ideas, art, concepts, spirits, history monsters, and morals (at least partly immaterial … on their own). I’ve been hearing from people (alive and dead) that one of the greatest dissatisfactions of our moment is our cultural inability to aesthetically represent our actual reality. I hear we use tech to recreate the past over and over and over again, more and more dimly- like a mountain of the morning stretching into a field of the night- and then we make the move to call it the future. That’s what I hear, I didn’t come up with it and it sounds real to me. How do the political and immaterial touch, color, shape, and rearrange one another and why is the one found by seeking the other. Horror (unsettlement) – who is watching all this unfold for the ones backed up into it? And who is doing it with us?
Media = performance/visual art/sound/writing as aesthetic creations of the future of the library (and an expansion of the word future beyond “progress” or tech or trauma or “diversity” or “peace” or “healing” Or straightforward time-as-motion or or or material conditions – and also those are everything).
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G.G. Kellner
Kellner is an accomplished artist, poet, author, and educator, she studied at the Marchutz School of Art in Aix-en-Provence, France. Her visual work has been featured in various exhibitions, including The Blue Heron Center for the Arts, The Barnworks, and the International Museum of the Horse in Kentucky. In recent years, Kellner has focused on completing her book, *Hope, A History of the Future*, which imagines a peaceful, just, verdant future world over the horizon of climate collapse. Published by Sparks Press, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster, the book features Kellner's original block prints. Her literary works, including essays, letters, and poems, have appeared in *Utne Magazine*, *Orion Magazine*, *The Loop*, *The Beachcomber*, *The Nature of an Island* and EveryWriter'sResource.com. Her most recent exhibition was at the Lopez Library where she shared ten of her "Teeny Tiny Houses," each exploring various interpretations of what home can signify. The collection ranged from the whimsical *Searching for a Home for My Heart to profound pieces such as Bereavement, which reflects on the current loss of habitat and species. Each house is crafted from found objects and mixed media and placed atop a stack of books, further exploring its theme.
Project: I’d like to offer the Lopez Island an opportunity to imagine the future, and the possibility of what community could look like. I would do this through several means that may include an author talk about my book Hope, A History of the Future, a facilitated book group, and or a hands on community model building event.
Ellen Peterson
I have over a decade of experience teaching children in the areas of fiber arts, seasonal crafts, and watercolor painting. My background is in illustration and Waldorf education and my interest is in sustainability and the psychological and social repatterning that can be experienced by taking part as a maker. I have a BA in art and literature from Evergreen and have attended watercolor workshops with Tom Hoffmann, as well as currently completing a Waldorf teacher training certification.
Project: to develop a body of natural fiber crafts, using local wool as the basis. In the past I’ve worked also with the themes of upcycling and relationship to place. For example, during my residency at the Remakery I developed a fanny pack design using upcycled sweaters and luggage straps, and decorated them with needle felted local plants. The idea was that our waste stream is also an integral part of our relationship to our immediate human and non-human environment, and something to value.