Yojiro Imasaka

Yojiro Imasaka uses the historical wet collodion photographic process to produce photos of landscapes from glass negatives, creating images that are soft, dream-like and filled with light. During his residency at Denver Botanic Gardens, Imasaka seeks to create works that reflect on the vulnerability of nature while imagining a sustainable future.

About the Artist

Yojiro Imasaka was born in Hiroshima, Japan and relocated to the United Sates in 2007. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He received a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in photography from Nihon University College of Art Photography Department in Tokyo and a Master of Fine Art degree from the Pratt Institute, NY. Imasaka’s photographs have been exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and his works are held in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN and the Carnegie Museum of Art, PA, among others.

Kiki Gaffney

Kiki Gaffney explores the intersections between the natural world and urban landscapes through illustration and painting, translating the detailed forms of fallen trees, rock formations and natural detritus into geometric designs. During her residency, Gaffney will explore the beauty of Denver Botanic Gardens’ natural and constructed environments, seeking inspiration in the forms, shapes and colors of landscapes and collections.

About the Artist

Philadelphia-based visual artist Kiki Gaffney juxtaposes organic and constructed patterns to explore our visual landscape. Gaffney received a bachelor's degree from Loyola College, and a master’s degree from the University of the Arts, PA. She is represented by Pentimenti Gallery, PA, Modern West Fine Art, UT, and K. Imperial Fine Art, CA. Her works are held in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States.
 

Aisha Imdad

Drawing inspiration from her homeland in Pakistan, Aisha Imdad’s miniature paintings are inspired by historical depictions of Chaharbagh gardens, a style of garden influenced by the artistic traditions of the Persian and Mughal empires and found across Central and South Asia. During her residency at Denver Botanic Gardens, Imdad will explore how cultivated gardens connect humans to the natural world across time and culture.

About the Artist

Based in Texas, Aisha Imdad uses watercolor and gouache to create paintings exploring the myths, folktales and history of South Asia. Imdad is the former Chairperson and Head of the Department of Art and Design at COMSATS University, Islamabad, Pakistan. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master in Visual Arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, and her works have been exhibited throughout Pakistan and the United States.
 

Daniela Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas

Daniela Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas used her residency to explore the human need for nourishment and the connection between the human and natural world. The resulting ceramic works give form to the desire to hold on to what is precious, to keep memories of home alive and to keep loved ones close. Like deep roots gripping the soil below, her work explores how the natural world can reflect the longing we feel when we leave home and the connections we make across distance. 

About the Artist 

Daniela Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas is a Colombian immigrant pursuing her MFA in ceramics at the University of Dallas. She graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA in studio art and a minor in art history and obtained her MA from University of Dallas. She focuses on organic forms through hand-built sculptures and ceramic installations to explore the longing of home. 

Laura Ahola-Young

Using precise research and study of plant physiology, Laura Ahola Young explores the scientific structures of plants. Her meticulous paintings often feature complex patterns and labored marks. During her residency, she created paintings that explore how an organism’s appearance is informed by its adaptations for survival.

About the Artist

Laura Ahola-Young develops work that incorporates scientific research, the Pacific Northwest and personal narrative. Originally from northern Minnesota, she has been influenced by landscapes, winters, ice and resilience. Ahola-Young received her MFA from San Jose State University in 2001 and currently resides in Pocatello, Idaho, where she is associate professor of art at Idaho State University. 

Paula Castillo

Paula Castillo used the Land Line residency to investigate the history and symbolism of corn, revealing the complex and malleable intersections between physical and cultural landscapes. What began as an inquiry into the divination practice of tirar maíz (throwing corn) and curanderismo (a Latin American folk medicine practice) transformed into a project exploring the key role of corn within human movement, conflict, and survival. The resulting artwork explores the often-unacknowledged role that plants have played in the complexities of human history.

About the Artist

A Latinx artist based in Belén, New Mexico, Paula Castillo creates intimate and large-scale sculptural installations using generative patterns and structures to draw parallels between the fluid and solid forms of life. Castillo attended Yale University and worked in an electronics factory where she forged her early career in contemporary sculpture. The complex and malleable intersections between the physical and cultural landscape are Castillo’s primary source. Her work has been reviewed by publications such as Hyperallergic, Washington Post, and The New York Times. She exhibits nationally and internationally, and her work is in collections such as the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. 

Laura Fantini

Laura Fantini’s hyper-realistic works inspire reconnection with nature through observation of the beauty and the astounding detail of the natural world. The artworks created for the Land Line residency were made using seedpods from Denver Botanic Gardens’ own living collections as reference. For Fantini, seeds are powerful symbols of optimism and the infinite possibility of new beginnings.

About the Artist

Laura Fantini is an artist working in a hyper-realistic minimalist manner, living and working in both Brooklyn, New York, and Bologna, Italy. She specializes in colored pencil still-life defined by strong contrast and dramatic lighting. She graduated from the Liceo Artistico and Academy of Fine Arts in her hometown of Bologna. Fantini's art has exhibited nationally and internationally in museums, galleries and art institutions and has been widely published and documented. She has won various awards, including The Canson Paper Award for Excellence and the Award for Exceptional Merit from the Colored Pencil Society of America. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh and at the Queens Botanical Garden in New York. 

T Edward Bak

During his Land Line residency, Bak created a series of illustrated works exploring the history of connections between people and native plants in the San Luis Valley region. His research drew from his own family history in the area, combined with resources offered by Denver Botanic Gardens. His work aims to support and expand awareness of connections between communities and their environments, and to detail the traditional knowledge and use of native plants in medicines and other cultural practices.

About the Artist

T Edward Bak was raised in Colorado and currently lives in Oregon. His approach as a writer and artist is informed by an interest in the environmental history of western North America. As an instructor of nonfiction comics and graphic novels with the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, he draws from the experience of a working cartoonist whose published stories have appeared in Drawn & Quarterly Showcase and The Best American Comics anthologies. 

Kyle Cornish

Kyle Cornish used the Land Line residency to collect visual source material from Denver Botanic Gardens’ modern and archival collections of specimens. Cornish’s perspective illuminates the role of race and identity in the experience of nature. The resulting collage artworks honor the Gardens’ mission to connect people with plants and celebrate abundance and community.

About the Artist

Kyle Cornish is a multidisciplinary artist and community organizer living in Brooklyn, NY. Their work explores nature, Black identity and queer community in the Anthropocene.  

Joelle Cicak

Joelle Cicak used her Land Line residency to research the entanglements that occur within the steppe biomes represented at Denver Botanic Gardens. Exploring the delicate connections between plants and animals, Cicak’s work captures how these interactions build a foundation upon which we all may thrive. Her research at the Gardens aided the creation of ceramic sculpture displaying the interchange of life within ecosystems, celebrating the intricate interactions between different plant species and the ways in which they combine to wondrous ends.   

About the Artist

Joelle Cicak grew up against a stretch of forest in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where she learned at a young age the intricacies that exist between humans and the environment. Her undergraduate education at Dickinson College focused on art practices and classical studies. Because of this, she often uses mythology to aid her thoughts on nature, memory and the connection between past and present, personal and public. She received her MFA in ceramics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She focuses deeply on both her relationship with the natural world, as well as the cultural ideas that both bind us to and separate us from it. 

Lauren Camp

With an interest in ecology, Lauren Camp’s work focuses on the dangers plaguing the environment—shifting climate, increasing desertification and wildfires. During her Land Line residency, she searched for positive outcomes within our changing environment, looking at the plants most appropriate to our changing climate and ever-increasing aridity. The resulting poems reckon with the ways that nature recharges the land, and what has the courage to stretch and bloom. 

About the Artist

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently “Took House” (Tupelo Press), winner of the American Fiction Award in Poetry and Distinguished Favorite for the Independent Press Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, Ecotone, Poet Lore and “Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology,” and her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian and Arabic. She is a recipient of fellowships from Black Earth Institute and The Taft Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities. Other honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and North American Book Award. She lives in New Mexico, where she teaches creative writing to people of all ages.

Laleh Mehran and Christopher Coleman

Laleh Mehran and Chris Coleman pursued a collaborative project for the Land Line residency, focusing on the natural world’s significance throughout history and across cultures. Their project resulted in a design inspired by carpets from Iran. The design combines plants from West Virginia (Coleman’s native home), Iran (Mehran’s native home) and Colorado (their current home), reflecting on the long history of migration of both people and plants. Combining old and new technologies, this work was created using 3-D recreations, photogrammetry, photography and lidar scanning, weaving a complex story of relationships and understanding.

About the Artists

Laleh Mehran was born in Iran and relocated to the U.S. at the start of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. She creates elaborate environments in digital and physical spaces focused on complex intersections between politics, religion and science. Mehran received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and has exhibited across North America and countries including Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, U.A.E., Bahrain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Taiwan and China. She is a professor and the director of emergent digital practices at the University of Denver. 

Chris Coleman was born in West Virginia and received his MFA from SUNY Buffalo in New York. His work includes creative coding, videos, sculptures and interactive installations. Coleman has exhibited in more than 20 countries including Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Finland, the U.A.E., Germany, France, China, Latvia and across North America. He currently resides in Denver, Colorado, and is a professor and the graduate director of emergent digital practices at the University of Denver.