Each year, Rhizome awards grants to eleven emerging artists for the creation of original works of new media art. Established in 2001, the Rhizome Commissions Program has awarded sixty-four grants throughout its history to projects that have gone on to have a great impact in the field of contemporary art. At this event, select artists from the most recent commissioning round will present and discuss their works in progress.

Participating artists: Maria Carmen del Montoya and Kevin Patton, Kristin Lucas, Joe McKay and Angelo Plessas

Kristin Lucas creates video, installation, interventions, digital images, sculpture, and projects for the Web. Positioning herself at the center of her projects, Lucas addresses the effects of rapid-spread technology on the human condition through her work. Reversing a popular concept of infusing humanity into machines she instead applies familiar strategies of electronic media to her own life. Transformations, mutations, and portraiture are the focus of works set to the backdrop of empty and meaningful exchanges with automated tellers, healing-arts therapists, celebrity impersonators, police officers, and a judge. Lucas’s work has been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including Queens Nails, San Francisco; Artefact Festival, Leuven; ICA, London; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Cheekwood Museum, Nashville; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the New Museum; and Artists Space, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Postmasters Gallery, New York; And/Or Gallery, Dallas; Or Gallery, Vancouver; Plugin, Basel; Windows, Brussels; the New Museum; O.K Center for ContemporaryArts, Linz, Austria; and FACT, Liverpool. Her videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. Lucas has been awarded numerous artist residencies including the Edith Russ Site for Media Art New Work Stipend, Oldenburg, Germany; the 13th International Studio Program of ACC Weimar and the City of Weimar, Germany; World Views, Experimental Television Center, Harvestworks, Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program and P.S.1 National Studio Program, New York; and the ARCUS A.I.R. Program, Ibaraki, Japan. She is an assistant professor of Studio Art at Bard College.

Joe McKay is assistant professor of New Media at Purchase College. He has an undergraduate degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and a MFA from UC Berkeley. In 2000 Mckay participated in the Whitney Independent study program. He has exhibited his work at VertexList, the New Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, ICA (san Jose), the Neuberger Museum, Postmasters, La Casa Encendida, and the National Gallery of Canada. In the fall of 2010 Joe will have a solo show at Pari Nadimi Gallery in Toronto. McKay works in several different mediums: photo, video, programing, performance, Web sites, games, and sculpture, and he enjoys the flexibility this grants him. Joe is disproportionately proud of how incredibly Googleable he is.

Maria del Carmen Montoya is a new media artist who works in sculpture, performance, and video. Her work explores the personal, emotional and utterly irrational tendencies of technology. Kevin Patton is a composer, scholar, and experimental sound performer whose music explores the intersections of composition, improvisation, technology, and the body. Their collaborative projects include WineBloodBloodLove, a performance and sound installation inside the Herman Nitsch retrospective at the Station Museum in Houston, TX; the creation of The Digital Poplar Consort, a family of handcrafted wireless musical instruments with which they use in concert performance; and most recently I Sky You, winner of a 2009 Rhizome Commission, an installation that sonifies the radiance of chemically synthesized light. It is inspired by the phrase Frida Kahlo used to describe infinite love: “I Sky You.”

Angelo Plessas lives and works in Athens, Greece. His main body of work consists of Web sites that bring together an animated “object” with a domain name that functions as the title and location of the piece. These Web objects often resemble sculptural portraits of imaginary characters, alternating between funny, poignant, strange, and romantic. In his work, Plessas fuses iconography of ancient civilizations, Surrealist abstractions, and modernist references together with the social-networking habit of imagined identities. Although immaterial, these pieces have a strong handcrafted quality and a distinct graphic style, always animated and interactive. Sometimes focusing on the theme of identity, these pieces become characters and portraits, while some other times they become experiments of color and form, always conveying abstract emotions to the viewer in contrast to our “reality”-driven online situation. His most recent solo exhibitions include "Angelo Plessas Works" at the Berkeley Art Museum, “Headquarters” at Rebecca Camhi gallery, and "The Angelo Foundation Headquarters" at Jeu De Paume (with Andreas Angelidakis). His work was presented at the the 2nd Athens Biennale in the exhibition "Splendid Isolation, Athens." His work has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, and other publications.