Marco Dessardo (France/Italy)
http://dessardo.com/
Bridge

Marisa di Paola (Vermont)
http://sculpturespace.org/dipaola
Smurfhouse

Cornelia Konrads (Germany)
www.cokonrads.de
Thanatopolis Project

Catalina Rojas (Chile)
www.catalinarojas.com
Mural of Light
Interactions with Natura
Onas or Selk'nam: The enigma of the natives of Tierra del Fuego

Catalina Rojas González was born in 1971 in Santiago, Chile where she continues to live and work. Majoring in audiovisual studies, Rojas received her Bachelor’s Degree in advertising in 1994 from the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. During this period, she also received art diplomas in painting and sculpture and took part in a number of theatre workshops. She later continued her painting studies, receiving a Bachelors Degree in Art, from Universidad Finis Terrae, Santiago, Chile in 2008. Rojas has exhibited and presented her videos in Chile, Mexico and, now, Connecticut.

Interactions with Natura
Her proposal for I-Park is to realise several interactions with natural means and the artistic community. The objective is to positively invade the space during her stay in this special and singular place.The human being and his surroundings - it is the foundation of her work. From the Murals of Light different to expressions like the sculpture, painting and drawing, she moves making of her work a message, a glance that it tries to undermine in the sensations and emotions of the spectator.

Onas or Selk'nam: The enigma of the natives of Tierra del Fuego
When Europeans, Chileans and Argentines studied and settled on the islands
in the mid-19th century, they brought with them diseases such as measles and
smallpox for which the Fuegians had no immunity. The Fuegian population
was devastated by the diseases, and their numbers were reduced from several
thousand in the 19th century to hundreds in the 20th century.There are no
full-blooded native Fuegians today; the last died in 1999.

Masha Ryskin (New York)
http://masharyskin.com
Hush

Ted Taylor (New York)

Ted Taylor lives in Cortlandt Manor with his wife, the artist Nadine Gordon-Taylor, and his daughter Masha. He has a doctorate in English literature from Rutgers University, and has taught at Iona, Yeshiva University, Mercy College, College of New Rochelle, and SUNY New Paltz; currently, he teaches at Lehman College, CUNY. He was the editor of Crosscurrents, the newsletter of the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, and curated two reading series in Westchester. Taylor served as Putnam County Poet in Residence from 1998-2001 and edited an annual anthology for them. He was a resident fellow in poetry at the Constance E. Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts summer arts colony in 2004. He has been a featured reader at Exoterica, the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts, and the Reed Library. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, among them The Atlanta Review, Amaranth, The North American Review, The Kit Kat Review, Chronogram, and The Ledge. Taylor won the Greenburg Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Hearst Prize. He has also published art criticism in NYArts Magazine and the Croton Echo.

Rachel Wilson was born in Iowa City, IA in 1948. She graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1970 with a B.A. Anthropology, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi. She later studied Art at Penn State, Shippensberg State University, and Northern Arizona University. She has traveled and resided in Europe and New Zealand. Wilson has been a volunteer on boards of Flagstaff Masterpiece Art Appreciation, FETE Riding Therapy Program, SMART Art Action Group, Diablo Trust Forum for the Arts, and Artists' Coalition of Flagstaff and has exhibited extensively nationwide in solo, juried and invitational group shows, as well as Arizona events sponsored by AZ Women’s Caucus for the Arts, the Phoenix Art Detour, the Artists’ Coalition of Flagstaff and the Sedona Visual Artists’ Coalition. In 2003, Wilson was awarded a Professional Developement Grant by the Arizona Commission on the Arts to attend artists’ residency at I-Park, East Haddem, CT. She is currently married with three children and has been residing in Flagstaff, Arizona since 1980.

Pollen Gate is about passages, circulation through time and the recombination of genetics. It is about catching the wind and the moment, and about loss and the passage of seasons. Pollen is one of those phenomena that are hard to live with, but impossible to live without - creating allergies on one hand, but also providing code for all the flowering plants that make life possible on this planet as we know it.

Though the installation is now alive in the wind, softly colored and moving, it is designed to deteriorate as the year ends. The paper pollen balls hung among the trees will  weather quickly and dissolve in the autumn rain. The fabric wings will tear in the wind and fade in the light. The recycling of life into not-life is a continuous circulation.

Materials: the fabric is #90 cheescloth painted with acrylics. The pollen balls are leaves and card stock. They are folded in an origami pattern called "Japanese Brocade."

Natalia Mallo (Argentina/Brazil)
www.myspace.com/nataliamallo
Sound Installation

Natalia Mallo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1974. She started studying at the age of 8, in the Conservatório Nacional de Bellas Artes. At the age of 17 she got in touch with the brazilian music and felt a strong identification with it, as well as the country itself, its language and its nature. She moved to São Paulo, the huge brazilian metropolis in 1995, when she was 20. There she started a career as songwriter, composing for other artists and for her solo project. Then she started studying and researching digital environments for making music, and became a sound engineer and producer, working for independent artists and producing music for theater and dance pieces, installations, cartoons and films. In her work with contemporary dance companies, she investigates the possibilities of improvisation as a language to communicate aesthetical and pollitical ideas. This was a turning point for Natalia's will to search for information and references in contemporary music and sound design. She produced three albums with her band Trash Pour 4, released in Brazil, Japan, Korea, Thailand and Greece and is a lead singer in gatoNegro, a group that plays contemporary tango, mixing this genre with brazilian and jazz influences. She already worked as musical director in the Danceability Brazil project, directed by the American choreographer Alito Alessi, where she started using digital manipulation of sounds from natural sources. During her stay in Japan, she collected samples of the strong presence of nature sounds in the city of Tokyo in contrast with silent crowds, and with this in mind, started thinking of a project that could reveal the sounds of a space/place/city, as a manifestation of its life and its movement. Then she tried to take this investigation to a place where nature could live and sound freely, to discover textures, melodic and rhythmic patterns and pure music in the sounds of nature and transform them in rough material to be manipulated digitally and used as a base for music inspiration and composition. This specific research brought Mallo to I-Park.

Fireworks Ensemble (New York)
www.fireworks-ensemble.org

Founded with the goal of creating a single, small ensemble capable of representing the full scope of today’s musical diversity, Fireworks Ensemble combines the talents of eight classically-trained but musically omnivorous young virtuosi who pride themselves on being able to play just about anything, regardless of style, time period, or instrumentation.

In the course of its seven year history, Fireworks has premiered over a hundred new works, promoting emerging composers worthy of wider recognition, and commissioning works by established masters. Passionate about its work with young people, the ensemble devotes a large part of its time each year to outreach activities, and has provided a doorway into contemporary and traditional classical music for hundreds of students in elementary, middle and high schools. This season, the ensemble will conduct a ten week residency based on its Cartoon program in Peekskill, New York as part of Chamber Music America's Residency Partnership program. Fireworks' three popular recordings: Dance Mix, First Tracks, and The Rite of Spring, have received airplay worldwide from WNYC in New York to Lo Otra Musica in Spain and RadioRock in Italy. This winter the ensemble will record Cartoon for Koch Classics. Additional upcoming events include performances and residencies in Florida, Idaho, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, and West Virginia, and a return to the Miller Theater for a performance with rock legend Lou Reed.

Derek Bermel (New York)
www.derekbermel.com

Described by the Toronto Star as an eclectic with wide open ears" and by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as "one of America's finest young composers", composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel has been widely hailed for his creativity, theatricality, and virtuosity. Bermel's works draw from a rich variety of musical genres, including classical, jazz, pop, rock, blues, folk, and gospel. Hands-on experience with music of cultures around the world has become part of the fabric and force of his compositional language.

Currently serving as 2006-09 Music Alive Composer-in-Residence with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Bermel has received commissions from major orchestras and chamber ensembles throughout the U.S. and overseas, collaborating with a diverse array of artists as Wynton Marsalis, Midori, John Adams, Paquito D'Rivera, Philip Glass, Gustavo Dudamel and Stephen Sondheim. Beginning in Fall 2009 Bermel will serve as composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and as artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. A recently released CD of his orchestral music, Voices, by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, was hailed as "magnificent" by the San Francisco Chronicle. Bermel's music is published by Peermusic (North/South America & Asia) and Faber Music (Europe & Australia).

Steven Mackey (New York)
www.stevenmackey.com

Steven Mackey was born in 1956. His first musical passion was playing the electric guitar in rock bands based in northern California. He later discovered concert music and has composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles, dance and opera. Since the mid 1980’s he has resumed his interest in the electric guitar and regularly performs his own work, including two concertos as well as numerous solo and chamber works.

Mackey is Professor of Music at Princeton University where he teaches composition, theory, twentieth century music, improvisation and a variety of special topics. As co-director of the Composers Ensemble at Princeton he coaches and conducts new work by student composers as well as twentieth century classics.