Innovation in Image Residency

ROMSON BUSTILLO

Romson Bustillo is a printmaker. The work is interdisciplinary, incorporating research, works on paper, installations, and interventions. Bustillo makes art to claim presence, to revisit truths, and to break constructed designations of place.

Over two decades, Bustillo has worked in a diverse range of printmaking, including collagraphs, lithographs, intaglios, monotypes, pochoirs, serigraphs, reliefs, and experimental techniques. What distinguishes the work is the intentional fusion of these prints, constructed from matrices made of found metals, wood, mat boards, screens, fabrics, and other repurposed material, into both distinct artworks and essential components of mixed media pieces, installations, and interventions.

Born in the Philippines, Bustillo is a Seattle based artist, who has traveled to countries in SE Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Africa to further artistic and cultural growth. Bustillo was awarded the Seattle Print Arts Larry Sommers Art Fellowship in 2016. In 2017, the co-recipient of the Garboil Grant. An award that considers artists “…engaging audiences outside the aesthetic industrial complex.” The 2019 Artist Trust Fellowship and 2021 Artist Trust Artist Innovator Award. The 2022 Northwest Film Forum Collective Power Fund Award in the "New Work/Projects" category.

Bustillo has taught printmaking and interdisciplinary art for over 25 years including at Pratt Fine Arts Center and as a Lecturer for the University of Washington.

KAGEN DUNN

Kagen Dunn collects items that accumulate in her life through daily routines to record her interactions with the world and the effects it has on her. She collects tangible materials and intangible residues that are left behind after use. In doing so, DunnI captures the feelings of place and time whose expression cannot be expressed in the physical realm. These keepsakes are evidence of existence. Their power sustains the connection between her passing in the world, memories of time and its passing along. She collects materials methodically and mindfully, gradually amassing a collection that reveals its history through wears, stains, and tears. She is interested in materials that are domestic and unremarkable; materials that pervade the day-to-day in such a way that every person can immediately identify them and identify with them, assuming they even notice them at all. These moments, either through performance, subtle changes in how something is meant to be, or the removal of an item, can be quiet but complex. Her practice relies on the acts of attention, mindfulness, and careful observation. Her work exists in the peripherals of the world we notice. It appears mundane and can commonly be overlooked, but the intimacy between the viewer and work becomes more precious upon close-looking. Dunn’s work brings attention to the forgotten elements of our everyday lives and the environments inhabited.