Makerspace Residency Talk with Will Toney, Lydon Frank Lettuce, and Jazmyn Crosby

Please join us on October 17th for a virtual artist talk and presentation. Will Toney, Jazmyn Crosby, and lydon frank lettuce will discuss their residencies at the LCDSS Makerspace's residency program. There will be time at the end for a Q + A about their experience and about the residency process in general.

Will Toney
William Toney is a photographer, arts administrator, curator, and educator from Kansas City, Missouri. Toney has exhibited nationally and had solo exhibitions of his work at the UMKC Gallery of Art and HAW Contemporary, Kansas City, Missouri. The nature of collaboration has inspired his practice as an educator and curator. Currently based in Philadelphia, Toney is committed to the arts with a vision of creating a more inclusive future for artists and practitioners.

About his residency project:

Sound System will be a work focused on black and queer cultural contributions, especially to electronic dance music. The speaker system will relate visually to sound system culture and its histories within the diaspora. This work applies Edouard Glissant's concept of opacity to rave culture. The speakers will act as discrete objects that contain worlds within worlds. Hopefully their interior is hard to define.

The goal with the Sound System is to create a 3-way speaker system that consists of a midrange, tweeter, and subwoofer. The speakers will also function as viewfinders into a visual field. Étant Donnés, the Duchamp peephole piece is a visual reference. I embrace the return to the past for the rethinking of new technologies.

Jazmyn Crosby
Jazmyn Crosby’s work explores transmission practices, discarded objects, and climate resiliency. Born and raised in New Mexico, Jazmyn lives in Philadelphia where she received her MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She got her BFA from the University of New Mexico. Jazmyn is an educator, an event facilitator, and musician. She is a founding member of Graft Gallery/Collective and is a current member of the Bio Materials Working Group. She is currently an adjunct instructor at the Tyler School of art and Architecture, The University of Delaware, Moore College of Art and Design, and teaches courses at Fleisher Art Memorial.

About Jazmyn’s Residency Project:

For the past several years, I have been collecting ocean water and boiling it until it becomes salt. There is something impossibly essential about salt. Salt is in the blood, it is electric, a transmitter between cells, critical for maintaining a heartbeat. Salt is a crystal associated with energy healing. Ocean salt water is one of the major ways in which micro plastics are consumed by humans and has a direct relationship to a world affected by climate change. I would like to learn more about how I can use salt for basic conductivity in electronics.

I am particularly interested in activating sculptures that will create sound and have some kind of voice associated with them, which is why I am interested in working with communication technology, particularly radio. I would like to hack into obsolete media objects and hope to learn more about electroacoustic electricity in nature and find a way to integrate that research into my work.

lydon frank lettuce 
lydon frank lettuce is an artist, writer, and all-around goon from rural Pennsylvania. They plant poems in your garden and dig diagrams into the sand. They wrestle with the knotted garden hose of desire and press your semantic satiation up against the wall. Using transdisciplinary modes of performance and play, psycholinguistic subversion, and new modes of embodied writing, their work interrogates the tensions within language — seeking to destabilize the boundaries of (be)longing inherent in social structures of violence and decipher-ability while maintaining the (im)possibilities of pleasure (physics), always. They hold an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BFA From Parsons School of Design. They are always speaking frankly.

about lydon’s Makerspace Residency Project:

Deeply embedded in concerns surrounding scientific knowledge (accumulation), pedagogy, and pleasure, this project builds upon my larger artistic practice — specifically my concept of “pleasure physics” — in order to destabilize boundaries of belonging and access as it pertains to scientific (institutional) knowledge. The title “Us Conductors (We Three)” is the third installment of an ongoing research project of the same name presented as part of Science Club.