IN THE ANNEX: FIGMENT FRAGMENT
2021Annex Fellows

“With a series of collages, Siller practices “layering”, “mark-making”, “multiplicity”, and “reorienting toward possibility” and “desires to emulate and to reject Western feminine ideals”. Wildman’s sculptures “are suggestive in form, personal reflections on gendered expectations, frustration, but also desire and sexuality and the complicated moments in which they overlap.” Hancocks creates “experiments which test the way identity is expressed in post-internet capitalist society. These experiments are interpreted into drawings, installation, sculpture, and participatory works.”
— David Guerra, Juror

November 27-December 19, 2021
Siena Hancock, Catherine Siller, Katherine Wildman

SoWa First Friday Art Walk: Friday, December 3, 2021, | 5:00–8:00 PM
Artist Conversation with juror David Guerra: Sunday, December 12, 2021 | 2:00–3:00PM

The selected artists for the 2021 Annex Fellowships are Catherine Siller, Siena Hancock, and Katherine Wildman. The 2021 Annex Fellows, through the act of dismantling, disassembling and questioning, embark on a search for new paths to explore gender, and overall, identity. The works presented examine social and cultural attitudes towards the body, and the self. The Annex Fellowship Recipients were selected by Juror David Guerra.

Siena Hancock

Siena Hancock is a multidisciplinary non-binary artist. As an interdisciplinary feminist, they strive to create works which question capitalist structures, the gender binary, and the effect technology has on social customs. With ironic humor, they create experiments which test the way identity is expressed in post-internet society. This is expressed through self-portraiture, objects, and drawings utilizing mirrors as a tool for replicating or ‘mirroring’ the selfie experience in order to examine how people view themselves and each other. Hancock explores the fact that while we trust the authenticity of the images we see reflected in a mirror, in actuality, it is a world that has no physical existence–a virtual reality.

Since graduating from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design with their BFA in 2016, Hancock has traveled extensively and participated in several AiR programs, including HEIMA in Seyðisfjörður Iceland and PlySpace in Muncie, Indiana. Now based in Boston, they were awarded the Emerging Studio Artist Fellowship through the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 2020 as well as the Annex Fellowship at Fountain Street Gallery in SOWA in 2021. As Co-Lead Fabricator and Studio Manager at Ross Art Studios, a state-of-the-art glass fabrication studio based in Hyde Park, they create objects for influential contemporary artists, designers, and architects. Their upcoming two-person show at BAC’s Beacon St Gallery will explore Hancock’s relationship to the work they do in glass fabrication.

Catherine Siller

Catherine Siller’s collages reimagine ideal, binary-gendered bodies. The process of cutting up, drawing on, and remixing these figures – all drawn from fashion magazines – is a practice. She is practicing taking things apart; practicing letting go of what she’s learned about how we are “supposed” to be. Siller is practicing dismantling her lineage of white, cis heteropatriarchy. She is practicing new personal narratives about gender; practicing layering and mark-making; practicing multiplicity. She is practicing holding all parts of herself. She is practicing growing flowers, spilling ice cream, screaming, showing up imperfect in glitter and tulle and a men’s blazer with one red latex opera glove. She is practicing queerness. She is practicing reorienting toward possibility.

Catherine Siller is a Boston-based multimedia artist and choreographer whose work affirms queerness and transness and invites all of us to rethink gender norms and expectations. Siller has shown her work at NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), Boston Cyberarts Gallery (Boston, MA), Nave Gallery Annex (Somerville, MA), Washington Street Art (Somerville, MA), and the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts (Providence, RI). Her animations have screened at the Boston Short Film Festival and Boston’s Area Code art fair. Her animations and interactive video installations have been commissioned by Boston Cyberarts “Art of the Marquee” program, Illuminus Boston, and the Somerville Arts Council. Siller has received support for her work from the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), the Boston Foundation, the Somerville Arts Council, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She holds an MFA in Digital Media from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and a BA in visual arts from Harvard.

Katherine Wildman

Celestial Order of Spirits Mystics & Oracles of Sleep/space (& beyond), C.O.S.M.O.S., exists as a portal to the divine. It is a meditation of dream space, deep space, and subconscious. The spirits are adorned but tired, a state which she felt intimately connected to. Wildmen channeled these spirits during the start of the pandemic, a time where she was learning the complicated emotions which liminal spaces hold and the powerful portals they open. Fashioning bodies for these spirits was a way to escape her own body which felt increasingly uncomfortable and restrictive. These spirits mostly comprise deconstructed dollar bin jewelry from a thrift store. Working with the donated and discarded cheap costume jewelry was a way of composting, taking what was gaudy and connecting it to what felt spiritual. The act of fashioning bodies for these spirits, was a small but important practice of her care and dedication. A way of reminding herself that the small but repeated investments of time and care carry transformative and transcendental potential. 

Katherine Wildman is a Boston-based interdisciplinary artist. She received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She has recently exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Beacon Gallery and Gallery 263. She has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Pilotenkueche and is a 2020 recepient of the City of Boston’s Artist Career Development Grant. She is currently an artist in residence at the Boston Center for the Arts.