collis

The Department of Art is pleased to announce that Prof. Shannon Collis, Prof. Jowita Wyszomirska, Prof. Matthew McLaughlin and MFA candidate Dan Ortiz-Leizman are the recipients of the 2023 Clarvit Research Fellowships. This award - the result of generous support from the Clarvit Family provides critical support for our faculty and graduate students to engage in new methods and modalities of research, giving them the time and resources to undertake ambitious new trajectories within their respective fields of creative research.

In its second year, the Clarvit Faculty and Graduate Student Research Fellowship aims to foster new uses of creative technology within the University of Maryland and to aid in the professional development of faculty and graduate students within the Department of Art, as described in the mission statement of the fellowship:

"The creation of new knowledge in the arts does not usually come from commonly sourced techniques; this is doubly so where technology intersects with the arts. Oftentimes, works of creative technology involve the invention of entirely new and novel visual media, which can create a significant barrier to entry for artists. This fund will provide opportunities for faculty and students in need of time and resources to create new works of creative technology in the arts and design and will help recruit graduate students to the Department of Art MFA program.”

More information about each recipient is below:

Professor Shannon Collis:

Shannon Collis investigates relationships among multiple sensory modalities and
between visual and acoustic phenomena in perception. She creates audiovisual
installations and interactive environments that highlight the situated, embodied
experience of hearing and seeing.
Her work has been widely exhibited across North America and abroad, including solo
exhibitions at The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art (Ursinus College, PA), The
Dalton Gallery (Agnes Scott College, GA), Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia, PA), and Open
Studio Contemporary Printmaking Centre (Toronto, Canada). Other collaborations and
screenings include projects at the Murray Art Museum (Albury, Australia), the Walters
Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Baltimore, MD), and the Currents New
Media Festival (Santa Fe, NM). She has been awarded the Robert W. Deutsch
Foundation’s Rubys Artist Grant and was a finalist for the Janet and Walter Sondheim
Artscape Prize. She has received numerous individual and project grants from the
Canada Council for the Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council. Collis is a 2005
graduate of the Master of Fine Art program at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Professor Matthew Mclaughlin:

Matthew McLaughlin is a mixed media artist and curator whose work explores the human
relationship with their environments and spaces, both physically and psychologically. He
received his BFA degree in Fine Arts from Ringling College of Art and Design and his MFA
degree in Printmaking from Arizona State University. Matthew has had solo exhibitions in
Washington, DC and Phoenix, among other areas. His work has been included in group
exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, in commercial galleries, artist-run spaces and
museums. He has received numerous awards including the Maryland State Art Council
Individual Artist Award 2016 in Works on Paper. His work is in the collections of the Library of
Congress, the Zuckerman Museum of Art and various universities, along with private collectors.
He has curated for numerous national exhibition spaces including the American University
Museum in Washington, DC.

Professor Jowita Wyszomirska:

Jowita Wyszomirska is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing and large-scale installations. Her work has been exhibited nationally in solo and two-person exhibitions. Some of her honors and awards include the Good Hart artist residency, MI; Andy Warhol Preserve Artist in Residence program, Long Island, NY; Wrangell Artist Residency in McCarthy, Alaska; Jentel Foundation, Wyoming; Soaring Gardens artist in residence program, PA; Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska;  Maryland State Art Council Individual Artist Award, and Board of Governors Award (b grant), William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund, Baltimore, MD . Wyszomirska's work, represented by a DC-based gallery, Neptune & Brown, has been included in many private, corporate, and institutional collections, with a recent acquisition by the Baltimore Museum of Art. 

MFA Student Dan Ortiz-Leizman:

Dan Ortiz Leizman is an artist, writer, and educator currently working towards an MFA at the University of Maryland. They received a BA in Philosophy and Studio Art from Goucher College in 2020. Ortiz Leizman’s work approaches mark-making as an embodied practice that sometimes leads to communication but often actively resists legibility. Their practice is utterly interdisciplinary, rejecting false divisions between art, performance, theory, science, and technology.  Themes in their work can be distilled into the endlessly repeating and very queer phrase “words and bodies and words and bodies and words.”

By Jessica Weiss ’05 

Cutting across more than 2,000 miles of prairie, wetland and other rural landscapes from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma, the Keystone Pipeline is a powerful symbol of human dependence on fossil fuels and its impact on people and habitats.

While much of the discussion and debate over the project have focused on the land it passes through, what about the area where the pipeline begins — the source of all that crude oil?

Shannon Collis, associate professor of art at the University of Maryland, is on a mission to tell the story of the lesser known Athabasca Oil Sands. That’s where millions of barrels of oil are dredged up each day from beneath thousands of miles of boreal forest.

“I want to capture the environmental effects of the industry … the abandoned open-pit mines, waste ponds and refineries,” said Collis, who teaches digital media and sound at UMD. “I want people to know what it’s like there.”

Collis, who is from Canada and now lives in Baltimore, was recently awarded a $10,000 Rubys Artist Grant through the Baltimore-based Robert W. Deutsch Foundation to travel to the oil sands in western Canada early next year to capture digital video, drone cinematography and sound recordings of the area. The resulting project, called “Strata,” will bring Canada’s immense oil fields to a gallery installation through immersive digital media. “Strata” is a reference to layers in the ground, or what happens when earth is being excavated.

“I create a space that envelopes people and surrounds them in sound and moving image,” she said. “So, you’re actually hearing this mechanical machinery, roaring off the landscape.”

Collis first learned of Canada’s massive oil sands 14 years ago. After graduating with an M.F.A. in printmaking from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, she moved to the boomtown of Fort McMurray to teach printmaking and art history at Keyano College. The area was cold and isolated but beautiful, and Collis loved to take in the natural landscape on long runs or drives. She often brought her film camera.

She found the oil sands on one of those adventures.

“I remember sitting on what felt like a crater in the earth, on the ledge, taking pictures and really thinking about how powerful it was to see the landscape altered in that way,” she said.

Alberta has the third-largest oil reserves in the world, after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.

Collis’ work has since evolved from film photography and printmaking into a more interdisciplinary, technology-driven form. Combining her two-dimensional work with a background in computer science, she now creates installations and interactive environments with audio and visuals that allow people to immerse themselves deeply.

Collis’ work has been exhibited widely across North America as well as in Europe, Asia, Australia and Brazil.

“Strata” comes after a similar project, called “Kiewa,” in which Collis documented the ways a hydroelectric project has transformed Australia’s Alpine Valley. For that project, Collis spent two weeks in residence at the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture in the Australian Alps, absorbed in the terrain. The resulting work came in the form of six large right triangles that screened video collages depicting Australia’s Alpine National Park and the neighboring Kiewa hydroelectric complex. It was exhibited at the artist collective Grizzly Grizzly in Philadelphia earlier this year.

Collis’ art also focuses on urban architectural sites. “Singular Space,” a collaboration with Baltimore-based artist Liz Donadio, uses immersive video and sound to provide a portrait of Forum Fountain, a public sculpture in East Baltimore. It’s currently on view at the Arlington Arts Gallery.

For “Strata,” Collis tentatively plans to exhibit large-scale video projections and surround-sound audio. She’ll travel to Canada in March — when the temperature may still be around -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit) — to begin her research and exploration.

“Calling it ‘research’ is appropriate because it’s something I’m investigating from all sides of this complex issue,” she said. “Things could shift depending on what I see and experience there. I’ll react to what I capture as data and then decide how to best execute it.”