Xander Marro (American b. 1975) is a fake scientist/olde style tinker residing at the dirt palace; a feminist cupcake encrusted netherworld located along the dioxin filled banks of the Woonasquatucket river (which is to say in Providence, RI USA). From this post she makes movies, puppet shows, prints and phone calls. Her adventures underground have included curating the "Movies with Live Soundtracks" film series and performing in various theatrick/musical formats as one of the variety of her alter egos (Madame Von Temper Tantrum, Lady Long Arms, Lil Blood-n-Guts, Madame Von Malt Liquor etc.) Of recent days she has gotten herself deep into the wild world of community organizing around neighborhood social justice and human rights issues.

 

PIPPI ZORNOZA is an artist, musician, performer and co-founder of the Dirt Palace in Providence Rhode Island. She is characterized by the incredible variety of media in which she works. The extreme intricacy and meticulousness of her work evidence a system of self imposed rules bordering on the obsessive. This maniacally disciplined approached manifests printmaking, embroidery, lace making, carving, knitting, musical performance, installation, sewing and drawing. Her printmaking work has been exhibited in the United States as well as Japan, Argentina, Columbia and Sweden,and was published in the art-poster anthology, , The Art of Modern Rock. Pippi is known for her frightening performance style which manifests the undernourished expression of female power. In 2004 she formed the musical performance project Bonedust, with musician/composer Chrissy Wolpert. Bonedust toured the US in 2006 and is featured in the Corleone Records 10 year anniversary DVD "Everything I own in Either Broken or Bent". Formed out of a mutual period of desperation, VVLTVRE a collaboration with Annapurna Himal Wagner began performing in 2007. VVLTVRE'S debut release is slated on .Corleone Records for next year. Other musical projects of hers include: Throne of Blood (2002-03) released on Corleone Records; Sawzall (2001-02); and the ongoing solo project, Master Pizor (songs for the heartbroken, horny and metalheads. Pippi is also the star in the cult movie classic, Die You Zombie Bastards, directed by Caleb Emerson. Someday she will direct and perform in a musical where she will star as death.

JAMIE URETSKY

Spawned from a large egg on the isle on Nwar, J.R. Uretsky crawled from her fetal cocoon to Providence, RI where she broke into the Dirt Palace and slept in a nest of dust, cat vomit and detached armpit hair for thirty years.   When she was found she was emaciated and ugly. Uretsky had kept herself alive by suckling from the teat of a pregnant gerbil who she later took as her wife. Once nursed back to health Uretsky joined the public education system and currently teaches at Eastern Connecticut State University.  J.R. and her wife, Nibbles McGobble-Uretsky, are located in Providence and plan to use in vitro to start their family. Please send sperm samples to The McGobble-Uretsky's c/o the Dirt Palace.

J.R. Uretsky received her BFA at BIOLA University in Los Angeles, CA and her MFA at the University of Connecticut. Uretsky has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues in New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Germany. Her work has been published by online and video journals such as Gaga Stigmata and ASPECT‐EZ.

OLIVIA HORVATH

is primarily a printmaker and comic draw-er eternally tethered to the East Coast (NY->Baltimore->PVD). Sometime in the past 20 something years they evolved from animal rights obsessed 8 year old to teen lolita goth wannabe to embarrassingly earnest printmaking student to the stunning specimen of a human being they are today (see pic). They came to the Dirt Palace after the eviction of the collective queer youth venue/studio/home Witch Club, of which they were a founding member. In addition to drawing girls w/ complicated haircuts to stave off feelings of impending disaster, Olivia is a breakfast expert (prep and consumption), junior succulent buff, ex-library worker, brass musician, and sometimes sloppy late nite radio host.

Olivia is a sprawling mess both on and off this here internet, and regularly shares sketchbook guts, bad tattoo ideas and project updates via their blog. All trade/collab/commission/date inquiries can be sent to- patchthatsweater (AT) gmail (DOT) com.

MUFFY BRANDT

was born in 1981 in Pennsylvania. She has been involved in many projects, some more successful than others.

Muffy graduated from RISD in 2004, majoring in Film/Video and Painting.

She returned to RISD for courses in textiles and sells her fabric designs in stores and online at www.etsy.com/muffybrandt where she lists hand dyed, silk screened, and sewn original pieces.

In May of 2012 Muffy graduated from the Salt Institute of Documentary Studies where she majored in Photo Journalism and Mutlimedia Storytelling. See her recent work at www.vimeo.com/muffybrandt

She was recently in the cast of the world premier of Andy Kaufman's musical comedy Bohemia West directed by Sarah Reiter and performed at Providence's AS220 Black Box Theater.

Muffy occasionally does stand up comedy as Sandy Kaufman, sings in Rotten Apples, knits, watches tons of movies and commentary tracks, and maintains a multi disciplinary studio practice.

Muffy is thrilled to be a part of the Dirt Palace.

MICHELLE CHRZANOWSKI

was born in Chicago to old-world Polish parents and grew up in small-town Wisconsin.

Although drawing has always been her bread and butter through school and life, she can't commit to anything so she tries to make everything.

Play time as a kid included watching cartoons, swimming during the day/biking in the afternoon/roller skating at night, and illustrating cards and drawing imaginary characters. Play time in the now is pretty much the same. Play time is very, very important. http://www.welcum.net

www.welcum.net

JIEUN REINER

holds a BFA in Printmaking from RISD and works in a variety of mediums including but not limited to printmaking, photography, painting, writing, drawing, sculpture, and all things in the realm of possibility that also make sense. Her current day job is as a bookbinder and restoration artist. She can be classified as an extreme hobbyist, dabbling in such things as kaleidoscope making, bread baking, tending to her (as of last count) approx. 150 plants, learning new things, and being the coolest and most fun person in the entire galaxy.

Much of Jieun's work is focused on dreams and the nature of memory and forgetting, intangibles and transitions, reality and fiction, symbols, translation between forms, words, sincerity, and inventories. She likes rocks, "science", moons, bird beaks, guts, the feeling of sand between fingers, bioluminescence, envelopes, cross sections, and the sea. Vist her website:www.jieunreiner.com

Sam Merritt

TRAINING < EXPERIENCE
Shopping is stupid.

Sam makes sweet clothes from other clothes, builds things from other things, repairs antique books, makes signs, and plenty else. She avoids the stores by going through the trash a lot, and making everything herself. Not cause she's cheap, unfriendly, and of limitless ability, which are also very true, but to avoid all the applicable mind poisons of today! (That's right, mind poisons. You see ad in front of the youtube video she sees "mind poison." You see new jacket she sees "mind poison." Energy drinks alone escape her scrutiny!)

Not only does she make all the things and dodge all the landmines, she crashes cymbals around the world in wild brass band What Cheer? Brigade, and abuses the mic in the awesome punk band the Cavegirls. Her independent, generous demeanor, and love of hard work have landed her many character building and many character dissolving experiences. Looking forward to the rest!

See: dedicated, Also see: cat lady

KIMI CAKES
Kimi Rich is a self taught multimedia artist from Newport R.I. Taking inspiration from her bizarre travels and odd day dreams, most of her work focuses on the darker nature of reality with a hint of magic.

ELIZABETH POTENZA

is glassmaker currently living and working in Providence, Rhode Island.

The origins of early science and the refinement of glass are inextricably intertwined. Historically the development of glass as a scientific device allowed humans the ability to see, test and experiment with the natural world in a way that far surpassed the limitations of the naked eye and brain alone.

I am fascinated by the forces of nature, which are invisible to the common eye: air pressure, evaporation and condensation, gravity, the passing of time, etc., yet with the aid of glass I am able to affect, to see, to measure and draw awareness to these earthly actions.

I think it wise to remember the basic functions of planet Earth are uncontrollable.

I also want to be a locomotive engineer and sea cucumber harvester.:

MICKEY ZACCHILI

b. 1983

likes breakfast, likes fun socks, now owns a van. one day aspires to have hair longer than natalja mickeyz.org

Rebecca Mitchell

?b 1982
?Pisces 2
?Week of the Loner
?Day of Heaven and Hell

Born in the Bible Belt. Loves Jesus; not joking. Raised by an understated Methodist percussionist gone Zen and a chic square-dancing bohemian. Brought up singing in the classical tradition. Began playing guitar and writing in bands at 14, gigging with a fake ID at 15. Ran screaming from the Midwest in 2001, began to regret it in 2003. Laments a bad case of cosmic isolation, but not as much as she used to. Turn-ons include well punctuated text messages, scholarly musicianship, and drinking like a grown up. Music projects include Whore Paint, Sexaphone, Made In Mexico, Blood Sacrifice, Assembly of Light Women's Choir, and something without a name yet. The good news is, she's a visual artist now.

Glenna Vannostrand

Glenna Van Nostrand graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2008. She majored in SIM, a program dedicated to new media studies, with a focus on lighting design and performance. While taking an electronics projects class, she began rewiring old telephones and radios and started a solo project known as Omnivore. Glenna moved to Providence, Rhode Island and resided at the Dirt Palace, where she contributed to collaborations such as Bonedust and Sexaphone. In 2011, she recorded her debut at Machines With Magnets for Feeding Tube Records. She spent two months traveling though India last year and is currently developing new work involving light// sound// video manipulation under the guise of Talisman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDCuNyej4zc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U62bIfXR_ew

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzBWGcH67Ik

http://thewire.co.uk/archive/issues/22847/the-wire-tapper-31

SASHA WISEMAN
b. 9/20/86, 3:19am, lat.41.82 long.-71.24

joined the Dirt Palace as a feral teenager, and emerged five years later as a woman of numerous and varied talents. Do you need a life-sized edible gingerbread house, or for a circuit breaker to be installed in your actual house? Are you planning a costume ball, or looking for a collaborator on your sci-fi theater project? Maybe your cable access show lacks a distressed heroine. This is the woman to call. Sasha spent several years touring the basements and warehouses of America, both as a member of collaborative noise and performance projects and under her solo synth moniker, Coppertone. She also held a dizzying array of straight jobs during this time, from live audio engineer to strip club waitress to small business owner. She moved to Los Angeles in 2009 for basically no reason at all. The summer of 2011 brought Sasha back to New England, where she began her undergraduate education at the age of 25. She currently studies the translation of the subjective human experience into mulit-media platforms-- talk about a marketable skill!

Carrie Collier is a writer, a visual artist, and a scholar. She studies anatomy, literature, foreign languages, and the occult.

She wants to explore the ways in which language and imagery affect us intimately - how they arouse, distress, disgust us. She plays with the sorcerous or alchemical effects of words positioned and repositioned in relation to other words.

She also makes films; regarding the relationship between her literary and cinematic praxes she writes: ?My films are about language and/or the body; my stories are about the body couched in language. The body, to me, is always a site of past or potential injury. Injury, in my work, wants to make an account of itself, to narrate a history, be rendered vocal. It wants to discover ? perhaps to indict ? a perpetrator. I like scarred bodies and scarred texts: works and forms that are crippled, that hobble, but that are potent enough to injure in turn, damage or harrow, that are thereafter culpable, injured and injuring alike.?

Obsessions include: masks; chimeras; people eating animals, animals eating people, people eating people; female aggression; communication as failed intersection of consciousness vs. communication as communion; consensual sexual violence; and nihilist Francophone authors of the 20th century. She enjoys travel and a surprising number of popular television shows. She is willing to bet that she has seen more dead fetuses than anyone else at the Dirt Palace.

LI PALLAS

is a Printmaker and Installation Artist currently based in Washington, DC. Focusing on the tenderness and brilliance of conversing with strangers, she shapes environments and posters alike with interactive reflections of simple kinship. While much of her work could be summed up as expressions of love and belonging, she never fully ignores the political and capital inhibitions to these most basic human needs. She walks the line between campy sentiments and radical gestalt often by littering what is uncomfortably real in the foreground of a harmonic composition: deconstructing useless mores and obscuring them into a critical and comprehensive peace. Her graphic work includes such proffers as “the wrench in your gears loves you” and "work hard and sunbathe often"; kidding at the irony of the existential and dominant narrative and imbuing it with lucid joy.

If she has a crush on you, she will tell you about her time spent in Providence: where "we should hang out and watch documentaries" is a euphemism for "I wanna be your best friend" and "we should collaborate on an art project" means "lets make out at 4am." Much of coming into her form as an artist was spent their, living without central heat and eating rice and broccoli. Sometimes cheese.

In the absence of a functioning profit motive, she finds herself intensely driven to produce that which acknowledges difficulty and then makes the world more bearable. With a background in logic and a penchant for theory, she often restricts herself to certain deductive elements: minimal layers, objects, colors; making use of repetition in patterns of cascading or swarming forms. Through these austere and subtle textures she hopes to help slip you from the strongholds of the mechanistic grind into an agent of your own experience. She also enjoys tea and cake.

KRISTINA BROWN
b. 1981

A transient artist, with a stubborn DIY ethic, Kristina had travelled across the country, up and down, side to side, in every way imaginable before finding herself in the dark cold nook of the Dirt Palace. Having more space and time to create than she had ever experienced, she explored new avenues of performance and scale. Generally, she likes to keep her hands busy to maintain peace of mind with almost any materials that suit her ideas. From building rafts to designing choir robes and theatre sets, to sewing, printing and making zines, she sees every project as an exciting challenge.

Her newest challenge is adjusting to being a mother. This new identity has made it ever so important to focus her creative energies towards community building and social revolution. She is a founding member of Libertalia, a collectively run radical community space , and started the Wild Child Care Cooperative, a community of radical parents working together to share the joys and burdens of raising the next generation. She is happily anticipating the birth of her second child.

SERENA JV
b. 1987

serena was born in the desolate ice-tundra of norway in a possibly dishonest alternate reality. requiring a skill in order to survive the frozen white hell, she learned the ancient art of "timberframing" which may or may not actually exist. she made many skill-trades in exchange for basic sustinance, but was eventually destroyed by the international viking army for undisclosed reasons.

ARLEY ROSE TORSONE

is the person that people call when they have a question about fonts. She's a full-time artist/designer who on an average day can be found doing something that involves typography, drawing, and/or music. Unfortunately, she's only able to do about two of the three at a time, with music usually coming in last (that is, if you don't count her listening to music while she hand-letters type illustrations).

She moved to Providence in 2004 after graduating from Parsons School of Design in New York City to create a job for herself as the in-house graphic designer for the arts non-profit AS220. There, she met the love of her life - printmaking maven Morgan Calderini - and the two started collaborating on design/print pieces together. A few years later, they left AS220, got married and started their own custom stationery business called Ladyfingers Letterpress.

She hopes to one day achieve normalcy.

KATE GRONNER survives exclusively off of chickpeas and chard, and possibly drinks as much tea, coffee, and other beverages as the whole dirt palace combined. She relocated to the providence from chicago during a blizzard in february 2006. She is excellent at loosing her cell phone, climbing trees and parallel parking pippi's van. She works in various mediums, such as embroidery, drawing, crochet, papier mache, carving, and printmaking, and is contemplating working in film again in the near future. Her interests include taxidermy, old pick up trucks, stereocards, blankets crocheted in striped patterns, succulents (and select other plants), her accordion, wood paneling, nature guides, encyclopedias, her mother's button collection,objects with a history, and the olneyville new york system. Rest in peace Salty.

CASSIE THARINGER grew up in vermont—-but redneck vermont, not hippie vermont. she shares a birthday with george washington, teddy kennedy, frederic chopin (though his birth date is contested,) her great aunt faith, and julius "dr. j" irving, and someday they will all form a superstar basketball team together. she has been known to make costumes, undies, lampshades, little boxes with stories in them, movies, collages, drawings & sometimes prints, overly-conceptual installations involving ebay, and various apple desserts. she is fond of obscure children's books from the 70's, listening to the radio, irish whiskey, wendell berry, things that really happened, popcorn, and salt. currently, she is learning about herbs (cultivation and lore), and pondering the inevitable, imminent apocalypse.

IAN COZZENS is an artist, designer, screen printer, carpenter, and "emerging professional in the field of architecture". He has lived in Providence since 1999 (spending time also in Italy, Worcester MA, Philadelphia, and New Orleans). He received a bachelors' degree in architecture from RISD in 2005. Since then, he's worked on drawings, prints, and posters, organized the renovation of a kitchen in a collective house, mentored high school students in screenprinting and artmaking, and collaborated on participatory city-building projects. As an artist, builder and designer, he hopes to use his skills to create radical change in the world. Updates on his current projects can be found here.

LAURA ZAYLEA is an experimental filmmaker. She recently co-wrote/directed Hold The Sun, an experimental feature film that was awarded Best Avant-garde Film at the 2010 Amsterdam Film Festival in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Best Experimental Feature at the New York International Film Festival in Los Angeles, CA. Zaylea’s experimental 16mm hand-processed short films have screened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, CA, Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, CA, PS1 in Queens, NY, and the Notthatbalai Art Festival in Kuala Lumpur, Malasia. Her queer-themed video work includes Lydia Li and Camouflage Pink, for which she received an independent distribution grant from the Open Meadows Foundation. Zaylea studied experimental filmmaking with artist Janis Crystal Lipzin at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received her MFA in Film in 2008, and with artist Leslie Thornton at Brown University, where she received her BA in Art-Semiotics in 2003. She currently works as a Film Lecturer at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA and is developing Closer Than Rust, her second feature film.

JO DERY

is an interdisciplinary artist who experiments with storytelling. Her works include animated films and videos, drawings, prints, illustration, installation projects, and artist/small-press book publications. Through the playful invention of characters and events, she investigates our relationship to natural phenomena, the built environment, history and current events, as well as aspects of cognition and consciousness.

Her animations have screened at festivals nationally and internationally, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She has been awarded grants for her film/video work from the LEF Foundation, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and The Free History Project. She has exhibited her drawings and prints in Providence, New York, San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles. Her books can be found in independent stores like Ada Books(Providence) and Quimby's(Chicago), or purchased online from Little Otsu. She has completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, as well as participated in an animation workshop at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland. Most recently, she designed an installation project for the DeCordova Museum Biennial, at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Massachusetts.

She holds a BFA in Film/Animation/Video from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. In 2011, she relocated from Providence, RI, to Chicago, IL, where she is currently an Assistant Professor of Animation in DePaul University’s School of Cinema and Interactive Media.

POLINA was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and then emigrated to NYC. Through her travels, she has learned that there is endless beauty in the world, even though it is surely rivaled by all the despair. Equal parts hope and despair have propelled her to work intensively as an artist, a writer, a teacher, and a community organizer in a variety of places and contexts. Sometimes these roles have blurred into a singular amorphous mass of energy, other times they have remained remarkably distinct. Sometimes her political thinking ends up directly informing the artwork and other times, the politics are more nuanced and sublimated. Ultimately, the hope is that the principles of respect, democracy, beauty, and empowerment can guide the choices.

For the past several years, Polina has been publishing work under the name "The Archaeology of the Recent Future Association". The "Association" is the catch-all moniker for the many projects and things that Polina likes to do, individually and/or collaboratively: film/video, community organizing, zines, drawing, printmaking, installation, sculpture, music, curating, and writing. Actually, the name was born right in the Dirt Palace kitchen, of a feverish mind, when the group embarked on its first collective art show.

While she has shared her artwork in basements, galleries, and festivals around the world, she has also worked on several local social justice projects. Currently, she is working on two film projects: One is a series of portraits made while traveling in Eastern China, and the other is a collection of portraits of children (in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) performing as their favorite animals, in costumes and sets of their own making. She is also learning about bee-keeping, curating a women's film festival (The Citizen Jane Film Festival in Columbia, MO), researching gray water systems, and running a small arts space called NEIGHBORS where a variety of public events, art shows, and a residency program are all hosted.

SAMUEL LOPES

is a painter, carpenter, teacher and a feminist living in Oakland, California. He was part of the D.P. from 2001-2002 and learned how to hang drywall there and use a screw gun. For this he is eternally grateful. His current work has focused on queer history, and fantasy. In the last five years, he erected a monument to the dreams lost throughout the AIDS crisis, made a visual biography of a genderless society, and most recently began a series called 'house of no', which begins to address a queer relationship to architecture and geographical location.

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ERIN ROSENTHAL
b. 1976 Planet Earth

creator of shadows, sculptures, and sounds as drummer/percussionist and singer in Crude Hill, Urdog, Sleepy Bones, and more guises to come.  a shape shifter of cut-paper prints and dancing feet, she transforms ordinary objects into forms for focusing the ground state and exploring the myriad realms of mystical experience.  most recently, she tends to spend as much time outside as possible, learning from plant and animal teachers.