Jeff Cain

Artist’s Statement

I am an artist, designer, and curator whose research-based art projects aim to provoke public discussion and direct participation within a social, technological, and natural landscape. Most commonly working in design, sculpture, and digital imaging, I organize my activities under the name of my studio, the Shed Research Institute, which allows me to work outside of the role of a singular auteur and to also include community based, collaborative and curatorial projects. The shed is both a series of real functional structures used to produce and exhibit work and also a symbol for independent research and the possibility of what an enthusiast can do with his or her free time, or surplus labor.

A recurring aesthetic and critical subject of my work is the broadly defined landscape and the legal, historical, technological, political, and natural forces that help shape our experience of a place. It is my hope that by focusing on the forces that define “place” and showing them to be malleable, I can encourage participants to speculate other possibilities.

Website: shedresearch.net

Biography

Select Group Exhibitions

2013
Carte De California: Contested Terrain, W. Keith & Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery

2011
Speculative, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

2009
The Future Imaginative, Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design
Entrance Strategies, The Art of Participation, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Select Community-based Artwork

2014
City of Hope, City of Resistance: Research and Actions in Los Angeles,
Big City Forum
What Can You Build With A House? with the Pasadena Earth and Arts Festival

2013
Radio Terremoto, In collaboration with Maile Colbert and Rui Costa. Lisbon Architecture
Triennial

2013
Culver Center Digital Mural, UCR ARTSblock

Fellowships and Awards

2013
Center for Cultural Innovation, ARC Grant

EDUCATION

1999
BA Whittier College, Whittier CA

2005
MFA California Institute of the Arts