Spring 2019

Hande Sever

Hande Sever is an artist and writer working across video, performance, sculpture and photography. Informed by a research-based process, her works often take up her family’s history of persecution to explore wide-ranging themes, including issues of exile, post-colonial identity, censorship, and cultural difference. Raised in Istanbul, Sever received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, CA and participated in the Hauser & Wirth Exchange Residency Program at Somerset, UK. She has published with the Journal of Arts & Communities, The Getty Research Institute, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hayal Perdesi, 5Harfliler and the Hauser & Wirth. 

 

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Sophie Jung

“I want people to take the sculptures seriously. If it weren’t for the sculptures the performance wouldn’t be there, as I don’t write without having props to write for. My reading connects all these interlinking stories. I can look at an object and see an abundance of things: the material, use, colour, history, rhymes, metaphors. I can’t use all of that in my texts. I want people to look at the sculptures and be enticed to go through a similar process to me.”

Sophie Jung (b.1982) lives and works in Basel and London. Using words, gestures and found(ed) objects, her practice addresses the politics of representation, both culturally as a system of disguised and shifting signs and personally as a way to track and record life. She has a deep trust in temporary definitions, to be sculpted while lazing on the apron-proscenium, the pre-stage, as a fluid messenger between reception and production of time-lined purport.

She received her BFA from the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam (2011) and her MFA from Goldsmiths, London (2015). In 2015 Jung spent 6 months in New York at ISCP, courtesy of the Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg. She won the Swiss Art Award in 2016 and the Manor Art Award in 2018. Recent projects and exhibitions include Äppärät at Ballroom Marfa, Paramount VS Tantamount at Kunsthalle Basel, Tarantallegra at Hester, NY as well as Unmittelbare Konsequenzen at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. Recent Solo exhibitions include: The Bigger Sleep, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel (2018), Come Fresh Hell or Fresh High Water, Blain Southern, London, UK (2018); It’s Not What It Looks Like, Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna, AT (2018); and Producing My Credentials at Kunstraum, London (2017). She is currently working on Dramatis Personae, a script for 6 actors, to be premiered on the 16th of February at Joan LA  as well as on The Day Teaches The Day, a year-long text intervention for the Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich.

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Bill Arning

Bill Arning is a curator and museum director who has worked for such institutions as MIT, White Columns, and most recently finishing a decade long tenure at Contemporary Art Museum Houston.

“After arriving in Texas in 2009, Arning organized solo exhibitions of Marc Swanson, Matthew Day Jackson and the late Stan VanDerBeek. Jackson and VanDerBeek were jointly organized with the MIT List Visual Arts Center where Arning was exhibitions curator from 2000-2009. At MIT he organized shows of AA Bronson, Cerith Wyn Evans and a retrospective of the Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler. From 1985 to 1996Arning was director of White Columns in New York City where he organized groundbreaking first solo shows for many of the best known artists of his generation including John Currin, Marilyn Minter, Andres Serrano, Richard Phillips, Cady Noland and Jim Hodges among many others. Arning has written on art for journals such as Artforum, Art in America, and Parkett and multitudes of international museum publications. Arning is co-curating a career survey of renown painter Marilyn Minter with Elissa Auther and the MCA Denver in 2015.”

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Adam Marnie

Adam Marnie is an artist and editor living in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions of his work include New Constructions, Bad Reputation, Los Angeles, One/Thinking Two/Willing, kijidome, Boston, Rongwrong, Elaine de Kooning House, East Hampton, NY, and Construction/Destruction, Galerie Almine Rech, Paris. He is publisher and editor-in-chief of F Magazine, a biannual self-published art magazine based in Los Angeles and New York, a project around which he has organized group exhibitions such as The Garden of Forking Paths at Magenta Plains, New York, and Windows at David Peterson Gallery, Minneapolis. In 2018 he co-organized, with Rebecca Matalon, the traveling exhibition Harry Dodge: Works of Love at JOAN, Los Angeles, which opened at Tufts University, Boston, January 2019. He is currently working on F issue 8: CELEBRITY to be released at the F Magazine table at Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair, April 2019.

 

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Ron Athey

Ron Athey is an iconic figure in contemporary art and performance. In his frequently bloody portrayals of life, death, crisis, and fortitude in the time of AIDS, Athey calls into question the limits of artistic practice. These limits enable Athey to explore key themes including gender, sexuality, radical sex, queer activism, postpunk and industrial culture, tattooing and body modification, ritual, and religion.

 

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Rosha Yaghmai

Rosha Yaghmai is primarily a sculptor experimenting with both found and cast materials. Her work brings together West Coast Conceptualism with a LA slant. Yaghmai’s practice is rooted in psychedelic concepts, exploring themes of transformation and alienation. The artist uses foreignness and estrangement as a way to open up the possibility of a connection to other temporalities. 

Rosha Yaghmai lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2007. Solo and 2 person exhibitions include: The Wattis Institute, SF, CA; Marlborough Contemporary, NY; Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY; Kayne Griffin Corcoran, LA, CA; Weiss Berlin, Berlin; Commonwealth & Council, LA, CA; Tif’s Desk, LA/Miami; Thomas Solomon Gallery, LA. Selected group shows include: Made in LA, Hammer Museum, LA, CA, Curated by Erin Christovale and Anne Ellegood; The Domestic Plane, Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield,CT, Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, and David Adamo; Mad World, Marciano Collection, LA, CA, Curated by Ali Subotnick; Virginia Woolf: An exhibition inspired by her Writings, Tate ST. Ives, Cornwall, UK, Curated by Laura Smith; The Annex, M+B, LA, CA, Curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan; Hanging With Friends, The Finley, LA, CA, Curated by Diana Molzan; California Curse, Mothers Beach, CA, Curated by Penman Shojael; KNOWLEDGES, Mount Wilson Observatory, Alta Dena, CA, Curated by Christina Ondrus; Present Future, Artissima Turin, Italy, Curated by Sohrab Mohebbi; THE STAND IN (OR A GLASS OF MILK), Public Fiction LA, CA, Curated by Lauren Mackler and Alex Gaty; 9/11 15 Years Later, Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA, Curated by Closing; ET IN ARCADIA EGO , Estacion Tijuana, Tijuana, Mexico- Curated by Kris Kuramitsu; Seeing is Believing , Cal State Long Beach. Long Beach, Curated by Carol Cheh; HOT ROCK , Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland.

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Pilar Tompkins Rivas & Jheanelle Brown

Pilar Tompkins Rivas is the director of the Vincent Price Art Museum at Los Angeles East College. Tompkins Rivas was the former coordinator of curatorial initiatives at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, co-directing the institution’s UCLA/LACMA Art History Practicum Initiative and the Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship Program in addition to co-curating forthcoming exhibitions in partnership with the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative. Specializing in U.S. Latino and Latin American Contemporary Art, she has been an arts professional since 2002 and has organized dozens of exhibitions throughout the US, Colombia, Egypt, France, and Mexico. Tompkins Rivas has also worked as curator and director of artist-in-residence programs at 18th Street Arts Center, the arts project coordinator at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, curator of the Claremont Museum of Art, and as director of the Latin American branch of the Artist Pension Trust. 

Jheanelle Brown is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, film programmer, and educator focusing primarily on film and video works from Black Diasporic creators. Her interests include experimental and documentary film, music and the cinematic image, and womanist & queer media. She received her master's degree from USC's Cinema & Media Studies program and her bachelor's degree from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

 

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Diedrick Brackens

Thoughtfully employing the language of weaving and textile making, Diedrick Brackens explores the intersections of identity and sociopolitical issues in the United States. Brackens uses calculated woven algorithms that stem from the cultural histories of African, American, and European textiles to generate his intricate tapestries, seeking to highlight the complexities of African-American identity while also focusing on the loom and its significance to cultural production.

Meditating on larger cultural and familial narratives of his childhood in Mexia, Texas, Brackens has created three large-scale wall tapestries that feature scenes centered on man and animal and are informed by the artist’s relationship to masculinity. Structured like a play in three acts, each piece features silhouetted figures who find themselves rooted in seemingly disparate narratives that, upon closer inspection, build upon each other. For example, bitter attendance, down jubilee is based on a real-life event that took place during a Juneteenth celebration on a lake near Brackens’s hometown, before he was born. Three young black men were arrested for possession of marijuana and loaded onto a boat by the police. The boat capsized and the young men, who could not free themselves from their handcuffs, drowned. The police were brought to trial but were acquitted, and the tragic event has had a lasting effect on the community, tainting its relationship with the lake and heightening racial tensions. In his tapestry, Brackens represents the young men as large catfish circling and being embraced by the black figures, as a pair of golden handcuffs looms in the foreground. These pieces serve as bridges between reality and memory, allowing new modes of myth-making to come forth. 

Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, Texas) works in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Brackens received his BFA from University of North Texas, in 2011, and MFA in textiles from California College of the Arts, in 2014. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita (2017); Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (2016); and Johansson Projects, Oakland (2015). Group exhibitions include SOMArts, San Francisco (2014); Berkeley Art Museum (2014); 3rd Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince, Haiti (2013); and Museum of Geometric Art, Dallas (2011). Brackens is a recipient of the Barclay Simpson Award from the California College of the Arts (2014) and Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund (2011).

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Danielle Dean

Born to a Nigerian father and an English mother in Alabama, U.S.A., and brought up in a suburb of London in the U.K., Danielle’s work draws from this multi-national background in her interdisciplinary practice. 

Her work explores the colonialism of mind and body—the interpellation of thoughts, feelings and social relations by power structures working through news, advertising, political speech, and digital media. She focuses on the processes of construction of race, gender, age and class that are generated through target-marketing practices, commodifying subjectivities. She is interested in subverting such processes, to both understand and shift them toward a non-essentialized space of being, blurring fiction and reality. 

Danielle studied Fine Art at Central St Martins in London and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She has been a Whitney Independent Study Program Fellow in New York City and a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Solo exhibitions include Hexafluorosilicic and PTL (Part Time Lover) at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; and Confessions on a Dance Floor, The Bindery Projects, Minnesota. Group shows include Made in L.A. 2014, The Hammer Museum; Demolition Woman, Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Orange County; and Auto Italia South East, London. She has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Rema Hort Foundation, and most recently a Visual Art Award from Creative Capital, 2015. 

Dean is currently Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Photography Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

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Erin Christovale

Erin Christovale is the Assistant Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She is also the curator of Black Radical Imagination with Amir George, which has screened both nationally and internationally in spaces such as MoMA PS1, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Museo Taller José Clemente Orozco. 

Christovale's exhibitions include a/wake in the water: Meditations on Disaster (2014) at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Memoirs of A Watermelon Woman (2016) and A Subtle Likeness (2016) at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, and S/Election: Democracy, Citizenship, Freedom (2016) at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and baby boy (2017) at Transmission Glasgow. She recently organized the 28th anniversary of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS with Vivian Crockett as part of Visual AIDS’ project, "A Day With(Out) Art" and "Made in L.A." 2018, the Hammer Museum's biennial showcasing artists from the greater Los Angeles area with Anne Ellegood.

 


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School of Art Visiting Lecture Series: Jocelyn Miller

Jocelyn Miller is a writer and curator based in New York. A member of MoMA PS1's curatorial team, she organizes exhibitions, produces cultural events, writes about art and culture, edits art books and makes objects for creative and thoughtful living. She received her BA in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing from Princeton University.

 

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School of Art Visiting Lecture Series: Yasmine Diaz

Yasmine Diaz navigates overlapping tensions around religion, gender, and third-culture identity using personal archives, found imagery and various media on paper. Born and raised in Chicago to parents who immigrated from the highlands of southern Yemen, her mixed media work often reflects personal histories of the opposing cultures she was raised within. She has exhibited and performed at spaces including the Brava Theater in San Francisco, the Albuquerque Museum of Art, Human Resources in Los Angeles and The Main Museum. 

Diaz is a 2019 California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellow and her works are included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The University of California Los Angeles, and The Poetry Project Space in Berlin. Her installation Exit Strategies, completed as an artist residency at the Women's Center for Creative Work, was recommended by the "Los Angeles Times," "Artillery Magazine," and "Feminist Magazine." She lives and works in Los Angeles.

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School of Art Visiting Lecture Series: Adrian Wong

Wong's works consist of installations, videos and sculptures that draw from various subjects such as 1970s television shows and the artist's relationship to his environment, particularly Hong Kong. "The work that I tend to do is not so much abstract representational sculpture. I tend to make things as what they are. My first year in grad school, I spent a lot of time learning how to build boats," said Wong in TimeOut Hong Kong.[2] The art critic Robin Peckham wrote, "The most significant aspect of his growing body of work is its willingness to play fast and loose with the hallowed if commonplace signifiers of culture and identity, loosening the binds between object and narrative, image and context in a way that contributes back to the parent culture even as it presents highly stylized and aestheticized (but never iconic) depictions of these visual styles to an imagined theatrical audience via a vaguely universal and totalizing sensibility."[3] His work has been included at the Hong Kong Sculpture Biennial, Saamlung Gallery in 2012, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Louis Vuitton Fondation pour la Création, Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, LOOP Media Art Center and Kunsthalle Wien. MFA, 2005, Yale University. Exhibitions: Drawing Center, New York; Kuandu Museum, Taipei; Kunsthalle Wien; Kunstmuseum Bern; Kunstverein, Hamburg; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Palazzo Reale, Milan; Saatchi Gallery, London; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. Publications: Art Asia Pacific, Artforum, Art in America, Harper's Bazaar, Monocle. Bibliography: Hatje Cantz, JRP Ringier, Nouvelle Editions Scala, Verlag für Moderne Kunst. Collections: DSL Collection, Paris; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Kadist Foundation, San Francisco; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing; Uli Sigg Collection, Lucerne. Awards: HKADC Project Grant 2010/2015; Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2014; Xian Rui Artist Excellence Award, 2013.

 

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Fall 2018

Lena Daly

Lena Daly works across mediums including video projection sound and sculptural installation. Daly has produced a number of installations internationally including at Various Small Fires, the 2016 Art Basel Miami films program curated by David Grynn, Romer Young Gallery, Sade in Los Angeles, and Balice Hertling in Paris. 

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Mungo Thomson

Mungo Thomson works in sound, film, sculpture, photography and publication. He has had solo exhibitions, projects and performances at The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, USA; The Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; The High Line, New York, USA; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA; The Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA; The Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France; and GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy, among others. His work was included in Pacific Standard Time, Los Angeles, USA; the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey; the 2008 Whitney Biennial, New York, USA; PERFORMA 01, New York, USA; and 9th Biennial of the Moving Image, Geneva, Switzerland.

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Kim Ye

Kim Ye (b. 1984, Beijing, China) is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist whose work incorporates performance, installation, video, and sculpture. She received her MFA from UCLA (2012) and her BA from Pomona College (2007). Her work traces the circulation of power by exploring concepts of labor, intimacy, and the exchange between an artist and their audience. She has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally at The Hammer Museum, Getty Center, Morán Morán, Material Art Fair, Human Resources, Machine Project, California Institute of the Arts, Pomona College Museum of Art, ACRE, Satellite Art Fair, and Visitor Welcome Center among others. She has been invited as a visiting artist and given talks at institutions such as Virginia Commonwealth University, Pomona College, University of California Los Angeles, and Loyola Marymount University.

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Sable Elyse Smith

Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in New York & Richmond Virginia. Using video, sculpture, photography, and text, she points to the carceral, the personal, the political, and the quotidian to speak about a violence that is largely unseen, and potentially imperceptible. Her work has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Ps1, New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, SIGNAL Gallery, Rachel Uffner Gallery, and Recess Assembly, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Artist Television Access, San Francisco, CA; Birkbeck Cinema in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries, London. Her writing has been published in Radical Teacher, Studio Magazine and Affidavit and she is currently working on her first book. Smith has received awards from Creative Capital, Fine Arts Work Center, the Queens Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters. She is currently Assistant Professor of Sculpture & Extended Media at the University of Richmond.

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Daniel Joseph Martinez

Daniel Joseph Martinez was born and raised in Los Angeles and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 1979. Throughout his career spanning close to four decades, Martinez has engaged in an interrogation of social, political, and cultural mores through artworks that have been described as nonlinear, asymmetrical, multidimensional propositions. Operating with fluidity and as open source manifestations not bound by any singular category, his works extend from the ephemeral to the solid. Martinez’s practice takes the form of text, sculpture, photography, painting, installation, robotics, performance, and public interventions to unapologetically question issues of personal and collective identity, vision and visuality, and the fissures formed between the appearance and the perception of difference. Ongoing themes include contamination, history, surveillance, violence, nomadic power, cultural resistance, war, dissentience, and systems of symbolic exchange, directed toward the precondition of politics coexisting as radical beauty. Their commonality is that they all address topics of race, class and sociopolitical boundaries present within American society.

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Stephen Lapthisophon

Stephen Lapthisophon is an artist and educator working in the field of conceptual art, critical theory and disability studies. His early work combined poetry, performance, sound art and visual art with postmodern philosophical concerns. He was influenced by the legacy of the Situationists, who sought to make everyday life a focus of artistic activity. In 1994 he suffered a major deterioration of his vision and became legally blind. His subsequent work as an installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and sound artist has been marked by this experience. Much of his work comments on, and seeks to redress, the over-emphasis on the sense of sight in aesthetic culture. Lapthisophon incorporates everyday objects as a means of breaking down the barriers between his art and daily life. His mixed media works combine text and letterforms to create poetic improvisations inspired by and referring to deeply buried literary sources.

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Alice Könitz

Alice Könitz, (born in Essen, Germany; lives and works in Los Angeles) has presented her work in numerous exhibitions including the 2008 Whitney Biennial (Whitney Museum of American Art, NY); the 2008 California Biennial; the 2014 Made in LA Biennial at the UCLA Hammer Museum; the Main Museum at Beta Main, Los Angeles; Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, Austria; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; LA><ART, Los Angeles, CA; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and Susanne Vielmetter Berlin Projects, Berlin Projects; the Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany, and Museum of the City of Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. In 2012, Könitz founded Los Angeles Museum of Art (LAMOA), an experimental exhibition space that the artist describes as a “platform for an organic institution that lives through participation.” LAMOA was featured in the Hammer Museum's Made in L.A. 2014 and won the Mohn Award.

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Guadalupe Rosales

Guadalupe Rosales (USA b. 1980) is an artist and archivist based in Los Angeles. Rosales is the founder of Veteranas and Rucas and Map Pointz, both digital archives found on Instagram. She has exhibited at The Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn NY), Vincent Price Art Museum (Los Angeles CA) and The Philbrook Museum (Tulsa OK). She has lectured at various institutions such as UCLA, Vincent Price Art Museum, The Getty, Rio Hondo College, Slanguage, Los Angeles Public Libraries, The New Museum, New York University and The Graduate Center in New York. In 2016, Rosales took over The New Yorker’s social media for a week and was one of the top rated takeovers of the year. Her role as Artist in Residence taking over LACMA’s Instagram feed was featured in the LA Times, Artsy and Artforum. Rosales has an ongoing project developing an archive of photographs, objects and ephemera related to the 90’s Los Angeles Latinx party crew scene and Chicanx youth culture. By preserving artifacts and memorabilia, Rosales' work deconstructs and reframes marginalized histories, offering platforms of conversation and agency of self-representation.

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Carmen Argote

Carmen Argote’s artistic practice is a response and conversation brought about through the process of inhabiting a space and responding. The concept, the form, everything, comes out of the way in which her body and personal history can connect with the site. For Argote, the effect of the architectures around her and their values are felt upon her body.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Argote moves through materials and media. Her art practice is consistent in its focus and inconsistent in its appearance. Argote makes art because she believes in the resonance of the visual. Argote believes in art’s ability to convey the more abstract, to point to ways of seeing and understanding outside of language. For Argote, art is felt in the body, it does not need to be understood. Enjoying the discourse and dwelling on the poetics of the queering of the everyday is what drives her visual searches. It is the only freedom she can take.

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Sayre Gomez

Sayre Gomez works across mediums, namely painting, sculpture and video, to address themes of perception and representation in the face of patriarchal political systems. Recurring metaphors such as windows are often used as a structural approach to investigating the role of context in the distribution and legibility of images in the 21st century. His work references the history of appropriation in tandem with a realist approach to rendering as a way of situating his practice with in traditions of conceptual art as well as pop art and the Pictures Generation. He holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Recent soIo exhibitions include: Galerie Nagel/Draxler (Berlin); Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles); Galerie Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels); Galerie Nagel/Draxler (Cologne); and Galerie Parisa Kind (Frankfurt).

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Lauren Woods

Lauren Woods is a conceptual artist based in Dallas, TX whose hybrid media projects—film, video and sound installations, public interventions, and site-specific work—engage history as a lens by which to view the socio-politics of the present. Challenging the tradition of documentary/ethnography as objective, she creates ethno-fictive documents that investigate invisible dynamics in society, remixing memory and imagining other possibilities. She also explores how traditional monument-making can be translated into new contemporary models of commemoration with new media. Woods will be exhibiting her latest installation American MONUMENT at UAM in Long Beach from September 16 through December 9, 2018 with the support of the Mike Kelly Foundation. Read more about this new project here: https://www.csulb.edu/university-art-museum/article/american-monument

Text courtesy of CalState University Long Beach, University Art Museum. 

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Mario Ybarra Jr.

Mario Ybarra, Jr. creates sculptures, installations, photographs, and activist interventions as a means of examining various components of Mexican-American identity. His aesthetic often combines street culture iconography with historical and political imagery, such as in Brown and Proud (2006), which depicts Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in a large-scale work that merges graffiti art with a style recalling the work of muralist Diego Rivera. Ybarra also draws from quintessentially American imagery and popular culture, such as in Scarface Museum (2007), which features paraphernalia from the famous 1983 film Scarface (about a drug cartel kingpin during the 1980s cocaine boom) displayed in a glass vitrine as a memorial to one of the artist’s late friends.

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