Featured Artists:
Sang Chi Liu, Chen Lyu, Sera Mac, Katrina Magowan, Kyle Martin, Jeff Maylath, Shara Mays, Zhang Mengjiao, Mareiwa Miller, Laura Pacchini, James X Patterson, evan pettiglio, Collin Pollard, Eleanor Schnarr, Sequinette, Rebecca Sexton, Yan Shao, T Shell, Anna Sidana, Iris Slade
My work focuses on the philosophical aspects of contemporary visual culture. My work explores machine vision and the ways in which it is constructed by the many forms of electronic eyes that scrutinize people’s lives. By creating a visual language that is performative and sculptural, my work expands the spectrum of machine vision and the human body.
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Satellite, 2019; Video, 3:43 minutes
Humans lighting up technology, the human touch being itself full of energy, light, chi - a manifestation of our potential. The interactive device connects to the future and forms a closed line with the possibilities of the future.
This is a dual virtual space. The combination with energy and electricity, spiritual and formal, historical and contemporary. Elegant, making the intangible tangible. A clean visual aesthetic rooted in a monochrome sensibility, allowing for subtlety and nuance.
As a student from Europe now studying in the United States, I am experienced in the art of Chinese ink painting, which relies upon the philosophy of opposition and harmony as well as the variability of how ink may flow from a brush. These works merged art and technology since both fields require experimentation as well as play with contrasting elements.
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Interaction, 2019; Touch sensor, diodes, fuse, resistance, wire (insulation removed), and batteries , 58 x 24 x 30 inches
My practice focuses on ideas about space as they relate to popular science, architecture, and urban, social and visual studies. I prefer using everyday materials. I intend to show how space is understood relationally, culturally and metaphorically, and to abide in a feeling of curiosity and wonderment in regards to such matters.
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Ever Expanding Universe, 2019; Latex balloons and museum putty, Dimensions variable
My paintings are in direct response to the landscape of climate catastrophe. I am enraptured by disaster, unable to look away. The landscape in pain is repulsive and seductive, mirroring our current ecological moral quagmire - the inability to stop our ravenous consumption despite knowing its consequences. My paintings resonate between utter indulgent ecstasy and sublime terror. Through painting I attempt to understand the violence brought upon the land and my own hand’s involvement.
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Looking West from Mt. Diablo; Oil on board, 48 x 60 inches
My studies at SFAI inspired me to create “BENJO17mfg,” a fictitious business that embodies the dubious values and corporate shenanigans of modern mega-entities. BENJO exposes the substandard workmanship and contemptible business practices of careless companies, disarming them via dark satire, wry sarcasm, and tongue-in-cheek reverse engineering. With BENJO as a springboard, my focus has broadened to larger-scale, reduced-narrative works exploring the interface between disparate materials. Thank you, SFAI!
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Benjo Station, 2019; Sculpture, 17 x 24 x 24 inches
My work is autobiographical, yet the questions it suggests are deconstructed into a nuanced universal discourse, provoking larger discussions around race, identity politics, and our culture at-large. My practice explores the social and psychological construct of race and identity in contemporary American society. My multi-disciplinary practice moves through painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and video. Specific work explores the politics of identity within the spaces around me, whether they be physical or psychological, societal or personal.
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California Spring, Installation view, 2020; Oil on canvas, 288 x 60 inches
We are misrepresented/have no privacy/under gaze anyway, so live with it.
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We Don't Speak the Same Language (Transparent Bird Cage), 2019; Archival pigment print, 36 x 28 inches
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Who Holds Whom?, 2019; Metal, medium, transfer image, textile, and spray paint, Dimensions variable
Image-making, people, and choices are my subjects. Oil paint is my tool.
Whistleblowers, heroes, life-savers, call them by any name you choose but remember this: they are just people like us. But are they? These individuals take a stand for a better tomorrow. They take action that makes a difference — they confront inequity, giving voice to the naive and abused. The recent painting’s title and subject asks the question, What Would You Do?
We live in a privileged country and society and we can choose and decide to act each and every day. Our climate is in danger, we are amid a pandemic that is predicted to return. Our lives seem important but are they more important than the collective? I am asking us to listen to our compassion and hope, to consider our actions and how we can leave the world better when we depart.
They are tragic figures and they are hope. I paint for the best in humanity to work for those yet to come and I ask you given what is at stake, what would you do?
Image:
Whistleblower Brittany Kaiser, 2019, Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
How may we honor memory and release memory simultaneously? Concerned with the connections between memory, trauma and domestic spaces my work deifies tangible objects representative of the pain and joy contained in our ability to remember. My work is an entry point to vivid narratives strewn with a quiet urgency; a profound need to venerate the residue of the past. I work sculpturally with predominantly textile, glass, clay, metal, and stone, among a wide variety of other sculptural materials. Utilizing domestic spaces and familiar objects as points of entry, I interrogate the way place can stain us.
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i can only hold what i can reach, 2019; Textile, stone, wallpaper, handwritten notes, house key, and resin, 60 inches x variable
I create sculptural photographs that use either technology or traditional building/construction materials in juxtaposition to the photographic fine art print. There’s a continuous push and pull between where the two-dimensional begins and the three-dimensional space ends. I’m interested in exploring the line between sculpture and photography, as well as a conversation around what constitutes a photograph in today’s world where images are ubiquitous.
Image:
Everyday Colors, 2020; 30 x 24 inches
Hydrogen
It might be lonesome here
Out past the singularity
Were not you here beside me
To join me in the dance
And if we were not shining
Then nothing would be shining
And nothing under heaven's gaze
Would ever have a chance
Image:
Celestial Sphere 2: Nebular Blue, 2019; Oil on paper, 50 x 50 inches
Cinema always distorts perspective and gender is always performed. As a queer femme drag artist who uses film, performance and installation I rely on elaborate costuming, makeup, sets and narratives involving over the top tropes of femininity to produce luxurious fantasy on stage and screen. Dreamy, magical queer worlds are created with DIY strategies and analogue special effects using the elements of artifice not as a “mask” but as an exposure of truth.
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Fancy Phone Numbers, 2020; 16mm film
Both body and land are perpetually violated without due regard for their respective agencies. Through this interwoven relationship, I explore a form of understanding with the land, while also coming to terms with my particular positionality as a descendent of colonizers and loggers. In asking what it would take to fully recognize the debts my family owes, my work positions the land (and our relationship) as sites and participants in remembrance, rootedness, resistance, and resolve.
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Intangible Embrace, 2019; Douglas fir trunk, fragmented coastal redwood trunk, the artist’s body, photographic print on chiffon, 36 x 48 x 24 inches
My work explores personal sensibility alongside natural and human marks in history, with cultural, sociological and geographical experiences and perspectives. The beauty and fear, the straight and distorted, the remembrance and obliteration, the subtle and inscrutable—mirroring our existence and connections in this world.
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The Ascension, Interactive webpage; 2020
My research and visual practices embody the multivalency of visibility and obstruction. Utilizing performance, video, sculpture, and sound I manifest personal traumas. Layers of traditionally gendered and unconventional uses for recognizable materials become the catalyst for creating abject works that cause both intrigue and repulsion. I position the witness in the middle of these installations leaving them to grapple with my body as I exhaust myself past my limit through durational action.
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Camera 5-March 8th-1:31PM, 2020; Performance still
Searching for a connection with complex family histories and deciphering my challenging but inspiring Indian culture, I stumbled upon nostalgic associations with cotton, honeycombs, and pomegranates. These metaphorical symbols deal with the innocence of childhood, the complexity of a home, and issues of seduction and puberty. Oil on canvas is my preferred medium. Through gestural abstraction, I improvise a conceptual landscape, resulting in a percussion of allegorical layers.
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Soft Landing, Sweet Innocence, and Forbidden; Oil on canvas, Installation dimensions: 72 x 180 inches; each panel: 72 x 60 inches
What is the logic of choreography and how can it be applied to marks on a page? In these works I am giving the body and time the same reverence, finding an actualized politics of space on the page. It is movement, it is impulse. It is reverence for the subtleties. It is listening.
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Choreographies 1-4
