Gary Aagaard

As a fledgling illustrator in Brooklyn during the 1980’s, I took on any project thrown my way. I refer to that time as my “snack or famine days”. Eventually, I zeroed in on editorial work and soon scored assignments at publications like The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, NY Newsday and The Village Voice (primarily covers).

Since the early 2000’s, I’ve concentrated on gallery work with an editorial, satirical slant….. essentially larger oil paintings with conceptual content reminiscent of my illustration years. Lampooning politicians, pundits or spiritual leaders who specialize in alternative facts, manufactured outrage, false equivalents, convoluted conspiracy theories and tunnel-visioned tribalism (whew) is my form of protest and provides a satisfying outlet. Of course, visually addressing the daily insanity of politics, punditry or social upheaval requires an occasional break, which is when I paint relatively non-confrontational pieces.

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John Affolter

Maga Ghost Flag

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Armin Amirian

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Norman Aragones

Growing Up

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Nurit Avesar

Nurit Avesar is a mixed media artist and a painter. Her work is process-based, including large multi-layered pieces. In her art, Avesar explores the ways cultural legacies and history interacting with the present.

Avesar’s recent major exhibitions were a solo exhibition at Beyond Baroque, Venice CA., the Carnegie Museum in Oxnard, CA, California State University Dominguez Hills, the Brand Library Art Gallery, and a solo show at the Neutra Institute Museum in Silver Lake. She recently curated First Response, a group show at Keystone Gallery, Los Angeles. Avesar is the 2010 recipient of the Dean Purchase Award.

Nurit Avesar was born and raised in Israel. She moved to Los Angeles in her early 20’s. During her early art career, she worked as a graphic designer and an illustrator. In 2010, Nurit completed a Master of Art in Studio Art at California State University Northridge. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Gaia

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Danielle Bewer

Danielle Bewer’s background is in architecture and graphic design, though she later added a BA in English and a MA in Italian from UCLA. Born in New York in 1962, she spent fifteen years of her early life in Europe: eight years in Rome where she moved with her family when she was eight; five in London where she studied first architecture at the Architectural Association, then graphic design at the London College of Printing; and finally two in a small town in Italy where she was introduced to the art of ceramics by a local master. Those early years in Europe greatly influenced her aesthetics. The second part of the artist’s life was spent back in the US, first freelancing in graphic design in New York, then settling in California where she raised three children.

A few years ago, a chance encounter with an old acquaintance who works in ceramics brought Danielle back into the studio. As she puts it, “My return to working with clay has been a gift as it’s shown itself to be the ideal vehicle for combining my passion for color and my love of interior design.” Since then, she’s been developing her unique style of multi- piece minimal abstract ceramic artworks designed to bring joy and uplift any interior. To view some of Danielle’s projects visit www.daniellebewer.com.

Daydreaming

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Christine Beirne

Southwest Dreamin’ 2A

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Lana Blades

Black Tie Required

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Jo Ann Block

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Lesley Bodzy

Lesley Bodzy is a painter and sculptor who works in Houston and New York City. She is currently a 2021 MFA candidate at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.

Lesley is interested in exploring the nexus between painting and sculpture. Focusing on the themes of absence and presence, hiding and revealing, she seeks to explore unusual materials to create a unique dialogue with the viewer. She is represented by galleries in New York, Houston and New Jersey. Her work was recently shown at Site: Brooklyn in New York City, The Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut, The Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, PA, Emerge Gallery in Saugerties, NY, The Meadows Gallery in Tyler, TX, Stone Quarry Hill Art Park in Cazenovia, NY and Palix Fine Arts in Houston.

Lesley has a BA from Mount Holyoke College and studied art at Hunter College and the Art Students League of New York.

Orange Drape

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Mia Bosna

Mia Bosna is a graduate of The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and Temple University in Rome. Her primary areas of study have been in Illustration, Printmaking and Graphic Design.

Mia worked for publishing companies and advertising agencies as a graphic designer and illustrator, creating images and designs for books, magazines and advertisements. She is currently working out of her home studio as a Digital Illustrator, mixing her photography with other mediums for new series called the ZenAssemblage Collection.

Repurposing the discarded objects of nature and those found along major highways have found new life in her studio. Each object is photographed to evoke an emotional quality that connects to every day experiences as well as connect to a universal experience. The shapes and symbols used throughout her work can reference ancient archeological findings and are also meant to bring the attention of the viewer to the impermanence of the material itself.

Quiet Space

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Alexis Bramwell

I grew up in Southern California in the city of Camarillo. At a young age my mother put me into painting classes on and off through my grade school years. In high school the only class I thoroughly enjoyed and could let down in was art. It became a no brainer that after I graduated, I had to do something in the arts. 6 years later, I am a year away from graduating Brigham Young University with my Bachelor of Fine Arts. My time studying art and creating my own work has allowed me to explore deep interests of mine incorporating them in my work and expressing myself in the purest form. Most of my work stems from the past, history of strangers lives and the history of my own. I find my inspiration through old objects, stories told through photos, and the places I have lived that have brought me the people I love and the memories I hold dear. I do not view my artwork as a separate part of my life, rather it is my life and my life is my artwork. They are connected and always progressing, learning, and influencing each other helping me to better understand myself and how to navigate this crazy wonderful life.

Check

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Megan Broughton

This body of work was conceived after The Arctic Circle Residency, sailing the waters of Svalbard, Norway in June 2019; a then record-breaking month for soaring temperatures in the Arctic.

The “Svalbard, 79.75° North” etchings have their origins in one day when, due to electrical failure, our ship was locked in pack ice for nearly twelve hours off the northwest coast of Svalbard: a storied location for expeditions of yesteryear and historical slaughtering of whales for oil. With encroaching ice dictating the ship’s mobility and the North Pole hinting over the horizon, this experience brought into unquestionable clarity the enormity of the natural world. It was humbling, wondrous, and shameful: that humans could destroy something so immense was, in that moment, inconceivable. However, the ship was locked in unseasonably low-latitude pack ice because of disruptions to ocean currents caused by catastrophic melting of the Greenland ice sheet that summer. Underlying the novelty, those long hours were sobering and melancholy.

The Arctic is warming at near twice the rate as the rest of the planet, and the effects are profound. An April 2020 report by Xavier Fettweis and Marco Tedesco in the European Geosciences Union’s journal, The Cryosphere, states that the Greenland ice sheet generated approximately 560 gigatons of meltwater runoff in the summer of 2019, whereas the amount of ice the sheet gained was only 54 gigatons for the entire year. This was the greatest drop on record, and studies predict future melting periods could be twice as high. These are not isolated events: what happens in the Arctic is a harbinger for us all and the affect of disrupted ocean currents and rising sea levels is already apparent. Svalbard is often noted as having no indigenous peoples – it is too remote to have supported sustained human life prior to invasive whaling practices in perhaps the 1600s – and yet still the landscape is scared from Western abuse. Smeerenburg, to the direct east of where our ship was locked in pack ice, was established in 1619 as a whaling outpost that decimated bowhead whale populations. Smeerenburg is just over 10 degrees south from The North Pole. This is literally the ends of the earth and still European-driven ventures destroyed the local ecology, leaving concretized remains of whale oil visible to this day.

I went to Svalbard with my coworker in the educator category, in order to aid our development of an integrated arts, science, and stewardship curriculum. Beyond these goals, I soon understood the responsibility in integrating that experience into all I do, as well as how it relates to my previous work which stemmed from investigations of relationships between human and natural forms, with essential questions being where we come from and how we give back to and grow from it. This new work, in some ways, engages with the opposite: where we “come from” and how we destroy it. These ice prints happened, essentially, on their own.

Copperplate etchings were a natural choice as the copper, in acid, erodes like melting ice; a natural resource incrementally lost. “Svalbard, 79.75° North: Pack Ice I” depicts an isolated section of open pack ice, suggesting the impending arrival of denser ice capable of trapping vessels and disrupting seasonal rhythms. This etching’s plate will remain intact as an elegiac image, but the “Svalbard, 79.75° North: Pack Ice II” plates will be regularly reshaped in acid until fully destroyed and the possibility to reprint is lost. Ten prints will be produced at each stage, with the plates’ destruction ensuring the image is steadily and irrevocably lost. For me, the most important point of the prints is their destruction and direct engagement with loss by human hand. By extension, the same holds true for the real land and seascapes.

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Adam Brown

The Triumph of the Red Brigade

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Emily Budd

Emily Budd draws from her background in foundry craft, mold-making, and paleontology to create sculptural works that challenge the human perception of time and speculate on our own futurity and fossilization. Her studio explorations lead to collections of fictional artifacts, queer memorials, and imagined geologic specimens that contemplate human sustainability when facing imminent change. She has completed artist residencies at PLAYA Summer Lake, Vermont Studio Center, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and Recology San Francisco where she spent four months developing a body of work made from materials gleaned archaeologically at the city dump. Emily earned her MFA at California College of the Arts and her BFA in Sculpture at Miami University School of Fine Arts. Currently based in Las Vegas where she teaches Sculpture and 3-D design at UNLV, her practice considers how we rebuild and adapt to transforming worlds.

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Kelly Burke

Look at POTUS Make America Great Again. A picture is worth a thousand words. And words matter. I drew this editorial cartoon to capture my sense that every sentence the current occupant said about the coronavirus just further facilitated its spread. So I depicted him standing “Novel Corona King” at his corona podium in front of his corona throne wearing his corona crown spewing the coronavirus. “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine” (Jan. 22 CNBC interview ) ”Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away” (Feb. 10 New Hampshire rally) “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. … Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” (Feb. 24 Twitter) “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” (Feb. 27 News conference). “I think the 3.4 percent [fatality rate] is really a false number” (March 4 Fox News interview) “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic” (Mar 17 News conference). As of July 22nd, 2020: in the US , total 3,893,700 tested positive for Covid-19 and of those 141,700 people have died. That results in a 3.64% fatality rate … so far. This has also been published in an essay by Marta Hanson, “From Sick Man of Asia to Sick Uncle Sam,” Current History (forthcoming Sept 2020).

Novel Corona King

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Glynn Cartledge

What I’m trying to say about the criminal justice system is that justice is not just a word, it impacts people’s lives. That justice is not guaranteed. Calling our system, a ‘justice system’ does not make it just. Justice is something we must continually strive toward. And, unfortunately our system relies on people, on their awareness of their own integral biases as well as the biases of the system and society within which they function. More importantly, it relies on those people being seekers of equity.

My views on the failings of our justice system are not original; many share these concerns but I hope what I bring to the artwork is original in that it comes directly from firsthand experience working within that system. I have witnessed the consistent manifestation of bigotry, classism, and hubris in place of service and that is what continues to motivate my work.

A punitive system with an obsession toward obedience punishes difference in favor of a herd conformity. Operationally, the prosecutors, judges, prisons, and parole offices defer to traditions within the system. The residual effect is that citizens are often wrongfully incarcerated and once released endure gratuitous humiliation and alienation. I find this destructive to both our fellow citizens and to our society at large.

So in making these collages it becomes a meditative process of cutting, pasting, and assembling disparate materials to form an intention and speak about the inequities. It is also a codified language that allows me to pull from a variety of sources and condense them into a single image. There is a cathartic violence to it that allows the broken-up pieces to be restructured while remaining fractured. My hope is that elements of poetic abstraction mixed with critically charged content allows the one-off jail cell collages to live as hybrid portraits of otherness, isolation, diversity, and systematic injustice.

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Larry Caveney

For a long time I spent my time in the studio making paintings, sculpting wood with a chain saw and print making. For me I found these forms limiting. I tried finding a way of expressing my frustrations with the world and its contradictions.

Finally, I realized that I wasn’t commutating social issues through painting or sculpting. I wasn’t making any change for my community because of the limitation of my audience. I wondered why so many fellow workers at the factory didn’t know what the heck I was doing in my art. All gallery openings for the most part catered to a certain group, certain class. I could see the evolution of my work but, where was the evolution of audience? I started to question why some people (fellow factory workers) were not aware of the art world and its social impact. I shifted the direction of my thinking about the role of audience and started collaborating with school children, fellow factory workers and the public in general. I worked in a factory for ten years and for the most part never really shared my studio practice until close to the end of working there. I eventually started showing my work to those at the factory who operated fork trucks and worked on assembly lines. I started inviting my fellow workers to openings. Collaborating with my friends at the factory allowed fresh ideas, new possibilities to come into the work. It allowed through their involvement a new audience to witness my work.

Malcom X

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Michael Chesler

My artwork illustrates the time contained within a structure. There are two times eras encompassed in each structure which exist simultaneously. The incongruity is concurrently obvious and invisible. I bring the viewer’s attention to the details that denote the disparity in time periods. Both images in the frame are photos of the same structure. In the black and white photo, whiteout, or correction fluid, is painted over the modern “improvements.” The past is manifest in what remains. In the color photo, the artistry of the past is painted over to highlight the transformations of the present era.

I am interested in exploring disparate aspects of seemingly integrated entities. My interest is also on the unnoticed, the ignored or overlooked features of our everyday world, from shadows to foliage that pushes through concrete edifices to signs of human encroachment in “untouched” natural environments.

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Kacey Cowdery

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Leila El Dana

Leila has a BFA is Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon and is pursuing an MFA in Visualization from Texas A&M University, TX. She currently splits her time between Houston and Beirut and exhibits her work nationally and internationally. Her work has shown at the Wright Gallery and Reynolds Gallery in College Station, TX as well as several Art Walk Events in Downtown Bryan, TX. ‘Beirut Olympic Games,’ the identity system for the fictional Olympic Games in Lebanon has been exhibited during Beirut Design Week at the Raymond Ghosn Hall (Beirut, Lebanon). The research thesis for this project received an award for Best Paper at the 14th annual FEA Student and Alumni Conference (Beirut, Lebanon) and has been published by the FEASAC Annual Book.

Leila has 3 years of professional studio experience at Kite Creative where she worked in branding and identity design, packaging and product design, publication design, user interface design and social media campaign design. She has handled projects from several sectors such as retail and e-commerce, real estate and architecture and f&b and education. She continues to work in the field of Design as a freelancer, most notably designing exhibition events for the Wright Gallery (College Station, TX).

UNCONSCIOUSLETTERS | GEORGE HUGNET (clip)
Third Place

If consciousness is not at the origin of language then the meaning we reproduce is not intentional. Gertrude Stein’s experimentation with the ‘stream of consciousness’ mode of writing demonstrates this concept. By refusing to follow the rules of structure and grammar, she frees herself to create new meaning with her poetry. This series explores generative art to allow an outside force to dictate language – here presented through the use of typography. It specifically allows the voice of Stein to set the dimensions and visibility of the letters in the every composition. Type is employed to portray the textual language used to visualize Stein’s word portraits of Picasso, Matisse and Georges Hugnet. The audio responsive type maps the repetition of her words. According to Stein, as the physical act of repeating a word aloud can alter its meaning, the textual repetition of words and concepts can change their implications and expand their significance. The abstract patterns of her words are reflected through the final composition of overlapping forms.

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Pat Richards Dodds

Pat Richards-Dodds began her art studies at Santa Monica High School, graduating in 1955. At age 16 she was awarded a scholarship for life drawing to Chouinard Art School. Her studies continued at the University of Washington and throughout her life at Ventura College and through private instruction.

Richards-Dodds professional art career began in 1978 with several one person exhibits. In 1985 she became a member of the invitational professional arts organization, Studio 83. Her work has been exhibited at Studio Channel Islands Art Center, The Los Angeles Art Association’s Gallery 805, the Hillcrest Center for the Arts, Community Memorial Hospital, the Museum of Ventura County, Buenaventura Art Association, The Crowne Plaza Hotel, as well as many other galleries and exhibits and in private collections.

Pat began her active participation in Ventura County art community in 1978 as a member of Buenaventura Art Association. In 1989 she entered a career in banking and continued her dedication to the arts by curating over 36 art exhibits at Ventura County National Bank. In 1998 she was one of small group of art leaders who founded Studio Channel Islands Art Center. Richard-Dodds served as the first chairperson of the Board of Directors, as well as co-chair for the Annual Seasons of Channel Islands galas and later, Art & All That Jazz. In 2005 she was responsible for creating the SCI Award for Excellence, a yearly $1000 gift to an outstanding art student attending a Ventura County college or university. Pat also served as SCI Director of Development, 2012-2013. She was recognized by the Ventura County Arts Council with the Arts Stars Award for Artist in the Community.

In 2014 Pat was invited to exhibit as one of the ten icons of Ventura artists at the Ventura Music Festival. In 2015 she was among the seven Southern California artists spotlighted in the New West Symphony’s presentation of Gustav Holst’s, The Planets. Her paintings were featured in Thousand Oaks, Santa Monica and Oxnard.

Richards-Dodds joined the Board of Directors of the New West Symphony in 2015. Her participation has opened new avenues of cooperation between NWS and Studio Channel Islands. Pat has also been involved in creating opportunities for Studio Channel Islands artists to exhibit in the new wing of St. John’s/Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo.

Pat’s current oil paintings represent her expressionistic style, focusing on the effects of the sun, the sea and incoming weather patterns. Her recent work can be seen in Studio D3, Studio Channel Islands Art Center at 2222 Ventura Blvd, Camarillo, 93010 by appointment.

Incoming Tide. Cayucos

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Kimberly Engel

Kimberly Engel is a contemporary abstract painter who lives and works in Clearwater, Florida. Her distinct gestural style combines a love for color interaction with spontaneous mark making. Engel’s paintings explore levels of transparency, evoking depth and natural light. She is inspired above all by the constant presence and changing states of large bodies of water, after a decade-long sojourn in a house overlooking Lake Erie in northern Ohio, followed by her 2011 move to the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2002, she received a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. Over the past decade, he has exhibited in Cleveland, Chicago, Raleigh, Dunedin and Gainesville. Her work is in Capright Corporation’s permanent art collection, Chicago.

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Wm Daniel File

Mr. File has spent most of his adult life working or teaching in the visual and performing arts. He has a BS in Education degree from Eastern Illinois University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Minnesota. All of the work Mr. File has done in the arts, from lighting, design & building, painting, and even his collaboration with other artists, has substantially informed and influenced his aesthetic approach to his present work as an award-winning photographic artist, with 9 solo exhibitions and over 40 juried regional and national exhibitions since 2009. His work is represented in several corporate permanent collections, in publications, and has been featured in a US Senator’s Washington office. Early in Mr. File’s career as an award-winning university professor, he worked as a ‘theatrical photographer’, shooting actor and model headshots, promotional photography for various theatres, and record images for various theatrical artists. Besides teaching theatrical design classes (scenic & lighting design primarily), he was responsible for the design elements of more than 180 theatrical productions. He taught those elements at both graduate and undergraduate levels, and included technical elements of the theatre in classes such as sound design & production, property design & production, and stage management. He served on many MFA and PhD thesis committees. After retiring from university teaching, Mr. File built a career as a union actor for professional theatre (Actor’s Equity Association) and film & television (Screen Actor’s Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), and performed in regional theatres across the US, in more than 70 drama, comedy, musical, and Shakespearian productions.

Breakfast At The Covid Counter

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Linda Fuller

A Raleigh, NC native, I have a BFA from University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and MPS from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Other educational experiences impacting on my art are clay sculpture at Penland School of Crafts (NC), post-graduate psychotherapy training at Institute for Expressive Analysis (NYC), and graduate work via a Fulbright Memorial Fund teacher grant for study in Japan.

In New York City, I worked in clinical and educational settings as an art therapist and learning specialist, spanning adult inpatient and outpatient psychiatry, and all ages of children with gifts and disabilities. I created a working studio for exhibiting artists in psychiatric treatment (Brooklyn and Staten Island), and a three-volume poetry and art project for South Bronx middle schoolers.

Solo and group exhibitions include the Nature Art Gallery of the NC Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, museums and galleries in the US (New York City, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, Colorado, Florida, California), and England (London, Lymington). Artwork is included in private and public collections in the US, England, and Australia.

Settlement II

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Emily Gomez

Emily Gomez is an internationally–recognized emerging artist based in Lubbock, TX. She is currently a senior in studio art at Texas Tech University with an emphasis in jewelry design and metalsmithing. In creating large scale unconventional works, she explores ideas of sustainability in both the environment and in mental health, as well as sexuality and women’s issues.

Gomez’ recent endeavors have been exhibiting in Craft in Contemporary Art, Craft Forms 2019, where her work “Triggers” was featured as the cover of the show catalog, and the 33rd September competition in which she received 2nd place and was also featured on the cover of the catalog. She will also be included in the Jewelry and Metals Survey 2019 book, to be published in 2020.

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Chitra Gopalakrishnan

Chitra Gopalakrishnan is a fine artist and graphic designer with more than a decade working in commercial design. She has double MFAs from the ESAG Penninghen in Paris, France (2004), and the Cranbrook Academy of Art (2009). She is the co-founder of Kara Weaves, a fair-trade and WBE certified social enterprise from India that supports and promotes artisanal handwoven textiles. In addition she is a lecturer in Graphic Design at San Diego State University and maintains an active painting practice. Her painting practice revolves around figurative and surrealist narratives on motherhood and womanhood in contemporary American society. Her paintings, textiles and design have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her full portfolio of work is at www.chitraaa.com

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Kara Greenwell

Painting found me in the wake of a loss. Art was an old friend, sadly neglected for decades. But in my time of need, it snuck up from behind, wrapped its arms around me and softly whispered, “You will be alright.” And my love affair with abstract acrylics began.

Born to an art teacher mother and attorney father, I’ve always struggled with a “split-brain personality.” My youthful artistic exploits eventually succumbed to the realities of adulthood and to the security of a road more travelled. 20 years of marketing, a Harvard MBA, a wonderful husband and two daughters later, I found myself struggling with a gaping hole in my life.

It was an arduous struggle to expand our family that ultimately led me back to the creative yearnings of my heart. In the midst of a brutal miscarriage and infertility diagnosis, I stumbled into an abstract painting class. Bruised and raw, I finally found the release I so desperately craved.

I paint from my heart and from my gut, trying desperately to stay out of my head. Hair pulled back, hands caked in pigment, I explode onto the canvas. Driven by instinct, my paintings bring to light the cauldron of emotions bubbling beneath my consciousness. With ardent gestures and intuitive strokes, I meld my intellectual and emotional layers into textured mixed media paintings.

Playful, yet contemplative. Broken, but hopeful. Fragile, while so very strong. My work releases the kaleidoscope of my soul.

Stitching Up the Scraps

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Howard Hastie

Using symbols and shapes I create a vignette of imagery that explores the avenues of a working space and the psychological and spiritual themes I have gravitated to. Some of the shapes are recognized objects or symbols while others are pattern shapes. My hope is that it will show something that helps direct me in my life and possibly in others as well. My work explores the psyche through the nuances of shape and form.

I like to build things. Although I started out as a painter, much of my creative life has been devoted to building sculpture and fine furniture. This background plays an essential role in the structural composition of my paintings. I find that the structural balance of geometric patterns provides a better framework for me to explore free form organic shapes. I use this interplay to express the essential concept in a piece. The overall theme of my painting usually does not appear to me until I am somewhere near the middle or end of my creative process. That is when I begin to see the “idea” of the work. I could say the idea or theme is filled with archetypes or some great tradition but to me it is simply a visual expression that emerges from me. The idea tends to reflect some concept or dream I have been working without any forethought on my part. Ironically, if I start out trying to express a particular idea it doesn’t seem to work for me. I just let it happen on it’s own.

My approach centers on a balance between an initial composition and a present awareness of the painting as it unfolds; altering the work as it speaks to me. Changing shapes, colors, and tones. The hand held brush is very important to me. I went through a period of pure spontaneity; throwing paint, using tools and my hands on the canvas to create some kind of expressed composition. This was a breakthrough for me because I realized in a visceral sense that as you paint it alters the canvas. But this type of painting wasn’t enough for me. I felt more in tune with story telling with objects and having a more organized framework compositionally. So now I start out with a worked out composition that is subject to the spontaneity of painting as it unfolds. It inspires experimentation and results in a medley of gestures that describe my journey through a beginning idea and its transformations.

Blue Torso

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Austin Irving

Born and raised in New York City, Austin Irving is a visual artist who works with large format analog photography. Irving graduated with a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at TISCH School Of The Arts at New York University in 2006. Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries and museums in Hong Kong, India, Germany, Paris, and across The United States. In 2019, her projects NOT AN EXIT and PLANTS IN EXILE both won the gold prize in the Prix de la Photographie, Paris (PX3) international competition. Irving’s work was included in the third Every Woman Biennial in Los Angeles and she was an artist-in- residence at The Varda Artist Residency on the historical houseboat, The SS Vallejo, in Sausalito, CA. In 2017, she was the Artist-In-Residence at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. Her images have been reviewed and featured in The LA Times, Wired, Slate, Architectural Digest, Art Ltd., Artillery, TimeOut NY, The International Herald Tribune, The Huffington Post, Frontrunner, Artsy, Yatzer, and Artweek LA.

Irving lives and works in Los Angeles and her work is represented by Wilding Cran Gallery.

Austin

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Joan Karp

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Andrew Lawson

Factory #2

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Linda Legman

I am delighted to be a full time artist again with a studio at Studio Channel Islands in Old Town Camarillo, CA. I retired from twenty-three years of teaching for the Conejo Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) in Thousand Oaks to pursue my art career once again.

Art was my full time career in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I studied with Marvin Harden at California State University, Northridge, where I received my BA in Fine Art. My career included many commissions for graphite, watercolor and batik portraits: a book cover, The Bear Tribe’s‚ Self Reliance Book by Sun Bear, 1977; the cover of a national magazine, The Libertarian Review, September, 1981; designing and illustrating a book, Ladybug by Catherine Drum Scherer, 1983. I used batik as a fine art medium to create batik portraits, still life, fantasy, historical commentary, and figurative paintings. I created batik hanging banners with Native American, wild flower, and Women’s Movement themes. My first solo show was in Spokane, Washington at Gallery Dupris in November of 1979. My most exciting solo show was at the grand-opening of the new Spokane City Hall Art Gallery in October of 1982. Both shows exhibited my graphite portraits as well as my batik paintings and banners. I was in several group shows, as well.

Upon my return to California, I went into corporate sales for a decade, yet I continued to make art with other figurative artists. I was a classroom teacher for the CVUSD from 1993 to 2016. I loved teaching. I was also the Art Mentor who taught teachers how to teach art to children in the CVUSD and Lawndale School District. I am currently contracted to teach a painting workshop for the Conejo Valley Adult School in Thousand Oaks.

During the last three years that I taught elementary school, I focused on teaching my students about the Channel Islands, which are known as the Galapagos of North America. Teaching my students how to draw the Channel Island animals began my journey into drawing wildlife, and that eventually lead me to my Vintage Map series.

These last several years I have focused on charcoal drawings of wildlife on 20 x 26 in. old camping maps from the 1950’s for my Vintage Map Series.

Triple Topographical Tortoises is the first charcoal drawing I have done on a topographic map. It is a 1958 map of the Lost Horse Mountain Quadrangle, Mohave Desert, CA, dated 1958, and old map has a price tag of ten cents.

I have been involved with Studio Channel Islands as an artist member for over four years. I am honored to have a studio here for the last year.

Triple Topographical Tortoises on Vintage Topographical Map

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Oleg Lobykin

Oleg Lobykin (Russian, b. 1966) is a sculptor who works in a variety of materials from stone to wood, bronze, composite materials and stainless steel. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Lobykin now resides in Silicon Valley and also specializes in the restoration of landmark architecture and sculpture.

He began his career as a master stone carver, honing his skills in one of the oldest forms of artistic expression. His work is inspired by nature and the life force behind it. It shows his fascination with a harmony of contradictions between chaos and order, darkness and light, negative and positive. He explores how they’re interconnected, how they can stay in balance, and how the meaning of thought or beauty can take shape in physical form. His work is a search for the roots where and how form is born, gets a soul, and begins life on its own. The combination of space and lines varying in size, angles, directions and complexity creates the form. Space + Line = Form.

Lobykin exhibits in the San Francisco Bay Area and has completed a number of projects in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Japan. Clients have included Stanford University, The Presidio Trust, The City of Cupertino, The City of San Jose, Cathedral Stoneworks Inc., The Denver Public Library, Yale University, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Cloisters), The Cathedral Church St. John the Divine, The Jewish Museum NYC, Alabama Limestone Co., & Artists and Architects.

Sea Foam

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J. Fredric May

A graduate of Brooks Institute, J. Fredric May received his Bachelor of Science in Commercial Photographic Science, a Minor in Color Technology and was accepted into the prestigious Eddie Adams Workshop in 1989.

He made his living as a photojournalist and commercial photographer traveling all over the world, telling visual stories with a signature style of bold color and confrontational composition. He won numerous state and regional honors.

As a filmmaker, May directed more than 50 corporate and industrial films and helped raise more than 7 million dollars for non profit organizations. He won Telly and Cine Awards for his creative film work and national awards for his corporate and nonprofit clients.

During open heart surgery in 2012, he suffered a major stroke leaving him legally blind and subject to vivid visual hallucinations. This life event changed his artistic vision, opening up an entirely new visual style. The result is his current project, Apparition: Postcards From Eye See You.

After winning critical acclaim in Photolucida’s Critical Mass and LensCulture’s Emerging Talent, J. Fredric May’s Apparition series broke out in 2018 with 3 solo shows, 8 group shows, took the Grand Prize at FOCUS photo la, won the Merit Award at all-about Photo and took home the Jane Friend Award from the Brand Library & Art Center.

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Melissa McClellan

Through the creation of art, I look for the evidence of our connection to each other and to present an opportunity for the viewer to connect to something vital within themselves. In this endeavor, I have employed diverse materials such as photographs, stone, glass, metal, wood, paper, canvas, paint, charcoal fiber, graphite, and found objects. It is part of my journey as an artist, exploring these materials to find just the right ways to communicate a particular idea or emotion. Regardless, color, form, line, and texture have been my constant companions along the way. For me, they are the bass notes I use to compose my work.

When I Dream of Mountains, I Dream of You

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Mary McGill

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Penny Mulloy

Circus

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John Parker

Scarf on a Peg

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Michael Potts

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Bob Privitt

Bob is a mixed media artist, venerated professor emeritus, and former director at Pepperdine University after teaching fine arts for over twenty years and directing for ten; working mostly in sculpture, collage, assemblage, and drawing. Bob has been awarded with various accolades and grants through out his career as well as participating in an innumerable amount of solo exhibitions at Vita Art center, Museum of Ventura County, Conejo Valley art museum, Buenaventura art center, and on. His work has also been selected for various public collections through out the mid west and southern California.

Bone Cabin

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Ted Rigoni

Fall in the Tetons #3

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Michael Rohde

Michael F. Rohde has been weaving since 1973. His formal training in drawing, color and design was at the Alfred Glassel School of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. His activities include lectures, workshop teaching, juror, exhibition organizer and exhibitor in many local, national and international juried and invited shows.

Recently his work has been included in the United States Department of State Art in Embassies Program, exhibits at the Textile Museum in Washington, DC, the American Craft Museum in New York, the invitational Triennial of Tapestry in Lodz, Poland, from Lausanne to Beijing (twice), Houses for Nomads (a solo exhibit at the Janina Monkute-Marks Museum in Lithuania), an exhibition at the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park in San Diego. His work is in the permanent collections of the Textile Museum (Washington, DC), the Mingei, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, the Ventura County Museum of Art, the Racine Art Museum and The Art Institute of Chicago.

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Winter Rusiloski

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Nicole Salimbene

Nicole Salimbene (b. Trinidad, CO) is a Washington, D.C. artist. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been reproduced for publications and purchased for private collections. She was awarded the Washington Sculptors Group’s Tom Rooney Prize (2012) and Second Place, Trawick Prize (2018). The Maryland State Arts Council granted her an Individual Artist Award for Sculpture/Installation, and she has twice received an Individual Artists and Scholars Grant from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County. Her work has received recognition from Contemporary Identities International Art Magazine, Al Tashkeel, Sculpture Magazine, The Art Newspaper and The Washington Post. Along with a studio practice, she has led Opening to Your Creativity: Art as A Contemplative Practice workshops in affiliation with American University, Clark University, Lama Foundation, The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, Wesley Theological Seminary, Ghost Ranch and World Wildlife Fund. 

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Richard Schindler

Two Yellow Orbs

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Leah Schretenthaler

Leah Schretenthaler was born and raised in Hawaii. She has recently graduated with anMFA in photography. Through her art practice, her research presents a connection between landand materiality. Her work has been displayed and published nationally and internationally. Mostrecently she has been named in LensCulture’s Emerging Talents of 2018, awarded 2nd in SonyWorld Photography Awards, and was also awarded the Rhonda Wilson Award from KlompchingGallery in FRESH2019.

Mauna Kea Observatory

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Jen Solomon

The Vulnerable Series

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Abbey Stace

Abbey Stace was born in Philadelphia in 1970. She grew up spending large amounts of time walking through woods, collecting items for terrariums and developing an intense love of nature, space and quiet. She began drawing and painting in college but maintained a course in psychology and philosophy eventually applying to medical school. Ultimately deciding she preferred depicting natural forms to studying them, she gave up her pursuit of medicine in favor of art. She began drawing and painting in earnest with a focus on the figure and portraiture.

Abbey interrupted her practice to raise two children which has resulted in a dramatic shift in perspective. Raising children gave her an appreciation for how little in this world can be controlled. While her early work had focused on realistic rendering, a new appreciation for chance and a curiosity regarding the interplay of natural forces has shifted her focus to an investigation into materials and abstraction. She enjoys the unpredictable myriad possibilities presented by the interaction of a wide variety of media.

Unswept Stone

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Georgia Tambasis

After earning a degree in nursing from Thiel College and working in the field for over a decade, Georgia Tambasis pursued her interest in art. Georgia received a B.F.A. from Youngstown State University and holds an M.F.A. from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has received numerous awards and honorable mentions in national and regional exhibitions. Currently Georgia is an artist, curator, and educator living in Wheeling, WV with her husband and two cats.

Untitled

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G.E. Vogt

G. E. Vogt originally began her artistic training in performance art and directing. In order to create the highly physical, postmodern performance pieces she was drawn to, she would gather “found” materials from as many arts as possible: poetry, news articles, paintings, philosophy, even the acting training exercises of the actors involved. The performance pieces eventually became living collages of the ideas and materials gathered in order to create a visceral story for the audience.

As G. E. began to travel and live in different parts of the world, she began to create collage art as a creative outlet, to continue experimenting with intermingling different found sources and materials. The more she worked with creating visual art, the more she became interested in telling increasingly complex stories through collage work until her artistic focus shifted entirely to the visual arts. Collage became her primary medium because of its ability to incorporate any medium, material, or found object into the telling of a story. Bringing together elements that are seemingly so disparate at first but using that contradiction between them to tell an inherently complex narrative is what continues to drive the inspiration behind her works. She has exhibited her work in various group shows across the U.S, spoken on the panel “Women In Collage,” at the annual Kolajfest in New Orleans, LA, and recently completed her first major exhibition, “Piecing It Together,” with Fresh Paint Gallery in La Jolla, CA.

Power

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Bryan Warner

Living as a biracial person of Japanese and European-American parents in the United States is a consistent influence on my work. Most of my life has been lived in between these two cultures. My work blends categories to create a space between them to mirror this experience of living between cultures or labels. I find inspiration in Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject as a troubling experience that forces us to reconsider the boundaries and categories we use to bring order to life.

Much of my painting relies on the use of found imagery or found objects as a starting point. As I work, I combine and arrange these images to search for new relationships. I start with a template such as still life painting and then add to that base seeking new forms or new ideas. I believe this process can push against the boundaries of a categorization and create a new understanding of that label’s relevance. My still life paintings take on the qualities of history or narrative painting. My portrait drawings blend with history painting or conceptual art. My paintings mingle objects associated with Japanese culture and objects commonly found in the United States. At other times, the paintings combine objects evoking childhood with objects commonly connected with adult life. I feel as though our world is overcome with names and labels that are viewed as property or territory. I would like my art to reflect the ambivalence that I feel toward this phenomenon.

Still Life with Pony and Toy Piano

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Katie Willes

Puppet on a String

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Jim Zver

Hallucination Series, 2019 –

The ongoing Hallucination Series collages reference and sometimes directly quote from a suite of drawings done over a three-month period in Madrid, Spain in 2018.  The curvilinear and convoluted forms of the drawings emphasized and enhanced their dreamlike quality.  My longtime friend, Luis Rangel, began referring to them as hallucinations, which increasingly seemed an apt description and title.

I titled the drawing suite Alucinaciones since they were done in Spain and the title suggested by a Spaniard.  For these collages, so informed by the drawings but done in Los Angeles, I’ve used the English Hallucinations as their title.

HALLUCINATION.43