The Next Big Thing 2021

I am photographer/printmaker and Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of North Texas. I have been engaged as a printmaker for forty years and exhibited my work in numerous national and international exhibitions including 2020 “Natures Vibrations” a one person exhibition at All Souls Unitarian Church, 2952 S. Peoria Ave.,Tulsa, OK. I recently received a best of show award in the “Call of the Wild” international exhibition Southern California Open Regional Exhibitions 2021, and I received 1st place award in the Plano 125 exhibition. My work has currently been accepted into the 2021 Biennial: Origins in Geometry exhibition at the THE MUSEUM OF GEOMETRIC AND MADI ART, Dallas TX. my work is also included in the “Time and Again” Traveling exhibition 2021-2023.

I am currently focusing on nature as a source of inspiration and enlightenment.

Lesley Bodzy is a sculptor and painter working in New York and Houston. Bodzy holds a BA from Mount Holyoke College and has studied art at Hunter College, the Art Students League of New York, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA).

Her work is represented by galleries in Saugerties, NY, Houston, TX, Williamsburg, VA, and Jersey City, NJ and it has been exhibited widely across the United States and abroad. Recent shows include ChaShaMa and Sculptors Alliance in New York City. Bodzy also recently exhibited a selection of her work at The Holy Art Gallery in London, UK, Site:Brooklyn, Emerge Gallery in Saugerties, NY, the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT, the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, PA, and the Meadows Gallery in Tyler, TX.

Heidi Brueckner is a Professor of Art at West Valley College in Saratoga, CA where she has taught painting, drawing, and design for over 20 years.

A native Californian, Brueckner studied at the University of Heidelberg and The Goethe Institute in Germany in the late 1980s. During this pivotal year, she visited the major museums of Europe and found herself heavily influenced artistically by 20th century German art.

Brueckner received a BA in Fine Art and a BA in Art History from University of California, Santa Cruz in 1991. She received an MFA in Painting from University of Kansas in 1997.

Professor Brueckner’s work has been shown at museums, galleries, colleges, and in publications nationally and internationally. She has received several awards and scholarships for her work.

In 2018, she published the book “Monsterbet”, a series of 26 oil, acrylic, and mixed media paintings based on the format of a children’s alphabet book. The book is available for purchase at Etsy, Amazon, and at her website heidibrueckner.com.

Most recently, she was awarded 1st Place in the Italian art competition, Prisma International Art Prize, and 1st Place for the Faber Birren National Color Award . Upcoming 2021-22 solo exhibitions include GearBox Gallery in Oakland, CA; Buckham Gallery in Flint, MI; Gallery 118, online; and East Central College Art Gallery in Union, MO.

She currently lives and works in Oakland, California.

People are in interested in people, whether it is because of their personality traits, actions, or outward appearance. My work is inspired by this curiosity and allows the viewer to be a part of the observation. I use both archetypes and portraiture as a way to study human nature.

The archetypes play roles in humorous allegories about morality, environmentalism, and cultural norms. I especially enjoy nodding to the margins of society and contemplating the precarious and dark aspects of humankind.

The portraits are more individualistic narratives which explore personality through self-presentation, facial expressions, and gesture. The work often inspects the under-revered, and appreciates the subject’s presence and dignity, giving pause to honor the person.

All of these interests seem to require, and in fact dictate an expressive use of paint and frontal, discomforting, and intrusive compositions to achieve psychological expression. I revel in playing with symbolism, mixed media, heavy texture; bright, invented color; elaborate patterning; exaggerated space; and distortion in order to enhance visual activity and conceptual impact.

“The Four Little Pigs” is a self-portrait about the feeling of guilt of overeating and the societal pressures of feeling one’s body has to look a certain way.

My creative process manifests from an interest in cultural anthropology and our place in Earth’s evolution. We are in a time of extreme change from the climate crisis to acknowledgement of racial disparity, political movements and global responsibility; all issues that will determine life going forward for all species. The questions I seek answers to are what do we want our role to be and how do we want to affect the story?

I create my images by drawing with paper. I keep my work graphic and simple with a straightforward message.

I hold a B.F.A. from the University of North Texas. My work has been exhibited in various shows and galleries and has been collected internationally.

The Paris Agreement, signed by 196 nations, is a treaty on climate change, it’s goal being to limit global warming to not more than 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100.

Currently, we will not meet that goal.

Our influences on our planet are now so extreme we have created a new geologic era-The Anthropocene – viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on the climate and environment. Our influence will be, literally, written into the rocks and dirt of geologic strata. In addition, because of our impact, we will cause other species stories to be unwritten. Completely erased from existence.

We are just one of many species on this earth. One. Yet, we have managed, through our consumption, to negatively change the intricate workings, the checks and balances of our home planet and it’s evolutionary journey.

At our current rates of consumption, we will not leave a habitable planet for generations in the not too distant future. The argument has moved beyond whether global warming is man-made or a natural cycle. Will we still be arguing that point while standing in water up to our necks and breathing through oxygen masks?

The good news is that there are actions we can take today to change the scenario if we are willing to look at the problem. Denying does not fix anything. Getting to work does.

What is our “poof point”? When is the collective moment when we act with a determination to be part of a solution for ourselves and our fellow beings so we don’t become part of an extinction story. All signs point to yesterday.

I can’t help but think about all of the beauty we will lose.

When in third grade, I remember a coloring assignment in school.   We were given a tree to color and underneath the tree was written;” El Arbol es Verde.” (The tree is green) in Spanish. It’s amazing what an adult remembers about being a tender young age. I love children and currently teach Awanas and Sunday School.  Fast forward in time to junior high school when I doodled girls faces in extremely dull classes where my teachers spoke in a monotone while I sat and watched the clock.  I wanted to obtain a degree in art, but my father thought that I would be unable to make a substantial living in the art world in Texas. In those days your parent’s decisions were set in stone, which is so different fifty years later, but I did as I was told. Instead, I went into retail merchandising and modeling as a career for the next twenty years. I moved to Palm Springs, California where I continued in retail but then went into real estate for the next thirty years of my life.

My friend, Ruth Leithal, a contemporary artist from Vancouver, Canada taught classes in mixed media that renewed my interest in painting in the 2000’s.  Most of my paintings have a religious nature based on my Christian beliefs with the intention of encouraging faith. In July of 2016, I was commissioned to paint a 6’x4’ painting of the Virgin Mary. In the painting, she is standing on top of the San Bernardino Mountains with the San Jacinto Mountains below. Under the mountains is the Church of Our Lady of the Valley in Yucca Valley, California surrounded by the soft coloring of desert landscaping of Joshua, yucca and palm trees with cacti. On either side of the Madonna are two cherubim floating serenely in the clouds.  The children upon completion of their catechism instructions are be photographed under Her painting when they to which starts their life journeys.

Bart Lindstrom, a fabulous, well known realistic painter gave me lessons which completely changed my painting style forever. I learned to paint exactly from a photograph and to determine changes from dark to light which seems simplistic, but it’s difficult to obtain as I attempt to achieve photo realism.

Since 1938 Forest Homes Campgrounds in the San Bernardino mountains has been positively impacting lives. Billy Graham decided to dedicate his life to God’s service at Forest Homes. My favorite Jesus painting was purchased and donated to be displayed at the retreat.  The Orange County Rescue Mission has a different Jesus painting of mine whose skin tone is more in tune with the region’s people where Jesus lived.

My favorite painting of Jesus has the most soulful eyes and caring face. A chaplain at Desert Regional Hospital in Palm Springs, California has handed out thousands of cards with Jesus on one side and Psalms 23 on the other. She said patients revere and kiss the card keeping it by their bedsides. The holy cards are also distributed by a missionary in the Philippines, a chaplain at the Tustin California Veterans outpost, two Desert Springs pastors and by the pastor at the Nevada Assembly of God with different portraits and scripture verses.

I am currently working on a 6’x5’ painting attempting to capture my favorite Jesus teaching the children who attend Desert Springs Church where the painting will be displayed.  The background will be of the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains with jacaranda, ocotillo, bird of paradise and palm trees, saguaro, barrel and aloe vera cactus. There is a cloud angel overlooking Jesus and the children.  Two children will hold a lamb and a four-legged kid with a few sheep sitting nearby. It is my largest painting to date and I’m thankful there is no completion date.

Chung-Ping Cheng graduated from National Taiwan University, where she majored in History. She spent much of her years absorbing millennia of art works and artifacts at the museums. In the U.S., she took intensive art and photography courses, pursuing her interest in art and photography. Cheng is among a new wave of Chinese photographers to re-introduce aspects of China’s considerable aesthetic heritage within contemporary photography. Cheng’s work was included most recently in LA Art Show, presented by Los Angeles Art Association, and Solo Exhibitions at the 1839 Contemporary Gallery in Taiwan, Shoebox Projects and TAG Gallery in Los Angeles.

My multi-year Sanctuary project began as a visceral response to refugees seeking shelter around the world. Suddenly, while developing the installation, the pandemic made refugees of us all, in a way, as we felt uprooted from the lives we knew, and Sanctuary grew in metaphorical significance.

Sanctuary is an immersive environment. I initially created life-size mixed-media drawings of figures walking to what they believed would be safety. When I saw reports of broken rafts trying to navigate the Mediterranean Sea, I crafted symbolic three-dimensional rafts that escape from a dark mural across a gallery floor. Still, I want to inspire hope. In 2021 I drew and sculpted families settled in tents and I hint at the possibility of life resuming.

The six pieces in “The Next Big Thing” are elements of all three parts of Sanctuary. “Madonna and Child,” “Woman with a Phone” and “I Want to Go Home” are each wall-hung panels from Part One. In these, charcoal drawings on raw linen combine with branded coffee bean bags and found objects to make each character unique, while inviting visitors to walk along with them. “Prayer for Safe Passage” and “Almost There” are free-standing rafts where hands of clay, tree bark, rope, and twine extend from portraits drawn on linen “sails.” Finally, “Mama Holds Up the World” shows a woman lifting a burlap roof of her tent in a sculpture from Part Three that culminates the journey.

My multi-racial background informs this subject with historical perspective. My immigrant grandparents barely spoke English. In Sanctuary, I also reflect on the Great Migration after the Civil War, the Holocaust, and echoes of those that drowned in the middle passage. All sides of my family persevered like the figures I depict.

I want viewers to experience my work with an intimate sense of individual lives. I aim to turn the conversation away from statistics to human empathy and create art that can move a wide audience.

Carlos Grasso is becoming more widely known these days for his innovative “shredded” painting series which he calls “Canvas Deconstruction”. A native Argentinian, Carlos never imagined he would spend more than 45 years abroad in France and the U.S. making art, gaining an American passport and three children, and all that after a promising professional career as a musician.

Over the last 35 years, not only has he transitioned from music to making art full time, he’s also shifted from representational works (which he studied with master David Leffel) to abstraction, mixed media, installations and conceptual art.

In his studio in Ojai, California, one encounters a display of torn canvases, found objects and disproportionally big brushes – the tools of an inquisitive mind. With these, Carlos tells manifold stories and implements varied techniques.

Carlos has participated in numerous Museum and Gallery group and solo shows: LA Art Show – The Museum of Ventura County – The Santa Paula Museum – Art Share L.A. – OCCCA (Orange County Center for Contemporary Arts) – Gallery 825, Los Angeles – Building Bridges (Santa Monica, LA, Bergamot Station) – San Diego Art Institute – Ojai Valley Museum, and many more. His collector base spreads throughout the United States.

Born and raised a Connecticut Yankee, Stacey Gregory was one of the proud few who received her BA in fine arts and art history from the University of Pennsylvania, standing alongside 2200 engineering, business, and pre-med majors. She attended Pratt Institute, studying Communication Design while working in packaging design for Donald Deskey and Associates in NYC. After two years, she headed to California where she met her husband and thus began a life crisscrossing the US while raising two daughters with a 150lbs Newfoundland in tow. Eventually she landed on California’s Central Coast. A Connecticut Yankee flummoxed by Santa Cruz, she migrated south to her final destination: the breathtaking Monterey Peninsula.

She is a member of Open Ground Studios in Seaside, CA and a member of the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art (NCWCA). She is active in the Monterey Peninsula arts community.

Current political and social issues fuel her conceptual artwork. Her work is observational in nature and takes a broad view approach. She references ancient history, Greek mythology, current events, scientific research, and art history to weave together facts, timelines and often a soupçon of humor into her conceptual assemblages. She is classically trained in oil painting and graphic design and employs those techniques in her work. She often uses repurposed materials and constructs her assemblages so that the viewer can manipulate the piece. This interaction is designed to elicit a visceral response from the viewer. Besides the Renaissance painters, other artistic influences include: Alexander Calder, Maya Lin, Mark Bradford, Ai Wei-Wei, Yayoi Kusama, and Ruth Asawa. She has exhibited works on Russian election interference, climate change, immigration, reproductive rights, the issue of consent, “the male gaze”, Big Tech and their responsibilities, and to lighten the mood, her series “KLUCKED!” features ornamental chickens imagined as pop culture icons. Her work has been exhibited throughout California, Chicago, and in numerous online exhibitions.

RBG slew the Giant Tire Company in her scathing dissenting opinion in “Ledbetter v Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.” This resulted in President Obama signing into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009; the first act he signed as president. Justice Ginsburg considered the law’s passage one of her greatest achievements. Lilly Ledbetter was not the only woman underpaid at Goodyear. One woman witness testified that as a supervisor, she was paid less than the men she supervised. In my piece, as a play on “the penny test” to gauge a tire’s tread depth, a used Goodyear tire balances on pennies inserted in the treads representing the backs of the women upon which that tire company was built. The pennies circle the inside and creep up the treads like flames. The convex mirror “hubcap” challenges the viewer to contemplate the power of dissent in her own reflection. The Goodyear logo and “dissent” are in the shade of red that was RBG’s favorite lipstick color. Her signature “dissent collar” is recreated in two shades of Swarovski crystals that trail up the tire sides like heavenly constellations. In her dissent and challenge to Congress, Justice Ginsburg owned Goodyear and we women are forever in her debt.

I moved to Colorado when I was 18 and I struggled deeply with depression, anxiety, and suicide contemplation following high school. I lost my sense of purpose and meaning and struggled to find myself in my latter adolescence. The most meaningful aspect of life that I found when I moved to Colorado was nature. The wilderness would eventually help me through the dark times of my life that included losing a friend to cancer, breaking my back, almost dying from the subsequent surgery complications, as well as several other transformative struggles I faced in early adulthood. I fought through the years of darkness and finally began to conceptualize my life, meaning, and purpose in ways that could bring light to other people’s lives.

I did not pick up a camera until I was 30 years old in 2016. I had just moved back to Colorado and one of my childhood friends urged me to pick up a DSLR for all my nature adventures. I eventually gave in, picked up a camera, and became immediately obsessed with photography. All the years I spent in the darkness quickly turned to light as I started taking and sharing photos of my experiences. I began to intertwine stories of the pain and suffering I dealt with over the years as the sharing became cathartic for my soul.

I strive to continue to push myself further into sharing the beautiful moments I am blessed to experience in life while connecting with others and trying to be a positive light in the world. My experiences and journey have shown me that with family, friends, and faith anything is possible and that when you change your perspective, you can inspire the world.

Robin Ossentjuk is an emerging contemporary fiber artist based in Southern California. She uses different techniques such as punch needle, traditional embroidery, and machine tufting to create a mix of abstract and figurative textural pieces that hold emotional and personal significance. Inspired by self reflection, dream images, and the tactile nature of her medium, Robin produces intimate, vulnerable works that put self truths on display.

With a BA in mixed media visual arts from Scripps College, Robin has shown her work in various group shows across the Western United States, including the 2017 senior art exhibition “Forming the Immaterial” at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery in Claremont, CA and the 2020 fiber arts show “Live Wire” at Form & Concept Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. She had her first solo show, Vague Communication, at the Santa Fe Art institute in 2017. She is a proud recipient of the Lucia Suffel Crafts Award, given annually to an outstanding student working in fabrics and/or ceramics, as well as the Fine Arts Foundation Grant. Her work can be found in private collections in several locations within the United States.

I am a contemporary artist working predominantly in fiber. I use different techniques such as punch needle, traditional embroidery, and machine tufting to create a mix of abstract and figurative textural pieces of a personal nature. Inspiration for my work comes from two sources; waking reflection and subconscious dreamstates. I place a lot of value on self reflection and familiarity. I channel strong emotions and inner truths through a combination of anatomy and shapes to capture a sense of self.

Other pieces are attempted replications of dream images from a state I like to call “The In Between.” The In Between is the moment between wakefulness and full sleep, where my subconscious is active but I am still lucid enough to recognize and remember images, colors, shapes, and forms. These pieces do not stem from active intent, but rather, their meanings begin to take shape as I work on them.

My process is slow and allows plenty of time for me to reflect on the significance of each piece. Working with fiber is strangely satisfying and calming. The repetitive motions of my needles allow for a vulnerable and meditative headspace. Therefore, the process is significant in itself as well. The time, motion, and tactility of my process breeds an intimacy between work and artist that is evident to the viewer.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t making things that made sense to me and completed me as a person. The search for meaning and beauty (“Venus Principal”) by drawing, painting, photographing, sculpting all seemed the only natural way for me to explain the world and create beauty in it. Fortunately I was taught and mentored by some of the best – Gui Ignon in Ojai, then Elmer Bischoff, Peter Voulkos, Richard Diebenkorn, Karl Kasten, David Simpson at UC Berkeley —and many others along the way. My career as an architect and builder was a natural extension of my six year-old self digging in the dirt, making miniature houses with scraps of anything, then sculptures as actual dwellings and restaurants, all while solving the puzzles of Venus’ beauty with abstract paintings and sculptures so surreal I have to tell you why I now make transient constructions, beautiful to me yet paradoxically revealing the ugly ruination that our greed and hubris are visiting upon our earth.

Today I make temporary sculptures with anything you or I can think of. I subject trash and recycled materials to manipulations and baths of pigmented liquids, then to lights and motion – the best part is steering the transformations toward a meaningful symbolic image that melds with the exact same vibrant feeling of creation I felt when I was six, digging in the dirt.

For the past six years I have concentrated many of these works in an Environmental Series and other RESISTANCE themes. These are still the photographs of temporary sculptures that I make with anything imaginable, but these images reveal prophecies and messages from our future, warning what will befall us should we fail to end our continuing Matricide.

The temporary aspect of my work is an added metaphoric reminder of our own transience and assists in telling the story of our grandchildren reaping Gaia’s Fury – if we don’t self-correct with urgent alacrity. Harsh warnings now greet us every day… this September 20, 2021.

In this exhibition is “Mind Bending Storm,” an example of these warnings. “Here see Gaia’s gale ripping us from our roots – with fierce migration our next big thing.”

I look everywhere to find startling images. I shoot with a painter’s eye. I am fascinated by the cycles of life: birth, aging, and death and the transient nature of all phenomenon. I look for the things that are changing constantly and then capture them to layer them into a new vision, like memories that pile up to form a personality.

Trained as a painter, I now paint with photographs. I use my own photographs and technology to compose my images. I am interested in juxtapositions of diverse images that resonate together to create new views of the world. I am involved with finding a dialogue between opposites, or a common ground between extremes. Chaos and order. Old and new. Strength and fragility. Nature and man-made. Beauty and ugly. Large and small. Useful and discarded. Meaningful and meaningless. Solid and Fluid. Transient and permanent. My inspirations come from many including Marcel Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Dali and Warhol.

I am exploring the boundaries of perception, the definition of reality, and the chemistry of the attraction of objects and happenstance.

Arline Tepper picked up a pencil and began drawing at the age of two. It took another 46 years before a hammer and chisel found its way into her hands, and it was love at first “tap!” Arline, born in 1943, is a second generation California native. She was born in San Francisco and grew up in the West Los Angeles area, always sharing her art and creativity with others. At 16 she took on her first interior design project with more to follow. When her four sons were small, she volunteered in their classrooms teaching art, made posters for PTA projects and events, and teaching art to young cancer patients at U.C.L.A. Hospital. Arline owned an unfinished furniture store where she sanded and stained furniture and taught customers how to finish their furniture. Chiseling, filing, sanding and polishing stone sculptured pieces were a natural progression.

After taking stone sculpting classes at Santa Monica College for four years, it was time for Arline to move on. Arline’s many trips to Art City to purchase stone convinced her to look around the city of Ventura and into the opportunities of living in a new community. “The energy of the sculptors in the Ventura area was contagious,” she relates. Shortly after moving to Ventura she said, “I’m finally confident about showing my work.” Apparently others thought so, too. Her piece, A TOUCH OF GOLD, won a first prize award in the sculpture division in the student art show at Ventura College. She remained there for many years sculpting but also helping and guiding new stone sculpture students.

A member of several local art associations, Arline has shown her work in many juried shows from Thousand Oaks to Santa Barbara. Her sculpture, SNEAK A PEEK has been a very popular and well received piece earning many top awards. It was considered for purchase for the City of Ventura’s Municipal Art Collection and also Ventura College. “This piece was my biggest challenge and I almost chucked it!”

Metal bases that use channel steel, solid aluminium, or copper sheeting, and a distinct simplicity in the design of the sculpture, makes her work easily recognizable and less format. Arline described herself as a minimalist. “I purposely pick stone with exciting color and an interesting shape. The stone is the star. I just enhance the beauty that is already in the stone. It’s hard to compete with Mother Nature.”

Arline’s work is collected widely and includes several private collections in Europe.