Clark Art Talks
Clark College’s Artist & Scholar Lecture Series
Archive:
James Boulton with Braille Stars
Saturday, April 27th , 2pm - 4pm
James Boulton’s artwork is often characterized by dense layering and energetic application of materials. He has exhibited sculpture, video, drawing, and most often painting in galleries, museums and artist-run spaces since the mid-1990’s. This will be the first time his work has been exhibited in the Pacific Northwest since the closure of Pulliam Gallery in 2013.
At Archer gallery, the artist presents an installation of new drawings paired with an improvised musical performance by the trio Braille Stars on April 27.
Braille Stars was founded in 1999 in Portland, Oregon by Gilly Ann Hanner and Stef River Darensbourg. Their expansive style combines experimental improvisation with melodic themes equally influenced by their guitar punk roots and ambient dream core. James Boulton joins the group in their newest incarnation performing instrumental pieces that rely on intuition, invention and responsiveness as the trio collaboratively generates compositions in real time.
Epiphany Couch
Thursday April 25th, 10 - 11am
Epiphany Couch is an interdisciplinary artist exploring generational knowledge, storytelling, and our connection to the metaphysical. By re-contextualizing classic mediums such as bookmaking, beadwork, photography, and collage, she presents new ways to examine our pasts, the natural world, and our ancestors. Couch’s work is unapologetically personal, drawing from family stories, her childhood experience, archival research, and her own dreams. She utilizes a multidisciplinary approach to create images and sculptural works that hold space for reflection, transforming from mere things into precious objects — intimate and heirloom-like.
Couch is spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian and grew up in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington). She earned her BFA in Sculpture with a minor in Asian Studies from The University of Puget Sound. Her work has been shown at Carnation Contemporary in Portland OR, Gallery Ost in New York City, and Yuan Ru Gallery in Bellevue WA. In 2022 and 2023 she received the Jurors Choice Award for her work included in the Around Oregon Biennial at The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon, and is a member of Carnation Contemporary Gallery.
https://www.epiphanycouch.com/
Kelly Bjork
Wednesday April 24th , 2pm – 3pm
https://www.kellybjork.com/
Pamela Chipman and Jan Cook
Thursday, April 18th , 2pm
Location: Archer Gallery
Sharyll Burroughs
Wednesday, March 6, 2pm
Location: Penguin Union Building, room CLPUB0258B
https://www.sharyllburroughs.com/work#/performance/
https://www.sharyllburroughs.com/
Courtney Kemp-Miyamoto
Monday, Feb 26, 1pm
Virtual via Zoom: https://clark-edu.zoom.us/j/87212685294
Courtney Kemp-Miyamoto is an artist and educator based in Portland, Oregon. She served as lead faculty for the MFA in Craft and Material Studies at Oregon College of Art and Craft until the program's closure in 2020. She is currently on the Board of Directors for Rainmaker Craft Initiative, a non-profit organization perpetuating material practice through the discourse of contemporary craft.
Her work has been exhibited in both national and international galleries, including Disjecta Gallery (Portland, Oregon), SOFA New York 2011, Galleri Puls (Norheimsund, Norway), Border Patrol (Portland, Maine), and Heidi Lowe Gallery (Rehobeth, Rhode Island), among others. She is an alumni member of Ditch Projects.
Cynthia Lahti
Wednesday, Feb. 21, 12 - 2:30pm
Location: Frost Art Center, room 011 Ceramics Studio.
Cynthia Lahti creates artworks that are visually alluring and beautiful, despite their overt imperfections and sometimes-humble materials. Inspired by objects and images, both historical and contemporary, her creations reflect her belief that even the smallest artifact can evoke the most powerful feelings. Her art practice, that encompasses drawing, collage, altered books and sculpture, is influenced by human artifacts from ancient times to the present, as well as by personal experiences and emotions.
https://www.cynthialahti.com/
Aaron Draplin
Clark Art Talk: Wednesday, Feb. 14, 11am
Location: Clark College PUB258B
Aaron James Draplin is an American graphic designer, entrepreneur and author based in Portland, Oregon.
Ryan Bubnis
Clark Art Talk: Monday, February 5, 2024
Ryan Bubnis is a multidisciplinary artist, illustrator, educator, and muralist based in Portland, Oregon. His practice includes painting, drawing, illustration, design, graphics, public artworks, and more.
The Stone Path, Exhibit Curators:
Owen Premore and Tammy Jo Wilson
Clark Art Talk: Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Demian Dinéyazhi'
Clark Art Talk: Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Demian Dinéyazhi' (born 1983) is a Native American artist and activist. Their work and advocacy focuses on indigenous and LGBTQ+ people and "consists of photography, sculpture, text, sound, video, land art performance, installation, street art and fabrics art.
Ka'ila Farrell Smith
Clark Art Talk: Monday, November 20, 2023
Ka'ila Farrell-Smith (b. 1982) is a contemporary Klamath Modoc visual artist, writer and activist based in Modoc Point, Oregon. The conceptual framework of her practice focuses on channeling research through a creative flow of experimentation and artistic playfulness rooted in Indigenous aesthetics and abstract formalism. Utilizing painting with wild harvested pigments and stenciling found metal detritus, her work explores space in-between indigenous and western paradigms.
Jon Huck
Clark Art Talk: Thursday, Oct. 26th, 1pm
“HI THERE. I’M DELIGHTED YOU’RE HERE.
I AM AN ARTIST FROM LOS ANGELES WORKING MAINLY IN WATERCOLOR ON PAPER & WOOD BUT I LIKE TO EXPERIMENT WITH LOTS OF OTHER THINGS (CUT-OUTS, MASKS, ANIMATION, COLLAGE, ETC.).
I ENJOY SWIMMING, CATS, THE LIBRARY AND GOING OUT TO BREAKFAST.
I AM NEITHER POET NOR WRITER; THAT IS TO SAY, I’M NO WORD ARTIST. YOU SHOULD PROBABLY GO LOOK AT MY PAINTINGS NOW.
THANK YOU!” = Jon Huck
Amy Turnbull
Clark Art Talk: Wednesday, Oct. 25th, 11am
Amy Turnbull’s work explores complexities of visual perception in our digital era. Seeing is a dance between bottom-up and top-down mental processing. Our eyes take in intricate arrays, and our brains use pre-existing schema to direct how we see. The self is viewed through a flexing mirror. Ultimately, humans are meaning-makers and pattern-seekers, striving to create order and connection from ocular flow.
Briar Levit
Clark Art Talk: Tuesday, Oct. 24th, 11am
2023 Clark Art Faculty Biennial - Gallery Walkthrough
Clark Art Talk: Thursday, Oct. 19th, 11am
Mako Miyamoto
Clark Art Talk: Friday May 12, 2023 noon PST
Mako Miyamoto is a photographer, filmmaker and Creative Director at Roundhouse Agency based in Portland Oregon. Clients include adidas, Reebok, Merrell, Vogue, XBox, Wacom and Ray Ban. Select exhibitions include Chefas Projects (Portland, OR), Gauntlet Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Nelly Duff (London, UK), and White Box Gallery (Portland, OR).
@neonwerewolf https://www.instagram.com/neonwerewolf
Mako Miyamoto https://www.makomiyamoto.com
Yaimel López Zaldívar
Clark Art Talk: Wednesday, April 19th, 2023, 11am
Yaimel López Zaldívar is a Cuban artist based in Vancouver, Canada, where they work as an artist, graphic designer and educator. With more than ten years experiences their work has been exhibited in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Cuba as part of collective and individual exhibits. Yaimel has also collaborated with several cultural organizations and has had work appear in different magazines and books.
https://www.instagram.com/yaimel1983/
https://yaimel.com/
Aaron Draplin
Clark Art Talk: Monday, March 6, 2023 at 12pm PDT
Aaron James Draplin (born October 15, 1973) is an American graphic designer, entrepreneur and author based in Portland, Oregon.
http://www.draplin.com/
Emily Counts
Clark Art Talk: Wednesday, March 1, 2023 at 12pm PDT
Emily Counts was born in Seattle, WA, where she currently lives and works. Drawing on craft traditions she creates ceramic and mixed media sculptures that explore connectivity, identity, memory, and merging a sense of the past with the futuristic. Her work has been exhibited nationally in institutions including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Torrance Art Museum in California, at Oregon Contemporary in Oregon, and in Washington at the Bellevue Arts Museum. She received her BFA from the California College of the Arts and has received grants from Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and The Ford Family Foundation. She was an artist in residence at Raid Projects in Los Angeles, Plane Space in New York, and a 2020 resident at the Varda Artists Residency Program in Sausalito, CA. Counts is currently represented in Washington by studio e gallery, and in Oregon by Nationale.
https://emilycounts.com/Home
Mark Takiguchi is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. He grew up in Chicago, Illinois and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lived in San Francisco from 1994 until 2012 where he taught and held staff positions at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Arts. He has created installations, participated in collaborative projects and curated exhibitions. His art practice is currently focused on painting and drawing. He has exhibited nationally and has work in private collections in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Portland, OR and Washington, DC.
https://marktakiguchi.com
Rachael Zur’s expanded paintings blend sculptural physicality with traditional painting techniques to depict objects found in living rooms. Her work is twice published in New American Paintings, as well as Friend of the Artist, Under The Bridge Magazine, and Stay Home by Stay Home Gallery and Residency. After 12 years as a stay at home mom, Zur resumed her education and completed her MFA in 2019 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since then she has exhibited her work throughout the United States, and has worked as a Program Mentor in the Low Residency MFA Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021, she drove her family of five across country in an RV to complete a residency at Stay Home Gallery while homeschooling her three children during their cross country camping adventure. Zur currently resides in the greater Portland Metropolitan area where she is a member of artist collectives Carnation Contemporary and WAVE Collective.
www.rachaelzur.com
Amy Bay (b. Elkhart, IN) is a painter based in Portland, OR. Bay holds a BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Winchester School of Art. She also completed the London-based Turps Banana Correspondence Course for painters. Bay's heavily worked paintings use motifs and imagery that draw from decorative sources. She values the subjective, the emotional, error and mishap. She is interested in the mutability of the picturesque and conventional feminine imagery. Bay has exhibited her work at venues in the Pacific Northwest including Melanie Flood Projects, Adams and Ollman, Nationale and SNAG Gallery, as well as throughout New York City at Peninsula Art Space, The Painting Center, The Drawing Center, Printed Matter, Brooklyn Public Library, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. She has shown internationally in group and solo shows and has been awarded grants and projects from The Rauschenberg Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Stelo, the Regional Art and Culture Council, The Lower East Side Printshop, Dieu Donné Papermill and Women's Studio Workshop.
www.amybay.com
V. Maldonado is a multidisciplinary artist, freelance curator, and writer who lives and works in Portland, OR. Born in 1976 in Changuitirio, Michoacan, Mexico, Maldonado grew up in the Central San Joaquin Valley of California in a family of migrant field laborers. They received their BFA in Painting and Drawing from the California College of Art (2000), their MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (2005), and is exclusively represented by Froelick Gallery, Portland OR. Maldonado’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR.Deploying both traditional media including painting, printmaking and drawing alongside contemporary strategies such as performance, installation and intervention, Maldonado expresses the power of identity to author experience and perception.
Jeremy Okai Davis
Clark Art Talk: Jeremy Okai Davis, Monday, January 9th, 2023 - 12pm PDT
Jeremy Okai Davis (b. Charlotte, NC) received a BFA in painting from the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, NC. Davis relocated to Portland, OR in 2007 where he has continued his studio practice in addition to working as a graphic designer and illustrator. His work has been shown nationally at the Studio Museum of Harlem (New York, NY), THIS Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA), Wa Na Wari (Seattle, WA) and The Rotating Art Program at Portland International Airport (Portland, OR). Davis's work resides in the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at Oregon State University and the University of Oregon's permanent collection. Elizabeth Leach Gallery began representing Jeremy Okai Davis in 2019.
Salvador Jiménez-Flores is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Jalisco, México. He explores the politics of identity and the state of double consciousness. Jiménez-Flores addresses issues of colonization, migration, “the other,” and futurism by producing a mixture of socially conscious installation, public, and studio-based art. His work spans from community-based work, drawing, ceramics, prints, and mixed media sculpture.
Jimenez-Flores is a member of The Color Network, an organization that promotes the advancement of people of color in the ceramic arts and assists artists develop, network, and create dialogue while maintaining a place for a database, resources, and mentorship. He is also a member of the Instituto Gráfico de Chicago, an organization inspired by the socio-political art of Mexico’s Taller de Gráfica Popular (The People’s Print Workshop) and uses art as a platform to inform and generate community discourse about urgent social issues.
Casey Gray is a contemporary artist from San Francisco, CA. Predominantly a still life painter, Gray's work celebrates the dignity and reality of the everyday, and explores the symbolic potential of objects to form narratives and explore identity. His work is characterized by a commitment to aerosol paint as his primary medium and hand-cut masking techniques as the foundation of his process, resulting in a type of skewed realism. Gray received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 and has exhibited extensively across the United States and abroad. His work hangs proudly in many public and private collections including the deYoung Museum in San Francisco, Stanford University, The Microsoft Art Collection and others.
Terry Powers is a painter who lives and works in Logan, Utah. He wanders around his home and the outside world, looking at things until they feel right, and then paints them directly from observation. Terry received a BFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2013. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Painting and Drawing at Utah State University.
Keith Jackson (b.1966, Essex, MO) lives and works in Kenosha, WI. Most of Jackson’s techniques are self-taught and he has been painting with oils on canvas and panel since 1984. While working in home remodeling and as a highly skilled custom furniture maker, Jackson relocated to Wisconsin in 1985 to take visual arts classes. Keith Jackson is represented by Steven Zevitas Gallery.
Julie Alpert is a Tulsa-based installation artist who was born and raised in the Washington, DC suburbs. She has a BA from the University of Maryland and an MFA from the University of Washington. Professional honors include a Pollock-Krasner Award, Artist Trust Fellowship, two Artist Trust GAP Grants, two MacDowell Fellowships, and the Roswell Artist in Residence Program. She was recently a 2019 and 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow. Her work is in the collections of the Washington State Art Collection, King County Portable Works, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, and Seattle Facebook Offices. In September 2021, she opened “Altars, Keepsakes, Squiggles and Bows,” an 88-foot immersive installation at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, on view through May 2022. She is married to the artist Andy Arkley and they have three cats: Coconut, Koala, and Baby Cloud.
Kari Orvik is a photo-based artist and educator. Through film and found materials, her work engages ideas of presence and absence, exploring what we hold onto, what we let go of, and where we place value. She has shown at the Oakland Museum of California, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Petersen Museum in LA, SF Camerawork, and has held residencies at Recology SF (the dump) and Headlands Center for the Arts. She operates a tintype portrait studio in San Francisco, and has taught at Stanford University, San Francisco Art Institute, City College of SF, and UC Berkeley.
Of a Setting Sun: Opening Reception & Art Talks with Anna Fidler & Katy Stone
January 21, 2022, 12pm PST
Heading into Archer Gallery's first in-person, physical exhibition since winter 2020, I wanted this show to be about building captivating worlds. Drawing inspiration from formal design elements, both Anna and Katy make work based on sets of rules they create for themselves - before eventually giving way to innate knowledge and psychic connection.
Anna’s work begins with a grid. She lays down the framework for each piece by lightly drawing out perpendicular lines. These intersections act as a guide that leads her through the composition - like an architect working her way through a blueprint. From there she adds the color, leaving at least a portion of her beautiful, large-scale works to chance and intuition. Katy, on the other hand, relies on shapes to guide her, subtly pressing outward from the wall into the depth of the room. She stacks two-dimensional layers like weightless cinder blocks, forming a foundation for the eventual three-dimensionality that slowly - but surely and entrancingly - forms.
There’s a meditation that exists in this world-building - high craft that sensually pulls you in, but with enough stillness in the negative space to allow for (and even command) breath. An inhale/exhale pattern of mesmerizing repetition provides inherent life to the space, complementing each other’s works and providing escape hatches out of reality and into a world beyond. Of a Setting Sun is a gasp, a moment, a fractal, a spectrum, a whole and a fragment at once. It becomes hard to look away. -Michelle Ramin, Of a Setting Sun curator
Katherine Vetne’s still life-based practice merges themes of high craft, art history, consumerism, and gender. She is the recipient of SFAI’s Graduate Fellowship in Painting, the Allan B. Stone Award, and a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant. Vetne has exhibited her work in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, DC (Heavy Metal: Women to Watch at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2018). Vetne's debut solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery opened in September 2019, opening the gallery’s fall season of programming. Her work was recently included in Crafting America, a major craft survey at the Crystal Bridges Museum.
Ashwini Bhat, an artist born in southern India, currently lives and works in the Bay Area, California. Coming from a background in literature and classical Indian dance, she now works at the intersection of sculpture, ceramics, installation, and performance. She often introduces radical but somehow familiar forms to suggest a complex interplay between the landscape, the human, and the non-human. Bhat is a recipient of the McKnight Foundation Residency Fellowship and the Howard Foundation Award for Sculpture.
Amir H. Fallah creates paintings, sculptures, and installations that utilize personal history as an entry point to discuss race, representation, the body, and the memories of cultures and countries left behind.
Fallah received his BFA in Fine Art & Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. Selected solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings SD; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland KS.
Lane Departure: Opening Reception & Art Talks
October 15, 2021, 12pm PDT
Conceptually thinking about the past 18 months and how much has changed, how much has stayed the same, how much of a departure from pre-pandemic "norms" the Clark College faculty have experienced, for better and worse, Lane Departure stands as a gauge of distance & space and provides a unique pedagogical perspective on art making during the pandemic. Pivoting has become an absolute part of the repertoire of teaching artists, if it wasn't already. More than ever, the question of "How important is staying in the lines?", literally and abstractly, floods to the forefront. How has the pandemic impacted teaching artists' ideas of boundaries and limits? The quintessential American road trip also comes to mind - thinking about what it means to hold both possibility and uncertainty at once, particularly after a year and a half of constantly changing restrictions, mandates, and lockdowns.
We’ve asked the Clark College art professors to depart, in some way, from their regular practice for this show. Maybe it's thematic. Maybe it's a new medium. Maybe it's an exploration, studies, sketches, etc. All work is new and made since the beginning of the pandemic, inspired in part by the theme of Lane Departure.
Cover Image: Jamie Waelchli, Tricycle, DSLR pinhole photograph, 2021.
Art Student Annual 2021: Opening Reception & Awards Ceremony
Guest Speaker: Anis Mojgani, Oregon Poet Laureate
June 4, 2021, 12pm PDT
Archer Gallery’s Art Student Annual 2021 exhibition is a juried show, curated by a group of Clark College art professors. This year’s exhibition will be held entirely virtually, for the second consecutive spring, due to the pandemic. Almost all of the work featured in this show has been made exclusively in our students’ homes while we’ve spent the last 15 months teaching and learning remotely.
I have never been more proud of a group of students. They have persevered through one of the most challenging and painful years of any of our lifetimes. I am in awe of their creativity, hard work, dedication, and drive - many of them care taking for family members, sharing workspaces with siblings, calling in to lectures in-between shifts at work, and some even dealing with grave sickness, in themselves and in their loved ones. Still - the work has remained poignant, fresh, and complex, exploring new mediums and ideas, conceptually & aesthetically navigating their way through not just compositions but a global pandemic, rampant social injustices, and regional & national political violence and division.
If there was ever a time to celebrate the work of a year - the (sometimes literal) fruits of labor - it is now, and it is for our courageous & inspiring Clark College art students. -Michelle Ramin, Archer Gallery Director, 2021.
Cover Images (left to right): Shannon Guo, A Dialogue of Environmental Protection and the Future, paper collage, 2021; Vicki Hastay, Transformation, plaster, 2021.
Tamra Seal creates space—not merely objects. Her light oriented installations embody a personal vision of the California myth, deeply influenced by and sourced from cinematic and science fiction tropes. Oscillating between 2D and 3D perceptual phenomena, her work challenges the viewer to contemplate their individual sensory experience. She is curious about what the color of the future could be, how various optical perceptions affect emotional response, and how light plays a role in a science fiction utopian gaze. She received her MFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited at Ever Gold, Cult Exhibitions, Hilde LA, & Durden and Ray.
Richard Tinkler was born in 1975 in Westminster, Maryland and grew up in Garland, Texas. He received a BFA from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Hunter College. He has shown his work in group shows in Europe and the USA and has solo shows at 56 Henry in NYC and Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times and the New Yorker. His work will be included in a group show at Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, MA this summer. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Cristina Victor is a Cuban-American artist whose making always stems from the hyphen. Her interdisciplinary practice materializes storytelling, meditations on the failure and power of language, auto-ethnography, and critiques the framing of identity by mass media outlets. Using performance, textiles, sculpture, installation, and public engagement she is committed to creating and facilitating generative exchanges about the complexities of our collective and individual human experience. Vexillology, analogue graphic design and archiving act as a foundational threads in her translations. Her concern for access, balances her formal object making and public engagement projects.
She received her AA from the New World School of the Arts, her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is a transient maker and goes wherever her work takes her.
Jeffrey Augustine Songco (b. 1983) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Born and raised in New Jersey to devout Catholic Filipino immigrants, his artistic identity developed at a young age with training in classical ballet, voice, and musical theater. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. His artwork has been exhibited throughout the USA including Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids. In 2017, he was featured in the publication Queering Contemporary Asian American Art, and he was the Installation Category Juried Award winner at ArtPrize Nine. His writings have appeared in Art21 Blog, Bad at Sports, The Huffington Post, and Hyperallergic.
Robert Minervini is an artist working in painting and public art. His work examines notions of utopia through built environments. He has exhibited nationally with Hirschl & Adler Modern, Edward Cella Gallery, Rena Bransten Gallery, the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. He has participated in artist in residence programs at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and the Headlands Center for the Arts. His work has been reviewed in the LA Times, Modern Painters, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He lives and works in Oakland, CA.
Yulia Pinkusevich: Calm Under the Waves in the Blue of My Oblivion
Clark Art Talk: Yulia Pinkusevich, February 19, 2021, 12pm PST
Yulia Pinkusevich is an artist and educator born in Kharkov, Ukraine (USSR). Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, her family fled the eastern block as refugees, immigrating to New York City. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Stanford University and Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts. Yulia has exhibited nationally and internationally including site-specific projects executed in Paris, France and Buenos Aires Argentina. Yulia’s art is in the public collection of the DeYoung Museum, Stanford University, Facebook HQ, Google HQ and the City of Albuquerque. She has been awarded residency grants from Gray Area Arts Foundation, Wildlands, Lucid Arts Foundation, Autodesk Pier 9, Recology (San Francisco Dump), Cite des Arts International (Paris), Headlands Center for the Arts amongst others. Her work has been written about in publications including New American Painting, Stanford Magazine, DeYoung Magazine, VICE, The Miami Herald, Dwell, Adbusters, KQED and Rhizome. Yulia has lectured at Stanford University and is currently Associate Professor at Mills College in Oakland California, she lives and creates works on unceded Ohlone territory.
Vanessa Marsh is an Oakland-based visual artist working in a mixed media process rooted in photography. Marsh creates imaginary landscapes and atmospheres which inform a greater awareness of the everyday places around us. Originally from Washington State, she moved to the Bay Area in 2002 and earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2004. Exhibitions include The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, The San Jose Museum of Art and Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco. She has been awarded Fellowships at the Headlands Center for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony and Kala Art Institute. In 2014, she was Artist in Residence at Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco and in 2017 at Jentel Foundation in Banner, Wyoming.
Living Lab Closing Reception
Laura Hyunjhee Kim in conversation with Archer Gallery Director Michelle Ramin: February 5, 2021, 12pm PST
Laura Hyunjhee Kim is a multimedia artist who reimagines on/offline (non)human interactions and feelosophical experiences of the body. Thinking through making, she performs moments of incomprehension: when language loses its coherence, necessitates absurd leaps in logic, and reroutes into intuitive and improvisational sense-making forms of expression. Blending and bending pop cultural tropes that playfully engage with the amateur aesthetics of the internet, she utilizes consumer electronics in production and draws inspiration from viral memes, lo-fi pop music, narrative found-footage film, and kitschy low-budget commercials.
Kim’s ongoing practice-based research project, “Living Lab,” focuses on the body as a philosophical medium and contextually shapeshifting laboratory for art-in-the-making. Situating the span of a (non)human life time as a critical framework for attending to the everyday with a sense of wonderment, the spontaneous and improvisational perspective-altering experiments in a “Living Lab” often require the experiential processes of (un)knowing: a destabilization, contestation and subversion of senses that have been made-sense into, normalized, and instituted as facts or forms of knowledge. Responding to the vitality of (non)human companionship and the radicality within these interactions that hold the potential to constitute change, the resulting outcomes of a “Living Lab” pulse (a)rhythmically to an intuitively chaotic score and oscillate with the hybridity and multiverse languages of physiodigital, (im)material, (non)living, and (in)animate worlds.
Cathy Lu (b. Miami, FL) is a ceramics based artist that manipulates traditional Chinese art imagery and presentation as a way to deconstruct the assumptions we have about cultural authenticity. By creating ceramic based sculptures and large scale installations, she explores what it means to be both Asian and American, while not being entirely accepted as either. Unpacking how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of American identity is central to her work.
She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and her BA & BFA from Tufts University. She has participated in artist in residence programs at Root Division, Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and Recology SF. Her work has been exhibited at Johansson Projects, Somarts, Aggregate Space, and Berkeley Arts Center. She was a 2019 Asian Cultural Council/ Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation Fellow. She currently teaches ceramics at California College of the Arts and Mills College.
Felicita Norris is an autobiographical figurative painter interested in revealing the complexities of "the familiar," evoking emotion by way of symbology and metaphor, and using the human figure to draw the viewer inward. Employing a series of multimedia processes, the paintings become a stage for figures and objects in confined spaces, depicting, at times, unsettling images that respond to social constructions, institutions, and politics.
Norris received her BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University. She has recently exhibited her work at the Walter and McBean galleries and at the deYoung Museum, both in San Francisco, and at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing and Leeds College of Art in the United Kingdom. She currently lives and works in the SF Bay Area, and lectures at Stanford University and the University of California - Berkeley.
What Words Mean
Art Workshop: Alyson Provax, October 30, 2020, 12pm PDT
Alyson Provax lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She is interested in loneliness, uncertainty, memory, and the other small but powerful specifics of living in our times. Her formal training is as a printmaker and works in letterpress. Her work has been described as “printmaking disinterested in the perfection based traditions that exist as a form of exclusion.” Within those experimental uses of traditional tools she often uses the potential for repetition as a drawing tool, creates original works by manipulating the printed image, or uses physical printed pieces as stills for animation, reproductions into books, blankets, posters, stickers, and billboards.
She has shown regionally at Carnation Contemporary, Wolff Gallery, Upfor Gallery, LxWxH/Bridge Productions, The Vestibule and the Whatcom Museum, nationally at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Montalvo Arts Center in California, and internationally at the Blue project Foundation in Barcelona.
Her work appeared in articles about artists’ responses to the 2016 election in New York Magazine, Newsweek and ArtSlant. Her work has been published in Poetry Northwest, The Buckman Journal, and Eleven Eleven, and her first book was published by Volumes Volumes in 2019. She has shown temporary public art installations in San Jose this summer as part of Montalvo Arts Center’s ‘lone some’, in Portland in 2019 as ‘something nameless’ and Seattle in 2018, as part of Vignettes and Gramma’s project ‘a lone’.
Rachel Mica Weiss is a sculptor and installation artist whose work draws attention to the constraints within our physical and psychological spaces, asking us to reimagine perceived barriers as flexible, passable, porous.
Weiss earned a BA in psychology from Oberlin College, an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as grants from the Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments. She has had seven solo exhibitions nationally, and her public artworks can be seen in the US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Airbnb, Seattle, WA; The Pittsburgh International Airport; and the deCordova Museum’s Sculpture Park.