Current
July 1st to August 4th 2024
Jinseok Choi, Republic of Korea
Jinseok Choi is an interdisciplinary artist who investigates our current cultural moment by researching historical and cultural contexts and weaving together seemingly unrelated issues via sculpture, installation, performance, and video. His recent works have been shown at various art venues in South Korea and the U.S., including Amado Art Space, Human Resources Los Angeles, The Box, and Werkarts. He has participated in multiple residency programs, such as Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, The Studios at Mass MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, and Otis Summer Residency, and was also recently nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Grant (2020). As a public event organizer deeply involved in local art scenes, he co-founded an artist-run space, Space 1, in Seoul, South Korea, in 2012, and also a mobile project space, MOTOR, in Los Angeles, in 2021. He received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2018. He was born and raised in Seoul, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Gijsbert Coenen, Brussels
As a visual artist I explore the relationship between art and play by creating a series of sculptures that, together, function as a playground. One of these sculptures, called Rocking Module, reacts to simple movements such as pushing, pulling or evading. It’s my ambition to investigate multiple facets of play by creating a variety of play objects, each with a unique response to movement. Within this series, spectators become part of the artwork, as adults and children move intuitively with the objects. These artworks find themselves at the intersection between sculpture, play-object and functional design. However, the conflict with functional design is significant, for how do you define the function of a free activity like play? Let alone; how do you design an object that supports this unpredictable action? I’m fascinated by how seemingly aesthetic elements such as color, texture and figuration take on a different kind of value within free play. As they definitely are key to our imagination. This is where play and art intersect conceptually. Both allow us to connect to the real world through an imaginary world, which calls for imaginative designs. And both allow us to connect to reality, whilst disrupting “the rules”. It’s this tension between the serious and the non-serious that is shaping my oeuvre. It’s this tension, powered by an unstoppable urge to play, that works as an incentive for the artworks.
Cara Jaye, Bellingham, WA, USA
Jaye is multi-faceted artist whose practice is rooted within drawing and expands into various techniques including painting, photographic processes, printmaking, and embroidery. She considers drawing her first and primary medium - she loves drawing for its immediacy and intimacy of marks placed directly on the page. Building work of a diverse nature, Jaye crosses into various subjects and material concerns. Themes in the work move between environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque. She examines the intersectionality of femininity, portraiture, authorship, and identity, and finds subtle affinities between these interactions. Cara Jaye lives and works in Bellingham WA where she is Professor of Art at Western Washington University.
Jamil Hello, Brazil
Jamil Hellu is a visual artist whose work focuses on the fluidity of identity, cultural heritage, and queer representation to express a shift towards a world beyond binaries. Through self-portraiture, his projects challenge the dominant ideology of masculinity while pointing to the tensions found in the evolving discourses about gender expression and queer sexuality. His art fosters empathy and dialogue, ultimately promoting a more inclusive and equitable world. Born in Brazil, Hellu holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Art Practice from Stanford University in the United States and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. His projects have been discussed in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Artforum, and VICE. He is the recipient of the San Francisco Art Commission Artist Grant, Zellerbach Family Foundation Community Grant, Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, and the Kala Art Institute Fellowship Award.
Thomas Bils, Florida, USA
Born and raised in central Florida before moving south to his current residence of Miami, Thomas Bils paints autobiographically in ongoing investigation into the precarious nature of the world and the banality of disaster. Reflecting from the absurdities he was accustomed to while growing up in the suburban south during the beginning of the opioid crisis, Thomas crafts images employing his role as the unreliable narrator to develop a fragmented reality where personal narratives intertwine with universal anxieties. Within that space the viewer is invited to meditate on the inherent contradictions that define human experience and the fragility of certainty.
Natalia Mejia Murillo, Bogata, Colombia
Natalia Mejía Murillo (b. Bogota, Colombia) is a visual artist whose work explores the notions of territory, repetition, trace and time through correspondences between astronomy, cartography and archaeology. She holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, an MA in History and Theory of Art and a BFA from the National University of Colombia. Mejía has been the recipient of awards including the 98th ANNUAL International Competition of The Print Center, Philadelphia (2023-2024), Kunstmuseum Reutlingen, Germany (2020) and Ministry of Culture of Colombia - Mexico (FONCA) (2017). She has also been awarded residencies at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023), Curatorial Program for Research (New York, 2023), Tajo Taller and Saenger Galería, Mexico City (2023), Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Maine (2022), Fundació Miró Mallorca and Casa de Velázquez, Spain (2021), Fundación CIEC - Centro Internacional de la Estampa Contemporánea (Betanzos, Spain, 2014), The Strzemioski Academy of Fine Arts and Design (Łódz, Poland, 2014) among others. Mejía’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include The Print Center, Philadelphia; A+D Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles; Saenger Galeria, Mexico City; Museo Moralense de Arte Contemporáneo, Cuernavaca, México, Casa de Velazquez, Madrid, Spain; Kunstmuseum Reutlingen, Germany, among others. She has taught at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, and is currently Assistant Professor of Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University Doha, Qatar.
Ashlyn Dadkhah, San Diego, USA
I am a facilitator and artist living and working between San Diego, Los Angeles, CA and Tijuana, MX. My practice weaves installation, sculpture, and wearable objects to create imaginary worlds that embody the possibilities for connection and play, with windows for those who identify with the in-between. My work engages with stories of belonging: how clusters of knowledge and place stored in our bodies are connected within and outside of ourselves, how they pass down through lineage, diasporic spirits, and body history and how that knowledge can create homes in that hidden realm. I’m curious about the shadow places and unearthings of one’s relationship to their many selves, land/space, and others. I’ve crafted multiple participatory projects. I am a co-founder of homegrown, a cross-border popular education and alternative learning collaborative where young people and adults imagine and co-create programs, events, play-dates that they otherwise wouldn’t have the freedom to create together within traditional education spaces. I’ve also worked with organizations including Allied Media Projects, Particle FM, Tijuana Performera, and Burn All Books. I hold a bachelor's degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from The University of California, Berkeley.
Nat Decker & Jules Chimes Garder, Los Angeles, USA
Nat Decker (they/them) is a Chicago born Los Angeles based artist interpreting the intimacies of queer and disabled lived experience as provocation toward collective care and liberation. Creating between digital and physical mediums, they identify the computer as an assistive tool affording a more accessible practice. They use digital 3D software to trace serpentine connections between the body and technology, reimagining fantastical mobility devices as cultural celebration and agitation of conventional desirability politics. This cyclically informs their work with sculpture, creating non-functional mobility devices as aesthetic scrutiny and frictional commentary on designations of usefulness. Nat is also an access worker, consulting on accessibility for various arts organizations. They are currently deepening their accessibility research as an awardee of the 2023 Processing Foundation Fellowship. In June 2022 they graduated from UCLA with a degree in Design/ Media Arts and Disability Studies.
Jules Chimes Gårder (they/she) is a Los Angeles based artist creating work centered around death, grief and sexuality. Their practice incorporates sculpture, large-scale ceramics, painting and performance. As someone who lost their mother as a child, Jules is interested in how embracing ongoing relationships with the dead can shift our lived experiences and recenter what we value. Born in Sweden and raised in Maine, the mainstream culture that they were raised in (the United States, whiteness, capitalism) has an uneasy relationship with death and mourning (these realities are often ignored or passed over quickly as ongoing grief is inconvenient for contemporary structures of productivity). For the past two years Jules has been making artworks re-creating (and interacting with) stream of consciousness drawings left behind by their mother in the 1990s. These recreations link to the shifts we experience in our relationships with the dead over time and space and counter the narrative that grief should be traversed quickly and privately. Other works grapple with the longitudinal realities (the complexities, pain and joy) of adult sexuality in the aftermath of ongoing sexual trauma as a youth. They will graduate from UCLA with a BA in Art this Fall 2023.