Current

February 1st to March 6th 2024

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Silvia Lopez Chavez, Boston, USA

“As a muralist, my process is fueled by understanding a site's context and relationship to how the public engages with that space. At the studio, I explore identity, working with patterns to tell immigrant stories of adaptation, assimilation, and resilience through painting, printmaking, and drawing; interested in how our environment influences who we become. My works use an unapologetic color palette, realistically painted areas juxtaposed with geometric forms. At the core of my practice is a desire to bring joy, connection, and agency to the places where my work lives.”

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José Herrera

José Herrera, artist born in Puebla and based in Mexico City, studied Architecture at the UNAM, has been part of group exhibitions in: Colombia, Bolivia and Mexico. His work is based on explorations of territory, the transformation of the landscape and the dynamics generated between private and public space. He obtained the stimulus PECDA Puebla 2021; he was selected by the call La tangente 2021; for the call PAC/Covid-19 and was awarded first place in the category alternative mixed media student during the International Image Festival Fini Mx 2019

MELHOP AT SANTA MONICA art studios LA

Frances Melhop

Frances Melhop is a visual artist, curator and gallery director, born in Christchurch, New Zealand, living and working at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. She works in tactile mediums such as photography, printmaking, hand embroidery, sculpture and oil paint exploring the tensions between the virtual and physical ways we experience the world. Her focus is on human presence and absence in our screen and material lives, along with imperfection and evidence of the human hand. Melhop has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Awards include, University of Nevada, Reno, Outstanding Artist Award, 2019, NNDA Innovator of the Year 2014, Luerzers Archive World’s Best Photographers 2009/2010.

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Dylan Ahern

My work focuses on the rapid and tumultuous transformation of everyday objects and material. Through processes such as burning, melting, casting and frying, I work to transubstantiate these objects as a means to envision the life and history that they hold. My own history with cancer and chemotherapy plays a pivotal role in informing the stylistic aspects of my work and often leads me to explore materials and objects that are inherently toxic. I'm interested in the ubiquity of toxic materials and their proximity to our lives and homes and the coverage of disease and rampant pollution.

Rodrigo Navarro

Between live paintings, paintings from drawings and photographic translations, the work of Rodrigo leans towards a constant representation of interiors, which he takes advantage of as motifs of pictorial exploration. From these paintings, he reflects on the stay, the stillness, finitude, drift and the “compositional” order that results in these spaces when they are inhabited His painting practice is based on artists such as David Hockney, Noah Davis, Matisse and Karin Mamma Andersson, as well as in the aesthetics of anime, the cartoons of the 90s and the first 2000s and fortnite style video games.Between live paintings, paintings from drawings and photographic translations, the work of Rodrigo leans towards a constant representation of interiors, which he takes advantage of as motifs of pictorial exploration. From these paintings, he reflects on the stay, the stillness, finitude, drift and the “compositional” order that results in these spaces when they are inhabited His painting practice is based on artists such as David Hockney, Noah Davis, Matisse and Karin Mamma Andersson, as well as in the aesthetics of anime, the cartoons of the 90s and the first 2000s and fortnite style video games.

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Igor Zigor

Igor Zigor is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist & craftsman, currently experimenting with various creative approaches. He predominantly focuses on sculptural and alternative graphical work through labour-intensive processes, which serves as a personal cathartic expression. His artistic journey is deeply intertwined with the threads of time and memory. By re-contextualizing history through a contemporary and unconventional approach, he endeavours to offer a fresh perspective on our surroundings, embracing their fragile and nostalgic qualities. His artworks do not aim for idealism; rather, they seek to capture the emotional and spiritual essence of a place or moment, presenting it in a more profound light.

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Sonya Yong James, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Sonya Yong James (b. Knoxville, Tennessee) lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. She received a BFA from Georgia State University where she focused on printmaking and sculpture. James has exhibited nationally and internationally for the past twenty years and has been the recipient of several grants including the Artadia grant in 2019 including being a nominee for the 2023 United States Artists Fellowship award. Her work is held in numerous collections including Art in Embassies and has been exhibited in galleries and museums such as MOCA GA, The Minnesota Museum of American Art, UAB’s Abroms-Engels Institute for the Visual Arts and the Ogden Museum of Art in New Orleans. James has received grants for residencies at the Atlanta Contemporary and Mass MOCA. She has upcoming residencies in Mexico City for 2024. Cloth and fiber can sometimes hold the gift of memory. Textile art can provoke a desire to touch, thus awakening multiple senses at once. Color and texture can be heard like a sound while the desire to experience art by physically touching it is using the eyes of the skin.

James is a multidisciplinary artist that works with thread and repurposed cloth for the references that they hold such as mending, repairing and connecting. This ubiquitous material is central to the human experience. Cloth is always touching us. She uses string, sewing, and weaving as well as found objects to construct new worlds of imagination. Adapting age-old techniques and traditional materials, she seeks to create environments and sensory experiences that vary in scale from the large and public to the small and intimate. For many, fiber art is synonymous with women’s work. Knitting, crochet, weaving, and sewing are historically associated with domestic work- clothing the body, providing warmth, adorning space - and speak to the strength as well as the exploration of female labor in the artist’s work. 

Her current work speaks to a fascination and reverence for the natural world. James has been exploring narratives that speak to collectively shared mythologies and folk tales. Myths and fairy tales spin and weave stories of relationships, power and morality. These once familiar stories are then fragmented and conflated with another to form new clusters of meaning and are a perfect medium for modern allegory and what it means to be alive today. The work seeks to join together the points where these stories and systems overlap and where sources of sexuality, memory, and death construct meaningful relationships and dialogue. 


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Martha Lorena Parada Mendoza,

I have used artistic practice as a way to investigate and come to terms (with the body) with issues that arise from food and eating. In my projects, I question the values we give to food, the landscapes built by food industries, and the current eating habits. Currently, I find myself thinking about sweets, particularly sugar and the coloniality of the palate for sugar. My projects have been installed in different streets and public spaces, such as Septimazo and Simón Bolívar Park in Bogotá. Also, in group exhibitions such as the Performance Biennial 2021 in Bogotá and the Artecámara section at Artbo 2019.