RESIDENT IN TEPOZTLAN

Delphine Tomes is an artist and translator based in Mexico City. She has an MA in Art History + Spanish from Edinburgh University (2008-2012), which taught her that contemporary art could be a lot more approachable and a bit less serious, and she likes playing with that middle ground and focusing on the day-to-day bread and butter. She's an optimist and her work aims towards a more inclusive collective memory.

Co-founder of Mi Valedor (Mexico City’s version of the street paper "The Big Issue"), a conceptual and colorful portrait of everyday life in the city that offers a legitimate income to homeless and vulnerable sectors. She also runs a micro-poetry project De Reversa ("Reverse It") with rapper Dayra Fyah, which plays with the misogynist lyrics of popular songs and turns new, neutralized lyrics into poems, raps, posters, and new songs.

RESIDENT IN TEPOZTLÁN

Leslie Moody Castro is an independent curator and writer whose practice is based on itinerancy and collaboration. She has produced, organized, and collaborated on projects in Mexico and the United States for more than a decade, and her repertoire of critical writing is also reflective of her commitment to place. She is committed to creating moments of artistic exchange and dialogue and as such is a co-founder of Unlisted Projects, an artist residency program in Austin, Texas. In 2017, she was selected as Curator and Artistic Director of the sixth edition of the Texas Biennial, and was recently the first invited curator in residence at the Galveston Artist Residency. Moody Castro earned a Master's degree at The University of Texas at Austin in Museum Education with a portfolio supplement in Museum Studies in 2010, and a Bachelor's degree in Art History at DePaul University in Chicago in 2004, and has been awarded two grants from the National Endowment of the Arts for her curatorial projects (2016, 2017). In addition to her firm belief that the visual arts creates moments of empathy, Moody Castro also believes that Mariachis make everything better. 

Corinne Thiessen is a multidisciplinary artist born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She holds an MFA from the University of Lethbridge. Her practice is informed by an interest in human behaviour, comedy, failure, healing, and purpose. 

Thiessen has exhibited at Ortstermin, Berlin, at the Esker Foundation and Stride Gallery in Calgary, at Soo Visual Arts in Minneapolis, and a solo exhibition, Factory Logic at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge.

Residencies and collaborative projects at the Banff Centre, ZK/U, Berlin; Island Mountain Arts, B.C.; Centre Pompadour, France; The Museum of Loss and Renewal, Italy; and presently at Casa Lü in Mexico City, also include published work in MAP Magazine and in the 2019 Printing Plant Art Book Fair in Amsterdam. Thiessen has taught sessionally at Lethbridge College and in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge.

Michael A. Salter is a Professor of Art at the University of Oregon, Department of Art, School of Art + Design, College of Design, Art & Technology Program. Salter's work has been shown nationally and internationally in Beijing, Wuhan, Brussels, New York, L.A., Portland, London, Amsterdam, Miami, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, Atlanta and Chicago. His work has been featured in Art In America, Best Art NY 2009, Dot Dot Dash, Pictoplasma2, Grab Magazine, Arkitip Magazine, Repellent Magazine, and LoDown Magazine. He has exhibited solo installations at The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston Salem, NC, at the Charles de Jonghe gallery, Brussels, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, Jeff Bailey Gallery, NYC, The University of Texas, Arlington, and Black Market Gallery in Los Angeles, California, The University of Colorado, UCCS Gallery of Contemporary Art Colorado Springs and the New Britain Museum of America Art in CT. 

Machine is an artist residing in the Los Angeles area, they have shown work in the US, Canada and the UK. Using recurring themes of strength and sport, Machine’s work consists of a juxtaposition of masculine and feminine symbols as a challenge to conventional gender representation.

Rebeca Huntt is an Afro-Latina filmmaker, multi-media artist, and native-New Yorker. She wrote and directed her first feature-length film, BEBA, which is currently in post-production, and was selected to be in the IFP Documentary Lab 2019/2020. Rebeca was a 2018 Uniondocs Collaborative Fellow, through which she directed ¡Hay Coro! which premiered at the Oaxaca Film Festival and on BronxNet Public Television. She wrote, directed, and/or edited various short films which premiered at Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, The Fader Magazine, and Elsewhere Brooklyn. Rebeca participated in the 2018 Kickstarter Residency and the 56th Annual New York Film Festival’s Artist Academy. She worked in event planning for over three years, producing art benefits, activist-based panels, and parties with creatives such as Venus X and Tschabalala Self. Rebeca received her BA from Bard College in 2012.

Yeni Mao was born in Canada, and spent his developmental years in the United States, Sweden and Taiwan. He received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and subsequently trained in foundry work in California, and the architectural industries of New York. In 2016 Mao relocated to Mexico City. Yeni Mao’s work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions. Most recently, Mao presented “vol. 2: cabal”, an installation of ceramic-based sculptures at PAOS in Guadalajara, Mexico and participated in the group show “The Waste Land” and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York and “Luego La Forma” at Galeria de Art Mexicano and “Escultura de la Tierra” at Complejo Cultural Los Pinos in Mexico City. Last December he created a site specific installation with AGUAS in the special projects section of Untitled Art Fair in Miami. He has presented his work in a large variety of exhibitions and projects, including the IX Bienal De Artes Visuales Nicaraguenses, Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo, Anonymous Gallery, Present Company, Allegra LaViola Gallery, Invisible-Exports, and Andrew Edlin Gallery. Mao has been awarded multiple residencies including Casa Wabi in Mexico, The Lijiang Studio and Red Gate Gallery in China, The Fountainhead Residency in Miami, OAZO-AIR in Amsterdam, and Flash Atöyle in Turkey. Mao’s work has been written about in The New York Times, Time Out New York, The Advocate, The Village Voice, and the Bangkok Post. Upcoming in May 2020, Mao will have a solo exhibition at Fierman Gallery in New York.

Kavel Rafferty is a queer illustrator and artist based in the creative seaside town of Margate, near London UK. 

Kavel works with drawing, found materials, paper ephemera, textures, photography, paint and collage. 

Everything used in her project ‘Welcome To My Head - Margate to Mexico City’ at Casa Lü will be sourced in CDMX, the majority of it from flea markets and or street finds. Using as much second hand and sustainable material as possible means these pieces will have little impact environmentally.

Colours will be taken from her exploration of the barrios.

Kavel has no control over what she finds, depending on the day, the market, her luck, serendipity, but she will control how the viewer see these paper ‘treasures’. An organised chaos of image and colour. 

Kavel will create a room setting, using redacted images and text. These palimcest assembledges will paper the walls of her room. An immersive installation based on her experiences in this wonderfully vibrant City. 

Garret Kane is a mixed media artist based in Brooklyn NY developing the concept of Neo-Naturalism, defined as the distortion and recreation of ‘base nature’ through human technology. A childhood and adolescence spent immersed in his own imagination and drawings, he  graduated from SUNY Albany with a major in communications and minor in fine art. 

Shortly after he began a career as an art director in advertising, working his way up to a Creative Director role. Over the course of the next decade he spent every spare second learning both traditional and 3D sculpting techniques until finally he left advertising to pursue sculpture full-time. Since then he’s had several solo exhibitions, installations in New York’s Flatiron building, a residency in Brazil and an upcoming residency in Mexico City.

As a mixed media sculptor, Garret strives to capture the fragility and beauty of human nature. But it is his ethos that in today’s world, drawing attention to a problem is not enough. The art itself should aim to fix it. That’s why 10% of all profits from the sale of work is donated to environmental charities.

Martin Zawadzki lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Active as a visual artist, producer, author and filmmaker. His mostly documentary approach to his work, he explores realities on different levels with different techniques including photography, painting, video, sound and language. In 1995 he got his Diploma from the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb). His graduation film ISOLATOR II was awarded with Preis der deutschen Filmkritik and Adolf-Grimme-Preis in 1998. Currently he is working on a documentary radio feature with the title: BINDUNGSLOS – DETACHED.

At Casa Lü he will show graphic art prints of scratched windows from the Metro CDMX, a continuation of a former project he did in Berlin with scratched windows from the Berlin tube. 

“Due to their condition, the removed window panes from the Berlin S-Bahn were used like printing plates, so that the marks left by random passengers were put on paper. The „originals" are the potential basis for a print run through its conversion. This procedure demonstrates that any gesture of rebellion and destruction (and thus also scratching) can be translated into a cultural language, into a cultural convention. The artistic use of “printing plates" also shows the formal qualities of certain examples of scratching that have already been qualified as irrelevant or harmful.”CK

Ali Printz is a historical, figurative painter and curator who splits her time between Appalachia and Philadelphia. She works with various mediums including oil, acrylic, collage, sewn fabric, as well as technology-based mediums. Her work explores ideas of throw-away culture and discarded photographic memories and the reworking of these in order to draw attention to societal and environmental issues. Her most recent projects include “Debtfair,” a piece by Occupy Museums in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, “Appalachian Spring” a traveling solo show within Appalachia in 2018, and a number of group shows in 2019-20. Ali was born in West Virginia and considers herself an Appalachian artist. She has lived and worked in Spain, Panama, Washington, D.C, and resided in New York City until beginning her PhD in Philadelphia. She received her BFA in Painting and a BA in Art History from West Virginia University in 2009 and an MA in Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in 2012. She is currently pursuing a cross disciplinary PhD in Modern and Contemporary Appalachian Art and Painting at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. 

Kelsey Shwetz is a Canadian born painter who lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens. She completed the Advanced Painting Intensive at Columbia University, and has been a guest lecturer at UCLA, Pratt Institute, and Laguardia Community College. Shwetz has exhibited in New York, Miami, Germany, Slovakia, Toronto, and Montreal and was awarded fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center and CanSerrat Residency in Barcelona. Publications featuring her work include: Maake Magazine, ArtMaze Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, and the Globe and Mail. Her most recent solo exhibition was in the spring of 2018 at Brethren Gallery in New York. 

London–based artist, illustrator, painter Leon Bowers invites the viewer to explore peculiar dreamscapes, each of which reflects the rich tapestry of ideas, insights and anxieties entangled in the deepest recesses of his subconscious. 

Unfurling beyond the confines of figurative images, his work reflects a search for a more honest approach to painting and drawing. He yearns for a somnambulistic style that, informed by his background in portraiture, is entirely more fluid, evoking not only the amorphous texture, but also the sense of boundlessness of dreams. 

Leon Bowers was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1981 and relocated to London, UK in 2004. He participated in the Turps painting course in London. To date, Bowers’ work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at On The Floor, London, UK (2019), Exposure Gallery, London, UK (2014) and Tina We Salute You, London, UK (2011) and included in group exhibitions at Mall Galleries, London (2019), PADA, Lisbon, Portugal (2019) and World of Wonder Storefront Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2007). He lives and works in East London, UK.

Nicole uses sculpture, music, video and coding to create spaces of alternate reality. These spaces are defined by mutability; of identity, of humour and of space-time. Their stories speak of similarities between non-binary gender, particle wave duality, and carabiners.

Antonio de la Rosa, Mexico City 1983. An active nature drove Antonio to the art practice, primarily through painting which he has been doing for more than a decade non stop. His painting routine consists of mixing acrylics to study colour on different surfaces like dry leafs or post cards. Antonio has a College degree at UIA on Industrial Design and a Masters on Visual Arts in UNAM. The main theme around his designs and his works of art are nature based, focusing primarily on the study of plants and landscapes, using wood to express it on. Antonio's paintings are interventions on different objects and his main focus is around the idea of time passing by and its impact on the surface of all things, even us.

Tyler Witzel was born in British Columbia, Canada in 1985. Raised in a rural, off-the-grid homestead within the interior of the province, these formative years in nature and relative isolation would lead to the development of themes that are present in his work today. Tyler attended the School for Arts and Technology in 2005 in Kelowna, with a focus on film and experimental animation. He has recently returned to Vancouver Island from some years living and working in Berlin, Germany. Currently based out of Victoria, B.C. Tyler is creating work primarily in the mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture and experimental animation.

Carmen Schabracq was born in Amsterdam, where she currently lives and works. In 2012 she received a BA in Fine Arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, after a year of painting studies at the Academia de Belle Arti in Rome. In 2015 she completed a MFA in Theatre Costume Design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Antwerpen, with a research and a body of work which she called 'naked masks’. In 2017-2018 she received ‘the new maker fund’ of the Dutch performing arts fund, with which she made two in situ visual performances.

Her work consists of performances, paintings, sculptural installations, photo and video work, in which she uses her selfmade objects, costumes and scenography to create her own world and tell stories to deal with life and death. “In my work I try to relate to human identity. Every human exists out of many faces, all of whom originate from the perception of the other. A mask is an object to represent the multilayered character and is a tool for a ritual or performance, to become ‘the other’. Masks and their rituals have the will to embody ideas and the aesthetic search for the meaning of life through art.

With mixed media and sculptural installation, Julia brings awareness to conditions of humanity. Attention to journalism on topics of human conflict, migration and gender enable her to reiterate truths through inaudible methods. When words falter, she uses art to further awareness of what is true in our world and of those in it. Julia currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. She previously studied Elementary Art Education at Gordon College in Massachusetts and has taught the fundamentals of the visual arts in settings across the East Coast and as far as Colombo, Sri Lanka. In the past year, she self-published a children's literature book about the true story of a radical art education program from Boston. That story inspired her to craft her latest education endeavor: a bilingual aftercare art program in Baltimore City. While at Casa Lü, she anticipates further developing her visual work about migration.

Tim Belliveau was born in Montréal and received a BFA in glass from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2005 and an MFA in Fibres and Material Practices from Concordia in 2017. He co-founded Bee Kingdom glass studio in 2005, assisted with the launch of Berlin Glas e.V. in 2012 and occasionally collaborates with sibling and fellow artist, Elisabeth Belliveau. His artwork is influenced by many years working as a technician and teacher, with a focus on the intersection of craft traditions and digital technologies.

Charlotte Haywood and Edward Horne are artists based in Australia. They work collaboratively and independently as interdisciplinary artists across: installation, architecture, theatre, sculpture, video, textiles, pedagogy and through inter-cultural collaborations, techniques and materials.

Their creative partnership is linked by a common questioning of dominant cultural, political and ecological practices. Exploring circular economies, biomimicry, multi-narratives and reciprocity in their work. They have been awarded multiple Australia Council for the Arts grants to realise their projects. They are collected by ARTBANK, Museum of Applied Arts + Sciences, Sydney, Australian National Archive of film + sound and privately.

Heidi Cooper is multimedia artist with a focus on experimental video, performance, and analogue photography. Her work revisits multicultural identity, family history and food as a means of story telling. She is currently based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam where she is the curator of the Saigon Experimental Film Festival.

Brooklynn Johnson works in painting, sculpture, and performance. Her work explores both the psychology of landscape and the terrain of the subconscious. She received her MFA from UC Davis and is currently based in California.

Luz María Fernández is a Chilean artist who works with painting, drawing and installation. Her work examines the psychology of masses and manipulation of the human mind, by representing enigmatic scenes of religious cults. Additionally, she has worked in art direction for fashion editorials and advertising. She lives and work in Santiago, Chile.

Carla Gulesserian's work is mainly focused on portraiture, natural studies and color. She studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago followed by a year as a visiting student at Goldsmiths University in London. She is currently working in Mexico City on different personal and commissioned projects.

Christine Longoria is a mixed media artist and entrepreneur in sustainable fashion. She studied Sculpture at San Francisco State University, where she developed her passion for visual aesthetic and the use of reclaimed materials. In 2013 Longoria moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in fashion, and in 2015 she launched her own design label - Dear Survivor. Her dual identity as an artist and designer has led to a variety of opportunities - from living in a sculpture studio in Budapest to having her design work featured in Vogue. Longoria now runs her brand and design studio in San Diego, CA.

Cody Howell is a California-based photographer and producer. He studied Art & Design at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with an emphasis on Photography. After working in the commercial advertising world for the last six years the rich colors and clean aesthetic has influenced his recent work as he has transitioned into studio portraiture and fashion. He currently resides in San Diego, CA along with his wife and fellow artist, Christine Longoria.

Sally Scopa’s work relates the practice of painting to the daily practice of managing and shaping the body. Through her large-scale abstractions of clothing and decorative objects, she explores the cultural significance of craft and design, as well as the artistry of presenting the body and fashioning the self. Scopa approaches painting as a system of rules that were made to be broken, often probing the medium’s traditional boundaries of taste and seriousness by incorporating consumer symbols and intervening sculpturally in the picture plane. 

Sally graduated from Harvard University in 2013 with a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies, and from Stanford University in 2019 with an MFA in Art Practice. She is from San Francisco, California (b. 1990). Recent shows include a two-person exhibition at Mills College, Oakland and participation in the Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards Exhibition at SOMArts in San Francisco, California. 

Jada Schumacher runs a materials-obsessed design studio in New York City. She is a Color Professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and a Color and Trend Reporter for the Government of Japan.

Jessica is a first generation Mexican-American from Houston, Texas.  In 2006, she received her Bachelor of Arts in Sculpture at the University of Houston, and her Master of Art at the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2009.  In 2013, she accepted a teaching position in New York City as Professor of Art at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.  In her practice, she has been working on a series of sculptures that discuss ideas with historical and social connection to assimilation, suppression, and a search for identity.  Using regional fabrics, she reconstructs forms that reference place and home, having the aloe vera plant plays a central part in her current series.

Evan Nilsson is a queer, non-binary, first generation Australian, born in Naarm (Melbourne), and raised in the Hume region of North-Eastern Victoria. They have recently completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) at the Victorian College of the Arts. Nilsson’s multidisciplinary practice involves photography, textiles, painting, drawing, sculpture, video and performance. They are interested in the intersection between performance and other forms of art making; in particular, the way in which all forms of art making have a performativity and all materials have a story. Nilsson’s current work revolves around spirituality and contradiction: being at once believing and non-believing; here and there; real and fake; deliberate and accidental. Through research into religion, mythology, royalty, theatre and philosophy they create narratives and characters that play with science fiction, false histories and cultural coding. These characters are staged, filmed and photographed within constructed environments that are then presented as the final work. Nilsson’s most recent exhibitions include- a solo show: ‘Majesty’ at Trocadero Art Space in Footscray, ‘Emerge: Photographic Edition’ at Brunswick Street Art Gallery; ‘Group Conversations: Australia’s Shame’ at George Paton Gallery; and, ‘Proud’ at The Margaret Lawrence Gallery.

Rodrigo is an artist from San Diego and Tijuana who is currently working in Brooklyn. His work is an exploration of his personal history, ideas and heritage. He uses the images and motifs from his childhood and culture as references to produce imagery that plays on ideas of identity construction, and culture assimilation, blending and rejection. He allows each painting to develop independent of the others, giving an individual approach to each idea with a specific style.  This manner of working is meant to allow his paintings to develop as they should.  His work references and is informed by his dual nationality, as well as by his interest in video games, films, comics, and history.

Julia is a multidisciplinary artist working within printmaking, sculpture, painting, and poetry. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2018 with a degree in studio art, and participated in a studio internship at Women's Studio Workshop the following fall. Her art-making process first involves going for walks and collecting organic or forgotten materials - a dead plant, a seed pod, a rusted piece of metal. While exploring these spaces she looks for objects that remind her of the body, for materials that can be reinvented, for plants that have died but can be brought to a new life. When she removes them from that space, she strips them of their context; taking the objects apart, she pieces them back together, molding various emotions and experiences into something new. The end products of these collected materials vary; she often use them as textures for prints, whether that means directly applying them to the plate with monotype, exposing them to a screen, imprinting their textures onto a copper plate using soft ground, or inking up the physical object with collagraph. In her sculptural work, she responds to the properties of the materials she has found and create intricate, delicate pieces, sometimes dipping these into plaster or paper pulp and leaving them to harden and dry. The methods used in her sculptural work are often intuitive, repetitive and laborious. Her work is a reflection of herself: tense but expressive, fragile yet assertive. Experiences with injury and chronic pain inform her everyday life and are tied, wrapped, sewn, etched, and scratched into her work. She is interested in representing the interior of the body, the invisible pain, the materials that hold it all together—ligaments, bone, tissue, blood vessels. 

Troy Argyros is a Melbourne based artist specialized in representational drawing and oil painting. Troy is interested in portraying the contemporary world using the time-honoured, universal language of realism, and remaining faithful to the beauty that nature offers.  

Amy Hoagland is a Louisville, KY born artist based in Austin, Texas. Her work focuses on the role that humankind plays within nature, discussing how man’s technological advancements are progressing Earth’s ever evolving structure.

Julie Falk's artistic practice is driven by a material curiosity and tactile sensibility that uses sculptural traditions as well as ideas from science fiction and object-oriented ontology to investigate relationships between people, things and materials around us. Futurology about new biotechnology or eco-systems is not the goal, but rather a meditation on what it means to be present in a world that doesn’t create solutions. 

Amy Stoker is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her research-based practice combines performance and installation to examine culinary traditions and rituals. As a woman raised in the American South, her practice looks at the ways race, gender, and religion impact how communities are formed and performed around food. Amy received her BFA with honors from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts and MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has conducted performances internationally in Cuba and has been included in exhibitions domestically, including New York City and Chicago. In early 2019, Amy was an artist-in-residence at Pike School of Art in McComb, Mississippi. Currently, she is a part-time faculty member in the First-Year Study program Parsons School of Art & Design in NYC.

Emilio Jimone (México City, 1978) Studied at ‘Escuela Nacional de Artes Pláticas’ and ENPEG, he also studied one semester at L’Ecolé Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Angers, France and did a residency at Cemac, France. He obtained the scholarship Jovenes creadores, FONCA and has participated in several group exhibitions in Mexico, France, Japan, Bolivia, Guatemala and  Belgium.

Emilio is interested in drawing, painting, installation and graphics. Aware of the visual possibilities of the image to generate projects in situ or of experimental nature. He works with great interest in the human sensibility with nature as a spiritual path of self healing as a collective.

Humbled by her creator. Sara is forever searching for a sense of meaning and belonging in the mystery of life and death. Artistic practice and thinking is one of many ways Sara is searching. A graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA,  2009, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, MFA, 2017. She is excited to find herself in CDMX and thankful to be a part of the beautiful community of artists, Casa Lü.

Elizabeth Thorp is a sculptor and an illustrator. With her sculpture, Liz explores our engagement with objects and the way in which materials provide both accurate and misleading evidence as to the story of things. Her illustrations are often biographical and serve to record people, places and experiences. Previously working out of Oakland, California Liz is now in search of a new home base. 

Hana Koob is a New York based artist who is a recent graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University. Using sculpture, photography, and drawing she investigates the relationship between humans and their surroundings as well as the impact of humans on the environment.  Hana hopes her work will encourage people to engage with their surroundings, reflect on their interaction with it, and question the modern dichotomy between nature and culture. 

Clementine Hardcastle is a visual artist living and working between London and Berlin. She studied Fashion Communication and has previously been working as an Art Director at Burberry, London. Clementine is now focusing on photography and curating, shooting intuitively between her phone, 35mm and medium format. Experimenting with light, colours and printing techniques, she documents the spaces and cultures around her.