OUR HOUSE
OUR HOUSE
ALUMNI
SARAH SAGARIN
Sarah Sagarin is a New York City based painter. She approaches her work from a formal aspect, with process and problems of composition being the emphasis, and avoiding “concept” for as long as possible. However despite this approach, the content of her paintings is rich and far reaching, expanding well beyond the boundaries of formalistic concerns. Sarah’s paintings tell stories. The narrative and subject matter of each remains somewhat allusive, yet she pushes the door open just enough to give the viewer space to walk through. Though each painting is it’s own world, and the subject matter varies from the geo-political to the deeply personal, they are unified by Sarah’s self imposed structures of process and palette, and thus create a cohesive body of work. In each painting she is striving to find the tension between composition, concept, and context.
Sarah received her BFA from the University of Montana in 2000 with a dual emphasis is painting and ceramics, and an MFA in painting from NYAA in 2003. Sarah’s paintings have been exhibited extensively in New York City, regionally, and internationally. Her work has been included in art fairs in NYC and Japan and her paintings are housed in several private and public collections, including the University of Montana’s permanent collection and the Copelouzos Art Museum in Athens, Greece. Sarah is the Director and a founding member of the South Bronx Independent Artists Coalition which hosts the annual South Bronx Open Studio Tour. Sarah was born in New York City in 1976.
ERRIKA ZACHAROPOULOU
Errika Zacharopoulou is a Greek film curator and artist with an academic background in film production and curation at the University of York (BSc) and the University of Glasgow (MSc) as well as a Fashion Photography diploma from Central Saint Martins. Starting out with the production of two short documentaries, Errika moved on working with organisations such as Sugar High Films and Sundance Channel, and has now worked as a programmer for The Aegean Film Festival and as a member of the selection committee for Glasgow Short Film Festival. Her independent work involves photography and moving image exhibitions at Project Cafe (GLA) and 16 Nicholson Street Gallery & Arts Collective, as well as collaborations with the Center for The Contemporary Arts (CCA) and SlowFood Glasgow. In July 2020, Errika became the Production Coordinator of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports' programme: "All of Greece One Culture 2020" and has been selected to take part in the Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s Recharge Youth Programme as the photographer of the Greek National Opera.
FRANK VEGA
Frank Vega is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago. He is currently working on his Master pf Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) also completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Vega works between painting and sculpture, looking for an intertwined relationship between these processes. His visual inspiration often comes from Latin American patterns, Pre-Colombian artifacts, pop culture, and from his Catholic upbringing.
Some exhibitions include Pareidolia, Patient Info, curated by Brian Jucas. Three For Life, West Loop Dot Gallery. Visceral, two-person exhibition Extra Projects with Bobbi Meier, curated by Karen Azarnia. Solo exhibition, De Huesos Blancos, Office of inclusion and intercultural relations, University of Illinois. 8 to Create, Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL. Small Works, Harper College, Palatine, IL. GIFC, Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL. Families, Lincolnwood Village Hall Gallery. Carvanal, Krannert Art Museum.
ALEX ARCINIEGA
Alex Arciniega is an artist and educator currently based in Reno, Nevada. From 2018 to 2020 she had the opportunity to live and work in Cali, Colombia. Her time spent there allowed her to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to create work that is inspired by ones environment and gain an appreciation for the process of art making. Her art practice primarily consists of working with paint and collage which often includes combining her own paintings with found images and materials in her current setting.
ADAM THORMAN
Adam Thorman is an artist, photographer, and educator from Oakland, CA, USA. He makes and alters photographs, creates books and installations, and likes to collaborate on projects with writers and other artists.
MARI HERNANDEZ
Mari Hernandez is a multidisciplinary artist. A career in non-profit arts organizations led her to explore socially engaged and identity-based art, as well as its contributions to human and community development. Simultaneously, Hernandez became concerned with the lack of representation of women of color in her arts community in San Antonio, Texas. These experiences deeply influenced her artistic development.
Inspired by appearance altering photographers and early Mexican-American artists, Hernandez began experimenting with self-portraiture to address questions about identity. As a co-founder of the Chicana art collective Mas Rudas (2009-2015), her self-portraits focused on Chicana aesthetic. Her solo practice is guided by these early influences, but Hernandez continues to expand her repertoire and skill base.
JUAN C. ESCOBEDO
Juan C. Escobedo uses childhood memories, fashion, and class/ race politics as the major catalysts for his artwork. The work explores his identity as a border town, brown person, from a lower-class background in a predominantly white structured world, and residual class and race shame.
His work consists of installations with objects primarily composed of cardboard, a material charged with preconceived notions of crudeness, utilitarianism, disposability, and brownness— characteristics which parallel Escobedo’s identity as a brown, queer male, raised in a low-socioeconomic community."
TAYLOR GALVAN
Taylor Galvan is a multi-media artist currently living and working in San Antonio, Texas. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2013, she spent time working as a public school educator in addition to developing her personal work. She is now focusing on reconnecting with her studio practice and is a resident artist and studio member of Clamp Light Studios and Gallery.
In her work, she is interested in exploring complex perspectives within her culture and environment. Using allegory as an investigative tool, she explores the beauty and humble reality of the human experience, creating ambiguous moments of familiarity with a tinge of discomfort.
BENJAMIN McVEY
Benjamin McVey is a multidisciplinary artist focusing on the mediums of drawing, painting, and sculpture. His work explores organic and architectural spaces through abstracted and geometric imagery, while working in-between two- and three-dimensional forms. He received his BFA from Texas State University in Communication Design in 1995 and his MFA from The University of Texas at San Antonio in Studio Art in 2012. Previously, he studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League and National Academy School. He currently lives in San Antonio, Texas where he maintains a vigorous studio practice along with holding the position of Gallery Manager at Trinity University. He has exhibited extensively and has works in both private and public collections.
Artist residencies include The Studios at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) in North Adams, MA, the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, receiving an Artist/Writer Grant, and at The League Residency at Vytlacil in Sparkill, NY, receiving the Ruth Katzman Scholarship.
SARAH FOX
Sarah Fox’s multi-media narratives and characters are created from embodied female experience. Stories of life, loss, sex and love are told through corporeal hybrid creatures. The resulting collages, cyanotypes, and animations suggest a childlike fairytale but with an undercurrent of dark symbolism.
Her work has been shown throughout Texas, as well as in the Kinsey Institute (Bloomington, Indiana), Field Projects Gallery (New York, New York), Espacio Dörffi (Lanzarote, Canary Islands), Bedsetter Art Fair (Vienna, Austria), and Casa Lü (Mexico City). In 2019 she was a recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant that allowed her to live and work at the Women’s Studio Workshop in NY with her son.
She was raised in Houston, Texas and currently lives and works in San Antonio, Texas with her 2-year old son William and their dog Myra. She is the director of the innovative community art space Clamp Light Studios and Gallery, the creator and co-director for the Brick Gallery in the Blue Star Arts Complex. She teaches at the Southwest School of Art and Texas State University.
LOUISE SMITH
Louise Smith @louisesmithart, born 1990, is a painter living and working in Hudson, New York. Currently, Smith paints on porous surfaces where she can best express her interest in color and in the deconstruction and disintegration of material and form. The viewer develops an instinct for problem-solving, filling in the blanks, and seeking hidden truths. Louise graduated with a BFA from Bard College and a Post-Baccalaureate degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her artwork has been exhibited in Washington, D.C. and New York, including commissioned work for the Freehand Hotel.
TOBIAS MOLITOR
Tobias Molitor (b. 1986 in Cologne) is a multidisciplinary artist and printmaker currently living and working in Berlin. His work is about everyday products and fast moving consumer goods, which sometimes only perceive a small amount of attention.
“I am fascinated about the materialism and the reshape of the form, when somebody is using a certain object. My focus lies on traces, marks and spots, which I include in my work and which are reinterpreted on a visual dimension. Especially the alienation of objects through rescaling or putting them into another context is something which I try to explore in my creative process”.
Tobias' work examines the role of the human being in the consumption cycle, by documenting objects he himself or somebody else has left behind at different places or by involving random people in the creative process itself. His oeuvre combines everyday objects and graphic language from different cultures such as plastic bags, packages, chewing gum, bills and most recently postcards. The technique of screen printing underlines the repetitive and industrial character of these objects.
“For me these left-overs are souvenirs, relics and pieces of evidence of a human visual culture and human existence in general”.
Tobias Molitor studied Graphic Design at Central St. Martins London and he has specialized in the discipline of silk screen printing and photography. Every month he publishes one limited edition, hand pulled screen print plastic bag from around the world.
MADELLINE VICENCIO
Madelline Vicencio b. 1996 in Houston, Texas is an interdisciplinary painter and muralist. Her most notable mural could be found in Houston’s Czech Center Museum which represents her fixation on using text and identifiable objects, binding them with bold and symbolic colors. In Texas, she attended University of Houston with a Bachelor’s in Painting and a Motion Media minor.
Vicencio’s text pieces draw inspiration from unspoken confessions about a desire for safety, affection, and sex. Due to her maturing relationship with identity, Vicencio gives a raw portrayal of her body onto clay and acrylic paintings integrating backgrounds of familiarity and isolation. Vicencio takes a fresh approach to expressionism by reducing ways of rendering drawings, creating textual surfaces with found objects, and using media as an alternative way to distribute her work.
Currently, Madelline Vicencio is working on expanding her artistic vision as she experiments with fabrics, illustration, and art collaboration with her women-owned clothing studio @doloresdesignstudio. At Dolores Design Studio, she prints her work on second-hand clothing and linens with the intention of raising awareness to sustainability and to promote opportunities to local artists interested in collaborating in large-scale projects.
FREYA DOUGLAS FERGUSON
Freya Douglas Ferguson, b.1995, lives and works in London. Working in a variety of mediums, she combines historical processes, including glass blowing, carving and metal forgery, with more high-tech modes of fabrication. By manipulating materiality and ways of making, she interrogates the hierarchies within art history and contemporary visual culture.
Drawn to the anachronistic image, the works Douglas Ferguson creates obfuscate their place in time, often inverting contemporaneous aesthetics with these unlikely material combinations. By employing these visual contradictions, she explores the dichotomy between experience and memory, using this to investigate her own relationship with nostalgia.
Having recently completed a post-graduate in Stone Carving and spent much of the last year shadowing a blacksmith, she is driven by physical modes of making, often labour intensive and physically demanding, where the very process imbues sensorial memory within the sculpture itself.
MICHELE LORUSSO
Michele Lorusso (Puerto Vallarta, 1994) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Mexico City. His work fuses various industrial materials with traditional practices such as painting, photography and sculpture to bring what is typically two-dimensional to the three-dimensional. The abstractness of Lorusso’s pieces speaks to poetry by stimulating conceptual contemplation and self-reflection.
Drawing inspiration from the naturally occurring decay of urban landscapes—a cracked sidewalk, the patinas on metal, a broken window—, Lorusso creates rich abstract paintings and sculptural objects by using conventional industrial materials—mirror, wood, glass, brick, concrete, metal—with both traditional pigments and unconventional chemical processes.
He began his academic career in Mexico City at Casa Laam University and later graduated from Naropa University in Boulder (Colorado) with a BA in Creative Writing and Literature. Lorusso has exhibited his work in Guadalajara and Mexico City.
ANASTASIA ZIELINSKI
Anastasia Zielinski (b. 1983 Washington D.C.) is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus in oil painting, mixed-media collage, and installation art. Bright and bold with an emphasis on texture, her art is a celebration of the natural world and the benefits gained from time spent in nature. Anastasia’s multi-layered work is characterized by an abundance of visual information that verges on excess yet is appropriate to the subject. She credits the memory of her mother’s overflowing sewing cabinet for the reoccurring and expansive use of fabric and sewing notions within her work, both as material and inspiration for mark-making. With a BFA from Pratt Institute (2005 Brooklyn, NY) Anastasia’s foundation in traditional oil painting has informed how she approaches other mediums. Ms. Zielinski has shown her work nationally and internationally and has created site-specific installations for INSCAPE arts, Shunpike’s Storefront Seattle, and Spaceworks Tacoma. She currently lives and works in Seattle, WA.
JULES MERCANTI
Jules is a Canadian illustrator and painter currently working in Toronto.
She attended the Ontario College of Art and Design University to major in criticism and curatorial practices and acquired a minor in painting and drawing. After graduating, she set her degree on fire and focused on creating a style of illustration she could explore that managed to capture the craving she had for cheeky humour, bright colours and imaginative worlds. Julia’s paintings are often chaotic and full of optimistic nihilism: the belief that life is meaningless and that is what makes it most wonderful. In these seemingly meaningless moments, we have the power to define our purpos.
AURA CARACOL
I am a curious wanderer. I navigate my surroundings as if it’s the last time I will witness them; with love and memory. Hola, mi nombre de nacimiento es Aura pero al igual, uso el nombre de Carocol. Nací en el ‘93 casi un mes antes de los terremotos de Northridge en Southern, CA. I’ve dreamt about that time, it’s significance draws me to the complexity of life as we know it. I’m an artist, focusing on the visibility of the unknown, unseen, overlooked and erased.
Carocol is a graduate from the University of California Santa Cruz, (Sociology & Latin American/Latinx studies.) You can find her unrest and experimental works @alooclover @arteamoresflores
MARCUS CLARKE
Marcus “Delmar” Clarke is a transmedia artist who is fixated on creating liminal spaces by combining mundane materials like dirt, rocks, cinder blocks, and construction materials, and giving them an ethereal quality through light and sound. His faith (and doubts within that faith) drives his practice, revolving around the pursuit of life to the full in mind, body, and spirit. He graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2019 and currently lives in Austin, Texas.
ROSARIO SALGADO
La Plata, Argentina, 1986. Graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the National University of La Plata as Professor and Graduated in Plastic Arts with an orientation in Painting. Rosario investigates visual language as a strategy to inhabit the world for as long as she can remember. For ten years she has reflected on the plant universe from an expanded conception of painting, exploring various materialities and compositional methods. She is currently working on the development of a synthetic personal language that aims to reveal what defines an organic system as such. Through formal variations, she investigates its internal logics on the plane, the links between the parts and their possible interrelations. Concrete although subtle, their configurations become routes of rhythmic and chromatic intensity, proposing entropic dynamics that seek to generate a certain estrangement from what we think is already known.
ASH RIVERA
Born in NYC in 1995. She went into Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts to study painting, but left with a love for sculpture. Upon graduating, she moved to Brooklyn, NY, in the hope of finding a sense of community, and now she is part of the studio program Chashama. In 2016 she was nominated and chosen to attend the Yale School of Art’s Summer residency in Norfolk, VA, where community and collaboration became a cornerstone of her art. Currently, she wants to explore the world of prop making/set design. Her sculptural techniques involve collecting found objects or using everyday scrap material to then transform into something she believes came from an alien world. Her interests revolve around the unfamiliarity one might have with their own body and bringing out feelings of discomfort by creating all forms of textural surfaces that invoke those feelings.
MAUDE SAUVAGE
Maude Sauvage is a Belgian visual artist, she lives and works in Brussels.
She creates an object with its matter, its color, its composition: from matter to form, from form to possible object. Through shapes and materials, she explores the emergence of the body that is conditioned and becomes an object of constant experimentation and in research of equilibrium. It is in this equilibrium that one finds that societal codification again through the playful assembly of modules and the combination of matter-colour effects, directly drawn from the seductive range of our environment. What is the brilliance of a metal that covers the roughness of a rock, that homogenizes the gap in the material and shows us that one element is dependent on another or on the contrary. So many little conflicts of materials and colours which nourish this physical interdependence in our environment.
MARISHA FALKOVICH
Marisha Falkovich b. 1993 in Moscow, Russia lives and works in New York, USA. She works primarily with ceramics and animation, often combining sculpture and video. She received BFA from Tisch School of the Arts in Animation & Film. Participated in CalArts Residency 2019 and Casual Art Fair, New York 2018. Awarded a solo show at Transatlantique Gallery, Paris in October 2019. Past projects also include short animated films, music videos and documentary film animation.
SOPHIE VARIN
Sophie Varin was born in France in 1993. After growing up between the countryside and Paris, she got her BA from the National Fine Art School of Paris, then studied at Hunter College School of Fine Art in New York and finally graduated from her MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. She now lives and works between Brussels and Paris.
Sophie Varin’s paintings and sculptures focus on our relation to reality, and how it often means a negotiation between what you would like to see, and what you would like to hide. Depicting seemingly banal situations, her works create ambiguous scenarios where apparent familiarity shows a twisted face. Very interested in abilities to adapt and mimicry techniques, she likes to think of her subject’s capacity to understand -or fail to- its context. Her works give a great importance to the gaze of the observer, the witness, the public. Especially how curiosity, desire or fantasy have the ability to modulate what is seen. This distorted gaze, too thirsty to remain rational, is projecting so many blurred scenarios onto the real.
Aside from her painter and sculptor’s practice, she writes detective stories starring a fictional persona; J.P Gutti. Among others, she has had recent solo exhibitions with feeelings in Brussels, at Fortnight Institute (New York City) and Brooke Benington (London).
ANTOINE CARBONNE
Antoine Carbonne is a French painter living in Brussels. He graduated from Beaux Arts in Paris (Ba 2009 Ma 2011), and also took part in a year of study at Hunter College in New York in 2009-10.
Since graduating, he soon moved to Brussels. His activity is now shared between these two cities. Often referred to as contemporary surrealism, he prefers the term “magical realism” to define his work. This term, which does not designate an artistic current, leaves an ambiguity. In any case, it raises very contemporary questions such as that of hallucination and dreams which are dear to Carbonne.
He participated in exhibitions in Europe, notably at the MuhKa in Antwerp or at the Villa Noailles (France).In the United States at the Rachel Uffner gallery and Embajadada in Puerto Rico.
He also frequently collaborated with Hermès and other brands for set designs, pattern conception or as an invited artist.
JEN PETERSON
I am a visual artist based in San Francisco. I paint to visually recall and document emotional responses to intimate connections, longed-for places, and lived experiences. I like to infuse my practice with a delicate lightness, a sense of play, and a quiet contemplation of the layers within ourselves that underlie our everyday connection to our surroundings. Bringing together contrasting influences of light and shadow, hardness and softness, edge and curve, in an effort to evoke feelings of both strength and vulnerability.
I express these moments through various experiments with colors, shapes, and lines using water-based media. I enjoy mixing and making my own watercolor paint and inks by hand using pigment and binding medium. This aligns with a certain philosophy I like to keep in mind while creating: one that engages the senses and celebrates a deep appreciation for raw materials and the beauty of simplicity.
MATILDE DIGMAN
Matilde Digmann (Mat) is a multidisciplinary artist and author. Mat's artistic practice is multi-faceted, but is rooted in two main principles:
Mat’s work evolves around shadow and outing the things we want to keep in the dark, thereby calling out structures in society and discrepancies in the dominant morality. Mat is working on outing shadow (in a Jungian sense) on a personal as well as on a societal level.
The second focus of her artistic practice working towards the betterment of her community - Mat is in service to particularly blocked artists via the podcast Shadow Work Podcast and in pursuit of healing a generation of men and women who have been broken by growing up in capitalist society and in abusive families - via the graphic novel Pseudo.
SOL BAILEY-BARKER
Sol Bailey-Barker is a multi-disciplinary artist working primarily with sculpture, sound and performance. Bailey-Barker is informed by the development of technologies that were for millennia seen as shamanic for their transformative power upon the landscape and their influence over life and death. His work reconnects technological development and its ancient spiritual origins. Drawing on the sound of rhythmic machinery, deep space and sacred bells, Bailey-Barker’s sculptures often double as sonic ritual instruments.
THE GRAMOUNCE (NORA SILVA AND FINN THOMSON)
The Gramounce is a collective researching food and art. We explore how to best convey information through food. We aim to challenge the concept of the art gallery, question the relationship of artists and labour and successfully fund art projects through our supper clubs. We establish the meal as a new display context where the audience is comfortable to be able to access contemporary art. The guest’s attention is choreographed to better engage with the work shown. The Gramounce is run by artists Nora Silva and Finn Thomson.
LEXI FAITH
Lexi Faith is a multidisciplinary artist, mainly focusing on performance art, visual art, textiles, fibers, and sustainability. She currently works with recycled materials and repurposes them into wearable art, and with mixed media to create paintings that combine poetry, indigenous textiles, and acrylics to expand on the storyline of awakening to and loving the darkest parts of ourselves which therefore permeate our current social systems at large. By making our unconscious, conscious, through the practice of expressive arts, Lexi believes that we can each heal ourselves, and ultimately live at our highest potential and ability to love. Besides visual arts, Lexi is an accomplished actress, singer-songwriter, writer, dancer, designer, and tantric teacher.
LEO NATAF
Leo Nataf is a multidisciplinary French artist based in Paris. He obtained his BA in fine arts in Central Saint Martins, London. He has shown his work in England and France.
JESUS D. TORRES
Jesus D. Torres b.1995 is an artist living and working in New York, Mexico City, and soon to be relocated to Los Angeles. In 2019 he earned a B.F.A. in sculpture from SUNY at Purchase College and was a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He developed his relationship with his practice at a young age by working for his father in their family masonry business. Torres gets inspiration from the intense labor implemented by a person in maintaining and transforming the landscape of someone else's home. He uses materials directly taken from job locations and fuses aspects of lived experiences into the artwork. Torres' work unfolds stories of familial history through cultural idioms and semiotics. The various layers of Torres' work raise questions of socioeconomic mobility, ethics of labor, and the living circumstances of future progeny.
MADELINE LINK
Madeline Link was born in 1996 in Calgary, Alberta. She is a musician, writing, recording, and publishing music as PACKS. She also uses stream of consciousness research and corporate powerpoint language to weave several disparate concepts into one big bundle of confusion, otherwise known as "The Uncertainty Seminar." This process also manifests itself in other hands-on mediums such as miniatures, clay, paper mache, short fiction, and video performance art.
BORIS GRANCHE
Boris Granche is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is located halfway between sculpture and photography through an installation perspective. His work addresses some environmental issues related to the reign of obsolescence, architectural degradation or myths surrounding the horticultural industry. In reference to architecture, to environment and to the living, his installations explore a range of varied materials such as plastic, water, air, natural plants as well as artificial.
ANNA LEE ROEDER & ERIK VASILAUSKAS
Dream Scene Placemaking is the creative team of Anna Lee Roeder and Erik Vasilauskas; artists based in Kalamazoo, Michigan (USA). Together they paint murals and facilitate shared community experiences in public space. They have often combined art and travel, and have painted murals all over the world. During their time at Casa Lu, they painted a colorful rose mural on an exterior wall of the residence. They each also have independent creative practices in oil painting, film photography and cut paper collage.
COCO BRUN
As a French art director and designer, I like to combine old-school processes such as painting and hand drawing with modern digital tools. After five years studying fine arts in Paris, I started to forged a successful career as a communication consultant for up-and-coming European fashion designers as well as leading couture houses. In 2004, I moved to London to develop my illustration work, creating imagery for major publications spanning both the independent & mainstream press (eg. Vogue, ELLE, Vanity Fair, Interview, Nylon and Muse). In addition, my work has been published in publications including Taschen, Gestalten, Victionary, and featured in exhibitions and installations in exhibitions in London, Paris, Los Angeles and Barcelona. It was during my time in London that I also conceived and launched the Forget Me Not studio.
YVE GUZMAN
b. Silver Spring, MD, 01/17/1991
Painting, sculpture and printmaking.
I am among many artists throughout history who have found landscapes inspiring and use this as a means for expressing an internal narrative. While the work is simultaneously expansive and compressed: its overarching story is a satire on our cosmic ontology. The environment’s syntax is created by primary figures such as rocks and leaves, supported by the lingering subtext of swirling gradients and vortices. These repeating interstellar bodies are symbolic of growth and collapse: an ongoing theme throughout the work.
LEA MARCACCINI
Lea Marcaccini is a French/Italian mixed media artist, working with photography, drawing & collage. Born and raised in a nature reserve on the Pacific coast of Mexico, she has been surrounded and inspired by the diverse and rich culture it has to offer. From pre-Hispanic art and Mythology, to vivacious colors, spirituality, to its vast flora & fauna. Such themes are gently conveyed into her work, indulging in both the friction and synergy of color, used as a form of communication.
Lea has shown her work in numerous group shows in the UK, Paris & Los Angeles, as well as displayed in the Drake hotel in Toronto. Her work has also featured in publications such as British Vogue, Vogue Mexico, So It Goes, Based Instabul & Ingenue Magazine.
ELMI VENTURA MATA
Elmi Ventura Mata is a visual artist, born in El Salvador and based in the East Coast of the US. His work explores the narrative format through the pictorial framework of the canvas. His investigation is guided through a focus on the configuration of the painted subject through a critical framework informed by the history of painting. The mergence between abstraction and figuration; thesis and antithesis offers a transformative nature in the work. In his words, “As a painter, it’s my calling to sift reality and pour its aspects onto the canvas through the brush. In doing so; a straightfoward vision and sincere voice emerges. Painting offers the artist an opportunity to view and observe life through a unique lens. Imagination is a powerful lens polish. An integral aspect to the painting process. Imagination also allows access into the subconscious, which coincidentally defines us."
Elmi has been awarded a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and his work has been featured in New American Paintings. Elmi earned his MFA from The Tyler School of Art's Painting Department in Philadelphia. He also holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from The Cleveland Institute of Art.
AIDA LIZALDE
Aida Lizalde is a multimedia artist born in Mexico and based in California. She uses her artwork to raise questions about power structures and explore identity and mestizaje through narrative and symbolism. Lizalde invites the viewer to consider the nuances of navigating assimilation to American culture, capitalism, neocolonialism, and politics. She employs an array of media, including construction materials, textiles, performance, video, photography, and ceramics to create her work.
Her work has been exhibited at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Torrance Art Museum, Southern Exposure, Gearbox Gallery, the Museum of Northern California of Chico, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Beacon Project Sacramento, SOMArts South of Market Cultural Center, The Latino Center of Art and Culture of Sacramento, etc. She is a member of Axis Gallery and has been a recipient of the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, Young Space Grant, the Hopkins Endowment for Studio Art Students, the Crocker Kingsley Art Award, and the Herb Alpert Scholarship for Emerging Young Artists among others
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LESDAVAG
Lesdavag is an interdisciplinary Mexican American artist whose work regards concepts of life, death, and humanity. His art is a realization that space and time are not objective phenomena, but rather the tools our mind uses to connect everything –energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change in form.
Through his art, Lesdavag explores memories and events that made an impact on his life and the people around him. For the most part, he uses raw materials like dirt and wood and in some cases found objects, to successfully convey his concepts.
Lesdavag has been part of several art exhibitions in the United States and Mexico, most recently exhibited at the art gallery in the Mexican Consulate of Tucson. He was born in Denver, Colorado, and studied Fine Arts in Tucson at the University of Arizona. Currently, Lesdavag resides in Mexico City where he works as a visual designer and continues developing new works of art..
CEDRIC TAI
"Hello, my name is Cedric Tai and I make art and friends spanning Detroit, Glasgow, and Los Angeles. I’m an un-disciplinary artist, who went and got Art Education certification from Michigan State U., and one of those MFAs from the Glasgow School of Art.
I’ve received a 25K Kresge Arts Fellowship, a 25K Knight Foundation Challenge Grant, and have gallery representation with Simone DeSousa Gallery based in Detroit, Michigan.
I make artwork to tickle, cajole and inspire people to consider their fears, limits and individual aspirations with curiosity.
Recently someone said that I’m 'Pathologically Curious’, which is the most tender way I’ve ever heard my ADHD (aka Time-Blindness, aka Intention Deficit Disorder) described back to me.
Some of my work is setup systematically (“Brixels” tessellations/“They Didn’t Go” excel spreadsheets/“Reverse-Pick-Pocketing” workshops) so that I can focus on the way that I want to elicit a response from a specific audience. Other works are like love letters wherein I come to know someone through the process of making the work.
What brings my work together is the magic element of PLAY; Play that begins in the landscape of the unconscious, made of doubt, ritual, grief, healing, honesty, tiny pleasures, guilt and responsibility. All of these elements are authentic and alive in my work, speaking to each other.
That conversation is what I hope the viewer experiences."
SARAH THIBAULT
Sarah Thibault is an artist and writer based in San Francisco. Her artwork has been exhibited in the US and abroad, including an upcoming solo exhibition at Fahrenheit Madrid in Madrid, Spain. Past projects include exhibitions with Steve Turner Contemporary, BAMPFA, Interface Gallery, HILDE Gallery and the ART in Embassies program in Montevideo, Uruguay. Thibault and her work have been featured in Artsy, CARLA, The San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine, SFAQ, The Examiner, The Huffington Post, and 7x7. She is a Charter Resident of the curated Minnesota Street Project studio program in San Francisco. She holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts, a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA from the University of Wisconsin- Madison.
GABI MAGALY
Gabi Magaly is an emerging artist born in Bryan, Texas. Magaly received her MFA in Visual Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2020. She works predominantly in the medium of photography, but also employs other mediums like sculptural installation and embroidery. Magaly has exhibited in solo shows at Satellite Gallery, Huntsville, TX; The Brick and Presa House Gallery, San Antonio, TX. Her numerous group exhibitions include at Luis Leu Gallery, Karlsruhe, Germany; The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, San Antonio, TX; Won Best in Show at “56th Annual Juried Competition Exhibition” at Masur Museum in Monroe, Louisiana. Magaly was honored with a Graduate School Travel Stipend to give an artist talk at SPE Conference at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX. She was recently awarded two CAMMIE awards from Blue Star Contemporary and Luminaria Contemporary Cultural Center during Contemporary Art Month 2020. Magaly currently lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.
MATTHEW ANDERSON
Matthew Anderson (b. 1989, Indiana, USA) is an artist, musician, and software consultant living in Mexico City. He grew up in a conservative religious family with three older brothers. Love, support, and fun abounded throughout his upbringing, but emotional maturity was a foreign concept to him until his late twenties.
He now seeks to attune himself to his emotions as they are triggered by ordinary scenes and objects from life. A watch on a table, a house on a hill, a dog on a couch - these simple daily snapshots can serve as vehicles for drawing out, feeling fully, and integrating past imprinted emotions and their present situational application. He hopes to make this process more natural for himself and more accessible to others through playful yet profound artistic expression.
DELPHINE TOMES
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.
LESLIE MOODY CASTRO
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
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
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 MCLAUGHLIN
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 SCHWETZ
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.
LEON BOWERS
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.
ANTONIO DE LA ROSA
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.