Meet the Artists
Alison Tharp is interested in everything. “I like being in crowded public places and taking the bus. I carry a sketch book everywhere and draw people around me. I write down little bits of conversations I hear. I’m a voyeur sometimes and I’m nosy and curious and never bored. I have lived in Oakland since 1998 and attended the California College of the Arts for illustration and painting. I work with watercolors and acrylic inks and paints. I experiment with a wide variety of media in my work. My art speaks to me through other people.I often hear myself thanking someone for telling me what my painting is about. It’s how I work, I love a good mystery. I love the dice roll of two unrelated objects getting married on the page and making us laugh.”
Alison OK Frost is an Oakland-based painter and draughtsman. She received her BA from UCLA and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been seen in galleries in Oakland, Los Angeles and New York, and a number of places in between. Alison’s watercolor works and oil paintings deal with dark subject matter, often post-apocalyptic in nature, tempered by jewel-like colors and a light touch. In 2011, Frost began delving into printmaking, collaborative works, and curating.
Ben Belknap is an artist and musician who lives and works in Oakland, CA. His art work consists primarily of small scale, richly glazed ceramic sculpture. In 2003 he received his bachelors degree from The California College of Arts and Crafts and has since had art shows at various galleries around the Bay Area and elsewhere.
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Clare Szydlowski is a printmaker, educator and storyteller who lives and works in San Francisco. She received her MFA from San Francisco State University and currently an Artist in Residence at Convent of the Sacred Heart High School in San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Bay Area and is concerned with the ways that industrial processes, theories and terminology have shaped the North American landscape; both the physical world and the collective imagination. Interested in the decay of the U.S. manufacturing industry –a world of concrete and architecture in disrepair as well as the phenomenon of suburbia — hinterlands of credit and commercial sprawl, she can often be found climbing into abandoned grain elevators and over the fences of housing development construction sites. CLICK HERE to watch VIDEO
Crystal Morey — My intention is to explore the human experience of emotion, and its relationship with the environment. I want to study the tenuous, symbiotic balance between human necessities and the health of our natural habitat of forests, oceans, mountains, and deserts. Everyday we strengthen the disconnect between what we use in our lives, and the destructive effects it has on where we live, the air we breathe and the water we drink. We have made a departure from nature and the balance that should exist has been broken. In my work I want to reveal the ephemeral quality of human life and show our dependence on an increasingly delicate ecosystem. CLICK HERE to watch VIDEO
David Fullarton is a Scottish born, San Francisco based visual artist specializing in works that combine images with text. He keeps notebooks filled with scribbled phrases, scraps of paper and other ephemera that he incorporates into his artwork. These elements represent the often overlooked stuff of daily life, which is the root of Fullarton’s inspiration. He sees beauty in the ways people manage to find joy and meaning in the minutiae. The artist paints vibrantly complex canvases whose elements jumble and mix together in a facsimile of modern life. Fullarton compliments these with smaller mixed media drawings on paper. These paper works are sometimes the genesis of the finished paintings, but are more often stand-alone vignettes featuring forlorn characters who find themselves in compromising situations.
David Spiher is an artist who lives in the East Bay and makes art—currently producing prints and paintings—at the Compound Studios in Oakland. He seroconverted in January 1987 and was diagnosed with AIDS in 1998. “I have been an assistant for a number of artists, designers and crafts people so I am really used to helping others make work. However, very often I have found it really hard to make my own, to justify my own choices, sometimes even to myself,” Spiher says. As a way to free himself from these self-imposed restrictions, he has shifted personae depending on subject matter and interest in various media. From 2004 to 2009, he produced hand-painted pornographic ceramic plates as Virginia Trembles. As David Six, he has been producing figurative work for about eighteen months. About the works shown here, he says: “On a lot of levels I equate my experience of HIV—for myself, my lovers, my friends and generation—with the flooding of New Orleans and the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan. It sounds crazy because it was crazy… is crazy.
Elise Mahan is an artist and educator who currently resides in Oakland. She studied Art History and Visual Art at Mills College and San Francisco State University. Elise is currently working on a project called The Neptune Collective, which is a 365 day visual narrative about astronomy and cosmology that will span from January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2012. This series has given her the opportunity to explore multiple disciplines as a means of researching and exploring the vast and complex universe. The act of creating a painting every single day allows her to create her own unique version of space. Her research has created a framework where the physical act of layering and stratifying a diverse range of materials allows the viewer to lose themselves in an abstract world where anything is possible.
Giles Goodhead-I am interested in the screens – television, computer, phone – that increasingly mediate our lives. Instead of going out photographing the world, I point my camera at the screens that bring it to us and separate us from it. Soccer from London, wrestling from Akron, blow-hard pundits, You Tube oddities, soaps, infomercials, and the strangest programming of all, ‘reality.’ A term of art in computers is ‘WYSIWYG’ – what you see is what you get. I disagree. We are deluged with high-definition media but we no longer trust it. How can we penetrate the glossy but dead surface of produced images, and uncover raw but true emotions lurking underneath. My technique may seem compulsive. To find subject matter I scan hours of recorded programming at high speed, and then toggle frame by frame. My shots make visible the individual screen pixels. Once I have a large print, I deconstruct it literally, slicing it into small squares. These I re-assemble on specially machined boards, re-building the image as a mosaic of super-pixels. As a result, the final piece is an exploded, intensified version of the original shot. Perhaps because I’m colorblind, I work with saturated, garish colors. Digital photo editing offers endless ways to perfect or prettify an image. I prefer to enjoy the noise: halos, moiré effects, and distortion. In these imperfections I seek the human. CLICK HERE to watch VIDEO
Jeanne Lorenz has had solo exhibitions at White Columns, New York City and Mixture Contemporary Art in Houston. She has shown her work at P.S.1/MOMA, the Drawing Center; and P.P.O.W. in New York City. In 2008 her collaborative print Stars that Shine Darkly was included in biennale of American prints at the University of Richmond Art Museum. In 2002 she was a fellow at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California. She was also the recipient of the Helen Winternitz Award for Painting from Yale University. Recently, she has been a visiting artist at U. C. Berkeley, U. C. Santa Cruz, Sonoma State and the California College of the Arts. In December she will be a visiting lecturer at Occidental College in Los Angeles. CLICK HERE to watch VIDEO
Jenni Ward is a sculptor, art instructor and owner of Earth Art Studio in Aptos CA. In 2005, she opened Earth Art Studio; a sculpture studio offering clay and mixed media sculpture classes and workshops for children, teens and adults. Throughout her teaching career she has worked extensively with many youth and senior art programs. She is also the creative engine behind the humanitarian group; HOPE Art; which brings art to the youth of Haiti. In addition to teaching, she has been creating, showing and selling her own sculptures since graduating from University of Hartford-Hartford Art School with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1998. She exhibits her sculptures locally and nationally.
Kelsey Robinson creates sculptures, paintings and screen prints, drawing inspiration from nature and its endless catalog of shapes, patterns and color. She received her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design ( RISD) in 2003. Her fine art has been shown on the east coast and the Bay Area. While living on the east coast, Kelsey managed the soft tissue department of a company making anatomical medical models in Massachusetts. She is currently the founder of a custom wedding and sculptural cake design company servicing the Bay Area, www.thewholecake.com. She now works and lives in Oakland, CA with one cat, one dog and one scientist. Click HERE to watch VIDEO
Kim Frohsin has worked in the realm of painting, photography, printmaking, drawing and collage over her last 28 years as a full-time visual artist. She has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1985; over the years, her figurative work has been likened to a new generation of The Bay Area Figurative in style and tradition. Yet, her extensive and intensive collaboration, especially for this last decade, with live models (Muses), reveal that her line, an innate color sensibility, a very independent spirit make it difficult to place her in one visual fine art catagory. She feels the “gestalt” she does as interdependent. She is a singular, studio artist who likes to push her own boundaries at will, drawing upon ever-changing subject matter, and media. Kim is inspired by literature, dance , personal experiments in photography and a myriad of autobiographical resources and experiences. She grew up in The South (Atlanta, GA) and has lived in France, outside of Minneapolis and in the San Diego, CA area, as well. Ms. Frohsin ‘s works are now the collections of The San Jose Museum of Art, The Crocker Art Museum and the De Young Museum, all in CA. She has been in many solo juried and group shows and has work held in numerous corporate and private collections, worldwide. Some of these include The Morgan Flagg Family Collection,The Gerald H. Buck Foundation, Texaco Corporation, Adobe Systems, Keker & Van Nest and Nordstrom. (Photo taken by Walter Swarthout, 2008)
Lena Verderano Reynoso is an artist, antiquarian, and a PhD candidate at the University of California Berkeley. Her artistic and academic work is centered around nineteenth century American sideshows and popular culture. Her art has been exhibited internationally and has been featured on E! Online, Gawker, the WB, TMZ, the Rumpus.com, Alameda Magazine, Oakland Magazine, Apartment Therapy, and many other publications and newspapers. She has published articles on folklore and Early American amusements in Proverbium and the Early American Review. She owns a gallery in Oakland, CA with her husband.
Martin Webb came to the East Bay from England in 2003. Previously a painter and art teacher, he worked as a designer and installer for commercial concrete art projects in the USA, Canada and Mexico. His studio work has been exhibited in the Bay Area and beyond, and he has completed several public art commissions. Much of Martin’s art reflects on the experience of travel, man’s interaction with the natural landscape, and individual stories of migration. He has developed a simple vocabulary of abstract forms, patterns, representational symbols and figures. His has an aversion to art-stores and predominantly works with construction materials – cement, industrial pigments, reclaimed wood, and found metal objects. Click HERE to watch VIDEO
Masako Miki is a native of Japan and now lives and works in Berkeley. She has exhibited throughout the Bay Area, including Root Division Gallery and Kearny Street Workshop in San Francisco, the Berkeley Art C enter, Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Her work is also available at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery. Recently she has finished an artist residency at the Contemporary Artists Center in Troy, New York. Masako Miki received her MFA from San Jose State University.
Matthew Pugh is an Oakland based draftsman, sculptor, and painter. He attained his BFA in Illustration from CCAC in 2004. His current body of work focuses on a combination of sculpture, drawing, and painting. These mediums serve as visual development for an ongoing narrative he is constructing as a way to merge the world around him with one developed in his imagination. He is particularly interested in exploring the unknown through a combination of materials and process. The experience of collecting, repurposing, and deconstructing found materials play a crucial role in his work. He navigates this mixed media series using what he has learned from traditional media as well as the study of nature and the human form. He has donated his work to the NASA space program, and has shown at galleries in the North and South Bay Area. He is currently working on a sculpture to celebrate the importance of Earth Day at the Civic Center in San Francisco.
Matt Reynoso works in a variety of medium including wood, metal, painting, printmaking, illustration, and murals. His work ranges from intimate forged jewelry to building sized murals. He has done numerous commissioned works for cities, businesses, and private entities. Some of his notable projects include a reclaimed wood conference table for Numi Tea and a downtown mural for the city of Fullerton. Click HERE to watch VIDEO
Patricia Gillespie is a mixed media artist who lives & works in Oakland, California. Throughout her career & personal work she has always “made stuff”. Her projects have ranged from Art Direction, Illustration & Graphic Design to Film & Theater Scenic Design to Photo Styling & Floral Design, & much-much-more. Patricia has exhibited her work both nationally & internationally. She also has worked with various clients in the world of publishing, music & entertainment.
Shannon Taylor is an Oakland-based illustrator who earned her BFA from the California College of Arts (& Crafts) in Illustration, and recently graduated with Distinction from the University of Arts London, Camberwell College of Arts Masters in Illustration. She has spent the better part of this past decade traveling, painting, lecturing, and showing work the world over. Currently Shannon is the Director of Arts and Restoration at Children’s Fairyland in addition to freelancing. She enjoys collecting miniature frames, painting giant mushrooms, and toiling away in her sketchbooks.
Steve Ferrera received his BFA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in Studio Art, and his MFA from SJSU with an emphasis in spatial arts. He’s worked as a sculptor at Cirecast in San Francisco, and ran Fourth Street Glass, a production studio for hand-blown glass in Berkeley. For five years he worked in the visual effects industry doing commercial and feature film work for clients like HBO, Prologue Films, and Sony Pictures. For the past three years he has been Art Director on a stop-motion short, building and designing puppets and sets- He lives and works in Berkeley, California.
Tallulah Terryll produces bright, upbeat fields of glyphs. Her interest lies in making small visual vacations for the eye to wander about. Tallulah’s work has been known to cause head bopping and the occasional full body sway. A partial list of her influences includes the rings left by cups on tables, repeating words over and over until they become absurd, a job which forced her to sort and count beads in meditative monotony, and the work of Kathleen Rabel. Tallulah’s work has been exhibited in Seattle, New York City, Oakland, and Nagoya, Japan. She lives, works and plays in Oakland, CA. CLICK HERE to watch VIDEO
Yuki Maruyama is a Japanese-American artist who grew up in constant transition between her two primary cultures and languages. Her drawings are strongly influenced by Japanese Manga (comics), her favorite form of art and literature since her childhood in the US and through her adolescence in Japan. The genre is intimately connected to her dual cultural heritage; Manga and related forms of visual culture have played a significant role in the complex cultural cross-pollination between the US and Japan, beginning as early as Post-War Japan and especially in the last three decades. Yuki received her MFA in Drawing and Painting from California College of the Arts in 2004. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, namely at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Southern Exposure, and the LAB in San Francisco; Flux Factory and the Queens Museum of Art in New York City; Theatres des Sens Gallery and Domestic Art Project Yomoyama-So in and near Tokyo, Japan. Yuki was an Artist-In-Residence at the Compound Gallery and Studios in the spring and summer of 2012.