Meet the Artists
Adrian Van Allen is a multimedia artist, writer, and designer. She creates multimedia exhibits and web sites for the Exploratorium Museum, NASA, the Smithsonian, UC Berkeley, and writes for ReadyMade magazine. Van Allen’s art work engages the history of science, emerging technology and taxonomy through interactive media art, video, scale models, artist books, drawings, photographs, and transgenic taxidermy. She will be a Rome Prize Fellow in 2010 at the American Academy in Rome.
Alissa Goss was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She is a recent graduate from the California College of the Arts, with a Bachelors of Fine Art in Ceramics. She currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. From an early age Alissa had a fascination with color and pattern. Partly influenced by her Angelino roots, her work emanates the shiny glittery candy like colors associated with Southern California’s popular culture. Her passion for creating is process oriented, whereby each new sculpture is influenced by the one that came before it. The constant evolution in her work and never knowing what the future will look like drives her to create.
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.
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.
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.
Jaime Lakatos was born in New York and attended the Rhode Island School of Design. She now lives and works in Oakland, CA. As a mad scientist, Jane of all trades she uses any material she can get her hands on and employs her curiosity of natural science, taxidermy, and evolution to make art. Her work intends to create an imaginary world or story that is based in the sad reality of our disappearing natural environment. “To the uninitiated, modern science is indistinguishable from magic, so my goal is to imbue the final work with an otherworldly presence.”
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.
Kerri Lee Johnson is a practicing artist, curator and gallery owner. She received her BFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003. Kerri is the Co-Owner of Blankspace an artist run gallery in Oakland, CA. Kerri has exhibited nationally and internationally; her most recent exhibitions include Fleetwing Gallery in Brooklyn, David Cunningham Projects, SF, The Compound Gallery, Oakland and upcoming SFMOMA Artists Gallery, SF. Her work has been featured on rock posters and album covers and will be included in an upcoming children’s book. Kerri lives and works in Oakland, CA.
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.
Lisa Solomon is a mixed media artist and educator who is best known for her work that questions and deconstructs the meaning of identity through the exploration of mediums traditionally associated with domestic crafts. She received her BA from UC Berkeley and her MFA from Mills College. Profoundly interested in the idea of hybridization, she is drawn to found objects and imagery altering them conceptually so that their meanings and original uses or intents are re-purposed. She has shown both nat ionally and internationally in venues such as the San Jose Museum of Art, the Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, the Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, NM, the Koumi Machi Museum in the Nagano prefecture of Japan, and Garson Baker Gallery in NY. Born in Tuscon, AZ to a Japanese mother and a Caucasian father, she now lives and works in Oakland, California with her husband, daughter, 2 dogs, 2 cats and many, many spools of thread.
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 m aterials – cement, industrial pigments, reclaimed wood, and found metal objects.
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.
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. Reynoso is the co-owner and curator of The Compound Gallery in Oakland, CA.
Narangkar Glover is an oil painter living an working in Oakland, California. Her figurative works investigate personal narrative and individualism, formalism and abstraction. Her influences are the Bay Area Figurative painters David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. For Glover, the process of painting and craft is treated like an equally intellectual pursuit – including building supports, stretching and sizing canvas in the traditional fashion, framing the work and hand-stitching her embroideries. Glover is a graduate of California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and begins her MFA candidacy at the University of California at Berkeley in the Fall of 2009. She is co-owner of Rowan Morrison Gallery in Oakland.
Pete Glover is an artist living and working in Oakland, California. A graduate from the California College of Arts & Crafts film department, he currently works in many mediums including drawing, printmaking, video, writing, and found object collecting. Pete has been creating and publishing zines for 20 years, and has additionally published art books by several other artists. His videos have been shown nationwide as part of Scion’s Easy 10 and Installation 5 programs. He has written articles for Readymade Magazine and Plastic Antinomy. He once received a $500 grant to repair his skateboard ramp.
Renee DeCarlo Johnson was born in Englewood, Colorado in 1972. She moved with her family every 2 years until settling in NW Washington where she finished high school. She attended San Diego State University where she received her BFA in 1996 and her MFA from the University of Oregon in 2000. Both degrees were in sculpture, however while finishing her MFA she discovered alternative processes in drawing-a deviation that has enlightened and refreshed her studio practice to the present. Currently, the majority of Renee’s work is on paper, however she incorporates a diverse and non-traditional selection of materials to the genre constantly looking for balance between materials and processes. Renee has participated in group and solo shows throughout Oregon, Colorado, Washington DC and San Francisco, and is in collections throughout California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado and New York. She currently lives and works in San Francisco with her husband, chasing around their 2 boys.
Ryan McJunkin is a mixed-media artist specializing in painting, screen printing, and digital art in Berkeley CA. Born in 1977, he started painting early, and continued art making in community college before transferring to art school. In 2004 he graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. McJunkin describes his work as being particularly inspired by his many backpacking trips into the narrow canyons of the southwest, and his most recent works are inspired by excursions to Yosemite and Joshua Tree in California.
McJunkin’s techniques are frequently developed in imitation of natural elements. Often pouring, dripping, splashing, and spraying paint, he allows chance to blur the borders between intention and chaos. His subject matter varies greatly from the figure and landscape, to the abstract and political, often intertwining meaning and symbolism that can become as layered as the geologic buildup of his pigments.
Shannon Danielle Ingraham —”My work has always spoken from a personal point of view. As a child I had a firm, rooted belief in magic, wonder, and the extraordinary. I craved beauty, and the infinite possibilities of storytelling. The passions from my childhood strongly reverberate in the work I make today.”
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.
YaChin Bonny You lives and works in Berkeley and Oakland. Growing up in Taiwan, a small sub-tropical island, she used to get scolded for drawing on the school desks. But now at the Compound Gallery and Studios, she’s free to draw all day even on the common table. Her work focuses on the small and beautiful moments in life that often get taken for granted.
