Artists Exhibited A-M
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Amalia Angulo
Amalia Angulo graduated from The Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design with a degree in fine art. Though she was born in Havana, Cuba, her family relocated to the Dominican Republic, where they lived for 20 years. Angulo’s practice interrogates human psychology through stylized vignettes of doll-like figures that masterfully tread between the idyllic and the unsettling. Depicting exaggerated and heavily sexualized bodies, her subjects confront us with disconcerting, wide-eyed gazes and stiff smiles. These saturated works aim to deconstruct notions of perfection and impose limitations of being, visually riffing on art history and other sources ranging from newspaper comic strips to mid-twentieth-century pin-ups.
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Eleanor Arbor
Arbor (b. 1993) graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2016 with a BFA in ceramics, and works in two- and three-dimensional media. She takes inspiration from the natural world, specifically her Southern California surroundings. Depicting plants, animals, mother and child, the artist is exploring what it means to exist in the world, to birth life, to witness death, to grow.
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Joshua Aster
Born in Brooklyn in 1976, Joshua Aster is a Los Angeles based artist and abstract painter who received his MFA from UCLA in 2007. Composed of memories of place, patterns, and current events, his egg oil tempera paintings feature triangular grids that obscure specificity. He has been featured in numerous exhibitions including solo painting exhibitions at Gattopardo, Cuesta College, Southwestern College, Edward Cella Art, Karl Hutter Fine Art, Carl Berg Gallery, and LAXART. His work has been featured in the LA Weekly and The Los Angeles Times amongst other publications. He was awarded a MacDowell Residency in September 2014. He is also a founding member of the artist collective OJO, and has presented work at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles and LACE in Hollywood, CA.
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Amanda Banker
The female characters, which I loosely base on 1920’s tube animation designs, are lewd, sexual and appear bendable and boneless. Effectively they become a new vision of the female nude; one that is no longer weak and demure, but bold and lustful. My re-assessed nudes not only explore brazen female sexuality, but also the representative limitations western culture places on it. These characters are nestled among realistic items reminiscent of Dutch still life paintings, resulting in a stark dichotomy between nude and environment. This polarity pushes the nude into the primary visual focus, forcing the viewer to encounter it. I further this bold focus with the use of saturated colors and dynamic lighting.
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Aaron Robert Baker
He received his BFA from The University of North Texas and his MFA from The University of Nevada Las Vegas, where he studied under influential art critic Dave Hickey. When he was in the second grade, his teacher told his parents that he had drawn a cheeseburger really well and they should enroll him in art classes. He has been an artist ever since. My work explores the symmetry between beauty and awkwardness, happiness and despair, the natural and the synthetic. Growth, transformation, and anthropomorphism interest me, as does our ability to turn any combination of shapes into a visual language.
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Sarah Bedford
Born and raised in Roundup, Montana, Sarah Bedford received her BFA from the Cooper Union and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Bedford has been a recipient of the National Academy of Design Painting Award, as well as a Lower East Side Printshop Artist Fellowship. Bedford has shown with Bellwether Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery, Charles Moffett and Deanna Evans Projects, New York, Mrs., Maspeth, NY; and Foyer, Los Angeles, CA. Her solo exhibition, Enormous Sunsets and Big Breezes was hosted on Martha’s Vineyard by Mrs. during the summer of 2018 and was included in a two person exhibition at the gallery in 2016. Bedford lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has been represented by Mrs. since 2020.
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Sara Bonache Ríos
Sara Bonache Rios (b. 1991) currently works and lives in Barcelona. She graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona in 2014. Primarily working in painting, Bonache’s practice conveys a sense of emotional intimacy in her plants, exploring the complex relationship between the human body and nature. Using soft tones in a style reminiscent of modernist artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Bonache’s subject matter contrasts the spiritual and earthly by evoking calm, comforting feelings that allow us to explore our relationship with the natural world.
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Vivien Ebright Chung
Ebright Chung (b. Santa Cruz, CA.) is a painter and curator currently living and working in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA from California College of the Arts San Francisco, studying both painting and conceptual fashion. She worked extensively in theater and fashion before returning to painting in 2016. She is also the co-founder and Associate Director of False Cast Gallery, a program devoted to contemporary emerging painting based in San Diego and Los Angeles. She founded Seated Horses, a project dedicated to assemblage and post-consumerism.
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Sydney Croskery
Sydney Croskery is an artist born and living in Los Angeles, making paintings that are both materially and conceptually rigorous. With a process involving detailed action painting coinciding with writings, Croskery uses abstraction as means to make sense of our political, emotional, overwhelming and hilarious aspects of life. Title and essay for the paintings connect the personal to the societal to our moment in time, creating a visual record for the complexity of contemporary life.
Croskery has presented solo shows at Craig Krull Gallery, boxoProjects, and Citrus College Art Gallery. She has participated in group exhibitions at Over the Influence, Monte Vista Projects, Baik Art, Central Park Gallery, Charlie James Gallery, The Fellows of Contemporary Art, The Bakersfield Museum, The Torrance Art Museum, and The Indianapolis Museum of Art.
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Michael Draghi
The visual language of Michael Draghi’s art practice is influenced by the artist's upbringing in Southern California. “As an artist, I am constantly inspired by California's vibrant and dynamic culture. I love incorporating various elements into my paintings, from colorful emojis and playful phrases to intricate three-dimensional objects and iconic surfing imagery. By blending these diverse elements, I aim to create unique and engaging pieces that capture the energy and spirit of the Golden State.”
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Cissi Efraimsson
Efraimsson graduated the MFA program in Experimental Animation at the California Institute of the Arts in May 2022. She received a BFA in Fine Arts from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2018.
Efraimsson works at the borderline between reality and the surreal/supernatural. She often uses a dream, myth, or creature and places it in the real world, within a contemporary context inspired by popular culture. Efraimsson works on the border between the ordered and near-perfect and the skew and absurd.
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John Flores
John Flores is a contemporary ceramic artist who lives and works in Yucca Valley, California. He acquired a BFA focusing on Ceramics at California State University Fullerton in 2019. John’s work revolves around a notion of sacredness that he associates with the natural world, an interconnectedness between all living things. Those notions embody the visual stylization of Flores’ work, with sculptures that often depict botanical forms combined with humanistic elements. Using his imagery as a foundation, John will weave in everyday life experiences, turning every sculpture into a narrative. Telling stories of shared experiences that often deal with changes and transitions in life.
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Ric Heitzman
Ric Heitzman is a Los Angeles painter with a background in the arts, entertainment, and education. Born in Texas, he received his BFA from East Texas State University. Shortly following graduation, he was in a two-person show at the Houston Museum of Contemporary Art, a print and drawing show at the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, and a performance and multimedia exhibition, APEWEEK, at the Allen Street Gallery. APEWEEK developed into a radio program on KCHU in Dallas. After this initial success, he moved to Chicago with a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He earned his MFA in filmmaking in 1980, a vibrant time with the still-active Hairy Who and experimental filmmakers, hugely influential to his development.
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Nikki Lewis
Nikki Lewis is a professional potter and educator who lives in the foothills of Los Angeles. She received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA from UCLA. Her wheel-thrown and handbuilt earthenware vessels have been widely exhibited.
Throughout my life I’ve had the great luck of living life in physically wild and beautiful places. My work has evolved over the years to reflect a fascination with my surroundings. Currently I reside in the mountainous area of Altadena, outside of Los Angeles proper. My backyard is a canyon with a large stream that swells from the snow pack from the San Gabriel mountain range. The abundant wildlife and flora in the vicinity inspires my current clay work. Coupled with a longstanding love affair with drawing and painting, I choose to carve and paint the indigenous creatures of my neighborhood into the most natural of materials, clay.
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Kevin Lucey
Kevin Lucey’s abstract paintings are composed of hundreds, sometimes thousands of tiny painted dots and dashes that accumulate to form geometric fields of color. Handwritten letters, aged photos, and other physical memory markers create a landscape of shapes and borders for pointillist color marks to flow in, around, and on top of. Lucey’s paintings operate like quilts or puzzles; many small pieces make up the whole. These pieces are cut, torn, and then fastened together by carefully placed painted marks.
Lucey works with the rhythm of the breath, repetition, human error, and the limitations of a body trying to replicate the same mark over and over– building, stacking, and burying the material beneath. Like the power of the breath, this meditative method of art-making examines present thoughts and lingering memories– challenging how we perceive and respond to what was, is, and can be.
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Peter Jeppson
Peter Jeppson, (b. 1985), is a visual artist from Stockholm, Sweden. He works in the field of painting, primarily with oils but occasionally with acrylics and air brush. Apart from painting, sculpture and ceramics are a frequent outlet for his creations. Jeppson only works within the field of figurative art and often tend to focus on the character since that is what really interests him. To do so, he has scaled down working with backgrounds, happenings or other concepts in the painting process. Peter tends to work long and hard on the depression of the character, which is what he finds the most fun – looking for complexity in the emotional register.
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Janiece Maddox
Janiece Maddox (b. 1998, Davenport, IA) is an interdisciplinary artist who earned her BFA in ceramics from the University of Iowa in 2022. She is currently based in Chicago, IL where she keeps a studio practice as well as works as a ceramics educator throughout the Chicago area. Her work addresses concepts of her identity and reality by contemplating the influence societal institutions have on the way we think . In my work I discuss experience growing up in predominantly white spaces as a Black woman. I address concepts of my identity by contemplating the influence my environment has had on my interests and how I move though life.
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Brittany Mojo
Brittany Mojo was born and raised in Northeast NJ. She received her BFA in Ceramics from California State University, Long Beach, and her MFA from UCLA in 2016.
Interested in time and labor, Mojo investigates the histories of gendered work through the manipulation of material. Using traditional processes, Mojo negotiates the utility of service and its relationship to women's work. Positing these processes as valid through their magnification ultimately questions certain value systems, while aiming to reconstruct rigid material hierarchies and gendered processes.
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Lester Monzon
Lester Monzon received his BFA from Art Center College of Design. He has been exhibiting his work since 2000. His work has been exhibited at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, in addition to shows in San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Lester lives and works in Pasadena, CA.
I’ve always been intrigued by perfection, and yet I have perfected failure in life. Embracing the pathetic lows in life can be a lovely comedic folly. Therefore, I try to let failure and perfection play off of one another in my work. Much like the ever changing landscape of the industrial part of Los Angeles I used to live in, my paintings reflect the ebb and flow of rules, rebellion, order, disorder and perfection and failure.