Otis College of Art and Design

Website:http://www.otis.edu/

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FAR Bazaar Project

TWENTY FOUR WOMEN ARTISTS 1977/2017

Description: In January of 1977, the group show "Twenty Four Women Artists" opened in the Art Gallery at Cerritos College. The show was reviewed in Art Week by artist Faith Wilding, and included Southern California artists such as Lita Albuquerque and Nancy Youdelman. Now, exactly 40 years later,  we find ourselves in the same space, tasked with curating another group show; this one featuring our fellow grad students (and some faculty) from Otis College. A student group show is always somewhat arbitrary. There's not necessarily something cohesive that links everyone's work, other than that we are all artists practicing at the same time and in the same place. A similar critique could be directed at the idea of a "women's show" - sometimes seen as an essentializing of "woman-ness" - as if a shared gender might automatically make different artists somehow relevant to one another. Yet, in the year 2017, the stakes for women in Southern California and in this country are profound. During this past year, women's bodies and identities have been put on display and under attack. Women will march on Washington and around the country later this month.  And thus, 40 years later, the idea of "24 Women Artists" still resonates and provokes. This shared time and place that unites us as artists, while arbitrary, also provides an opportunity for resonance. We want to recognize a history that includes these women, even as the art world continues to struggle with gender equality on both gallery and museum walls and in institutional positions. During studio visits with all the participating artists, we built a series of questions to function as a curatorial guide. These questions are not meant to be answered, but rather as jumping off points. Nor are these questions directed only at women artists. In bringing to the surface the historical  memory of the very place we are showing this work, it is our position that all artists must contend with what came before us. We have not limited the artists in this show to women for this reason, and also because the gender binary that informed the 1977 show no longer makes sense to us. We plan to share this list of questions with viewers of the show, and invite an ongoing conversation with the work, past and present.

Location: FA50

Participating Artists: Carole Frances Lung, Tara Kelton, Sophie Lee, Sara Schnadt, Sarah Jones, Maura Brewer, David Prince, Jenny Yurshansky

Deb Adams-Welles is a visual artist living in Los Angeles. Working in large scale installation, her work engages in ideas of contemporary remix theory and the aesthetics of sampling, using structural references from music, architecture, and technology. Her exhibition history includes the solo show “The Wall of Sound (Remix)” 2014 at the Patton-Marolt Gallery at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass, Colorado, in addition to group shows. She is currently an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design and holds a bachelor's degree from Ohio State University with a major in Industrial Technology. In 2015, she was awarded a merit fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center.

Sydney Aubert is an unapologetically fat, crass, and sexual ceramics artist also working in food, video, and whatever other materials arouse her in the moment. She is currently working and living in Los Angeles California, but grew up in Vacaville California; both towns are way too sunny for her liking. She received her BA in Art at the University of Nevada, Reno in 2015. Sydney is currently a graduate student at Otis College of Art & Design and is expected to graduate in 2017. She has shown work in Nevada and California since 2011

Robert Begley is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. He completed his undergraduate degree in painting at Cal State Fullerton and is currently finishing his Masters in Fine Art at Otis School of Art and Design. His art reflects his love of order and mathematics and expressionist mark making, and often is a commentary on the intersection of each of those disciplines. His pieces have been featured in galleries in Fullerton, Los Angeles, and online.

Henderson Blumer is an artist and curator based in Los Angeles. His work runs the spectrum from personal expression and mining of self-history to projects that look at systems and globalism. His recent curatorial efforts are in conjunction with Suzanne Joskow and Jefferson & Indian Wood, her bookstore and imprint.

Shirin Bolourchi was born on an icy December day in Tehran, Iran. She is an American-Iranian fine artist, independent curator, writer, poet and blogger. In 1999 Shirin was admitted to the school of Dramatic Arts at Tehran Sooreh Art University. She graduated in 2004 with her B.F.A Degree in puppet theater directing. Following her education, she migrated to Canada and later to the United States of America to continue her Post-Graduate in Fine Arts. She is currently a graduate fine art student at Otis College of Art and Design's MFA program in Los Angeles.

William Bryant is an artist from Atlanta, Ga and completed his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College ( B.A. Studio Art and Geography). He has shown Not-A-Gallery Gallery in Hanover, NH, Barrows Rotunda in Hanover, and the Westend Arts Festival in Atlanta.

Jocelyn Casas was born in Los Angeles, California in 1988. She received her BFA in studio art from the University of California, Irvine in 2011 where she studied painting under the instruction of Allison Miller. Her paintings explore the complexity of imperialism by a Chicana through an experiential process of reactionary composition. Activated by her environment, motherhood, and the convoluted perception of traditional Mexican customs, her work urges to mend wounds placed by new and uncertain futures. In 2016 she participated in the Soledad Residency Program in Mexico City where she also had her first solo exhibition in the Fundacion Sebastian A. C. titled, Open Wound/ Herida Abierta. Her work has been featured in various group exhibitions. She is currently an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design expected to graduate in 2017.

Austyn de Lugo is an artist working in collage, drawing, and installation. He graduated with a BFA in oil painting from the American Academy of Art in Chicago in 2014, and he is currently working towards his MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, where he is the teaching assistant to Judie Bamber. His work has been included in numerous group shows and exhibitions in Orange County, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and has been featured on NBC’s Chicago Fire. Austyn is interested in topics relating to sexuality, gender, history, and violence.                                                                  

Mark X Farina is a visual artist creating works within the fields of Pop Art, Light and Space, Experimental and Atmospheric Media. Mark X Farina is an old fashioned Futurist with a BFA in Advertising from Edinboro University and is currently enrolled in the graduate public practice program at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles California. Mark has donated his artwork for various benefit auctions including UNICEF/NextGen, The Venice Family Clinic/Google, and the Junior Diabetes Research Fund/OneArt. In 2016 Mark's work has been included in the Photo LA fair, the MFA Biennial city of Brea CA, and the Open Engagement Conference in Oakland, CA. Select past exhibitions includes work displayed with the Hammer Museum, LA Art Show, Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH), Paramount Ranch art fair, Vast Space projects Las Vegas, High Desert Test Sites and Miami Art Basel.                           

Irene Flatley is a master’s candidate at OTIS College of Art and Design. She was born and raised in Toronto, ON and is currently living and arting in Los Angeles. Irene has undergone a handful of personal transformations from competitive sport through high school and university in the hopes of competing at the national level, to an in depth examination of current events and a passion for international development and social anthropology - most recently furthered by an internship with Journalism for Human Rights this past summer. Social anthropology is explored in a more conceptual way through her art practice at OTIS.                                                 

Nathan Gulick (b. 1980 in Ann Arbor, MI), lives and works in Los Angeles. Nathan Gulick works at the intersection of image and object, remarking on the semiotics of the built environment and the pervasive myths that hide in plain sight. His exhibition Contractor was recently on view at mandujano/cell in Inglewood, CA and closed in September of 2016.

Suzanne Joskow is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. She has a BA from Yale University and is currently an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design. Joskow's work focuses on the interplay between physical space and social history. She often creates site-specific, immersive installations that investigate the neighborhood and community where a piece will be installed. Joskow's work has appeared at Yale University, The Bolsky Gallery, and as part of LA Road Concerts. She also runs Jefferson & Indian Wood, an art bookstore and imprint in Culver City. In 2016 Joskow did a series of commissioned works for The Los Angeles Athletic Club, in Downtown LA.

Alex Kay was born in Moscow, Russia in 1982. He traveled and lived all over the world with his family until moving to the United States in 2010. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Professional Photography at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, CA. His multicultural perspective has now poured itself into the digital realm. Just as Uda Barth creates in the confines of her own home, Kay has turned to computer technology as his fountainhead. It is at once his entertainment, social hub, library, shopping mall, and art studio. In this realm, Kay is investigating the digital culture’s perceptions of art, religion, and fame. Currently, he is an MFA candidate at OTIS.

Lucas McDaniel is a visual artist from Santa Cruz, CA who currently lives in Los Angeles and is an MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and design. He studied at California State University Northridge and received a BA in Film Production.  His interests are in exploring weird histories and ruptures that can be created by reading into what is taken as authoritative truth. Lucas' work typically plays with the power of different modes of display and aestheticization, and various forms of coding that inform the viewer.

Karim Shuquem is developing interrelated visual art and performance works as an MFA student at OTIS College. Karim performed in the 90’s with the pranksterist Cacophony Society, the no-wave group BoyScouts of Annihilation, and toured nationally with the absurdist variety show Circus Redickuless. In the early 2000’s, he sang/performed for infamous deathpunk group The Phantom Limbs and earned a BFA in Fine Art as well as a BA in Graphic Design from Cal State East Bay. In Chicago from 2005 to 2012, Shuquem directed his own art gallery (Reversible Eye) and was artistic director for non-profit The Arts of Life, inc. He was a member of the rambunctious brass ensemble Mucca Pazza for five years until 2010 when he began developing and touring with musical/performance act Loto Ball. He moved back to Los Angeles in 2013.

Amanda Benefiel grew up during the Eighties in a trashed Victorian mansion on an idyllic lake in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a college town where she found early inspiration flying on a tricycle among the bones and death masks of the anthropology department. Her Catholic school upbringing, where she was often reprimanded for shortened hemlines and clashing views, was offset by time spent mending holes and dusting the racks in vintage clothing shops while listening to Billie Holiday. Worlds were found in the remnants of bygone eras and hundreds of hours spent flipping through old magazines. Amanda has an ongoing love of textiles and obsession with popular culture both present and long gone. She tends to look at culture as a puzzle to be deciphered, and things in general as they might be remembered and not as they seem to be now. Amanda received her BFA from Pratt Institute in New York and her MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in California. After a few years of wandering around the world like a trash cat, she has landed in Los Angeles, CA, where she currently works and resides.

Emily Thorpe is a native Angeleno who is currently a MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design. Her work explores sousveillance and the formation of identity through memory, architecture, and location. Emily uses multimedia to address these topics; her work explores the qualities of memory through wax, plexiglass, photography, and drawing. Currently Emily is experimenting with the formal elements of mapping, charting, tracing, and reconstruction. She is interested in the idea of what makes home and how one’s environment shapes them. Emily has exhibited her work in Los Angeles, including four group shows in 2016: Humiliation, Bolsky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA with Ben Weissman, Judie Bamber and others; The Gift Shop, Culver City, CA and participated in and organized Doodles and Canoodles, The Elysian, Echo Park, CA with Renée Petropoulos and others. In 2016, Emily was awarded a summer residency at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, Colorado. Emily received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Davis. Emily will be showing her current work at her upcoming solo exhibition at the Bolsky Gallery in February 2017.

Raghubir Kintisch was born in New York City holds a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), teaches Painting and Mixed Media at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA) and is currently a second year candidate in the MFA Public Practice Program at OTIS School of Art and Design. She is a multi- disciplinary artist who works primarily in video, painting and yogic technology to provoke radical positivity, intentional creativity and spiritual transformation in others. Kintisch uses the devices of popular music and culture, pattern and repetition, found footage and archival photography, recorded conversations and interviews as well as her senses of humor, wonder and nostalgia to create autobiographical video works and large scale painted retablos that both poke fun at and acknowledge our efforts to connect with each other.

Renée Petropoulos has created projects and exhibited internationally. Most recently embarking on the project "Among Nations (Mostly)" with a performance "Analogue" (2012) at the MAK, Venice to Venice (2012) as part of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. and “Women in Surrealism” for LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). "Black Star", begun in 2006, is a performance in continuum in Berlin. Her most recent installment of "Prototype for the History of Painting: Eingrouping Social Historical" was installed in MARTE San Salvador, El Salvador. Her recent film, "Two or Three Things I Know About Gas Station Mini Marts" screened at Screening, in Philadelphia. The outdoor public sculpture project “Bouquet”(Flower Tower) Between Egypt, India, Iraq, the United States, Brazil, Ethiopia, and Mexico”, situated in Santa Monica, California at a street and pedestrian intersection was completed in spring, 2014. An exhibit of related subject, “Bouquet (Flower Girl) Between Libya, the United States and Scotland”, was installed at LAMOA in Eagle Rock in May 2014. Petropoulos’ monument drawings were also included in “Forms of the Formless” at Beijing Moca, curated by Marlena Donahue.

Annetta Kapon works in Sculpture, Installation and Video. Kapon, born in Athens, Greece, now lives in Los Angeles and has exhibited in the United States and abroad since 1982. She is a Professor and Assistant Chair in Graduate Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design, where she teaches both studio and theory seminars. Her work has been featured at Side Street Projects, Jewish Museum in Greece, the University of Chicago, LACE, Exit Art, Wexner Center for the Arts and the Biennale of Sydney among others. She has had solo exhibitions at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Armstrong/Schoenheit, French Institute and Zefxis in Greece, Carnegie Mellon University, U.C. Riverside, Southern Exposure in San Francisco and Las Cienegas Projects. Kapon holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki and the University of London, respectively. She then received her BFA from Otis College of Art and her MFA from UCLA. She is the recipient of numerous artist residency fellowships, as well as WESTAF, Art Matters, Pollock/Krasner and California Community Foundation grants.

Dana Berman Duff lives and works primarily in Los Angeles and Mexico. Her object works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NYC), the Phillips Collection (DC), Brooklyn Museum (NYC), The Carnegie Museum (Pittsburg), and a number of private collections. Her works in small-format film and video have been screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement (Geneva), EXiS Experimental Film Festival (Seoul), South London Gallery, Northwest Film Forum, (Seattle), and other programs. Duff is a professor at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

Heejung Choi was borned on 30th November in 1988 in Seoul, South Korea. She had studied music in her childhood and she found more interest in visual art. Heejung studied art in a BA Fine Art course at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London for 3 years. After graduating the university, she moved to the United States to do her Master's degree in the Graduate Fine Arts department in at Otis College of Art and Design in Culver City, Los Angeles, California.