B.A., University of California, Berkeley, Art Practice and History of ArtLeah Theis
Creating art from materials found within a personal landscape, Caz (Christopher) conceptualizes the connections they may have with humans and nature to inspire a narrative that empowers the work to have the authority to communicate the story. Ritually working with cause and effect as a process, adjustments are made based upon the reaction of the last while working in a repetition of mark making and layers, until shapes become forms that manipulate themselves into representational figures. There is a voice of direction from what is being created that speaks with in
Zeina Baltagi is a first-generation Lebanese-American artist and educator. Baltagi was born in Stockton and raised between California and Lebanon. Her work explores and exposes the tensions with in identity and social politics. She ritualizes materials into symbols of past memories and current circumstances. The work reveals intimate transformations in relation to lived experiences with physical, emotional, economic and cultural mobility. She holds a B.A. from California State University, Northridge and is a M.F.A. candidate at U.C. Davis.
B.F.A., Seoul National University, 2013M.F.A., Seoul National University, 2017
I was born in Seoul, South Korea. Through my practice, I try to reveal the various conditions involved in making an artwork in order to rethink the value of art that is freed from its myth of creativity. My work often employs the strategy of disguise, which recreates the boundaries between art and life within the exhibition space such as the gallery or the museum. On the other hand, I reconnect art with daily life by setting a new context outside the institutions. In my search for the conditions of art making, I begin to become curious about how it can be applied to other artists and audience members in different social and cultural environments, and how my own condition as well as the society to which I belong are socially and culturally distinct.
Brett Melliar’s formative years were largely spent grinding competitively on soccer fields, basketball courts, and baseball diamonds where a large portion of his identity and core values were formed. Drawing inspiration from those experiences for his art, Brett works with themes of competition, power, hierarchy, frailty, and mortality. His large, busy, chaotic, in-your-face paintings combines competing images and modes of paint application, seemingly without rhyme or reason, into complex visual statements that transcend into arena’s of contemporary life.
B.A., Amherst CollegeM.S.W., Smith College School for Social Work
Jessica Eve Rattner’s photography has been featured in exhibitions and respected publications at home and abroad. She is a recipient of the Duke Center for Documentary Studies Essay Prize and was a finalist for the The Arnold Newman Prize in Portraiture.
Julia Edith Rigby is an artist from California. She works in printmaking, sculpture and installation media. She is particularly interested in conversations involving gender, wildness and the environment in the context of the Anthropocene. She has exhibited her work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Paris and the Netherlands.
Rachel Maryam Smith is from the California Bay Area and is interested in the shifting meaning of symbols in the visual world, approaching how they are interpreted and coded.
