Rachel Maryam Smith addresses constructed and glossy notions of
domestic and maternal bliss through enticing and prosaic
materials in menacing scale. She engages capital transformed into
disused collections of familiar objects and how those collections
represent the Western girl-woman-crone experience, exemplifying
internalized objectification and disabuse from autonomy.
Julia Edith Rigby is an artist from California. She works with
salvaged materials to hybridize printmaking, sculpture and
installation media. She in particularly interested in
questions involving gender, wildness, and the Anthropocene. Julia
sculpts with wood and metal salvaged from local natural areas and
waste sites, investigating mark as a means for exploring
existence, body and voice. She is interested in the slippage that
occurs between the disassembly and reassembly of forgotten
materials, in the relationships of these marks to one another, in
recomposing the decomposing.
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.
B.A., Dartmouth College, Art Studio and Japanese Language and Literature
Brenda Gonzalez was born and raised in East Los Angeles,
California. She earned her B.A. in Art Studio and Japanese
Language and Literature at Dartmouth College in 2015 and
continued her studies in art through a post-baccalaureate program
at Brandeis University from 2017-2018. Being far from home during
most of her studies, she explores ideas of home and nostalgia
through the use of materials and objects typically found in the
home in her sculptures and use of digital media.
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 within 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.A., University of California, Berkeley, Art Practice and History of Art
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
