Alia Ali is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multimedia artist. Her aesthetic interests stem from people, place, and the processes which unite and divide us, all at once. Her work reflects on the politics and poetics of contested notions surrounding the topics of identity, physical borders, universality, mental/physical spaces of confinement, and the inherent dualism that exists in everything. Her work blurs the lines between what we claim to be objective and subjective, illusion and reality, truth and interpretation.

Her work has been featured in publications including the Financial Times, Le Monde, Elle, Vogue, Hyperallergic, Adobe Create, and Harper’s Bazaar Arabia. Alia has won numerous awards including Chromatic Art Award as Photographer of the Year 2020, the Allan Sekula Social Documentary Grant, the LensCulture Emerging Artists Award, the Magenta Foundation’s Emerging Talent Award, and Gold in the Fine Art Category of the Tokyo International Foto Awards. She has exhibited internationally and has most recently shown at Galerie Peter Sillem in Frankfurt, Galerie Siniya 28 in Marrakech, Gulf Photo Plus in Dubai, PhotoLondon 2019 in the UK, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Morocco, the Lianzhou Photo Festival in China, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in the Netherlands, and the Katzen Museum of Art in Washington DC. Alia has presented lectures and workshops at the College Arts Association, Harvard University, LACMA, the Middle East Institute, the Arab American National Museum, and the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

In 2020–21, Alia will be exhibiting at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Benton Museum of Art, the CAFKA Biennial, PhotoLondon, and Art Dubai.

Alia Ali lives and works in Los Angeles and Marrakech.

alia-ali.com

Casey Baden (b. Houston, TX, 1991) completed her BFA at NYU in 2014 and her MFA at CalArts in 2020. Her practice engages with concepts of subject(ivity) and object(ivity), embracing how these positionalities collapse when we engage in relationship. Processes and materials associated with textiles serve a metaphorical function: it is through fabric’s construction—warp and weft—that a surface emerges from the interaction of threads in opposing direction. She plays with this tension of pseudo-oppositional modalities, of holding on and letting go, of coming together and moving apart, often memorializing—or making a totem of—a particular memory or emotional experience.

Her work considers the body, tactility, and language in relation to time, space, and interaction. The idea of embodying and inhabiting—both the physical body and the domestic space—is explored with aims of divorcing the household and the feminine self from concepts of private property, domestic labor, gendered emotional experience, and fixed location. Instead, the sense of home she creates emanates from the intimacy developed between the viewers, the work, and the jumbles of human figures portrayed and imbued with electricity. 

caseybaden.com/

I am a Los Angeles–based sculptor whose practice encompasses object-making, photography, and video. I received my MFA in Art from CalArts in 2020 and completed my undergraduate studies in 2012 at Davidson College in North Carolina. My work looks at the production of subjectivity and ideology, specifically the fabrication of femininity and aggression. I work with materials and objects that carry strong sociopolitical meanings, such as pearls or barriers, prioritizing their function as signs of containment/enclosure or support apparatuses for bodies. Employing a similar strategy to that of a rebus or visual puzzle, my works oscillate between the aesthetic and the cultural—what they are and what they are made of‚and encourage the viewer to imaginatively try out possible strategies of defiance, play, and refusal.

www.clairechambless.com/

This video aims to exhibit the experience of being scared of getting a virus and being an Asian individual, and feeling the eeriness that everyday life continues.

From mid-March through early May, the time of the COVID outbreak, my iPhone kept reporting how terrible the world was—hate crime footage, hate speech by politicians, the COVID-19 death rate, uneducated and neglected people... When I changed my view from my iPhone, everyday life was ceaselessly there—and that also scared me.

The robot cleaner is one of the companies in my precarious self-quarantined life. It sometimes frightened me because it feels like a metaphor for fascists when it tries to wipe up everything on the floor, including my body. It keeps me accountable because it starts cleaning regularly at 6PM. I sometimes felt it deeply when it was stuck, lost, out of battery in the middle of the floor.

wooheecho.com

no title (tricycle) 2020 is a grand-scale photograph that measures at approximately 9 by 6 feet and features a red flyer tricycle secured to a pole with a kryptonite lock in an unidentified urbanscape. This piece is a photographic portrait of an object(s) Sophia Daud encountered during her ongoing observational field research of quotidian objects that are placed in outdoor spaces and appear to exist in a liminal state between functionality and disintegration. Through portraiture, Daud attempts to examine and call into question how meaning is prescribed to objects and how, in turn, these objects ascribe meaning and bring light to conditions and structures of the times we inhabit. Daud creates photographic portraits of these objects at a grand scale as a way to reframe a physical, sculpture-like, confrontation with the viewer, and invite them to question their relationship with these familiar objects.

sophiadaud.com

When Streams Become Flood is an ongoing work that spans making, convening, sharing, showing, and giving. It centers around a set of teaware that is abstracted, distorted, and scaled at a much larger size than its efficient reciprocals. The tea servers are then asked to negotiate the obstacle of being unable to operate the tea set by themselves or in a way that is familiar to them. The objects invite people to problem-solve together and to collaborate physically, verbally, and intellectually while actively acknowledging our intra-dependence. The project is composed of research, workshops, sculptural and functional objects, score, and performance, and these components are activated by viewers and participants (or guests) in the exhibition space.

www.jennyeom.info

When Jackie gives a televised tour of the White House, she goes to market.

I examine American mythologies, from the practices involved in storytelling to bulk purchasing ketchup to save money. I create illogical systems designed to illuminate the equally illogical systems we participate in everyday by exaggerating the absurdities of lower/middle class white America and through the performance of specific personas I’ve created that at once critique and embrace the capitalist system they were interpellated by. My understanding of this system is informed largely by grief. The characters process and generate this grief through their many grievances. My personas do the work of the historical, emotional, and political in a land that is simulated and exasperated by fetish, mass media, and contamination.

In Victorian Mourner 2 (2020) the Mourner visits a site claiming it is the Fresh Kills Landfill, which hosts 2,000 acres of the remains of Ground Zero.

welcomehomehollyharrell.info/

vimeo.com/hollyraeharrell

My work explores anxieties of the present through video, sound, performance, and installation with particular attention on the effect of technologies on the mind, the body, and the Earth. Where site offers a portal to a breadth of historical narratives, my research asserts the intersection of human and nature as the cynosure.

The “Cascades” series, an ongoing project begun in 2018, focuses on sites of water intervention up the Los Angeles Aqueduct through Owens Valley, reaching the source at Mono Lake. After completing the Aqueduct, William Mulholland headed the construction of the St. Francis Dam to further capitalize off the redistribution of water from the north. Shortly after its opening the dam collapsed, killing at least 346 people.

The cement formation in the center of the video was expelled from the western abutment of the dam during the rupture.

cargocollective.com/sterli_ng

stephanie mei huang is a Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist. Her work finds its roots in globalization and the role of displacement in changing perceptions of nationhood, loss, and identity. Through research and practice, she aims to erode the violent mythologies that perpetuate expansionist narratives, in the hopes of fabulating adjacent histories. She uses a diverse range of media and strategies including film and video, installation, sculpture, writing, and painting. She will have solo exhibitions at 4th Ward Project Space in Chicago, IL and Hauser and Wirth Book and Printed Matter Lab, Los Angeles, CA in the coming year. 

how to paint a rocking horse, filmed on March 30, 2020—two weeks into the stay-at-home order—is an immediate response to violently resurfaced xenophobic histories and shifting degrees of visibility in the pandemic: a performative lecture in which she performs auto-theory from her kitchen while painting a mechanized rocking horse.

stephaniemei.com/

Erin Kapor is a conceptual artist using a multidisciplinary approach to critique and explore the uncanny. She uses olfaction, photography, video, and sculpture to construct fictional narratives that function as catalysts for dissecting our perceived notions of reality. Her current work explores the human capacity to function as a vessel for ideas and how society uses a theory of objecthood to determine value. Born in Cincinnati, OH, she received an MA from Central Saint Martin’s in London in design thinking. Erin recently received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

www.erinkapor.com/

I am interested in the gap between the body and its representation. Through performance, film/video, and installation, I critique the dominant culture’s production of images and their influence on our sense of self. I work to recognize the importance of what is left out of these images.

In Four Girl Trick, the choreography was derived from the girlhood game on young women’s YouTube channels, Four Girl Chair Trick. The choreographic systems are based on the instructions the young women give one another in the videos, suggesting they are creating a networked object out of their simultaneous cooperation and resistance to a system. The work reveals the materiality of the game as an interdependent network of women supporting one another—not just physically, but aesthetically and politically as well. I put the game up on pedestals to speak to the fetishization of young women’s bodies, considering the hundreds of thousands of views on their YouTube pages.

www.lucykerrarts.com/

Mia Yao Meng is a media artist working in installation, video, virtual reality, and physical computing. She explores everyday actions to understand the self and today’s human conditions. Her work involves elements of playfulness, humor, and absurdity as strategies to engage the audience in looking at realities differently, through which to dissect our mundane gestural engagements, in order to explore the unknown consequences and to question the complacency of our actions in using technologies. Her work answers the question of what it feels like to be a human living in the twenty-first century. She aims to offer reflections on the phenomenology of behaviors as a way to help search for self, and understand the way we exist in the world. In doing so, she hopes the audience can reconsider our unsolved relationships with objects, machines, and each other.

jellyberg.cargo.site/

This is No Dream

While recently watching a satirical news segment I learned that television medical dramas are donating masks to the pandemic response. To reiterate: A parody accurately informed me that pretend doctors are coming to the aid of a real worldwide medical emergency which should have been handled by a reality TV President—as ludicrous conspiracy theories, falsehood, and fact mix and mingle with nearly unprecedented virulence.

With these preoccupations in mind, I have painted Mia Farrow from  the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby. Rosemary is a muse for our cultural moment. She believes she is being conspired against by a coven of witches. “This is no dream, this is really happening,” she declares.

Similarly, in this deranging era, anything seems possible.

Even If Rosemary’s plight is actually the result of paranoid hallucinations, might she have access to a special way of seeing? Perhaps the mentally ill have a more multitudinous view of the world? “We murder to dissect,” William Wordsworth warned. In this case, we condescend to Rosemary at our own peril.    

www.morgan-ogilvie.com

Minga Opazo is a fourth-generation textile crafter who explores the relationship between climate change, contemporary textile production, and Chilean textile history and design.

She exposes the unsustainable and dehumanizing practices of the textile industry through large-scale weavings and installations.

www.mingaopazo.com

Alexeis Reyes left Cuba as a political dissident. He received his BA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. As a multi-disciplinary artist he experiments with various media, emphasizing the role of research to inform his process. He uses certain materials to explore the intersection between identity politics, gender, and Diasporic displacement. Through a visual grammar, his work examines how power structures affect corporeal expression, in order to negotiate a critical dialogue that questions ideologies subsumed under socio-political, cultural, economic, and historical discourses. He was part of “DebtFair, Occupy Museums,” Whitney Biennial (2016), a group installation that interrogated the function and position of the artist as “debtor” within the museum structure. In 2019 he received the Félix González-Torres Travel Grant, and began a life-long project that scrutinizes how Cuba legalized censorship for some artists while promoting cultural production.

Some of Alexeis’ work is currently online at Artfare: members.artfare.com/artworks

www.alexeisreyes.com

In June 2019, I traced the fourteen dams of the Colorado River with my body over the course of three weeks, creating a haptic and indexical mapping of a series of structures that are abjectly sublime in their inability to be adequately represented. How else to meet this stolid performance of patriarchal power than with my own queer performativity?

This body of work proposes dams as “settler colonial land art”—immense sculptures that shift the topographies and futures of our environments—where the materials of concrete, wood, and steel are jammed tightly into rock, dirt, and clay. The absurd or invented documentation of this site-specific performance connects the architecture of the land with the architectures of our bodies, both of which are shaped by the same complex flows of power and ideology. Sites of repression (both psychic and structural) generate immense amounts of energy. With this work, I propose an ethics of staying in and grappling with the trouble: creating space for grief, wit(h)ness, and response-ability.

www.hannahrubin.com

Through the use of illusionistic space, humor, color, and gesture, Michelle K. Sauer uses painting as a means to explore idealization in the uncanny. Stemming from the allegorical, the work engages with questions around agency and ontology through a visual myriad of exchanges between the body and its surroundings. Objects become stand-ins for the human body and figures appear to mimic their environment. The “frontside” of the canvas sets a stage for performativity and transformation within the narrative. The “backside,” often facing the viewer first, uses the sculptural industrialization of objects to further embody the unfolding of the rectangular and the politicized nature of space. Legibility within this space is questionable, however, both visually and physically. Work stands dimly lit, grays embody in-betweenness, electrical wires, and interiors remain exposed. The figures, grouped in threes, or the several, push away from dichotomies and into spaces of liminality.

www.michelleksauer.com

Since graduating from California Institute of the Arts with an MFA in Photography & Media in 2020, Andrew Siedenburg has broadened his practice as a visual artist working in photography, film, sound, and painting. His work explores the corollaries of sound and image and the potential within the indexical and the prosaic. Siedenburg is most interested in the musicality of intuitive gestures––where one voice can strengthen itself while raising others through self-invested listening and close observation.

“Four Oranges is one image from a series of ten that uses a number and color for each image to question systems of language, perception, and meaning formation. It was to be released as an artist book in tandem with my final show at CalArts.”

www.andrewsiedenburg.com

As a Chinese female artist born in 1995, my work explores wide-ranging themes including identity, memories, history, migration, and spirituality which unfold in different mediums, ranging from photography, video to performance, sound to sculpture. Inspired by the working methods of self-ethnography, I consciously explore the relationship between an experienced and introspective self and related social phenomena, bridging a deeper understanding of vulnerability within the complexity of reality. My recent work Klio (2019) is a set of sculptures that manifests the manufacture of history and what is lost in the process. I curated a set of bark from a pine tree that was recently cut down and discarded with a piece of plywood I found in the trash—ready-made objects and remains of nature. Klio is the muse of history in Greek mythology who represents capacity as “the proclaimer, glorifier, and celebrator of history, great deeds, and accomplishments.”

www.zhangjiayu.cargo.site

“Invested in the excavation of history, the preservation of traditions, and the retelling of collective memories, I visited places in rural parts of the American West in search of stories from early Chinese immigrants.”

Evelyn Hang Yin is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Working with photography, video, text, and installation, Yin investigates how her personal experiences moving between China and the US inform her cultural identity. Evelyn received a BA in Political Science and Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in Photography and Media from California Institute of the Arts. She was the Media and Production Fellow for Arts in a Changing America and the Research and Archive Fellow for China Alley Preservation Society. She is a recipient of the Allan Sekula Social Documentary Fund and an alumna of the Signal Fire Wide Open Studios Program. She spoke at the 2019 Chinese American Women in History Conference in Washington D.C.

www.evelynyin.com/

I see my art practice as a tool to communicate with my father about my perception and beliefs. Let’s Race offers me a chance to present to him how I perceive our current relationship visually and tangibly. For this project, I invited my dad to join me in a one-kilometer race competition on January 18, 2020. We were running along a lakeside where the miles were marked on the ground. The only rule in this competition was whoever reached the finish line first was the winner. The participant was able to quit if he/she felt physically unable to finish, and the other participant would become the winner automatically.

To record this performance, each of us held a selfie-stick with a GoPro camera attached to capture the changes in our facial expressions, physical conditions, and positions during the race. My final work will consist of two video channels, one of which is the footage from my dad’s race and the other is the footage from my race. The idea of competition is embedded in the change of frame size. At the beginning, the scale of the two videos is equally sized, but it will change based on our position in the race; if I am ahead, the scale of my projection will be bigger in relation to my dad’s and vice versa.

www.liyuanyang.com/