Kelly Campanella
BIO: finds beauty and inspiration on the streets of her home—Long Beach, CA. She uses the neighborhoods she lives in as a foundation to explore how humans become products of their environment.
Her work stems from injustice and community dilemmas, with an emphasis on the importance of the process. Through her inward journey, she relies on this process to let shapes manifest themselves. Abstract designs, free-flowing drips, quick tags, and street-based inspirations keep her work flowing. Although there is an initial concept at the outset of each piece, she chooses not to let those ideas dictate what the end result will be. The final narrative is often ambiguous and can vary with the perception of each viewer.
Artist Statement:
My environment and how it shapes me is my biggest inspiration. Using youth as a model for my figurative narrative work and incorporating bright colors and childish mark making, I aim to create a familiar yet unsettling environment. Although my work stems from injustice and community dilemmas I never forget the importance of the process. Quick lines, abstract designs, free-flowing drips, and street-based inspirations keep my work flowing. I rely on the process of letting things manifest themselves. Although there is an initial concept, I choose not to let the ideas dictate what the end result will be. The final narrative is often ambiguous and can vary with the perception of each viewer. The figures, often ambiguous as well, show my interest in my community. I use the neighborhoods I live in as a foundation to explore how humans become products of the environment. I often use children to depict feelings of innocence, confusion, raw emotion, and love. The work touches on issues of social status, gender roles, family expectations, political issues and the joys and struggles of life. As an artist I challenge myself to always push the limits of my work, and to continue to bring my art in the community. With inspiration from the Mexican muralist’s of the 1920’s and from artists such as the Clayton Brothers, Swoon, and Os Gemeos, I have found a passion for creating large-scale personal narrative paintings about my community. The images often walk on the edge of humor while the environments I create often bring a feeling of awkward familiarity. It is in my paintings that I tell a personal story; it is my hope that those stories continue to open up dialogue and honor creativity long after the product is complete.
Travis Ott Conn
BIO: Long Beach resident, Travis Ott-Conn, has been making art since childhood. The museum's hallowed archives, the art gallery's audacious artists, and the total saturation of popular culture: These are the forces of consumerism and capitalism at work versus the conservation and recycling that our environment requires. Inspiring his latest "Green Works", Travis has composed them mostly of found and reused materials defying usual conventions of archival artwork and fine art materials. To depict a human environment using found pieces of the environment illustrates how intimately related we are to the things we consume.
Artist Statement:
All of us at times exist in a series of constructed environments and in the transitions in-between them. The knowledge that the physical components of our lives are rarely unique becomes ubiquitous. The common experiences of our architectural surroundings, advertising, pollution, traffic, population and construction/destruction punctuate our lives and create striking disparities between our animal nature and our actual experience. This work seeks to capture the density of that city center, the expanse of a barren dump and the rumpled folds of a homeless man's belongings. Through the use of used and found materials we can explore the experience of physical scale, density and overlap using urban refuse. The re-appropriated paper, cardboard and other bits contain intrinsic evidence of a previous life. The differing types of materials create surface texture and quality of line that fluctuate between their former existence and their new visual/narrative purpose, transforming the sum of these materials into something truly unique. The figures inhabiting the slightly warped landscapes allow themselves to be a conduit to confusion between the recognizable space and the physicality of the worn surface. While based on line, light and shadow, these works are simultaneously sculptural and the 2-D pictorial depth is punctuated by a 3rd dimension that comes only with a concentrated layering effort of the materials. Through the process of collecting refuse and reference, up until the final work, the process of accumulation and the nature of making a mixed-media collage is not unlike the growth of a city or civilization which puts multiple layers upon previously existing situations. This process continues until only thin seams of the original ground may still be observed.
Andrew Cortes
BIO: Born: November 1985 in Southern CaliforniaBFA Drawing & Painting Minor Comparative World Literature California State University Long Beach Lives and Works in: Los Angeles, CA
Artist Statement:
I enjoy the little, finer, more intimate things in life. The here and the now play an important role in my work and me as a person. I do not make work that is made to last forever, I make work I hope will breathe and change over time, decay and die as we do. The vessel in which I explore these ideas is what keeps me interested...I don't feel connected to one subject for too long, instead I continuously feel as though I'm in the midst of transition, a constant state of arrival and departure within ideas. Some may see this as lacking continuity, but I instead see it as immensely full of possibilities.
David Cortes
BIO: Born: April 11, 1991Work/ Live: Los Angeles, CA
Artist statement:
I photograph because it's one of the very few things, which make complete sense to me in a world, which often makes no sense at all.
"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."
-Pablo Picasso
Viraag Desai
BIO: Viraag Desai is a painter and graphic designer born in Kolkata India. While he studied in school to become an engineer, he has apprenticed under several artists throughout his childhood, most of who were well versed in folk art and watercolors, the preferred method of painting in West Bengal. He has been exhibiting from the age of 13, in galleries both in India and America. His interests lie in the cultural and technical interchange between countries, often drawing from local art and interpreting with new materials and techniques .In 2005 he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he worked in a variety of media, from graphic design to woodblock printing to bronze sculpture, alongside his painting practice. He currently manages and exhibits in the Kolkata based art gallery 'Tejas', while creating work in his downtown Los Angeles studio.
Artist Statement:
The cesspool of urban life should not be represented in graphic from. It is a giant feast of confectionaries slowly oozing off is tray onto the nice clean tablecloth. It is the crap that a porter has to carry on his back, day after day, until he finally gives up. Everything seems to be on the verge of collapse.
Jessica Lah
Artist Statement:
In contrast to the usual ideal representation of landscape of elegant beauty, I focus on images of industry, decay, and transition. I have been painting oil refineries, shipping ports, water treatment plants, and motor scrap yards. These images are either painted directly or composed from collected sketches and photographs. The sites where utilitarian use reigns over aesthetics do not mask the scars of strain, neglect, disuse, and demolition, but instead bare a humanistic quality through stress fractures throughout the industrial age. Fine details in the structures reveal a history by which man and nature has left trace evidence that is neglect but then rediscovered when I observe and paint. I pay careful attention to the complexity of pipes, concrete blocks, and steal structures in order to make new discoveries. The drawing warps the structures from the low, close proximity by which they are perceived while the paint and color often disintegrating structures as light shifts and refracts a spectrum of color throughout the day.
My research is conducted on site as directly gathering research eliminates preconceptions and maintains a more non-objective perspective of the atmosphere. I make frequent weekly visits to particular places to paint, explore, conduct interviews, and embrace scenic sensations. Exploration unveils mystery and excitement while drawing becomes and method to organize and understand thoughts by connecting lines, color and shapes.
I document industrial structures through drawing and paint to slow the process of observation down and capture a span of time through the humanistic perspective and hand of an artist to echo the humanistic quality I see in each industrial landscape. The structures are offered as potential symbols and narratives to the history of growth in the industrial age and may possibly reveal the direction by which the world redirects their values as we redefine an era of industry. My inclusion in the landscape marks a still moment of time.
Valentine Malone III
BIO: A young Long Beach expatriates and graduate creating for the sake of finding his own space.
Artist Statement:
A process, which has evolved from a simple resentment of advertising, into an examination of my surroundings through an admiration of their existence. Restructuring of signage and text commonly found in everyday use.
Carlos Oropeza
BIO: Born in 1976 in the UK, to Mexican parents, Carlos Oropeza is the son of a teacher and a scientist who left behind the arts as a path in life. He watched and admired his father's talent and love for photography through most of his life. Once schooled in mechanical engineering in Mexico City, he switched gears years later and decided to pursue his attraction for the arts by attending film school in Chicago.
Now in LA, Carlos Oropeza's photography, a relatively new endeavor, may very well be attributed to his passion for cinematography and visuals in a variety of forms. His work has ranged from the very subtle and naturalistic, to the strange and abstract; all heavily influenced by the style of cinematographers such as Christopher Doyle and Rodrigo Prieto. Even in still form, one can find the presence of dynamic elements of filmmaking and the rhythm and repetition of poetry, as well as the clean and meticulous aesthetic of anime. Most of his work inherently conveys an interesting mix of schooling, from the structure of science to the freedom of the arts. Yet, it is always affected by the impact of having experienced different cultures around the world. It is an ever-evolving permutation of disciplines; a rich and flooded interaction between form, color and texture.
Artist statement:
1 part deconstruction, 1 part isolation, shaken well. The theme is one of deconstruction and isolation of the mundanely common (of the present and of the hidden). Like pulling on a loose thread of a brand new garment until you're left with a string of unraveling textures. Like the feeling of bare skin brushing aside the first layer of sun burnt sand to uncover the catalyst for a gasp of relief that lies beneath it...
Ya'el Pedroza
BIO: Ya’el currently lives in Huntington Beach, recently received her M.F.A. at California State University at Long Beach, and her B.F.A. at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village, Nevada. She has shown her art nationally in-group shows throughout New York, Florida, Washington, Nevada, Oregon, Wisconsin, and recently in the OsCene show in Southern California at the Laguna Art Museum. Ya’el has also participated in-group shows internationally in Italy, and Denmark at the Roennebaeksholm Arts and Culture Center.
Artist Statement:
This body of work is concerned with man’s footprint on our biological environment and how it is altered by certain deliberate and unintentional interactions. Issues that I am most interested in are genetically modified organisms and human refuse. If abused, these two concerns can lead to severe consequences. As our food sources and certain advanced medical practices become saturated with genetic manipulation, both new dilemmas arise as well as the hope for something better. On the topic of man’s refuse, we consume products that will soon become obsolete, and are fated as unwanted trash. Therefore, an increasing need for ingenuity within man’s imagination must rise to the challenge of making trash into treasure.
I design mutated organisms that reflect the uncertainties of what lies ahead when we mess with Eden. I commonly use actual trash such as plastic bags in my work as a base layer under other processes such as printmaking, drawing, and painting. I frequently come across challenges of how to utilize the trash and media that I apply in the most environmentally friendly way. By combining various media I create many layers that mimic the ongoing organic changes in living creatures. These life forms merge with refuse, assimilating its properties into their DNA, thus becoming altered forever and unknowingly as they try to survive. In turn, this threatens our natural biodiversities.
Katie Reinman
Artist Statement:
I have always been inspired and intrigued by the world around me. Often times my work reflects how I interpret this world and the way I feel within it, while aiming to find some common ground with others. This can be as simple as the beauty I find within a certain object to a more social or political statement. I find myself exploring my role as a woman, and especially what it means to be a woman and an artist. My most recent piece literally points the finger at the audience. How does one feel when they are pointed at? In reflection of all the corruption we have created in our world today, I hope to remind the viewer that we are responsible for every action we make and experience we go through. For this reason I choose not to duplicate any one hand, emphasizing the importance of the individual. The weight of the material being used reinforces this idea. From a distance the hands may look all alike. The white of the piece helps to create this uniformity. It is how a group comes together that creates a stronger presence and hopefully a stronger impact on whatever issue is being confronted. Rather than feeling attacked I hope that the viewer can walk away with a sense of empowerment and a better awareness of themselves as an individual.
Niko Sonnberger
BIO: Hatched out of an Easter egg 187 day before Halley’s comet appeared. She is an avid collector of unicorn blood and always eats the crust on her sandwiches. Niko is an active member in the Church of Google and can ingest any liquid (except milk) via her tear ducts. Her last word will be “tinkle”.
Artist Statement:
I would describe my photography as the unease that Jackie-O must have felt when Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday to John F. Kennedy.
BIO: finds beauty and inspiration on the streets of her home—Long Beach, CA. She uses the neighborhoods she lives in as a foundation to explore how humans become products of their environment.
Her work stems from injustice and community dilemmas, with an emphasis on the importance of the process. Through her inward journey, she relies on this process to let shapes manifest themselves. Abstract designs, free-flowing drips, quick tags, and street-based inspirations keep her work flowing. Although there is an initial concept at the outset of each piece, she chooses not to let those ideas dictate what the end result will be. The final narrative is often ambiguous and can vary with the perception of each viewer.
Artist Statement:
My environment and how it shapes me is my biggest inspiration. Using youth as a model for my figurative narrative work and incorporating bright colors and childish mark making, I aim to create a familiar yet unsettling environment. Although my work stems from injustice and community dilemmas I never forget the importance of the process. Quick lines, abstract designs, free-flowing drips, and street-based inspirations keep my work flowing. I rely on the process of letting things manifest themselves. Although there is an initial concept, I choose not to let the ideas dictate what the end result will be. The final narrative is often ambiguous and can vary with the perception of each viewer. The figures, often ambiguous as well, show my interest in my community. I use the neighborhoods I live in as a foundation to explore how humans become products of the environment. I often use children to depict feelings of innocence, confusion, raw emotion, and love. The work touches on issues of social status, gender roles, family expectations, political issues and the joys and struggles of life. As an artist I challenge myself to always push the limits of my work, and to continue to bring my art in the community. With inspiration from the Mexican muralist’s of the 1920’s and from artists such as the Clayton Brothers, Swoon, and Os Gemeos, I have found a passion for creating large-scale personal narrative paintings about my community. The images often walk on the edge of humor while the environments I create often bring a feeling of awkward familiarity. It is in my paintings that I tell a personal story; it is my hope that those stories continue to open up dialogue and honor creativity long after the product is complete.
Travis Ott Conn
BIO: Long Beach resident, Travis Ott-Conn, has been making art since childhood. The museum's hallowed archives, the art gallery's audacious artists, and the total saturation of popular culture: These are the forces of consumerism and capitalism at work versus the conservation and recycling that our environment requires. Inspiring his latest "Green Works", Travis has composed them mostly of found and reused materials defying usual conventions of archival artwork and fine art materials. To depict a human environment using found pieces of the environment illustrates how intimately related we are to the things we consume.
Artist Statement:
All of us at times exist in a series of constructed environments and in the transitions in-between them. The knowledge that the physical components of our lives are rarely unique becomes ubiquitous. The common experiences of our architectural surroundings, advertising, pollution, traffic, population and construction/destruction punctuate our lives and create striking disparities between our animal nature and our actual experience. This work seeks to capture the density of that city center, the expanse of a barren dump and the rumpled folds of a homeless man's belongings. Through the use of used and found materials we can explore the experience of physical scale, density and overlap using urban refuse. The re-appropriated paper, cardboard and other bits contain intrinsic evidence of a previous life. The differing types of materials create surface texture and quality of line that fluctuate between their former existence and their new visual/narrative purpose, transforming the sum of these materials into something truly unique. The figures inhabiting the slightly warped landscapes allow themselves to be a conduit to confusion between the recognizable space and the physicality of the worn surface. While based on line, light and shadow, these works are simultaneously sculptural and the 2-D pictorial depth is punctuated by a 3rd dimension that comes only with a concentrated layering effort of the materials. Through the process of collecting refuse and reference, up until the final work, the process of accumulation and the nature of making a mixed-media collage is not unlike the growth of a city or civilization which puts multiple layers upon previously existing situations. This process continues until only thin seams of the original ground may still be observed.
Andrew Cortes
BIO: Born: November 1985 in Southern CaliforniaBFA Drawing & Painting Minor Comparative World Literature California State University Long Beach Lives and Works in: Los Angeles, CA
Artist Statement:
I enjoy the little, finer, more intimate things in life. The here and the now play an important role in my work and me as a person. I do not make work that is made to last forever, I make work I hope will breathe and change over time, decay and die as we do. The vessel in which I explore these ideas is what keeps me interested...I don't feel connected to one subject for too long, instead I continuously feel as though I'm in the midst of transition, a constant state of arrival and departure within ideas. Some may see this as lacking continuity, but I instead see it as immensely full of possibilities.
David Cortes
BIO: Born: April 11, 1991Work/ Live: Los Angeles, CA
Artist statement:
I photograph because it's one of the very few things, which make complete sense to me in a world, which often makes no sense at all.
"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."
-Pablo Picasso
Viraag Desai
BIO: Viraag Desai is a painter and graphic designer born in Kolkata India. While he studied in school to become an engineer, he has apprenticed under several artists throughout his childhood, most of who were well versed in folk art and watercolors, the preferred method of painting in West Bengal. He has been exhibiting from the age of 13, in galleries both in India and America. His interests lie in the cultural and technical interchange between countries, often drawing from local art and interpreting with new materials and techniques .In 2005 he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he worked in a variety of media, from graphic design to woodblock printing to bronze sculpture, alongside his painting practice. He currently manages and exhibits in the Kolkata based art gallery 'Tejas', while creating work in his downtown Los Angeles studio.
Artist Statement:
The cesspool of urban life should not be represented in graphic from. It is a giant feast of confectionaries slowly oozing off is tray onto the nice clean tablecloth. It is the crap that a porter has to carry on his back, day after day, until he finally gives up. Everything seems to be on the verge of collapse.
Jessica Lah
Artist Statement:
In contrast to the usual ideal representation of landscape of elegant beauty, I focus on images of industry, decay, and transition. I have been painting oil refineries, shipping ports, water treatment plants, and motor scrap yards. These images are either painted directly or composed from collected sketches and photographs. The sites where utilitarian use reigns over aesthetics do not mask the scars of strain, neglect, disuse, and demolition, but instead bare a humanistic quality through stress fractures throughout the industrial age. Fine details in the structures reveal a history by which man and nature has left trace evidence that is neglect but then rediscovered when I observe and paint. I pay careful attention to the complexity of pipes, concrete blocks, and steal structures in order to make new discoveries. The drawing warps the structures from the low, close proximity by which they are perceived while the paint and color often disintegrating structures as light shifts and refracts a spectrum of color throughout the day.
My research is conducted on site as directly gathering research eliminates preconceptions and maintains a more non-objective perspective of the atmosphere. I make frequent weekly visits to particular places to paint, explore, conduct interviews, and embrace scenic sensations. Exploration unveils mystery and excitement while drawing becomes and method to organize and understand thoughts by connecting lines, color and shapes.
I document industrial structures through drawing and paint to slow the process of observation down and capture a span of time through the humanistic perspective and hand of an artist to echo the humanistic quality I see in each industrial landscape. The structures are offered as potential symbols and narratives to the history of growth in the industrial age and may possibly reveal the direction by which the world redirects their values as we redefine an era of industry. My inclusion in the landscape marks a still moment of time.
Valentine Malone III
BIO: A young Long Beach expatriates and graduate creating for the sake of finding his own space.
Artist Statement:
A process, which has evolved from a simple resentment of advertising, into an examination of my surroundings through an admiration of their existence. Restructuring of signage and text commonly found in everyday use.
Carlos Oropeza
BIO: Born in 1976 in the UK, to Mexican parents, Carlos Oropeza is the son of a teacher and a scientist who left behind the arts as a path in life. He watched and admired his father's talent and love for photography through most of his life. Once schooled in mechanical engineering in Mexico City, he switched gears years later and decided to pursue his attraction for the arts by attending film school in Chicago.
Now in LA, Carlos Oropeza's photography, a relatively new endeavor, may very well be attributed to his passion for cinematography and visuals in a variety of forms. His work has ranged from the very subtle and naturalistic, to the strange and abstract; all heavily influenced by the style of cinematographers such as Christopher Doyle and Rodrigo Prieto. Even in still form, one can find the presence of dynamic elements of filmmaking and the rhythm and repetition of poetry, as well as the clean and meticulous aesthetic of anime. Most of his work inherently conveys an interesting mix of schooling, from the structure of science to the freedom of the arts. Yet, it is always affected by the impact of having experienced different cultures around the world. It is an ever-evolving permutation of disciplines; a rich and flooded interaction between form, color and texture.
Artist statement:
1 part deconstruction, 1 part isolation, shaken well. The theme is one of deconstruction and isolation of the mundanely common (of the present and of the hidden). Like pulling on a loose thread of a brand new garment until you're left with a string of unraveling textures. Like the feeling of bare skin brushing aside the first layer of sun burnt sand to uncover the catalyst for a gasp of relief that lies beneath it...
Ya'el Pedroza
BIO: Ya’el currently lives in Huntington Beach, recently received her M.F.A. at California State University at Long Beach, and her B.F.A. at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village, Nevada. She has shown her art nationally in-group shows throughout New York, Florida, Washington, Nevada, Oregon, Wisconsin, and recently in the OsCene show in Southern California at the Laguna Art Museum. Ya’el has also participated in-group shows internationally in Italy, and Denmark at the Roennebaeksholm Arts and Culture Center.
Artist Statement:
This body of work is concerned with man’s footprint on our biological environment and how it is altered by certain deliberate and unintentional interactions. Issues that I am most interested in are genetically modified organisms and human refuse. If abused, these two concerns can lead to severe consequences. As our food sources and certain advanced medical practices become saturated with genetic manipulation, both new dilemmas arise as well as the hope for something better. On the topic of man’s refuse, we consume products that will soon become obsolete, and are fated as unwanted trash. Therefore, an increasing need for ingenuity within man’s imagination must rise to the challenge of making trash into treasure.
I design mutated organisms that reflect the uncertainties of what lies ahead when we mess with Eden. I commonly use actual trash such as plastic bags in my work as a base layer under other processes such as printmaking, drawing, and painting. I frequently come across challenges of how to utilize the trash and media that I apply in the most environmentally friendly way. By combining various media I create many layers that mimic the ongoing organic changes in living creatures. These life forms merge with refuse, assimilating its properties into their DNA, thus becoming altered forever and unknowingly as they try to survive. In turn, this threatens our natural biodiversities.
Katie Reinman
Artist Statement:
I have always been inspired and intrigued by the world around me. Often times my work reflects how I interpret this world and the way I feel within it, while aiming to find some common ground with others. This can be as simple as the beauty I find within a certain object to a more social or political statement. I find myself exploring my role as a woman, and especially what it means to be a woman and an artist. My most recent piece literally points the finger at the audience. How does one feel when they are pointed at? In reflection of all the corruption we have created in our world today, I hope to remind the viewer that we are responsible for every action we make and experience we go through. For this reason I choose not to duplicate any one hand, emphasizing the importance of the individual. The weight of the material being used reinforces this idea. From a distance the hands may look all alike. The white of the piece helps to create this uniformity. It is how a group comes together that creates a stronger presence and hopefully a stronger impact on whatever issue is being confronted. Rather than feeling attacked I hope that the viewer can walk away with a sense of empowerment and a better awareness of themselves as an individual.
Niko Sonnberger
BIO: Hatched out of an Easter egg 187 day before Halley’s comet appeared. She is an avid collector of unicorn blood and always eats the crust on her sandwiches. Niko is an active member in the Church of Google and can ingest any liquid (except milk) via her tear ducts. Her last word will be “tinkle”.
Artist Statement:
I would describe my photography as the unease that Jackie-O must have felt when Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday to John F. Kennedy.
