Gallery Artists

Asgar/Gabriel

The paintings of Daryoush Asgar and Elisabeth Gabriel mingle the dynamics of the Baroque and the filmic quality of nineteenth-century historical painting which converge with Pop Art and Abstraction in an epic sprawl of youth culture in search of the heroic. Through the use of art historical idioms the figures are self aware, ironic and iconic, beautiful if somewhat pathetic, seductive, sensuous, opulent and, in gazing out at us, the viewers, they include us in their desires.

Tim Bavington

Music is the genesis of Bavington’s paintings. Through sprayed paint, he translates guitar solos, melodies and bass lines into vertical bands of color that bleed into one another. Tracks from bands such as The Darkness, Oasis and The Stone Roses are transformed into visually hypnotizing color compositions. Although Bavington has a method that designates sound to color and composition, the paintings are not literal translations; they remain open to intuition and decision-making, allowing for a distinct artistic presence.

Mark Bennett

Mark Bennett’s whimsical works engage with pop culture and celebrity to an extreme degree. His blueprint lithographs of Baby Boom era sitcoms and popular television series depict the ultimate pairing of flight of fancy and stoical logic; the purely imaginary floor plans grounded by the dry format of an architect’s design. His works are both pleasingly nostalgic and vaguely disconcerting in their premonition of a society obsessed by television and celebrity culture.

Kim Dorland

Kim Dorland’s paintings depict the real space of his hometown suburbia; free of romantic delusions, but perfectly accepting of quiet, unexpected beauty. His refusal to remain faithful to one medium or approach plays into the symbiotic nature of his work, the deadness of acrylic, the sheen of spray paint, the density of oil paint all convene to engage the viewer. The loose yet identifiable scenes are interjected with areas of heavy abstract impasto, adding to the raw, fleeting quality of his canvases. Dorland is by no means trying to entice his audience with a nostalgic vision of utopia, but rather he cultivates reflection, upon a quiet moment, a party ended, the fleeting beauty within the often ugly and mundane.

Vernon Fisher

Addressing the everyday, Fisher’s multi-media paintings engage with a narrative conceptualism which, when placed over a deliberately misleading grid system, imply that the intent is an informational attempt to solidify meaning. Fisher positively dismisses this possibility via the fluid and interconnected juxtapositions of images and text, which undermine static and singular readings through a mixture of factualities, personal reflection and prognostication, memories and ruminations.

Todd Hebert

The placid pleasures of suburban leisure are set in vaguely unsettling surroundings in Hebert’s paintings. Combining high resolution detailing with imagery that hovers on the edge of perception, Hebert’s work treads the line between abstraction and realism, concrete knowledge and uncertainty.

Julie Heffernan

Akin to Magical Realism, Heffernan’s lush self-portraiture utilizes a myriad of art historical references to present a sensual interior narrative, a self-allegory whose half- hidden political agenda is the literal background of the paintings.  The dark, Grimm fairy tale-like undercurrent transforms her aristocratic, operatic portraits into a contemporary vanitas or memento mori, acting as both a stylized fantasy and a Bosch-like warning.

David Hilliard

Hilliard uses his unique, multi-paneled technique to produce expansive photographs, both figuratively and literally. His sweeping images depict subtle moments of love, family, adolescence, friendship and homoeroticism, with a quiet yet powerful resonance. The multiple panels act as short films; a single work captures the passage of time before our very eyes. Although Hilliard’s photography illustrates his own personal tensions, fears and desires – embroiled in his upbringing and sexuality – they remain universally evocative.

Kiel Johnson

Johnson’s drawings and sculptures tell tales; layered narratives speak of his travels and adventures through everyday life.  His works become a springboard for metaphorical investigations of the world he inhabits. Although both factual fictions and absurd scenarios, they are ultimately testaments to observation that force us to question the concrete and truthful.  What at first might appear safe and secure will be, upon further inspection, very precarious.

Dimitri Kozyrev

Kozyrev regards the current political and military polemic as relative to past Totalitarian and Imperialistic regimes.  He therefore associates contemporary events with the climate of suspicion and censorship (and thus instability) that prevailed in his homeland during the last century, especially in relation to art. The series entitled Lost Edge focuses on notions of the avant-garde and both the military and artistic implications of the phrase.  A Modernist and Constructivist re-arranging of pictorial space references artistic movements at the turn of the last century and acts as a reflection on the censoring of the Avant-garde artists within the increasing totalitarianism of the early Soviet Union.  This body of work illustrates Kozyrev’s contemplation of this history in an attempt to critique, through association, the current state of affairs in both the military and artistic spheres.

Jennifer Nehrbass

Nehrbass’s opulent yet unsettling realist portraits of women are a complex presentation of voyeurism, beauty, femininity, sexuality and independence.  Although obviously influenced by glossy, stylized fashion photography, her paintings seem to document a performance, rather than a pose; she catches her subjects in action, presenting then as more than simply inactive props for their own beauty.  Thus Nehrbass both supports and subverts traditional notions of the gaze and the female portrait, echoing the complexities and contradictions of being a woman in contemporary society.  She explores notions of formulated female identity, and the resulting difficulty of a sense of self, free from media influence and preconceived ideals.  Her work reflects a desire to disarm and subvert accepted ideals of beauty by presenting the unexpected and often confusing, even distasteful.  By seeing these elements of beauty in settings we do not understand or expect, we are forced to reconsider and hopefully to question why our expectations are so limited, so ingrained that we cannot find beauty in the other.

Nobuhito Nishigawara

Nishigawara’s sculptural work plays out the battle of cultural identity in a humorous way with dark undercurrents. The work focuses on the dichotomies and junctures of the two cultures that prevail upon the artist – those of Japan and the US. The resulting strange figures reference various models, including toys, to reflect the commercialization of individual experience that forms our desires and identities. These figures relate and interact with each other, exploring interpersonal and societal connections. Nishigawara utilizes characters, poses and gestures sourced from religion, Manga, J-Pop and traditional Japanese culture – as well as American models – combined with other cultural sources from around the world to create odd visual nexus points of cross pollination.

Gavin Nolan

Gavin Nolan traces the social strata of his environment by utilizing his friends and acquaintances as models, using images taken when they are either drunk or high, at that moment between intoxicated happiness, fun and optimism and the inevitable fall. His cast of characters exists in the moment, eyes bright and clearly painted but faintly unfocussed with a distant smile often in tandem. The sophisticated technique employed – washes, scumbles, delicate line-work and splashes – all condense into subtly unsettling portraits of ravaged beauty with a Dorian Gray quality that addresses the subject’s mortality alongside our own.

Yigal Ozeri

Through his hyperrealistic oil portraits of distinctive young women in lush environments, Yigal Ozeri brings an ethereal sensibility to his tableaus. With tinges of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, Ozeri’s works engage with contemporary theories of femininity and sensuality while offering a revitalized connectivity to nature.

Chad Person

Ozymandias Weeps refers to the Shelley poem, Ozymandias, in which a traveler stumbles across the wreck of a statue in a vast wasteland of desert. The statue has an inscription that reads “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”.  Person’s inflatable, imposing sculpture – alongside his dollar bill collages and other highly conceptual works – reflects upon the confluence of money and power throughout history, and in particular considers current US attitudes that have filtered down from Westward Expansion and notions of Manifest Destiny. The result is a political and cultural critique that encompasses not only the shifting cultural changes that have taken place within Person’s lifetime but also those throughout US history.

Kim Rugg

Rugg’s work consists of literally deconstructing and rearranging newspapers, stamps, comic books and other materials.  Through reassembling and reconstituting them in different forms she corrupts the function or status of the object and highlights the inherent power structures and politics of authority supporting the dissemination of information and knowledge.

David Ryan

Ryan gleans inspiration from the slick colors and lines of cars, electronic gadgets and household appliances to transform mundane, undesirable MDF into luxurious, enticing wall-sculptures. By creating multiple (literal) layers, Ryan explores the way line, shape and shadow interact to produce perceptual conundrums that intrigue his viewer. Thus his multi-layered (conceptual, ,that is) pieces speak not only of glossy consumer products but also refer to phenomenology and complex art theories. His work explores the dynamic between craft and production, art and design, man and machine.

Cordy Ryman

Tinged with humor, Cordy Ryman’s works often contain reflected colors as well as real and painted shadows. The works play with illusion versus reality and attachment versus detachment. Cordy Ryman manipulates and reconstitutes an inherited visual language, defining himself in relation to it.

Jason Salavon

Using software processes of his own design, Salavon generates and reconfigures masses of communal material to present new perspectives on the familiar. Though formally varied, his projects frequently manipulate the roles of individual elements derived from diverse visual populations. This often unearths unexpected patterns in the relationship between the part and the whole, the individual and the group. Reflecting a natural attraction to popular culture and the day-to-day, his work regularly incorporates the use of common references and source material. Often, the final compositions are exhibited as art objects – such as photographic prints and video installations – while others exist in a real-time software context.

Allison Schulnik

Schulnik choreographs her subjects in compositions that embody a spirit of the macabre, a Shakespearian comedy/tragedy of love, death and farce. The subjects often stare back at the audience and study them as they are in turn studied, aware of their ancestors from the Grand Theme works of the past, the genre paintings that inform them. Although a haunting sense of foreboding, discomfort and unease is palpable, a sense of understanding, compassion and hopefulness for her cast of characters is still evident in the heavy impasto paintings.

Ali Smith

Ali Smith uses the canvas as an open space of exploration; an empty landscape that serves as the starting point for investigation into abstract terrains.  Her work illustrates the existential plight the artist has in finding new, personal meaning and direction within the field of abstract painting. The recurring visual trope of Rococo-like excess and abundance performs a celebratory re-assertion of the endless possibilities available to the painter. Smith weaves together fleeting thoughts, moments of time, the fine lines between fact and fiction and subjective desires within her canvases, which in turn present the hopeful attitude of the artist, in the face of the realities of life and experience.

Lisa Stefanelli

With a painstaking process of refinement, Stefanelli’s paintings reify the fleeting mo ment of a gesture or passing movement in an elegant ingestion of the individual into the corporate, logo-like, high gloss of the manufactured image. The resulting dialogue between the individual and their consumer-based world provides the context in which beauty attempts to triumph regardless.

Ryan Taber

Through his research-intensive practice, Taber investigates a broad range of histories, artists, architects, and filmmakers – amongst others – who have contributed to the visual canon that shapes our perception of social and cultural landscapes. His hyper-textual sculptures, drawings, and paintings address cultural objects across centuries – from antiquity to pop culture – to build a coherent vision of the interconnectivity of such discourses, in which he contextualizes cotemporary discussions.

Ben Weiner

By photographing paint and luxurious ephemera at close range, then using the resulting image as his subject, Weiner creates works that pose a confusion of object, subject and medium. Weiner’s paintings harness the idolatrous fetishistic desire of consumer culture, the fashion industry, and the art world. Thus, his paintings self-critically describe the duality of their own identity as both transcendent creation and commercial item. Likewise, all of the themes and references in the paintings reinforce their status as consumer/art objects. Roland Bathes’ application of Freud’s concept of “the uncanny” to landscape photography is the pertinent reference.

Yoram Wolberger

Wolberger uses childhood toys and everyday domestic items to create his large scale sculptures, foregrounding the latent symbolism and cultural paradigms of these objects that so subtly inform Western culture. By enlarging this ephemera to life size, Wolberger emphasizes the distortions of their original manufacture disallowing any real illusion and conceptually forcing the viewer to reconsider their meanings. When enlarged beyond any possibility of dismissal, we see that toy soldiers create lines between Us and Them, plastic cowboys and indians marginalize and stereotype the Other, even wedding cake bride and groom figurines dictate our expected gender roles.

Cindy Wright

The hyperrealism of Wright’s large-scale portraits and still-life paintings can often  (perhaps ironically) bleed into abstraction.  From a distance, her monumental paintings appear to be photo-realistic, displaying snapshot characteristics like cropped composition and intense single source lighting. However, on closer inspection, the range of mark making and painterly applications becomes astoundingly apparent.  The paintings become a perceptual conundrum as an easily recognizable object dissolves into abstract shapes and brush-strokes. They are conceptually rooted within an artistic tradition that forces the viewer to question the nature of how we read and understand the world, and they yet remain entirely contemporary in their painterly treatment. Her subjects are taken from her immediate world and are transformed into iconic and timely images.

Mario Ybarra Jr.

Reputed for “contemporary art that is filtered through a Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles,” Mario Ybarra Jr.’s works operate as examinations of conflated and excluded socio-cultural “norms.” Often encompassing complete environments, histories and narratives – fictional and actual alike – Ybarra’s visual dialogues uphold an autobiographical context that is unique to Southern California, but universal in concept.

Kenichi Yokono

Yokono uses traditional woodblock methodologies to address the comic book horrors of contemporary Japanese culture. Manga, anime, horror movies, and other stereotypical aspects of Japanese pop culture merge to present iconic images of buoyant menace and cruelty, which serve to contrast startlingly with the sugary cartoon characters that are also common. Although functioning woodblocks, the works are only ever exhibited directly and prints are never produced. Such a method maintains the primacy of the hand made object and the artist retains a tangible presence. These multiple oppositions in Yokono’s work results in pieces that are highly relevant critiques that retain a pleasing irony.