Sarrita Hunn

www.cammiestaros.com

Artist Statement
I make sculptures and installations that mine Classical antiquities and the contexts in which we view them. Through a combination of ancient techniques, contemporary sensibility, and museological display, my work folds the past in on itself to reveal semiotic systems developed and reinforced through art history. I try to challenge the dominant historical narrative that places the relics of my own Greek lineage at the origin of the “Western Canon,” adding broader regional and epochal references to reflect the overlapping nature of visual influence and considering the role of the museum in the shaping of such narratives and such canons.

Biography
Staros received her BA in Art and Semiotics from Brown University (2006) and her MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts (2011). She has presented solo exhibitions with Shulamit Nazarian, François Ghebaly, and Lefebvre & Fils galleries. Her work is currently on view in the Ceramics Biennial at the Craft Contemporary Museum and is featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, a Thames & Hudson survey of contemporary sculpture. She has received several awards, grants, and residencies, including a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.

www.nataliesmith.info
IG @natalienfs

Artist Statement
This painting was made as a reflection on the cow or the bull archetype, known to ancient cultures as the Queen of Heaven and creator of the great Milky Way Galaxy. Across cultures and spanning millennia, the cow possesses the power of the eternal mother: birth and rebirth, of expansion and contraction, the life force of Spring, beauty, sex pleasure and becoming. This painting is a continuation of a body of works deailng with my shadow. In these paintings, I am reconciling the conscious and unconscious selves into one whole, honoring space for our experiences that remain on the edge of knowing.

Biography
Natalie Smith (b. 1986 Chicago, IL) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Her practice spans painting, drawing, and sculpture to confront the ways that not only beauty and pleasure, but also ambiguity and bewilderment are necessary in our acts of survival. Recent group shows include U’s in Calgary and Spirit in Los Angeles. Her work has also been exhibited at The Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, NM, the University of New Mexico Art Museum and in a public project with the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. This fall, Natalie was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. She received her BFA from the University of Illinois and MFA from The University of New Mexico.

www.martyschnapf.com
IG @marty_schnapf

Artist Statement
I work with the inconstant emotional and psychological space experienced in dream, desire, memory, and premonition. In Par la main, a woman’s right hand signs, salutes, and shades. Light breaks in a partial spectrum across her palm. She looks out beneath a broad-brimmed hat through the shadow of her hand. A second set of eyes (second sight) peer from her upturned collar. Button loops open like mouths mid-breath, but she remains close-lipped. Her left hand draws the coat tighter or removes it. One hand sees. The other decides how much to reveal.

Biography
Born in 1977, Marty Schnapf received his BFA from Wittenberg University and studied in Italy through the Lamar Dodd School of Art. He has exhibited work throughout the U.S. and internationally with recent solo exhibitions at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles, Alice Black Gallery in London, Soulangh Cultural Park in Tainan, and Wilding Cran Gallery in Los Angeles. He is the recipient of numerous international residencies and grants including, most recently, the 2017 Rema Hort Mann Community Engagement Grant.

www.shelby-roberts.com
IG @williamshelbyroberts

Artist Statement
Through sculpture, video, and photography, Shelby Roberts has spent over thirty years peering into and stabbing at the darker corners of American life. His images are beautiful, replete with irony, often imagining something better of our character than one might otherwise perceive. His sense of humor appears offering an escape, launching a psychic lifeboat. Roberts’ most recent project Origin Myth is on view February 2020 – June 2020 at Foto Forum, Santa Fe. This project started in 2018 as a series of color photographs made on the side roads along the I40 corridor between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City. It is a long drive Roberts made frequently to address obligations calling from both ends. The project expanded in 2019 to include locations in Kentucky and New England while contemplating the remains of those troubles.

Biography
Shelby Roberts was born in Oklahoma City, OK and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Roberts’s photography has been exhibited nationally at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis, IN; the Supreme Trading Annex Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and the Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles, CA to name a few. Roberts counts among his major influences, Walker Evans, John Cassavetes, and Townes Van Zandt, He received his BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and an MFA in art from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California. He is faculty in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine.

www.mamiko.biz

Biography
Mamiko Otsubo was born in Nishinomiya, Japan, in 1974. Her work has recently been featured in the solo exhibition Sky Lobby at Cleopatra’s in New York (2015) and Lullin + Ferrari in Zürich, Switzerland (2013), and included in the group show Minimal Baroque at Rønnebæksholm in Næstved, Denmark (2014). Recent public art commissions include Bold Tendencies in London, Lujiazui Harbour City in Shanghai, PS 313Q in New York, Public Art Fund in New York, and Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. Having first earned her BA in economics from the University of California, San Diego, she went on to study fine art at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and receive her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She is a recipient of the Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, which was awarded by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and has held artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and Statens Værksteder for Kunst in Copenhagen. In 2017 she was commissioned by the City of Seattle to realize a three-part public art project for the Center City Connector streetcar in 2020. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

www.joetken.com
IG @jotkn

Biography
Jordie Oetken is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her photographs use scale, lighting, and strategies of containment to maintain a continuous tension, asking the viewer to oscillate between their desire for calcification and the ambiguous narrative power of the image. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, Oetken has held residencies at the Lighthouse Works, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Vermont Studio Center. She received her MFA from UCLA in 2017.

www.benwolfnoam.com
IG @wolf_noam

Biography
Ben Wolf Noam was born in Cambridge, MA, in 1987, and received a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. He has exhibited throughout America, Eu- rope and the Middle East. Exhibitions include The Breeder Gallery (Athens) Suzanne Geiss Co. (New York), Museo di Capodimonte (Naples, Italy), SADE Gallery(Los Ange- les), Metropolitan Art Society (Beirut, Lebanon),10 Hanover Gallery(London, England), and others. He has had performances commissioned by Night Gallery and PS1 MoMA.

Ben Wolf Noam’s visual, curatorial, and performative work has been presented in The Observer, Vice, T Magazine, ArtFCity, Art in America, Artforum, Nylon, Purple Maga- zine and many others. He lives and works in Los Angeles.