ABOUT THE ARTISTS



SANDOW BIRK

Sandow Birk was born in Detroit, Michigan and raised on the beaches of Orange County, California. He is a graduate of the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles, and resides in Southern California. Subjects of his work include gang violence, graffiti culture, prisons, surfing, skateboarding, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Iraq war, and the Qur’an. Birk creates monumental series developed over the course of many years, often working across media to support his ideas through a multi-disciplinary approach — painting, drawing, printmaking, writing, film, video, and sculpture.

Birk has exhibited in dozens of museum and galleries, and his work is in many public and museum collections including: SFMOMA and the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Getty Center in Los Angeles; the New York Historical Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Harvard University Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Italy; and Stadtisches Kunstmuseum in Reutlingen, Germany. Birk has received an NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Getty Fellowship, and a City of Los Angeles Fellowship. Most recently, Birk’s work has been the subject of several solo exhibition including at The Andy Warhol Museum (2011); McKinney Avenue Contemporary and the San Jose Museum of Art (2012); Arizona State University Library and Millersville University Winter Center Gallery (2013); and The University of Puget Sound Kittridge Gallery (2014). In 2015, W.W. Norton will publish American Qur’an, a book of Birk’s complete series of paintings on this subject, which will coincide with solo exhibitions at Catharine Clark Gallery and the Orange County Museum of Art.

Birk has collaborated with his wife, Elyse Pignolet, who is also a practicing artist, most notably in a series titled The 99 Names of God.

DEBRA BROZ

Debra Broz began her love affair with unusual things while growing up in rural central Missouri. In her art practice, Broz collects and deconstructs secondhand ceramic figurines, then seamlessly combines them into reimagined versions of their former selves. Broz received her BFA from Maryville University - St. Louis in 2003. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Austin, Texas where she trained as a ceramics restorer, learning the techniques that would become the basis for much of her future artwork. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she is an artist, ceramics restorer, and member of curatorial projects Monte Vista Projects and Gallery Also.

Broz’s work has been exhibited at galleries and museums including Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Austin Museum of Art, and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Her work has been featured in print in Ceramics Monthly, American Craft, and Frankie magazines; and in two international surveys of contemporary ceramics.  

Debra Broz - Artist Statement

My modified ceramic sculptures are a product of my continual desire to understand and change the meaning of objects, especially those that were once valued, then discarded. I search thrift stores for decorative figurines, then I dismantle, dissect and recompose them using the techniques of ceramics restoration. I often hunt for months or years to find figurines that are the right match. My seamless surgeries create works that humorously, yet pointedly, reflect the overlap between real science and science-fiction, and offer considerations about the power of kitsch, and the "truth" of objects as they pass from one owner to another.

ELYSE PIGNOLET

Elyse Pignolet’s recent body of work includes items of the domestic realm––wallpaper, plates, platters, and vases feature decorative and traditional hand-painted design. Yet cloaked words or phrases, which express familiar and oppressive ways to stereotype and categorize women, sit unobtrusively within the decoration. Pignolet subverts expectations in a medium associated with both domestic art and feminism, turning her attention to themes of misogyny and inequality. Vases, dishes, and drawings of ceramics are created with traditional, delicate, organic patterns in blue, yet upon closer inspection, images and text containing politically confrontational, unapologetic messaging hide within: suggestive innuendos and tropes that are all too common in our language and culture. The affect is a compelling dissonance between benign decoration and misogynistic message, which makes the viewer confront transitory everyday language frozen onto a permanent vessel. Born in Oakland, CA, Elyse Pignolet is an American with Filipino heritage, living and working in Los Angeles. Pignolet received a BFA in Ceramics from Cal State Long Beach in 2007.

ALICIA PILLER

Los Angeles based artist, Alicia Piller envisions historical traumas, both political and environmental, through the lens of a microscope. Her sculptures and installations conceive of past atrocities, suffering, and accomplishments as biological forms–broken down to a cellular level. A variety of materials including vinyl, latex balloons, and photographs, are employed to examine the energy around wounds societies have inflicted upon themselves and others, but also give optimistic glimpses of a possible future with bright colors that show signs of life and proliferating forms that show signs of growth. Her subject matter is often informed by her studies in anthropology and her sculptural process by her time in fashion and craft making. 

Alicia Piller received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in the spring of 2019.

KRIS RAC

Kris Rac (Kristen Racaniello) is a medievalist, artist, gallerist, curator and writer. They completed a dual BFA/BA in painting/art history from SUNY Purchase College in 2014. Following that they received a Masters in Art History from Hunter College in 2017 and an MPhil from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2020. While pursuing their Masters, Kris became a partner at Field Projects gallery, an artist-run space in Chelsea, NY. They also became the manager for Les Enluminures NY, a private gallery of medieval art. Currently, Racaniello is pursuing a PhD in medieval art history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Kris has exhibited their artwork in galleries throughout the USA and internationally, including most recently at Equity Gallery, Art of Our Century, and ATELIER XIII in Slovakia. 

Rac’s research interests catalogue the relationships between materials within the medieval shrine complex as components of transmedial communication. Sexuality, gender, death, mourning rituals, and shrines can be seen across all mediums and formats of their work. Gender dynamics and their intersection with nationalism have become a particular focus in Rac’s artwork over the past five years as the rise of the “cult of patriotism” has risen to a near-religious status in the United States and internationally, validating an historical culture of toxic masculinity that has sculpted huge political shifts and endangered the lives of previously marginalized individuals.

CAMILLA TAYLOR

Camilla Taylor is recognized for her monochromatic and intensely introspective works on paper and sculpture, which utilize figurative and architectural forms. Taylor’s artworks reflect the viewer’s internal lives as well as collective issues we experience as a society.

An accomplished artist exhibiting in traditional gallery spaces, she also creates installations in intimate and unusual locations, such as site-specific works in a swimming pool, desert garden, and other locations. 

Raised in Provo, Utah, Taylor attended the University of Utah and received a BFA in 2006, and an MFA from California State University at Long Beach in 2011. 

Recent solo and group exhibitions include Your Words in My Mouth, Track 16 (2020); What She Said, ace/121 Gallery, Glendale, CA (2020); Black, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Continuant, Noysky Projects, Hollywood, CA (2019); Other Voices, Woodbury Museum, Provo UT (2019); Didn’t you know what you were carrying on your back?, Rosalux Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2019); Erotic Vulvic Phallis, Pøst Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2019).

Taylor lives in Los Angeles, CA, with her partner and 3 cats. 

CHRIS ULIVO

Christopher Ulivo (b.1977, Brooklyn, NY) lives and works in Ventura, CA. He is an artist, educator and Co-Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles. Ulivo received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. His work, mostly egg tempera paintings, imagine the confluences and collisions of fate, myth, personal lineage and the unintended consequences of unlimited wish fulfillment. The resulting paintings are visually dense and darkly humorous. In the course of his career, he has both exhibited and organized shows across the United States and Europe including: The Benkai Museum,Athens, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Susan Inglett Gallery, NY and the RISD Museum and Axel Obiger, Berlin as well as some pretty questionable places.

CATHY WARD

Born in Kent, England, Ward attended a Catholic Convent served by The Sisters of Mercy, an experience both mind altering and life changing. Redefining a personal spirituality plays a core role in her continuing psychological regeneration. This is reflected in her work which often springs from encounters with life experiences of love, loss and death. Recognised for her intuitive, psychedelic drawings, Ward was awarded resident artist for the ‘Madge Gill-Medium & Visionary’ retrospective exhibition at Orleans House Gallery, London. She continues to exhibit internationally primarily with underground, outsider and visionary venues. Solo exhibitions include ‘Sub Rosa’ 2018 at The Horse Hospital, London; ‘Phantasmata’ 2017 and ‘Solo’ 2015 at The Good Luck Gallery, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include: ‘Romantic Detachment’ at PS1 MoMA NY; ‘Talespinning’ at The Drawing Center, NY; ‘Bridging Two Worlds: The Land of The Living and The Land of The Dead’ at Morbid Anatomy at Greenwood Cemetery, NY; ‘Art & Spirit: Visions of Wonder’ at The College of Psychic Studies, London; ‘Waking The Witch-Old Ways, New Rites’ with Legion Projects and ‘Searching For The Miraculous’ at The Curfew Tower, N. Ireland. A monograph ‘Liberty Realm’ was published by Strange Attractor Press & MIT Press 2020.

NOA YEKUTIELI – ARTIST STATEMENT

Engaging with various mediums including drawing, photography, and a signature manual paper cutting technique, I explore the tension between shared human experiences complicated through cross-cultural perspectives. I work with source images of disasters to metaphorically speak to the universal experiences of destruction, loss, trauma, and memory. Adopting a symbolic relation to ruins, I explore the collective and personal process of remembering and forgetting the past. In an on-going exploration of man-made and natural disasters I use a paper cutting technique to suggest both fragility and permanence. Akin to the demolition of building, swift changes are an absolute act followed by the strained effort to rebuild, leaving permanent scars. The negative space of the paper cuts render absence visible, attesting to a loss of information or misplaced memories. Mirroring the human desire for control, the paper cutting is a labor-induced effort that doesn't allow mistakes. It is an irreversible process that emphasizes the temporality of the human body and demonstrates irreversible destruction. 

I draw from personal experiences to explore conflicts surrounding assimilation and immigration, which are undeniably relevant in today’s globalized reality. Coming from the context of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, my work often incorporates various inconsistent narratives from different cultural contexts that occupy a single space, blurring the line between fiction and fact. Through an evolutionary process of working with images I afford viewers glimpses into the construction and development of narratives. By layering specific images of day to day human interactions, I bring together various stories into a singular frame to examine how larger social and political structures affect the personal realm of empathy and emotion and vice versa. The focus of the works migrates from the personal to the collective and back again to the personal. Reflective materials and are sometimes incorporated in installations to confront the viewer with their own subjectivity and place them within the work. By combining and overlapping images of cities and the people that inhabit them, I look beyond the notion of a singular and secure notions of home and instead find truth in the ephemeral residues.

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