In Conversation Faculty Exhibition 2016

Elliot Anderson’s current research incorporates computer technologies to engage questions about land use and social interventions into the environment.  His recent work, Silicon Monuments - in collaboration with the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition - uses augmented reality software on hand-held devices to create a site-specific, multimedia documentary about toxic Superfund sites in Silicon Valley.  Viewers can explore the sites and interact with the documentary, which reveals hidden environmental damage and its health and social costs.

Melissa Gwyn considers the word reproduction as it pertains to biological and artificial structures. In a recent series of paintings entitled Fabergenic she considers the subject of Assisted Reproductive Technology or ART and embeds within her craft to create parallels between the decadent eggs  conceived in the jeweler’s studio and those forged through the métier of medicine. Splurges of oil paint and preciously crafted imagery on her painting’s surface belie social commentary on class, technology, health and human vanity.

Dee Hibbert-Jones' cross-disciplinary artwork ranges from experimental forms of public art, interventions and participatory practice to sculpture, installations, time-based video and animated film projects. Her research looks at the changing nature of public and private spheres, social connectedness, affect, memory and political feelings. She also researches the role and function of the object in the 21st century, specifically in relation to the environment, landfill, planned obsolescence and the global economy. Currently she is creating an animated film project in collaboration with families of prisoners on death row. This work explores trauma, memory, testimony and democratic truths by looking at the ways power structures and political feelings impact whole communities and how these reactions formulate and create a sense of external and internal reality.

Enrique Leal is a visual artist and Assistant Professor of Print Media at the Art Department  of the University of California in Santa Cruz. Originally from Recife Brazil, Leal has worked as a printmaker in the U.S.A. and Europe before receiving his B.F.A. from the Polytechnique University of Valencia, Spain; M.F.A. and PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Castilla La Mancha, Spain. He is the recipient of printmaking fellowships from the Institute of Iberian-American Culture, the Spanish Academy in Rome, and a visiting artist/teacher at Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Rutgers University.

Jimin Lee combines digital print, photo-digital intaglio and laser cutting processes. Her work seeks to convey a sense of emotional and psychological intensity through re-imagining the mundane and everyday social interactions.  Lee has an extensive background in print media that include both traditional and contemporary and Eastern as well as Western styles and techniques with an understanding of their different histories.

Norman Locks photographs the biodiversity of nature and masters a visual language for speaking about the wilderness.  There is a democracy at work in Locks' imagery.  Every leaf, rock, tree and blade of grass is deserving of attention.  These works present the beauty of the ecosystems, the details, the enormity of the delicate enterprise of nature.  They offer the viewer a powerful sense of belonging to nature and serve as an irrefutable call for stewardship and eco-sensitivity.

A. Laurie Palmer is concerned with material explorations of matter’s active nature as it asserts itself on different scales and in different speeds, and with collaborating on strategic actions in the contexts of social and environmental justice. These two directions sometimes run parallel and sometimes converge, taking form as sculpture, installation, writing, and public projects. Collaboration, with other humans and with non-humans, is a central ethic in her practice.

Her recent book In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material Extraction (Black Dog, London, 2014) investigates what happens to places where materials are removed from the ground, and, once liberated, how these materials move between the earth and our bodies.

Jennifer Parker maintains a multifaceted art practice at the intersection of art and science. The conceptual framework of her research includes a literal, formal, and idiomatic approach to materials and a political, private, and metaphorically abstract attitude toward expression as it relates to information and creativity. This research approach animates a space of possibility by asking the viewer to pay attention to the overlooked details, juxtapositions and interdependencies of our physical and sensory experience in the world around us.

Elizabeth Stephens is a performance artist, filmmaker, activist and educator. Her artwork, performance art and writing have explored themes of queerness, feminism and environmentalism for over 25 years. Her current focus is SexEcology: the art of exploring the Earth as a lover. Stephens is creating this new field of research in collaboration with her partner Annie Sprinkle. Together they are the movers and shakers of the ecosex movement within the field of SexEcology.

Brandin Barón is a painter and a digital media artist.  Over the past year, he has been part of group exhibitions at: Umbrella Arts/Fountain House Gallery (NYC); The Studio Door, Art on 30th (San Diego, CA); The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History; Orange County Creatives (Laguna Beach, CA); Sacramento Art Center, Viewpoint Photographic Center (Sacramento, CA); Richmond Art Center (Richmond, CA); The Annmarie Sculpture Garden and Gallery (Maryland); Meridian Street Gallery (Indianapolis); Spectrum/Miami Photo Salon 2015, Projects Gallery (Miami); Northgate Studio (Chester, UK).

E.G. Crichton is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher who lives in San Francisco. Her work uses a range of art strategies and media to explore social issues, history and site-specific subject matter. She often collaborates within community settings and across disciplines with other visual artists, performers, writers, scientists, composers and others. Her work has been exhibited in art institutions and as public installations in Europe, Asia, Australia and across the US. She has also received grant and fellowship awards from the Creative Work Fund, Southern Exposure, Ragdale Foundation, the KunsthØgskolen (Bergen, Norway), Anderson Ranch Art Center and the San Francisco Arts Commission, to name a few.

Frank Galuszka has been teaching art for over 35 years. He is interested in approaches to painting both contemporary and historical; including the association of individual style with individual personality and the notion that painting is both an example of individual consciousness and a metaphor for individual consciousness; creativity and creative freedom. His work has been exhibited in twenty-six solo exhibits and in over sixty group shows.

Lewis Watts focuses his research and artwork on the photography of African American cultural landscapes, where people live, how they occupy and use space, and the traces they leave behind. He is interested in the cultural roots of architecture and both the intentional and unintentional manipulation of space.

Susana Ruiz is an artist and scholar whose work traverses the intersections of cinema, games, art, ethics and activism. Much of this work takes place via the studio she co-founded, Take Action Games (TAG), which has an evolving portfolio situated at the confluence of game design, participatory culture, social justice, and transmedia storytelling.

Peter Loftus is graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the University of Pennsylvania where he was a student of Neil Welliver. He is inspired by light and specializes in impressionistic landscapes. He is currently teaching a class called Outdoor Painter's Project, which explores contemporary landscape through the practice of plein air painting.

Tra Bouscaren Tra Bouscaren is a post-disciplinary artist and independent researcher.  Trained in Philosophy and Art at Yale and Penn, he is currently finishing his PhD in Media Study at Buffalo from afar.  Working at the intersection of madness, demolition and toxicity, Bouscaren's practice bridges interactive video mapping, found-object assemblage, and painting in the expanded field.  He takes the world itself as a projection of found object/images, through which he must act and re-project.  His output has been featured in nationally and internationally in more than 70 exhibitions.  Since 2007, he has been represented by N2 Gallery, Barcelona.  

Noah Buchanan began his artistic studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he studied classical painting and drawing as well as extensive studies in human anatomy. He received a Bachelor of Arts in 2000 from University of California, Santa Cruz.

His work is based in the academic tradition of the figure, and favors themes of the mythic, symbolic and heroic. He is primarily interested in depicting the human figure as an anatomical event, which houses the spirit of the human condition. He teaches figure drawing and painting at UCSC.

Jeff Andrade Hemming is a Bay Area artist who teaches as a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He grew up in Northern California and studied in Hawaii where he began rendering tropical scenes of the North Shore, Koolau Mountains, and other sites. He has an MFA from Florida State University and currently creates complex works in a maximalist genre. Jeff overlays converging elements in an entropic manner. The elements are images of materials that connote society’s excess materialism.

Kyle Lane-McKinley is an artist and an educator in Santa Cruz, California, where he lives with his partner Madeline Lane-McKinley, and their daughter Tuli. Kyle completed an MFA in Digital Art and New Media at UC Santa Cruz in 2010, where he continues to work as a lecturer, research associate, and as associate director of the Social Practice Arts Research Center. Kyle's pedagogy is informed by his background in worker collectives, popular education projects, and grassroots social movements. His research interests include theories of representation and reification, critical spatial practice, revolutionary feminism, speculative futurism, and counter-cultural history. 

Wes Modes is a Santa Cruz artist focused on social practice, sculpture, performance and new media work. He holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the Digital Art and New Media program at the University of California Santa Cruz. He has exhibited his art and performed regionally since 1996. He is an educator with decades of teaching experience. He currently is a senior instructor with HackBright Academy in San Francisco and lecturer at UC Santa Cruz. He has taught more than thirty classes at Free Skool Santa Cruz, a project he helped form.

Sean Monaghan is an artist, owner of the Bronze Works Fine Arts Foundry, and an instructor at both UC Santa Cruz and Cabrillo Community College. Bronze Works Fine Arts Foundry has been in operation since 1992, and has provided outstanding service to hundreds of artists locally and nationwide.

Kathleen Perry is an educator and artist based in Capitola, CA.  She maintains a practice focusing on connection.  Connection to people, places and ideas manifested through photography, public art and sculpture.  In this photographic project, mere glimpses of inconsequential moments still the activity and provide an opening for noticing. 

Ian Pines’ paintings celebrate the overwhelming gravity of our human condition with a carnival of radiating ecstasies. Everything is electrified with bright color and bravado. It all must be affirmed and criticized! Humor and irony are integral parts of his work. This absurdity is no more humanely or acutely conveyed than through the highly plastic medium of oil paint.