Graphite 13, 2022

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

GRAPHITE XIII is an omen.

Or is the thirteen just a coincidence?

How we perceive omens, whether we want to view them as predictions or coincidences, is our choice. How we interpret these signs—whether they are transmissions from the divine, natural phenomena, or the spirit world—is variable and specific. But no matter the source, the truth of the omen remains. Whether auspice or forewarning, omens must be untangled and translated.

Reading omens can be difficult, but mystery is welcome. Do the crows spell luck for love or augur misery? What is to be made of the subconscious tendency to decipher nature as the world’s indications of what is to come? Omens exist outside of the binary of good and evil; they are moments of sibylline reflection.

The artists of GRAPHITE XIII explore omens of the world as signs, indications, or nothing at all. It is the coexistence of fears, intentions, and hopes embedded within an omen that makes them so alluring. GRAPHITE XIII is an investigation of omens on a semiotic/symbolic level and as a personal, intimate belief system.

The theme of omen called to us as co-editors, in the way omens are supposed to – subtly, but with the pull of a rip tide. Our desire to compile this book of omens was strong. We felt the need to reveal the ways artists decode and characterize the signs and symbols of premonition. To uncover an auspice is no easy trick, it takes acute observation and hard belief. The oft-banality of omens, leaves them frequently unread by unfamiliar observers, but they appear for the right eyes (and ears?).

The thirteenth issue of GRAPHITE is brought to you by us and a team of many dedicated GRAPHITE members at UCLA with support from Hammer Museum’s Academic Programs staff. Thank you to Hallie Scott and alea adigweme for your invaluable guidance and trust in producing this journal - we are so grateful for you.

Louise Buckley, Talia Markowitz, and Shari Wei

LEO HORTON

ESTEBAN A. GONZALEZ

TOMMY SVENINGSSON KREK

KYLIE MANNING

ADALI SCHELL

TOMMY SVENINGSSON KREK

F. GARCIA RODRIGUEZ

RACHEL BOS

MAX CAPUS

HENRY CHAPMAN

ISABELLA ROSE

BOB VIERA

CLAIRE DOWNES WHITEHURST

STEPHANIE MEI HUANG

SHANI STRAND

IZZY DENT

GIANCARLOS CAMPOS

MARY HERBERT

CJ

WORKS

2 signs and symbols plucked from world and scratched onto paper mixed media

LEO HORTON

ESTEBAN A. GONZALEZ

Ai! Dios mío tattoo on skin

TOMMY

SVENINGSSON KREK Nattfackla acrylic on cotton 40 x 40 cm

KYLIE MANNING

Doldrums oil on linen

68 X 96 inches 2021

ADALI SCHELL

Dive, Cross photograph

Morro Bay ink, charcoal and pasteol on paper

XAVIER VILLAURRUTIA

They say the streets flow, tenderly, nocturnal. The lights aren’t so vivid that they unsheathe the secret, the secret that the men who come and go know well, as they are all within that secret and nothing is to be accomplished in its shattering yeah... on the contrary, it’s so sweet to guard it and share it only with that chosen fellow. If each one would say in any given moment, in one word, what he thinks, that four letter word—WISH, would form a luminous scar, a constellation, older, and yet more alive, than the others. And that constellation would be like a searing pendulum inside of night’s vast abdomen or better yet, like Geminis that for the first time, face each other, eye-to-eye, and embrace, now, forever.

Suddenly the river-street populates with thirsting beings. They walk, they lurk, they seek. They exchange glances, steal smiles. Surprising pairs form...

TRANSLATED BY F. GARCIA RODRIGUEZ

There are bends and benches, shady corners deep and indefinable in form. and gaping holes of blinding light, and doors which head to the slightest pry.

The river-street momentarily deserts. Then, it upstreams even itself wishing to start anew. A paralyzing moment idles, the whole world eager, like the heart between two spasms. But a new pulse, a new flutter brings parched souls to the river-street anew. They crisscross, entangle, and levitate skimming the soil’s surface.

They swim on foot—miraculous— and no one would suggest it’s not a strut. They are losÁngeles Having touched down on earth having taken invisible freeways. They reside in the Pacific, the sky’s mirror, in vessels of smoke and shadow, to fuse themselves with, and be mistook for mortals, to cranial-dip between the thighs of women, to allow the feverish other’s hands to track their bodies down, and that other bodies seek them out until they are found, like how two lips shut to form one mouth, to exhaust their pent-up mouths, to untie their fiery tongues, to recite the songs, the swears, the vulgarities, through which man rehearses the archaic mystery of flesh, blood, and desire.

They have names of course, divinely simple— Dick or John, or Marvin or Louis. In nothing but their beauty are they discernible from mortals. They walk, they lurk, they seek. They exchange glances, steal smiles. Surprising pairs form.

They grin maliciously as they savor the shaft of the hotel elevator, upwardly flexing their measured ascent. On their naked bodies are celestial marks: omens, stars, jade runes— which they flaunt on the bed, drowning in the pillows, which even here recall, for a moment, the clouds. But they close their eyes to succumb to the novelty of their unexplored incarnation, and when they sleep, they dream not with the Angels but with the mortals.

LosAngeles,California,1936.

Hot On Heels of Love

RACHEL BOS

Graphite on paper

14 x 17”

MAX CAPUS

A time I remember oh so well chalk pastel and collage on panel 18”x24”

HENRY CHAPMAN

Blue Triangle Green Triangle acrylic and ink on canvas with custom blocks

ISABELLA ROSE

Maggot

ISABELLA ROSE

Incubator

socks, pantyhose, paper mache, resin, polymer clay, mdf, plastic

BOB VIERA

Lip-lock oil on canvas

2021

STEPHANIE MEI HUANG

how to hobble a young horse (still) mini-DV transferred to digital, sound 2022

STEPHANIE MEI HUANG

requiem for my damsel oil on canvas sisal, horseshoes

2020

SHANI STRAND

when you’re dead, you’re dead (whatever that means) concrete, tar, tiles, wood, paint, latex, sorrel, nail, clay

IZZY DENT Roadkill video stills

GIANCARLOS CAMPOS

Sketch #10 mixed media and collage on paper

GIANCARLOS CAMPOS

Sketch #4

mixed media and collage on paper

MARY HERBERT Family

soft pastel on paper

CJ SHAW

It’s Dark and Hell is Hot oil on panel

ALEXA HAWKSWORTH

Lunch

graphite and conté on paper

HECTOR NEVAREZ MAGAÑA

Watching myself watching tv photograph

HECTOR NEVAREZ MAGAÑA

Chopping wood before the shrooms kicked in photograph

A Relayed Message from the Dream World, Trying to Become an Object ceramic

Six Ranges

LOSEL YAUCH

woven wool tapestry on wood frame

MARY HERBERT

Like Milk Was the Flower soft pastel on paper

AN EXCERPT FROM GOODY

CLAIRE JOSEPH

In the dead of winter, on the edge of the East Coast, in the few fleeting hours of muted sunlight, silence sings like the ever-angry Atlantic waves. The grass here, which only grows out of the soft curves of the cold dunes, continues to bloom. There is no real danger beyond a fox hunting a rabbit, or the magic potential to get lost amongst millions of grains of sand. The buzz of sunscreened families and drunken partiers is long gone and is replaced by the frustrated hums of writers and artists trying to create greatness when all they truly wish to do is pause. They don’t understand how it is possible to rest. It was here, halfway to the peak of erosion, where we had our picnics. I knew of her only in unfinished stories. Her name misspelled in grammatically incorrect fantasy blogs. I only came across her name in a passing conversation about local legends with Mrs. Penton. While there are hundreds of books and pages written about perished women who lived close by (sometimes I wondered if too many), most doubted her existence altogether. Her lore was minimal and her fate choppy. I learned that she mostly liked it that way. She liked being everywhere and anonymous. I spoke to her only those few days. I spoke to her only until the sunset in the late morning. And from our first encounter, I knew she likely had no interest in me. There have been so many versions of me since she’s been here.

“I’m heading out for a bit of fresh air.”

–

“Dad.” (louder)

“Oh, hi dear.”

“Hi, I’m going out for a minute. Do you need anything?”

“Mm?”

“Do you need anything?”

“I don’t believe so. But maybe if you could get more pomegranate jam from that one store that I like?”

“Of course.”

He now slept after every meal he managed to keep down. I wondered if he knew what he was ingesting; if tastes still had distinction, even if he couldn’t see the food that they were a part of. Maybe, the flavors were bolder than ever, though, I never felt it the right moment to ask.

I’d been out here now for four days. Four days that bled together into one greyscale nostalgia trip. The constant racing in my head made me a morning person. It made me a night one too. The crashing presence of experience sang as a continual alarm. I thought I might pick up running. “I think you should get away for a bit,” Fran said last week.

“You don’t seem like yourself,” Elise said two weeks ago.

The city where I live is a grid. Living on a grid means wraparound all-encompassing energy. Energy jets through the sidewalks and the streetlights and the people who generate it generate it hot. Each intersection on the grid, a moving memory. And some now, are always glowing red. Cruelly. What once was a line of homes and of stores, now plays as tunnel-visioned panic. So, I left.

Here, even with my own thoughts buzzing and dancing, I could strive for stillness. The beauty of simplicity is marginally more possible. I stayed up all night listening to the pack of coyotes wailing into the trees. It is beautiful, the fucked-up circle of it all. I pictured her hair flowing and me, reaching through the line separating the living and the dead.

I didn’t leave much time for much sunlight today. And with cold bare feet, I climbed up to where we would meet. She moved around the coastline, watching the landscape change. There were laws against the landscape changing enacted long after her end. It was protected now. She argued to me she always protected it. I liked that idea and so I believed her. I thought of our prior conversation.

“So, did you do it? Did you sink the Whydah?”

She laughed. She went silent. She disappeared back into the evening. “Maria.”

“Why don’t you just stay here, with me. It’d be easy. It’d be silent.”

Now, I laughed and quieted. The idea danced around me, whispering, the intrigue of being memorialized in the sand. I then saw that one particular intersection in the city. I then saw the whole ocean ahead of me become hungrier. So, I left.

Still, I promised her I’d return tomorrow, and there I was. If she asked again today, I knew what I would say. I knew that didn’t want to be paralyzed on that street corner for as long as she’d occupied the Cape tides. An eternity of haunting is not much growth at all. I’d tell her I couldn’t stay forever; I had to go to the market and get pomegranate jam. That’s what I planned on saying.

SABINE PARIS

Fairies #8

papier-mâché and paint

SARAH BECHTER

Untitled (jarring) oil on canvas

JUSTIN WILLIAMS

Scorpion bites and shoes from Cuba oil on canvas

JUSTIN WILLIAMS

The trap I set for you, has caught my leg instead oil on canvas

SPHERES, CIRCLES AND RECURRING DREAMS ABOUT THE APOCALYPSE

ISABELLA BUSTANABY

There is a special finality to experiencing death in a dream. When I die I wake up. My dream is over. And I have changed states.

It began in the desert at dusk. We chatted and joked while laying out the blanket, sat close to one another and prepared to watch the night sky envelope the horizon. The nocturnal animals, birds and bugs emerged and moved in between the trees. I noticed them watching us and especially felt the gaze of a large bat with a human face. After welcoming the company, we melted into the change.

But, as soon as it had set, the sun seemed to be rising again in reverse. How could this be? Night had just arrived. How could we have sat through the descent and sudden return of the sun in only a few minutes?

The light grew stronger and brighter and hotter until it became apparent that the unnatural daybreak was not the sun but a cataclysmic combusting sphere that was eviscerating everything in its path, and it was making its inevitable meeting with us. Staring at the end, all we could do was watch.

The bright red hot heat stretched towards us and we huddled under our blanket for shelter. We knew it wouldn’t help. We knew that the energy coming from across the mountains had no way of being stopped by building or body or blanket.

Our faces close together, our words quiet and only for one another. They said, “Hey, I love you guys,”. Those words felt obvious. This was all we had left to say, not only to us but to the universe that was moments from collapsing in on itself.

“I love you too. I love everyone. I love everything.”

~

This dream sat in my mind for three years. Every now and again I felt it emerge like a memory.

Giving thanks with my friends gathered around a freshly set meal;

Watching birds play;

Leaning back in a planetarium chair just as the lights fade off;

Feeling the sun’s heat on my skin; Sitting on the porch in distinct silence, staring at the skyline;

Hearing the last note of a song disappear into the room while staring at one another and our instruments;

The feeling of my body shockingly adjusting to the heat of bath water.

These moments brought me back to my dream of the world ending. I would feel my nervous system prickling on all ends. I would softly hear the low reverberation that marks a great change, an ending or beginning, within my body. I would breathe in and bring back that eagerness to fill my lungs. To bring back the happiness to have lived. To bring back a small death.

It was to my surprise that two weeks ago I began dreaming about these deaths again. The same fiery ball would appear in the sky, interrupting an otherwise typical dream day, asking for all of my consid -

eration once again. Releasing, once more, all of my gratitude as I face my own vanishment. Spheres and circles of mysterious origin, of unknown content and immense energy.

Spheres and circles that inflate with utter determination. These radially expanding spheres, these knowingly impending fireballs, these prophecy stars.

I love you. I love everyone. I love everything.

ADALI SCHELL

LEJIN FAN

I Love You Instagram image transfer on tofu

LEJIN

FAN

I Love You Instagram image transfer on tofu

JANNE MARIE DAUER

Gestalten Underwegs acrylic on canvas

CJ HEYLIGER

VVVVVVVVVVVVV (1229R4F5) carbon pigment print

Bench of Good Omens

walnut wood, tried and true oil, agate stone, acrylic, air-dry clay, swarovski crystals

DISPATCHES FROM MEMORY PAINTINGS

CASSANDRA KESIG

I woke up with a sty from Georgia doing my makeup for the party—or from negligence, depending on how you look at it—a pinch-sized polyp opposite my tear duct, pulsing. Through one milky eye, the smeary midmorning light, winds screaming through the live oaks in the court and pulling a big wash of leaves inland, west. I was tired again, or still; nested under a quilt with bits of filth and debris stuck to the soles of my socks that refused to be washed out.

I was feeling raw and erratic and made a list of all my friends in ballpoint pen, then crossed them out. It numbered a modest fourteen and had little tolerance for the mundane. I drew circles around the mosquito bites on my legs, which numbered nineteen. The clouds were antipathetic giants in a feather-light sky, fringed by the pulverized teeth of the mountains and their ash trees angled with wind and their uncanny slopes resembling sleeping men’s profiles. I was in a Land of Giants. I hailed from a Land of Giants also, lobed and fatty with the life of the chaparral like one of Giorgione’s women,

and I had made a decadent trade-off to be here that involved some debt with my parents, principled, unflinching people with a low melting point for their youngest daughter, me, and orthodoxy, and Japanese public television. I had left behind a boyfriend with whom I soared above the milquetoast pageantry of all other twenty-first century love affairs. I had sloughed off the benign summer glaze of the Pacific. So this was dispossession.

The sty needed some fresh air so I took it outside. I felt nothing about the bucolic pastures and bees always dying in my too-sugary coffees. Felt nothing about my body, my biology, save the pus-rich deposit affixed to my eye, all of my nerve response leached into that neutron star. I flopped down onto the grass like a disanimated marionette; I thought of my boyfriend, which I often did to conjure a deadened flash of longing. He was the part of me lopped off in the creation myth, I thought, shrouded in rational, mathematical misery. He had left behind a tender and itchy exposure that sometimes flared with misanthropy. Conversations with him were like

scaling the Tower of Babel, garrulous. Sex with him was moderate to severe. We wanted to get married, but it was expensive. Sometimes he would sing to me over the phone in a leaden voice that calcified the marshy, disease-prone rot choking the cave of my head—a few wet coughs before the heart attacks.

But I couldn’t hold the feeling close to me long; it squirmed away like a baby wanting its mother, disqualified, dispossessed. Somewhere in a nearby dorm, shrieking chorus: Happy birthday, happy birthday, the day you were born, Gabriel and all the angels did the bump and grind…

The sty demanded my attention. I rubbed it furiously, tried to disband the council of elders in my head, envisioning my physiology as taffy going through the pulling machine, over and under, erudite in its flexibility and always kind and eternal. This is a pretty girl: a mycelium system of cellulite-melting creams and parasite-killing tinctures the scent of molding fruits, absorptive and unabashed like a lipsticked dish sponge. And I wanted to be a pretty girl. I drowned the sty in eye drops that made it redder and angrier and more hateful, and averted my gaze.

The thing about ideas is that I have them, in spades, and feel the need to dispense them in even, exacting numbers, a perfect center part through an oil slick of hair. I’d arrived here, immaculate pasture of dead animals and missing persons, and gone to a party and puked up my ideas in spectacular quantities, which impressed no one but my faraway boyfriend. I required an IV drip of psychotropics

and dread. Calamitous, creationist, articulated, thread-waisted collapsing train cars rubbernecking, discothequing, surging around my sick on the lawn in acrylic slips. Georgia was painting my face like a harlequin; my head pounded. I wanted to go home, but couldn’t, and cried fat tears that cloyed around the sty like a caul. I migrated to a mirror with a pair of forceps and worked dutifully at the sty, Puritanically probed its bald head with my mouth agape, eyeballs rolling and shot through with sleeplessness. If only Georgia and Boyfriend could see me now, pretzeled and disemboweled and not knowing any words on the bathroom sink.

The forceps dislodged something that birthed itself through the pore, growing in diameter, evicting itself from the skin, and neatly it came free. Poised on the aluminum arms: a baroque pearl, dimpled and glistening. I would take it to a gem man on my walk into town for kindling, and he would record its ounces and blithely inform me of its worthlessness. Damn it, damn it, I would think, throat scorched from social smoking, Venus in Appalachia.

KIRIAKOS TOMPOLIDIS

Self-portrait mixed media and collage on canvas

SANTIAGO LICATA

untitled graphite on paper

YOURI JOHNSON

keycards

IPHONE 1 - STEVE JOBS MACWORLD KEYNOTE IN 2007 - FULL PRESENTATION, 80 MINS

MAYA BUFFET DAVIS

The mouse types into YouTube: steve jobs iphone, scrolls down to the fifth option steve jobs iphone presentation, clicks, and selects the second result. A 1 hour 19 minute long video with 8.1 million views. Posted on May 16th, 2013, taken on January 9th, 2007. The MacWorld Convention in San Francisco. Steve Jobs is unveiling the first iPhone.

About 15 minutes into the talk he takes a sip from a Smart Water bottle with a sippy-sports cap and walks over to the podium where an iPhone is hooked up to a massive projector screen hanging behind him. He pushes the Sleep/Wake Button on the top of the iPhone, the screen lights up, a pair of clownfish look out at the audience from their green sea anemone home, he uses his pointer finger to slide a grey arrow across the bottom of the screen to unlock the phone. The audience cheers. You wanna see that again? He pushes the top button, the screen returns to black, he pushes the button again and slides open the iPhone as the audience cheers louder. Still using his pointer finger, he presses the orange iPod icon on the bottom right of the screen, a list of artists appears, he demonstrates that he can press the Home Button to return to the home screen and then he presses the iPod icon again and returns to his music library. He demonstrates how he can use his finger to scroll through the list of artists.

The top comment on this video is from 2020 by a subscriber named Ben Mortimer: Watching everyone get excited about touchscreen is weirdly wholesome.

The audience giggles and cheers louder as he scrolls up and down the list. He narrates his actions as he selects the Beatles and taps on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He plays “With a Little Help from my Friends” and remarks on the gorgeous album art.

Another comment on the video is from 2021 by a subscriber named Joshua: I love this part because Sgt. Pepper’s is considered the first true album in music and the album that began the album era. Exactly 40 years later, Steve Jobs unveils the device that would essentially start the streaming era of music, and the first thing he plays on the device that would end the album era, is the one that started it.

Also in 2021, three people were eating dinner at a vegan Japanese restaurant in Culver City and talking about this video. The middle aged person in the group looked at the younger person and said softly: That was the day when the map...became more important than the territory. The younger person looked at the middle aged person, wideeyed: I need to write that down. They pulled out an iPhone 11 and typed into the notes app. The oldest person at the table asked what they meant by that. 18 or so minutes into the video, Steve Jobs finishes up his set with “Take me to the River” by the Talking Heads. Then he shows that the iPhone can play video. He flips the phone to landscape mode

and plays a scene from the Office. In the scene Jim has transferred to another branch, he took a box of Dwight’s stationary with him, and he is now sending Dwight messages from himself, from the future. He reads one of these messages: Dwight, at 8am this morning someone poisoned the coffee. Don’t drink the coffee. More instructions will follow. Cordially, Future Dwight. The audience laughs and Steve Jobs continues with his demo. The mouse pauses the video, scrolls down to the comment section and begins to type: It’s so crazy that Steve Jobs picked that clip from the Office... about sending messages from the future...? What message would a future Jobs fax himself re the iPhone if he was alive today? The cursor deletes the comment and presses play on the video.

Around 45 minutes into the presentation Steve Jobs demos the Google Maps app on the iPhone. He says that he certainly will need a coffee after this and types Starbucks into Google Maps. The audience laughs and cheers when the map displays a spattering of red pins indicating nearby Starbucks. He clicks on one of the pins. Let’s give them a call. After two rings an employee answers the phone: Good morning this is Starbucks, how can I help you? Yes, I’d like to order 4,000 lattes to go please. The crowd erupts into laughter and Steve says: Just kidding, wrong number, thank you and hangs up. The mouse pauses the video and scrolls down to the comment section. There are many comments about this part of the presentation. Imagine being the woman that picked up that phone at Starbucks that day and 46:58 Steve just did the first prank call on an iPhone. Revolutionary. The mouse scrolls up and plays the video.

Back in the vegan Japanese restaurant in Culver City, the middle aged person looked at the oldest person: What do I mean that? By the map becoming more important than the territory? The oldest person nodded their head. I mean that there was a time when the territory, the physical world, was more important, more trusted even, than representations of---The waiter arrived: More water? They looked at their nearly full glasses and nodded: Thanks.

SONIA HAUSER

The Elixir acrylic and oil on canvas 16”x20”

2021

BECCA MANN Garden oil and black gesso on canvas dropcloth

MIKE NUDELMAN

Age Without Time ballpoint pen on paper

SANGREE

SANGREE Photo Archive (Lucy) 2010

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

ADALI SCHELL

Adali Schell, born in Los Angeles in 2001, is a photographer who, at an early age, found the camera as a means to help him understand what it means to be an Angeleno. By submitting himself to his camera, and in effect, collaborating with the physical world as photography mandates, Schell has gained a greater sense of self in relationship to Los Angeles and beyond.

ALEXA HAWKSWORTH

Alexa Hawksworth, born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1994, is a painter and illustrator living in Montreal, Quebec. She received her BFA from Concordia University in 2020. Solo exhibitions include TBA at Theta Gallery (New York) and Semi-Detached New Build at Projet Pangée (Montreal). Duo exhibitions include Family Exhibitions (Montreal) and Sibling Gallery (Toronto). Recent group shows include Afternoon Projects (Vancouver), Echo Boomers presented at Projet Casa (Montreal), and Opening Night at Rialto Hall (Montreal).

ANJA SALONEN

Anja Salonen, born in Los Angeles in 1994, is a visual artist whose practice digests the psychosocial complexities and philosophical implications of

ecology, trauma, materiality, and female subjectivity through figurative painting. She completed her BFA at CalArts.

BECCA MANN

Becca Mann was born, lives, and works in Los Angeles. She earned her BA in Visual Critical Studies and BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and has exhibited her work at Soccer Club Club in Chicago, and at Ghebaly Gallery and Roberts & Tilton in Los Angeles.

BOB VIEIRA

Bob Vieira is a fourth-year Fine Arts major at UCLA currently pursuing a minor in Arts Education and hopes to continue making whatever she wants.

CJ HEYLIGER

CJ Heyliger is a photo-based artist whose work assesses the veracity of the photographic image in relation to human perception and experience. CJ received a MA in Fine Art from the UCLA in 2015 and a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in 2006. He is represented by Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles.

CJ SHAW

Cj Shaw, born in 1998, is a Chicago-based artist. He

uses oil paint to color personal imagery and explore western religion and pop culture.

CLAIRE DOWNES WHITEHURST

Claire Downes Whitehurst, born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1991, is a painter, printmaker, and ceramicist based in Jackson, Mississippi. She draws heavily from the landscape and atmosphere of the South, exploring dreams, narrative, memory, time, and grief through color, form, surface, and space. Her work plays with the boundaries of emotional reaction through form as well as the relationship between image and object, with particular attention paid to what is left unsaid or unexamined inside those relationships.

ESTEBAN A. GONZALEZ

Esteban A. Gonzalez is a very cheesy person. The 30-year-old was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and has been tattooing for about 4 years. He thinks about the future and global warming a lot.

FRANCINE BANDA

Francine Banda, born in Santa Monica in 1998, is a Mexican-American interdisciplinary artist currently based in central California. She graduated from UCLA in 2019 with a BA in art. Her work is often concerned with memory―it seeks to explore how knowledge is processed and retained in relation to different states of consciousness, and how it affects one’s perception of reality.

GIANCARLOS “GG” CAMPOS

Giancarlos “GG” Campus was born in South Central Los Angeles in 1994. He lives and paints in Brooklyn, New York.

HECTOR NEVAREZ MAGAÑA

Hector Nevarez Magaña is a Mexican-American photographer from East Palo Alto, California, working and residing in Portland, Maine. He received a BA in Visual Arts from Bowdoin College in 2016, and in 2018 co-founded an artist-run exhibition space in Portland called New System Exhibitions. He photographs the people and environments with his reach and then take those images and reformat them into stories he wants to tell.

HENRY CHAPMAN

Henry Chapman’s work has been described as “making a case for rigorous attentiveness to the interaction among forms. The subject of solo and two-person shows at Kate Werble Gallery, T293 Gallery, Labs Gallery in Bologna, and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chapman has received support from the Philip Guston and Musa McKim Named Residency at Yaddo, the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Prize, and the Hans G. and Thordis W. Burkhardt Foundation. He trained at the Cooper Union, where he was awarded Young Alumnus of the Year in 2013, and at Yale University, where he completed his MFA in 2015.

ISABEL YANG

Isabel Yang believes that every object has a story rooted in home, memory, and origin. Her personal work celebrates sentimentality by creating functional objects that serve purpose, both physically and emotionally. Through her multidisciplinary practice, she strives to understand the relationship between different mediums, and the relationship among users, objects, and the spaces they occupy. She hopes her work will encourage others to appreciate the beauty

and narrative of everyday objects.

ISABELLA ROSE

Isabella Rose is 21-year-old sculpture artist with home bases in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Bellingham, Washington. Using theoretical concepts of the abject, she uses grotesque and bodily imagery to make viewers question what a monster is, and why they are scared of it.

IZZY DENT

Izzy Dent is currently a BFA 3 in Film and Video at CalArts.

JANNE MARIE DAUER

Janne Marie Dauer, a painter and comic artist who graduated from Kunsthochule Kassel in 2021, lives and works in Vienna. Her works deal with shifts in ordinary lives and fragmented narration, often playing on association and tension. The blurriness of airbrush contrasting sharper lines and forms of acrylic paints and markers, playing with visual notions of foregrounds and backgrounds, being in and out of focus.

JUSTIN WILIAMS

Justin Williams, born in 1984, produces contemporary figurative and representative artwork that focuses on community, migration, and modes of living. Rendered in murky oil paints and thin washes of color, Williams’s figures and landscapes appear to hover above the canvas as they glow from within. He attempts to depict both the transitions of his grandparents’ migration from Egypt to Australia, and also his own outsider perspective toward both notions of place and time as well as hidden normalities within a

group or individual. Williams views his own bloodline as something he is inherently close to but conversely was not directly exposed to, thus enlisting a distant or even historical viewpoint.

KIRIAKOS TOMPOLIDIS

Kiriakos Tompolidis is a 25 years old German-Greek art student based in Germany. He works and studies in Berlin, at the University of Arts, mostly doing paintings on canvas combined with mixed media elements, such as prints, collages, and other diverse materials.

KYLIE MANNING

Kylie Manning, born in Juneau, Alaska lives and works in Brooklyn, New York City. Using pure pigments dispersed with safflower oil on linen, Manning creates a whirlwind of thinly layered oil sketches using a variety of traditional techniques. She imbues her compositions with a contemporary feminist sense of humor re-contextualizing the macabre aftermath of traditionally gendered “masterpieces.”

LEJIN FAN

Lejin Fan is an experimental artist and student who revisits memories and current moods by playing with existing items and creating images of herself. She was born and raised in Xiamen, China, and is currently based in Los Angeles.

LEO HORTON

Leo Horton is an artist and designer from South Carolina. He enjoys image making.

LOSEL YAUCH

Originally from New York City, Losel Yauch is a Tibet -

an-American artist currently residing in London. She subverts masculine aesthetics and typically gallant imagery in her playful paintings and tapestries, toying with war scenes, boxing matches, and system control rooms.

MARY HERBERT

Mary Herbert makes drawings and paintings formed of a composite of feelings, lived-sensation, unconscious processes, and observation. Her current work is a series of luminous soft pastel drawings that act as windows into a dreamlike realm, tapping into the power of such a space to support alternative models of thinking and perception. Born in Welwyn, England, in 1988, Herbert lives and works in London. She gained her BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in 2010, and completed her postgraduate studies at the Royal Drawing School in 2018. Selected recent exhibitions include Like Glaciers, Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles (solo) 2021; Bloodroot, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh (duo show with James Owens) 2021; To See Through it, Lychee One, London (solo) 2021; Nine Lives, Fortnight Institute, New York 2021; Somewhere Else for a Little While, Eve Leibe Gallery, London (online) 2020; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Leeds Art Gallery and South London Gallery 2019.

MAX CAPUS

Max Capus, born in 1999, is a Chicago-based artist. He makes work with varying surfaces that oppose and rhyme with one another, producing flattened images that emblematize personal imagery.

MIKE NUDELMAN

Mike Nudelman, born in 1985, Smithtown, New York,

in 1985, currently lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He received a BFA in Printmaking from Cornell University and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Fortnight Institute (New York) and Thomas Robertello Gallery (Chicago), and in group exhibitions at Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, Massachusetts),

SPRING/BREAK Art Show (New York, NY), Good Naked Gallery (New York), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Devening Projects + Editions (Chicago), The Valley (Taos, NM), and Hecho a Mano (Santa Fe, New Mexico), among others.

OWEN MCCALLUM-KEELER

Owen McCallum-Keeler, a Marin County, California, native, is currently a junior at Rhode Island School of Design majoring in painting. Juxtaposing the interior and exterior through layering and deliberate composition, McCallum-Keeler’s work explores the complex relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. He pulls imagery from dreams, meditations, and fantasies as means of reflecting on his experiences with the unknown.

RACHAEL BOS

Rachael Bos, born in 1999, is an artist from Salt Lake City who lives and works in Chicago. She recently received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. Bos has been in group and solo exhibitions in London, Chicago, Ogden, Utah, as well as online.

RACHEL LESTER-TREND

Rachel Lester-Trend describes her perception of life: “Coming together is so beautiful. To me there is

nothing quite as beautiful as hundreds of people singing take me out to the ball game in a big old stadium, eating hot dogs and screaming. Almost every time I go to the supermarket, someone is screaming—either a baby or someone on the phone or a couple in a fight. It’s usually easy to hear them from almost any place in the store, even if you can’t see them. This is because the screams bounce off of the grocery store walls, and travel through every aisle to every shopper and employee in the building. Even after everyone leaves, through the sliding doors, we will all still have our receipts, and the echoes of people screaming in our ears, uniting us.”

SABINE PARIS

Sabine Paris was born and raised in Los Angeles. She studies art history at Bard College.

SANGREE

SANGREE is a Mexico City–based collaboration between Mexico City natives René Godínez-Pozas, born in 1986and Carlos Lara, born in 1985. They started working collaboratively in 2009 on a homologue photography zine meant to explore the most puzzling subjects in human history through images they made. This visual investigation on many different subjects such as nature, technology, popular culture, the cosmos, and history progressively migrated to different media and gave way to the creation of two ever-growing archives: photography and drawing. Both archives are continuously updated and are regarded as pools of ideas from which different projects may emerge. The extensive range of subjects they have explored throughout a decade has led them to develop an

interest in materiality and the use of different media, from traditional techniques, to craftful hand-made processes, to large- scale architectural installations.

SANTIAGO LICATA

Santiago Licata, born in Buenos Aires in 1986, is self-taught.

SARAH BECHTER

Sarah Bechter, born in 1989, lives and works in Vienna. She studied painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and has participated in exhibitions at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (CH); Intersticio, Madrid; Haus Wien (AT); Exile Gallery, Vienna; tart/ Galerie Thoman, Vienna (solo); Pilot Vienna (solo); Kunstverein Schattendorf; eastcontemporary, It/Fr; Not Cancelled Salon (online); Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna; Haus Wittgenstein, Vienna; Magyar Mühely Galeria, Budapest; summer art picnic, sort, Vienna; and Spazi Aperti, Rome, among others. Her works are represented in several public collections including Artothekt des Bundes, 21er Haus Vienna; City of Vienna, Wien Museum; State of Vorarlberg, Hypo Landesbank, Illwerke AG.

The conditions and ambivalences of artistic production lie at the center of Sarah Bechter‘s practice. Blurring the lines between private and public, work and leisure, surface and line, Bechter‘s canvases exist as individual subjects rather than surfaces of projection and seem entangled in a vivid debate among themselves. The artist uses a wide range of techniques and references to interrogate the validity of the images she creates, and of painting itself. Furthermore, Bechter invites the viewer to a game of hide-and-seek often by only hinting at protagonists and objects, infusing her works with a mysterious,

dreamy atmosphere.

SHANI STRAND

Shani Strand was born in New York in 1995and raised in Teaneck, New Jersey. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

SONIA HAUSER

Sonia Hauser is an artist from San Francisco currently living in Los Angeles. They graduated from UCLA in December 2021 with a BA in Art and work mainly in oil paint, although they recently made a video and found it surprisingly fruitful.

STEPHANIE MEI HUANG

stephanie mei huang is a Los Angeles- and New York-based interdisciplinary artist. They use a diverse range of media and strategies, including film/ video, installation, social interventions, sculpture, writing, and painting. Through research and practice, they aim to erode the violent mythologies that perpetuate exceptionalist narratives, in the hopes of excavating forgotten histories.

TOMMY SVENINGSSON KREK

Tommy Sveningsson Krek searches for models in the subjective experience of places in his vicinity. It can be a discovery of something in the environment during a certain lighting condition that indicates a mood. The external environment reflects an internal state in a kind of everyday magical moment. Many times the images contain some symbolic objects.

TRENYCE TONG

Trenyce Tong is an art student based in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in The Adroit Journal

and recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

CASSANDRA KESIG

Cassandra Kesig is an art history student and writer at Bennington College. Her background in curation and literary editing has shepherded her toward a love for the brief and experiential.

CLAIRE JOSEPH

Claire Joseph is a graduate of Scripps College with a degree in Creative Writing and English. She lives in New York City, works in television, and really likes the color green.

F. GARCÍA RODRÍGUEZ

N/A

XAVIER VILLAURRUTIA

N/A

ISABELLA BUSTANOBY

Isabella Bustanoby is an artist based in Los Angeles working with analysis, dream-space, and perception in the form of writing, imagery, and sound. She’s interested in how the aesthetics of scientific formalism can be used to understand personal and unquantifiable phenomena.

MAYA BUFFETT-DAVIS

Maya Buffett-Davis is an artist from the Bay Area who lives in Pasadena. In 2020, she graduated from UCLA, where she studied art and gender studies. Among other things, she loves license plates, rubber stamps, and long bike rides.

GRAPHITE CO-HEADS

LOUISE BUCKLEY

TALIA MARKOWITZ

SHARI WE I READERS

AUDREY HARRISON

ANNA ZISER

BRADLEY BELL

DODI SHEPARD

EVAN IBARRA

GENEVIEVE NOLLINGER

HOLLAND FOX

JOHN JACHO

LAILA ALDERSON

LUCAS BJELOS

LUCIA SANTINA RIBISI

MORGAN SILVERMAN

NKOSI NESMITH-NELSON

QUINN HARRELSON

QUINTIN ATCHISON

ROWAN O’BRYAN

ROXY WILLS

SEY YANG

SOPHIA MUYS

SOPHIE LATTU

TARA BLOSSOM

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