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 Maga A

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

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Xavier Villaurrutia

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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

GRAPHITE INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTS JOURNAL IS PUBLISHED WITH SUPPORT FROM THE HAMMER MUSEUM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED. CONTENT DOES NOT REFLECT THE OPINIONS OF GRAPHITE EDITORIAL STAFF OR HAMMER MUSEUM. DESIGNED BY GRAPHITE AND ANNE-FATIMA SYED. PRINTED BY TYPECRAFT.