GLAMFA 2014

Pilar Elizabeth

my practice is holistic. it involves interior environments. 

i see it as polar. it relates notions of likeness, citation and site 

with sight. my work is specific 

to the trace, transience and permanence of 

the vessel, concept or object. my work 

and i engage atmosphere, perspective, preservation and phenomena 

through process 

like weaving; each concept 

treated 

as an individual 

thread or strand

to be

Kiyomi Fukui

MFA student in printmaking at CSULB

Maria Rendón

2014 MFA UCSB

I make paintings, sculptures and installations that tap into how absence, fractured forms and distorted forms transform the way we perceive the world. I remove – through unplanned gestures or through thoughtful manipulation – recognizable elements within a form, and graft other forms equally ambiguous. I also give materials an alternate use in order to explore notions of distorted perception and to shift the material’s expected confines. With this work I hope to make connections that haven’t been made before.

www.mariarendon.net

https://www.facebook.com/maria.rendon1

instagram: @mariarendon03

Ja'Rie Gray

My work is about the beauty of simplicity: simple line, simple shape, and simple color designed within a picture plane using an array of figurative positive and negative shapes to form a composition. In sequence with simplicity are the many colors of African American women composed together to create rhythm, harmony, and unity. I want my viewers to see the beauty of Black women in their simplest form and shape.

Andrea Breiling

It seems like it was just yesterday that I was here for GLAMFA 2013 performing with my feminist art collective Skunkworks; four artists with like minded concerns and frustrations about gender and sexuality. This year GLAMFA 2014 two of my paintings are in the show and I am thrilled! I see my painting as just another way of engaging my own personal limitations as well as the historical jargon that’s inherent with in it. I have found both my painting practice and performance work to be mutually exclusive and yet need one another to exist. Painting as we all know has always been viewed as one of the most extreme, patriarchal art forms. And, yet I continue to find fuel in reexamining and helping reclaim painting as an important part of a feminist art practice.

skunkworksprojects.com

andreamariebreiling.com

Megan Mueller

Born and raised Manassas Virginia

BFA Sculpture VCU

Lived in DC for 5 years before moving to West Coast

Certified in dog and cat CPR

Love infinity pools and wood grain

Bad at card tricks

My goal in life is to be like the tv show deadliest catch but with more drinking and smoking

Don’t have a thyroid

Description of Practice:

Concerned with time, space, utopian ideals, architecture, landscape 

Overlapping areas of the built and natural environment are of particular interest.  

Recently, I have been focusing on domestic architecture as a way to examine how these overlapping areas manifest in and around the American home.  

These works have consisted of displaced elements of domestic architecture; a deck, a hallway floor, a hole in the wall, a floating white picket fence, and the shapes of infinity pools. 

I tend to think spatially, in cast shadows but underestimate gravity, wind, and weight.  

The logic of my work is similar to the logic of an infinity pool, in that, it is man made but desires to connect with the horizon for infinity.  

  instagram: @megamueller

Christina M. Lee

The “fuckity” piece is reverent/irreverent, playful and vulnerable. It’s about order and form, but also fragility and temporality. The word itself is slang, informal language; I think the word is a bit elusive and ephemeral in that sense. In the studio, there is a constant dialogue and exchange between materials and ideas. I’m always on the lookout for materials and I collect them through my studio practice as well as through the ins and outs of daily life. The materials are loaded with qualities and associations in the physical world. Recontextualizing them through altering, combining, and arranging reflects a desire to create layers of meaning. 

Patricia E. Rangel

My process involves tracing, layering and extracting geometric shapes from maps, playing with dirt, and fabricating in metal.  Some things that inspire me are the book, “Breathing in Dust” by Tim Z. Hernandez, and California’s central valley agriculture.

Matthew Warner-Davies

UC Irvine

MFA, Studio Art, 2015

"These artworks are from related but distinct projects that are process oriented dialectics. Process matters to me because life is not meant to be a means to an end. How I work informs, and is informed by, what I am doing and why I am doing it."

Shannon Leith

My photography explores the significance of everyday life. I find an odd joy in the most mundane daily experiences: taking showers, going to the post office, getting groceries and taking walks.I do yoga, eat paleo, and have a pet bird named Cosmo who keeps me inspired and has taught me to whistle. 

Other things about me:

- I'm Canadian

- It will be my first year at CSULB

- i love doing handstands

- In a past project i took Polaroids every day for 6 months as a study of the mystery in the daily

- I also have a current project where I photograph mail trucks every time i see them-- they're under the hashtag #mailtruckseverywhere

- In another life I'd be a ballerina

instagram: shannon_leith

Shiva Aliabadi

My work involves imprints of original objects or artistic instances now gone. For example, one of my rubber pieces is the imprint of the lining of a car door, taken from an accident, since thrown away. The viewer is left with a mere record of what came before and even that record keeps shifting as it is displayed repeatedly. What remains is an idea of the original that changes over time much like memories of incidents, objects, and people that we attempt to preserve.

Dawn Ertl

Dawn Ertl is our fearless leader! She is the current president of Fine Arts Roundtable (FAR), the grad student art organization at CSULB School of Art, and has been for the last 3 years. FAR hosts the Greater Los Angeles Master of Fine Art (GLAMFA) show which is a juried show exhibiting work from MFA students in the Southern California Area. She specifically timed her class schedule so that she would be able to direct our 10th anniversary GLAMFA exhibition! 

We are very glad she did because there's a steep learning curve when a new FAR president steps in to run the the annual GLAMFA show. Dawn says that "I've also learned about several aspects that most artists going through a grad program might not experience, so much about the behind the scenes of jurying and curating, and other 'outside of the studio' aspects. I've met a lot of great people, and made a lot of amazing friends."

Dawn is also the organizer of a teaching program CSULB, designed to give MFA grads more opportunities to teach and get experience. 

Her own art practice deals with the relationships between people and the socially constructed perception of nature. It is an unhealthy relationship influenced by our attitudes towards craft, industrialization, community, mass production, self worth/market worth, and more. 

Dawn's work makes use of weaving, knitting, and fiber. Many first assume she is a Fibers major but in fact she is a Sculpture major. 

Audrey Barcio is a current MFA candidate at UNLV. Coming from Los Angeles, Audrey is also an independent curator and blogs for Field Projects in New York.  

When asked recently, “How old were you when you knew you were an artist?” her response was quick - she was 5, in kindergarten.  2 + 2 = ___  was written on the board and she was handed chalk in order to fill in the blank. The answer was clear to her, it was 3. When the teacher told her she was mistaken, she explained her logic, “2 looks like this (I made a curve shape with the chalk on the board) and 2 + 2 must be 3 because 3 has two curves.”  

After she dropped that truth bomb on her class, it was time for finger painting, which she continued to do right through recess. She says, “I knew that finger painting was more important than anything else that day and I wanted to find a way to do it forever.”

Annette Heully

Annette Heully is currently in the MFA Fibers program at Cal State Long Beach. The first photograph is a self portrait referencing the second photograph which is from the Bauhaus period. She is inspired by the Bauhaus movement because of the way it combines art, design, and craftsmanship. 

Clare Little

2014 MFA UCSB, Studio Art

My current work began with an interest in the Baroque and Rococo, as movements where nature found itself metastasized in design. Envisioning poltergeists of nature just below the surface of the wall gradually breaking the barrier and confronting civilized space. I am interested in a dialogue between feral and civilized qualities emerging simultaneously. By creating forms of the “other” in domestic architectural material, the work challenges the hierarchy of man.

https://clare-little.squarespace.com

Instagram- alittleclare1984 facebook- www.facebook.com/alittleclare

Matthew Usinowicz UCSB MFA

My current works examine my experiences with American capitalist ideologies, specifically the relationship between human and commodity. Rooted in the American working class, I grew up as a paperboy, butcher, and US Navy sailor. My work reflects the political and conceptual outlook of these experiences.

As serious as this sounds I like to keep it humorous. My process involves chaotic processes of graffiti, tattooing, painting & drawing, three dimensional studies, lots of cooking, and everyday city living – somehow these all twirl around in my brain and art is the result.

Michael Rollins

"Ideas that have been slowed down by paint, and exploited with color. Thoughts confined to four corners and a flat plane. Uncanniness puddles on the canvas. It's as if the works are depicting something familiar that is not from here."