This May 1-3, Embark Gallery is curating a booth at Startup Art Fair, San Francisco's independently produced contemporary art fair for unrepresented artists. Embark Gallery is thrilled to be a nonprofit partner of this brand-new fair.
Find us in Room 305 for a brand-new show featuring Embark artists from our first and second exhibitions as well as a special pool-installation work by Embark Gallery Founder Tania Houtzager called Very Big Head, which literally, is a very big head sculptural work.
Ashley Valmere Fischer -- Stanford 2016
Isaac S. Lewin -- SJSU 2016
Matthew Goldberg -- SFAI 2015
Tania Houtzager -- CCA 2016
Nicole Lavelle -- CCA 2015
Jacqueline Norheim -- Mills College 2016
Matt Smith Chavez -- UC Berkeley 2015
stARTup Your MFA: Panel Discussion
Gallery founder Tania Houtzager, also the founder of unique art history resource Sartle.com, will be moderating the panel stARTup Your MFA: Learn tips, tricks and what not to do, from local art experts about getting your MFA. This panel discussion will help you master the art of earning your Masters of Fine Arts degree. Panelists will discuss how to know when to apply, why to apply, what happens after, and insiders' knowledge about the workings of MFA programs in the Bay Area and beyond.
Read our panelists' bios below:
Ted Purves, head of CCA’s MFA Department:
Ted Purves is a writer and artist based in Oakland. His public projects and curatorial works are centered on investigating the practice of art in the world, particularly as it addresses issues of localism, democratic participation, and innovative shifts in the position of the audience. His two-year project, Temescal Amity Works, created in collaboration with Susanne Cockrell and based in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland, facilitated and documented the exchange of backyard produce and finished its public phase in winter 2007. His collaborative project Momentary Academy, a free school taught by artists over a period of 10 weeks, was featured in Bay Area Now 4 in 2005 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
Ted recently received a visual arts grant from the Creative Capital Foundation and a Creative Work Fund grant from the Elise and Walter Haas Foundation.
His book, What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art, was published by State University of New York Press in 2005.
Matt Smith Chavez, artist:
Matt is receiving his MFA from Berkeley in 2015. He has been exhibiting his work since 2008.
“I’m interested in the journey of images. In the images that arrive in my studio and the images that I create and send away. I’m interested in the trajectories whereby an image becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, so far removed from its original that authorship begins to seem malleable. Partly my work is about mimesis -- finding a way to mimic gestures and visual strategies to make *representations* of abstract paintings. The goal is never to make an abstract painting per se. Instead I appropriate and resignify the visual strategies of painting to make work that exists self-consciously as something less heroic and more quotidian. The brushstrokes, spray paint marks, and splatters that I screen print onto my work are derived from stock images produced for commercial purposes and distributed freely on the web. I use these marks made by anonymous producers as a way to question notions of authorship, aura, and authenticity in a networked age when digital tools are accessible to practically anyone. Ultimately, what pushes me to make work is an interest in our changing relationship to abstraction -- as both producers and viewers -- within a visual economy that is becoming more and more decentralized.”
Jacqueline Norheim, artist:
Jacqueline is a Mills College MFA candidate for 2016, and received her BFA Art & Design Cum Laude from California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo in 2008. Additionally, she studied Fine Art and Languages at Scuola Lorenzo de’Medici in Florence, Italy in 2006.
“With photography and collage, I create interruptions in space. These interruptions examine how we experience a natural landscape, and its passage through time. Portals into different moments explore the land in greater depth. Each scene becomes a symbol of timelessness, as it permeates the centuries of its existence.”
