Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Rachel Corry on Monday, November 30

Artwork Courtesy of Rachel Corry

What: Art 1A Artist Talk featuring Rachel Corry

When: Monday, November 30 @ 9:30AM

Where: in TD-W 1701

Instagram:

@rachelseessnailshoes

@attachmenttoearth

Website: www.rachelcorry.art

Artist Bio,

Rachel Corry (1982) is an artist, shoemaker and poet. After studying painting and sculpture at UCLA in the early 00s, she stumbled into shoemaking and focused on refining and teaching that skill for 15 years with her brand Rachel Sees Snail Shoes. Rachel is now a 2nd-year MFA student at UCSB working primarily in sculpture- making functional art-objects for domestic space: quilts, lamps, and furniture. 

Rachel's current work represents a more whimsical, idealistic world where objects are handmade, personal and idiosyncratic. These often contain repeating motifs, symbols and references to her values of biophilia and multi-species justice. She pays close attention to folk and alternative cultures, literature, early cinema, fairy tales, indigenous teachings, Zen, music, comics, Jungian psychology and dreams. Color is used as a sign of hope and collage offers clues to connections. Materially, Rachel enjoys using what's been left behind, 'making do' and being light on the earth. She hopes her work can offer a vision of a more ecocentric world. 

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Yaroslav Golovkin on Monday, November 9

All Images Courtesy of Yaroslav Golovkin

What: Art 1A Artist Talk featuring Yaroslav Golovkin

When: Monday, November 9 @ 9:30AM

Where: in TD-W 1701

Instagram: @yyy_rrr_ccc

Artist Bio:

Yaroslav Golovkin (b. 1995) is a cinematographer, filmmaker, and moving image artist from Russia. After graduating from the GITR Film and Television School and the Moscow School of New Cinema, he has continued working in Los Angeles as both a cinematographer and director, drawing methods, technologies, and production processes from cinema into his artistic practice.

Films he has shot have screened at festivals including New/Next Film Festival, Kraków Film Festival, Frameline, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

His current practice centers on time-based works and multi-channel installations, experimenting with 16mm film, its materiality, and modes of projection. His research engages questions of distributed accountability, plant relocation, new media theory and media teleology, life within climatic and social disasters, memory, and the fragility of the moving image. Characterized by a raw and expressive visual language, his work investigates trust in the image itself, leaving the viewer with a persistent question: How was this image produced, and can it be believed?

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Yaroslav Golovkin on Wednesday, July 29

All Images Courtesy of Yaroslav Golovkin

What: Art 1A Artist Talk featuring Yaroslav Golovkin

When: Wednesday, July 29 @ 2:00PM

Where: Arts 1344

Instagram: @yyy_rrr_ccc

Artist Bio:

Yaroslav Golovkin (b. 1995) is a cinematographer, filmmaker, and moving image artist from Russia. After graduating from the GITR Film and Television School and the Moscow School of New Cinema, he has continued working in Los Angeles as both a cinematographer and director, drawing methods, technologies, and production processes from cinema into his artistic practice.

Films he has shot have screened at festivals including New/Next Film Festival, Kraków Film Festival, Frameline, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

His current practice centers on time-based works and multi-channel installations, experimenting with 16mm film, its materiality, and modes of projection. His research engages questions of distributed accountability, plant relocation, new media theory and media teleology, life within climatic and social disasters, memory, and the fragility of the moving image. Characterized by a raw and expressive visual language, his work investigates trust in the image itself, leaving the viewer with a persistent question: How was this image produced, and can it be believed?

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring KeyShawn Scott on Wednesday, June 3

Untitled (2025). Courtesy of KeyShawn Scott

 Who: KeyShawn Scott

What: Art 1A Artist Talk

When: Wednesday, June 3

Where: Chemistry 1171

Website: www.keyshawnscott.com

Instagram: @sklamar_

Artist Bio: 

KeyShawn Scott holds a BA in Art Studio from UC Davis and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His artworks have been featured in exhibitions such as "What You Give" at the Latino Center of Art & Culture in Sacramento, CA, "Larger Than Life: Murals in the Making" at The Barn Gallery, Woodland YoloArts, CA, and at the Glassbox and Red Barn Galleries at UCSB. He is also recognized for his contributions as a Recreational Leader at the Greater Vallejo Recreation District, where he mentored and engaged with young artists. KeyShawn’s practice spans drawing and installation, exploring how systems of visibility, order, and control shape everyday experience. His work examines vulnerability, identity, and the educational, commercial, and social structures that influence how we move, see, and are seen.

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Alexis Childress on Monday, June 1

Artwork and photograph courtesy of Alexis Childress

What: Artist Talk featuring Alexis Childress

When: Monday, June 1 from 12:30-1:45

Where: Chemistry 1171

Website: www.alexischildress.com

Artist Bio:

Alexis Childress (1993) is a mixed media artist born in Illinois. She received her BFA from Georgia State University (2020), and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her work visualizes an investigation of identity, systems and Afrofuturistic dreams. Using 2D and 3D digital collage to craft creatures and imagine worlds that symbolize the Black American consciousness. Alexis has exhibited in venues such as the Morean Arts Center (FL), MINT Gallery (GA), Atlanta Photography Group Gallery and the Rhode Island Center of Photographic Arts. As an established writer, her contributions extend to publications like Burnaway Magazine, Create! Magazine and the New York Public Library Zine. She has been recognized with the Red Bull Arts Microgrant, the Georgia Visual Artist Grant as well as selected to present at the 2021 Society of Photographic Education National Conference.

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Dannah Hidalgo on Monday, May 18

My Mom Is My Dog's Favorite Person. Courtesy of Dannah Hidalgo.

 What: Artist Talk Featuring Dannah Hidalgo

When: Monday, May 18 from 12:30-1:45

Where: Chemistry 1171

Instagram: @dannahmari_art

Artist Bio:

Dannah Mari Hidalgo (1994) is a Filipina-American artist based out of California and Oahu, Hawai‘i where she was born and raised. Hidalgo obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2019. Hidalgo has also attended the Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute in Florence, Italy in 2015 and in 2016. Hidalgo recently received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2024. Hidalgo is a proud graduate of Leilehua High School, a Hawai‘i public school.

Hidalgo creates cacophonic narratives through a collage-like technique, identified as “double image.” Two images simultaneously existing on one surface, while still attempting to maintain distinction, compels the viewer to alternate between narratives -recognizing one in the context of another. The concept of double image reinforces dichotomous relationships: abstract and representational, severity and humor, depth and flatness, the brazen and tender, and resolve and tension.

Within the intersections of patriarchal and colonial structures of domestic spaces, servitude of the matriarch, and thus consequentially, of the daughter, is reflected upon in Hidalgo’s recent works. These structures condition women from early on to be self-sacrificing and dismissive of their individuality, personal interests, and pursuits, existing to bear the weight of domestic labor and servitude. The lineage of designated and assumed stewardship of domestic spaces is confronted, as well as the weight of maintaining communal spaces at the expense of the self. Through the exchange of figures between mother and daughter, Hidalgo looks to highlight fraught domesticity, while excising a departure that exemplifies brazen femininity. Within this dynamic, residual guilt, care, and tenderness seep between bursts of assertive mark making and layering.

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Christopher Velasco on Monday, May 11

Courtesy of Christopher Velasco.

What: Artist Talk featuring Christopher Velasco

When: Monday, May 11 from 12:30-1:45

Where: via Zoom: 

https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/83111992304

Artist's Website: https://www.christopheravelascophotography.com

Artist's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caver83/

Artist Bio:

Christopher Anthony Velasco (born 1983) is a photographer and performance artist based in Los Angeles, known for exploring the queer brown body and blending horror with camp aesthetics. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2019, and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 2011.

 

Velasco has contributed to his field through various internships, including positions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center and Library as a Getty Marrow Undergraduate Intern. He is an adjunct professor at Moorpark College and East Los Angeles College, and he teaches at CSSSA (California State Summer School of the Arts). 

 

His work has been prominently showcased in exhibitions at respected venues such as the Art Center College of Design, AD&A Museum, Avenue 50 Studios, the California Institute of the Arts, the Hibbleton Gallery, the Getty Museum, and the Vincent Price Art Museum. Additionally, Velasco has collaborated with Harry Gamboa, Jr., notably through Virtual Verite, and has performed at Los Angeles Union Station, UC Santa Barbara, and LAST Projects. Velasco's work is part of collections at The Getty Museum, Alta Med Art Collection, Cerritos College Art Gallery, UC Santa Barbara Department of Art, Keck School of Medicine at USC Research, and East Los Angeles College Photography Department. 

Artist Statement: 

My photographic works often incorporate performance-based encounters with clearly defined boundaries of the photograph structure that defy purpose or permanence. Each of my photographs captures the unsustainable gaze upon a disregarded, disfigured body that is constantly evolving, descending, and autodestructing into endless layers of lost memory. The uncanny loops camp aesthetics together. 

 

My efforts to capture the briefest moments of awareness most often result in beautifully played-out visual vignettes that echo beyond the façade that sustains the original setting of place or subject. 

 

Through my photographic works, I have effectively portrayed the fragility between existence and metaphor.  My sense of self serves as a medium by which characterizations can be asserted in visual form. My insistence that role-playing, role reversal, and role surrender are all acts of defiance against that which portends to control the destiny of the image gives my photographic works an essential urgency and definite positive charge.

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring KeyShawn Scott on Wednesday, March 11

Untitled (2025). Courtesy of KeyShawn Scott

 Who: KeyShawn Scott

What: Art 1A Artist Talk

When: Wednesday, March 11

Where: Ellison 2626

Website: www.keyshawnscott.com

Instagram: @sklamar_

Artist Bio: 

KeyShawn Scott holds a BA in Art Studio from UC Davis and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His artworks have been featured in exhibitions such as "What You Give" at the Latino Center of Art & Culture in Sacramento, CA, "Larger Than Life: Murals in the Making" at The Barn Gallery, Woodland YoloArts, CA, and at the Glassbox and Red Barn Galleries at UCSB. He is also recognized for his contributions as a Recreational Leader at the Greater Vallejo Recreation District, where he mentored and engaged with young artists. KeyShawn’s practice spans drawing and installation, exploring how systems of visibility, order, and control shape everyday experience. His work examines vulnerability, identity, and the educational, commercial, and social structures that influence how we move, see, and are seen.

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Alexis Childress on Wednesday, December 3

Artwork and photograph courtesy of Alexis Childress

What: Artist Talk featuring Alexis Childress

When: Wednesday, December 3 from 12:30-1:45

Where: Phelps 2524

Website: www.alexischildress.com

Artist Bio:

Alexis Childress (1993) is a mixed media artist born in Illinois. She received her BFA from Georgia State University (2020), and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her work visualizes an investigation of identity, systems and Afrofuturistic dreams. Using 2D and 3D digital collage to craft creatures and imagine worlds that symbolize the Black American consciousness. Alexis has exhibited in venues such as the Morean Arts Center (FL), MINT Gallery (GA), Atlanta Photography Group Gallery and the Rhode Island Center of Photographic Arts. As an established writer, her contributions extend to publications like Burnaway Magazine, Create! Magazine and the New York Public Library Zine. She has been recognized with the Red Bull Arts Microgrant, the Georgia Visual Artist Grant as well as selected to present at the 2021 Society of Photographic Education National Conference.

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Maiza Hixson on Wednesday, November 26, 2025

Image Provided by Maiza Hixson

WHAT: Art 1A Artist Talk featuring Dr. Maiza Hixson

WHEN: Wednesday, November 26 from 12:30-1:45 PST

ZOOM LINK: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/83111992304

WEBSITE: https://maizahixson.com

About the Dr. Maiza Hixson:

The Art of New Media Theatre: Staging Site-Specific Performances from the White Cube to the Black Box and Beyond.

Multimodal artist, painter, performance scholar, curator, and theatre director Dr. Maiza Hixson will present on contemporary art as a transdisciplinary aesthetic practice that merges the visual and performing arts. 

Hixson holds a PhD in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She served as Chief Curator of the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts from 2010-2015, during which time she taught, performed, and lectured at Towson University in Baltimore and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She studied Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds an MFA in Fine Art from UC Santa Barbara, as well as an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies, and BA in French from the University of Louisville. She was a recent grant panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and her curatorial work was featured on the Emmy Award-winning PBS TV show Articulate with Jim Cotter. She was a Warhol Foundation grant recipient for Radical Participation: A Series of Four Interactive Exhibitions. Hixson also designed and curated a 5,500 square-foot group exhibition, American Idyll: Contemporary Art and Karaoke, featuring Candice Breitz, Phil Collins, and Christian Jankowski, for the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, designed by Zaha Hadid.

Hixson has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at venues such as Eisenwunderwelt in Berlin; Little Tokyo Arts Complex in Los Angeles; the Art, Design, and Architecture Museum in Santa Barbara; Highways in Santa Monica; Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York; Baltimore Contemporary; Soap Factory, Minneapolis; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC; Haverford College; and many others. She is a member of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Independent Curators International (ICI), Performance Studies International (PSi), and a Lead Jury Member of Art Papers for the ACM/SIGGRAPH Vancouver 2025 Conference. SIGGRAPH stands for the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, a special interest group within the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) focused on computer graphics and interactive techniques.

Art 1A Artist Talk featuring Emily D'Achiardi on Wednesday, July 30

thought of you (2025). Courtesy of Emily D'Achiardi

What: Artist Talk featuring Emily D'Achiardi

When: Wednesday, July 30 from 1:30-3:35 PT

Where: Arts 1344

Website: https://sneakyfelix.com

Instagram: @sft4u

Artist Bio: 

emily d'achiardi (she/her) is an internet artist exploring the intersections of digital culture, memory and intimacy. she received her b.a. in art history from reed college and is currently pursuing an mfa at uc santa barbara. through web-based experiences and video work, she examines how technology mediates our relationships and shapes our understanding of presence and absence.

Tiffany Aiello Art 1A Artist Talk on Wednesday, June 4 from 12:30-1:45

Tiffany Aiello. Dead End, 2023, 36" x 48", Oil on canvas. All images courtesy of the artist.

What: Artist Talk featuring Tiffany Aiello

When: Wednesday, June 4 from 12:30-1:45

Where: Ellison Hall 2626

Website: https://plasticanimal2001.neocities.org/

Instagram: @plasticanimal2001

Tiffany Aiello. Omen, 2025, 40 x 40", Oil on canvas.

Artist Bio:

Tiffany Aiello an interdisciplinary artist from Northern California. She received a BFA in Studio Art from Sacramento State University in 2023 and is currently pursuing an MFA in Art at UC Santa Barbara. Her creative practice is propelled by a lifelong interest in zoology, the solidarity of outcasts, and guided by her experiences as a neurodivergent woman. Through overstimulating and peculiar juxtapositions, she invents worlds with figures that exist at the intersections of human, beast and object.

Tiffany Aiello. Trotalong, 2023, 12 x 36”, Oil on canvas

Artist statement:

Tiffany explores the tumultuous human experience using animal metaphors and anthropomorphic vessels, woven together with humor and tragedy. She portrays hybrid worlds through an idiosyncratic lens, where things exist in the spaces between and outside binaries. Inspired by the escapism offered by niche online subcultures, her current body of work explores the body/soul dichotomy and the malleability of identity through the role-playing actions of character performance, masking, puppetry, and synthetic avatars.

Picture of Tiffany Aiello's studio.

Lyra Purugganan Art 1A Artist Talk on Monday, June 2 from 12:30-1:45

Photograph Courtesy of Lyra Purugganan

What: Artist Talk featuring Lyra Purugganan

When: Monday, June 2 from 12:30-1:45 PT

Where: Ellison Hall 2626

Website: lyrapurugganan.com

Instagram: @lyrapurugganan

Artist Bio:

lyra purugganan (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Manila, Philippines and raised in Columbus, Ohio. They received a BFA in printmaking from The Ohio State University in 2021 and a MFA at UC Santa Barbara in 2024. lyra is based in Southern California and Central Ohio, and was named the UCSB College of Creative Studies 2024-2025 Teaching Fellow. 

Influenced by craft and materials, queer culture, and the midwest DIY music scene, lyra explores selfhood and their intersecting identities, disrupting systems through the misuse and misplacement of materials. 

As an emerging artist, lyra has exhibited at OSU Urban Arts Space, 934 Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, UCSB Architecture, Design, and Art Museum, and the Greater Los Angeles MFA Show at CSU Long Beach. Recently, lyra is a co-recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Center artist project grants and has attended the Haystack Mountain School summer sessions.

Emily Baker Art 1A Artist Talk on Wednesday, May 28 from 12:30-1:45

 

Photograph by @morganeshots

What: Artist Talk featuring Emily Baker

When: Wednesday, May 28 from 12:30-1:45 PT

Where: via Zoom https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/83111992304

Website: https://www.emilyabaker.com

Instagram: @emilyallisbaker

Shouldering the Outmoded, 2023 (All photographs courtesy of Emily Baker).

Artist Bio: 

Emily A. Baker is an artist and researcher based in Atlanta, Georgia. With a BFA in Interior Design from California State University, Chico, and an MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Baker has exhibited work nationally and internationally. Residencies include Salem Art Works, The Vermont Studio Center, The Steel Yard, and The Santa Fe Art Institute and Penland’s Winter Residency. In 2022, her work was presented at the International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art in Berlin, Germany. She received an exploratory research grant from the Hagley Museum & Library supported research into DuPont’s contribution to the textile industry, specifically the rebirth of nylon’s image post-WWII. In 2024, she held her first international solo exhibition at ProjeckTraum FN in Friedrichshafen, Germany. She is a recent recipient of the 2024 Reed Fink Award in Southern Labor History at the Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University Library, the 2025 Nexus Fund from Atlanta Contemporary. She now is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Artist Statement:

Baker’s work studies manufacturing industries and honors the industrial past while actively re-envisioning who is included in its future. By investigating the worker’s role in relation to automation, technology, and trade, her work bridges gaps between materials, industries, and bodies, fostering a deeper connection to the products we use and the journeys they have taken. Centered on identity, repair, and retroactive healing—both within the body and of place—she expands upon the fragility of industry alongside the economic and seismic shifts shaping the future of work.

White Hot, 2025 white neon mounted on PVC print, steel, print 30” x 40”

Source image from AL Tech

We Were Here, source image from AL Tech

Red Barn Gallery Talk: At the Root on Wednesday, May 14 from 12:30-1:45

Six of my Independent Study students are having a group show, entitled At the Root, at the Red Barn Gallery (the Old Gym near the bus circle), and they we will be giving Art 1A a special Gallery Talk on Wednesday, May 14 from 12:30-1:45. Please meet at the Red Barn, not Ellison. The exhibition is from Monday, May 12-Friday, May 16 (New extended date).

What: Gallery Exhibition Talk

When: Wednesday, May 14 from 12:30-1:45

Where: Red Barn (former Old Gym)

Who: Akela Craig (not available for the Gallery Talk), Anikka Gedney, Elyse Harris-Crayton, Mikayla Kellum, Montserrat Rubio, Jasmine Wood.

Art 1A Artist Talk on Wednesday, December 4 Featuring Vivek Karthikeyan

Photographs courtesy of Vivek Karthikeyan

What: Artist Talk featuring Vivek Karthikeyan

When: Wednesday, December 4 from 9:30-10:45

Where: HFH 1104

Artist Bio:

Vivek (b. 1986, Abu Dhabi) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and filmmaker of South Asian-Indian ethnicity working at the intersection of moving image, spoken word, sound, text, devised performance and digital art. Working predominantly in an experimental idiom that emphasizes contingency of process and a visceral subjective experience for the viewer, Vivek is interested in extending the moving image beyond the screen into an immersive, “expanded cinema” experience that incorporates the spatiality of newer forms like projection mapping, xR, 3D modeling and computational imagery. His work often deals with themes such as the ambiguities of the creative process, the predicament of subjectivity in the digital age, technological dystopia, urban alienation and angst (thanks in no small part to years of living a double life as artist and tech worker.)

Vivek trained in cinematography at the prestigious Mindscreen Film Institute in Chennai, India and has worked on several independent films screened at venues including International Film Festival of Rotterdam, Scary Cow Film Festival in San Francisco, and Mono X Festival in New York, among others. Born and raised as an Indian diasporic kid in the Middle East before moving to the US as a young adult, he feels both at home and forever in exile everywhere he goes.

Art 1A Artist Talk on Monday, December 2 Featuring Autumn Nicole

Photograph provided by Autumn Nicole

Who: Autumn Nicole

What: Art 1A Artist Talk

When: Monday, December 2 from 9:30-10:45

Where: HFH 1104

Website: autumnnicole.com

Instagram: @autumn_nicolee

Artist Bio:

Autumn Nicole’s paintings are primarily composed of dark cool colors and highly contrasted scenes. She uses lighting as a way to evoke feelings of loneliness and highlights moments of silence. Within sculpture and installation works, light reappears to represent the presence of the individual. These works are derived, through carefully considering ritual, the passage of time, and the presence of oneself existing within a memory. Using experiences through adversity, and themes rooted in psychology, philosophy, domesticism, and language as the theoretical basis for her practice. Refining and simplifying provocative encounters through a gaze of hypervigilance. Nicole aims to create deeply complex psychological spaces as visual puzzles to foster thoughtful conversation among audiences.

Nicole is a Southern California-based artist. She completed her BFA in Studio Art at California Polytechnic San Luis Obispo with a French Minor. Followed by a certificate in Children’s Book Illustration from UC San Diego. Currently, Nicole is a MFA Candidate at UC Santa Barbara. Her work has been featured in major cities along the East and West coasts. Selected works have been featured with The San Diego Museum of Art, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Pickens County Museum, and she received a second place award in 48th International Art Show at the Brownsville Museum of Art. Additionally, she was awarded an Emerging Artist Grant and The Denis Diderot Grant, to participate at Château d’Orquevaux artist residency in France for 2025.

Art 1A Artist Talk on Wednesday, November 27 Featuring Dakota Noot

Courtesy of Dakota Noot

What: Artist Talk featuring Dakota Noot

When: Wednesday, November 27 from 9:30-10:45

Where: Zoom https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/83111992304

Artist's Website: www.dakotanoot.com

Artist's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dakotanoot/

Artist Bio: 

Dakota Noot is a Los Angeles-based artist and curator. He uses drawings, paintings, and installations to create animal-human hybrids that explore rural yet fantastical, queer identities. Originally from Bismarck, North Dakota, he continues to show in both North Dakota and Los Angeles, including solo and two-person shows at Highways Performance Space, MuzeuMM, and PØST. Noot has exhibited in group shows at Charlie James Gallery, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Torrance Art Museum, and LAST Projects. His series of cutout drawing installations have been shown at LA Freewaves, Cerritos College Art Gallery, and Otis College. Noot has been featured in Hi-Fructose and was a recipient of the 2023 Hyperallergic Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators. 

Art 1A Artist Talk on Monday, November 25 Featuring Christopher Velasco

Courtesy of Christopher Velasco.

What: Artist Talk featuring Christopher Velasco

When: Monday, November 25 from 9:30-10:45

Where: In person in HFH 1104. If you are sick or out-of-town, join via Zoom: 

https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/83111992304

Artist's Website: https://www.christopheravelascophotography.com

Artist's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caver83/

Artist Bio:

Christopher Anthony Velasco (b. 1983) is a photographer and performance artist based in Los Angeles, known for his exploration of the queer brown body and his innovative blend of horror and camp aesthetics. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from UC Santa Barbara in 2019 and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 2011.

 

Velasco has contributed to his field through various internships, including positions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center and Library as a Getty Marrow Undergraduate Intern. He is an adjunct professor at Ventura and Moorpark Community College and Los Angeles Valley College and instructs at CSSSA (California State Summer School of the Arts). 

His work has been prominently featured in exhibitions at esteemed venues such as the Art Center College of Design, AD&A Museum, Avenue 50 Studios, the California Institute of the Arts, the Hibbleton Gallery, the Getty Museum, and the Vincent Price Art Museum. Furthermore, Velasco has collaborated with Harry Gamboa, Jr., notably through Virtual Verite, and performed at Los Angeles Union Station, UC Santa Barbara, and LAST Projects.

Artist Statement: 

My photographic works often incorporate performance-based encounters with clearly defined boundaries of the photograph structure that defy purpose or permanence. Each of my photographs captures the unsustainable gaze upon a disregarded, disfigured body that is constantly evolving, descending, and autodestructing into endless layers of lost memory. The uncanny loops camp aesthetics together. 

My efforts to capture the briefest moments of awareness most often result in wonderfully played-out visual vignettes that echo beyond the existence of the façade that sustains the original setting of place or subject. 

Through my photographic works, I have effectively portrayed the fragility between existence and metaphor.  My sense of self serves as a medium by which characterizations can be asserted in visual form. My insistence that role-playing, role reversal, and role surrender are all acts of defiance against that which portends to control the destiny of the image gives my photographic works an essential urgency and definite positive charge.

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Autumn Nicole on Tuesday, July 30

Photograph provided by Autumn Nicole

Who: Autumn Nicole

What: Art 1A Artist Talk

When: Tuesday, July 30 at 12:00

Where: Arts 1344

Website: autumnnicole.com

Instagram: @autumn_nicolee

Artist Bio: 

Autumn Nicole’s paintings are primarily composed of dark cool colors and highly contrasted scenes. She uses lighting as a way to evoke feelings of loneliness and highlights moments of silence. Within sculpture and installation works, light reappears to represent the presence of the individual. These works are derived, through carefully considering ritual, the passage of time, and the presence of oneself existing within a memory. Using experiences through adversity, and themes rooted in psychology, philosophy, domesticism, and language as the theoretical basis for her practice. Refining and simplifying provocative encounters through a gaze of hypervigilance. Nicole aims to create deeply complex psychological spaces as visual puzzles to foster thoughtful conversation among audiences.

Nicole is a Southern California-based artist. She completed her BFA in Studio Art at California Polytechnic San Luis Obispo with a French Minor. Followed by a certificate in Children’s Book Illustration from UC San Diego. Currently, Nicole is a MFA Candidate at UC Santa Barbara. Her work has been featured in major cities along the East and West coasts. Selected works have been featured with The San Diego Museum of Art, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Pickens County Museum, and she received a second place award in 48th International Art Show at the Brownsville Museum of Art. Additionally, she was awarded an Emerging Artist Grant and The Denis Diderot Grant, to participate at Château d’Orquevaux artist residency in France for 2025.