April 22 - June 16, 2023
Curated by Galia Linn
Don’t Believe Everything You Think, is an exhibition that explores how artists manage the universal impulse of negative self-talk through their artistic practice. Working across multiple disciplines: painting, collage, sculpture, photography, performance, video, and sound, the 14 featured artists exert concerted effort to push past, accept, or prevail over their own negative self-talk. Through the sanative process of their art—from genesis, to creation, and finally presentation—they have learned that it is best to not always believe everything you think.
Curator & Artist-led Exhibition Tour: Thursday, May 25, 2023
Join artist and exhibition curator Galia Linn, along with other artists featured in Don’t Believe Everything You Think, for a tour of the current exhibition. Light refreshments will be served at 6:30pm and the tour will begin at 7:00pm.
Artists in the Exhibition:
Sacha Halona Baumann, Adrienne DeVine, Alexandra Grant, Iva Gueorguieva, Bettina Hubby, Janna Ireland, Galia Linn, Amanda Maciel Antunes, Erin Morrison, Jacky Perez, Alicia Piller, Madaline Riley, Elena Stonaker, Camilla Taylor
Sacha Halona Baumann
Sacha Halona Baumann is an artist, designer, curator, publisher and art business professional whose primary medium is collage. She extracts found images and places them in a new context, manipulating the original tone and intention, creating a new narrative. She does so using self-imposed restrictions, which is in part a nod to her training and work as a designer as well as a consultant in which she concentrates on problem solving for the specific needs of clients. Restrictions become opportunities for new creations.
Baumann is the independent publisher of FULL BLEDE, a contemporary art and writing broadsheet. She received her BA in Visual Communication from San Francisco State University and Masters in Art Business from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art (now the Center for Business and Management of the Arts) at Claremont Graduate University. In Los Angeles she has curated exhibitions at Noysky Projects, Charlie James Gallery and Keystone Artspace.
In 2022, Baumann published STEP and REPEAT, a full-color, 480-page book featuring a small selection of her street photography taken around downtown Los Angeles between 2014-2022 on her iPhone. Says Baumann, “I believe the way you can help make a city work is by participating in it… A phrase that goes through my head as I’m stomping around this neighborhood I love so much is: There is so much to see. These walks and images I take are studio research. They are performance. They are a way of seeing. They are love.”
STEP and REPEAT: A romance., 2023
Ink jet photographic prints, 14 x 11 inches, ed. 1/3, $150 each
STEP and REPEAT, 2022
480 pages, full color, trade paperback, $45.00
Adrienne DeVine
Adrienne DeVine’s visual language has developed through exploration of materials, signs, and symbols grounded in Afrocentricity. She incorporates ideas from African traditions and beliefs and seeks out the histories of Black people throughout the diaspora to fuel her creative vision. Materials, techniques, and the intellectual process of problem solving drive her creative expression. Paintings evolve from layers of mark making with cultural, historical, and autobiographical meaning. DeVine uses recurring motifs and themes, texture, and rhythmic gestures to activate surfaces and conjure up visual energy. She crafts handmade books to archive cultural and historical information. DeVine’s series of wire mobiles form a constellation that captures time, space, movement and shadows, animating her ideas in what she calls choreography of thought. Her intent is to spark conversation and inspire new ways of seeing and knowing by sharing her art skills and intellectual interests with the viewing public.
Adrienne DeVine lives and works in her hometown, Pasadena, CA. She has a BA from CalState Long Beach and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. DeVine was a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant Nominee, a 2019-2020 Teaching Artist Fellow at Armory Center for the Arts. In 2020, she was among six Black women artists on the inaugural panel of the Los Angeles-based platform, Conversations About Abstraction; and was among a select group of makers in the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage African American Craft Initiative. Her work is in public and private collections.
(clockwise)
Choreography of Triumph, 2022, mixed media on canvas, 36 x 48 inches, $8,125
La Fleur de Vie, the Golden Yoni, 2019, mixed media wall hanging, 45 x 21 inches, $7,085
A Penny For Your Thoughts, 2023, mixed media on canvas, 10 x 10 inches, $500
Throne, 2023, mixed media embellished antique Chippendale chair, 45 x 24 x 20 inches, $20,000.
Alexandra Grant
Alexandra Grant is a Los Angeles-based visual artist who—through an exploration of the use of text and language in various media including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and photography—probes ideas of translation, identity, dis/location, and social responsibility. Her work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), the Pasadena Museum of California Art, among others, and in a solo exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art, Telepathy is One Step Further Than Empathy, curated by Cassandra Coblentz. Awards include the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
Alexandra is the creator of the grantLOVE project, which has donated artwork to raise funds for arts-based non-profits, including Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA); Project Angel Food; Art of Elysium; 18th Street Arts Center, and LAXART. Her most recent book, LOVE: A Visual History of the grantLOVE Project (Cameron + Company, 2022) documents the first fourteen years of this project. In 2017, Grant co-founded X Artists’ Books, a publishing house for artist-centered books.
Antigone 3000 (8), 2020
Acrylic paint, acrylic ink, sumi ink, collage, screen-printing and colored pencil on paper mounted on fabric, 106 x 72 inches, $55,000
Iva Gueorguieva
In lieu of an artist statement, artist Iva Gueorguieva would prefer to use something her friend, artist Trenton Doyle Hancock, wrote about her tapestry paintings:
“Iva’s current body of images are perhaps her most spiritual and allude to a metaphysical component. That’s not to say that they adhere to or promote any religious ideology, but these works bear some similarities to a number of talismanic textiles. Some of these new works are painted on unstretched canvas and hang from wooden devices. These pieces have a raw energy almost as if they were the hides of some recent kill. The works also feel less like they were painted and more like the images were somehow absorbed or burned into the ground. I’m reminded of a Rorschach test or the Shroud of Turin, especially in the cases where the silhouettes of human forms seem to bleed into focus.”
- Trenton Doyle Hancock, April 2013
Iva Gueorguieva (born 1974, Sofia, Bulgaria) has an upcoming show at Night Gallery, LA in March 2024. Select solo exhibitions and projects include Benton Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL; Bradwolff Projects, Amsterdam, NL; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, CA; ACME, Los Angeles, CA; Frederic Snitzer, Miami, FL; Pomona Museum of Art, Claremont, CA. Notable group shows include Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA and Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
(above, left to right)
Tendons and Tendrils, 2022, Acrylic and collage on muslin, 120 x 81 inches, $30,000
Sparrow, 2020, Acrylic and collage on muslin, 120 x 81 inches, $30,000
(as seen in installation)
3. River, 2021, Acrylic and collage on muslin, 53 x 300 inches,
4. Figures 1-6, 2020, Acrylic and collage on gauze, dimensions variable, $5,000 ea.
5. River II, 2023, Acrylic and collage on gauze and concrete blocks, 14 x 99 x 26 inches.
Bettina Hubby
Hubby’s multimedia practice is grounded in thought-provoking humor and topical exploration. Her diverse subject matter is expressed through collage, painting, drawing, printmaking, bookmaking, sculpture, collaborative art happenings, ceremony, and virtual reality.
“This new incantational series, Inside Job, served as my own monkey mind hygiene for the last few years of unrivaled challenges that were the micro to the world’s macro. The mantras (mind tools) became a calming field of preferred messages. The paintings are my body’s width and height, reflecting the physical embodiment of the words chosen. I am passionate about harnessing aesthetic technology, i.e. art, that can shift one’s perspective and experience.”
Bettina Hubby (b. 1968, New York City) earned her MFA in 1995 from the School of Visual Arts in New York and moved to Los Angeles in 1999, where she currently lives and works. Hubby’s work has been widely exhibited including solo exhibitions at Klowden Mann (Los Angeles), The Erotic Heritage Museum (Las Vegas), and Lora Reynold Gallery (Austin). Group exhibition in Los Angeles include Klowden Mann, Santa Monica Museum of Art, LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), ForYourArt, Side Street Projects, and The Center for the Arts Eagle Rock. Hubby and her projects have been featured in numerous media outlets including ARTFORUM, The New York Times, T Style Magazine, W Magazine, NPR, Los Angeles Times, Curbed and LAWeekly.
(left to right)
Loving Kindness Meditation (Metta)
When I Am Within I Am Never Without
I Accept What Is Let Go Of What Was...
I Am The Master Of My Fate
I Think I Can I Thought I Could
Breathing In I Know I Am Breathing In... Gouache on linen, 64 x 17.25 inches, 2021, $7,500 each.
Janna Ireland
Janna Ireland lives in Los Angeles, where she is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College. Her photographic work is primarily concerned with the themes of family, home and the expression of Black identity in American culture. In 2016, she began photographing structures designed by legendary Black architect Paul R. Williams. A collection of 250 of these photographs was published in a monograph entitled Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View, in 2020. In 2021, Ireland was awarded a Peter E. Pool Research Fellowship by the Nevada Museum of Art to photograph Williams’ work in Nevada. Ireland is the recipient of the 2023 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize.
A broad selection of Ireland’s work was included in the exhibition “Family Album: Dannielle Bowman, Janna Ireland and Contemporary Works from LACMA” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Charles White Elementary School Gallery. Ireland’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions including LACMA, the Nevada Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been the subject of articles in publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Harvard Design Magazine, and Aperture. She holds an MFA from the UCLA Department of Art and a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imagining at NYU.
(left to right)
Orange, 2020, inkjet print, 54 x 36 inches, $2,000
Knot, 2022, inkjet print, 54 x 36 inches, $2,000 Window, 2022, wooden table and metal frames, dimensions variable, $5,000
Galia Linn
Galia Linn is a sculptor, painter, and site-responsive installation artist living and working in Los Angeles. She is a builder of vessels, places and immersive gatherings. Often her work brings people together, exploring relationships between strengths and vulnerabilities—I invite other artists and community members to participate in aspects of my studio and to share their own creative practice. As an immigrant who escaped a war-torn landscape, Linn molds personal past traumas into clay-based vessels and guardians. Her work forms sanctuaries for experiencing strength and vulnerability, to feel protected and become protectors, to come together and unravel personal stories and rituals. She often depicts opposites: movement and stillness, masculinity and femininity, matter and spirit, as well as the passage of time and its imprint on our experience.
The work is a delicate balance between the capacity of the materials Linn uses (including clay, plaster, metal, yarn and paint) and utilizing these materials to their point of rupture. The objects reflect imperfections which cannot be controlled—they are windows into the interior strength of the structures, evidencing vulnerability, sturdiness, and resilience.
Linn has shown nationally and internationally, and her work is included in numerous private collections in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Paris, Brussels, and Tel Aviv. Her work has been featured in LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Art + Cake, and KCRW’s Art Talk. In Los Angeles she is represented by Track 16 Gallery.
(left to right)
Dino Egg. Large. Heineken Bottle, 2016, red sculpture clay with crawl white glazed stoneware, 39.5 x 35 x 34 inches, $15,000
Dino Egg. Large. Bombay Sapphire, 2016, red sculpture clay with crawl white glazed stoneware, 38.5 x 34 x 33 inches, $15,000
Stone I, 2019, black mountain clay and glazed stoneware, 51 x 19 x 16 inches, $15,000
As A Cage, 2016-on going
Wood, metal, plexiglass, and yarn, 112 x 120 x 120 inches, nfs
Amanda Maciel Antunes
Amanda Maciel Antunes is a self-taught Brazilian artist based in Los Angeles since 2016. Antunes considers her art a trans-disciplinary and spiritual practice. She creates for/in non-traditional spaces and works on responsive and durational projects, often concerned with anthropological texts and poetry in translation. Her practice reflects on the selective nature of memory, language and cultural heritage, as processes that help us adapt and interpret our present. Sites of practice have included a former WWII military shelter in East LA; Sæborg historical theatre in a northern fjord, Iceland; The Crowley Theatre in Marfa, TX; a Dessana Tribe territory in Rio Negro, Brazil; the Los Angeles National Forest; and the High Desert of California.
She’s currently in residency and researching the archives at UCLA Special Collections Library, a book will be published about the project with HEXENTEXTE titled Second Birth at Philosophical Research Society this coming April, 2023. She has exhibited her work in the USA, Brazil and Iceland. Recent select exhibitions and solo performances: Galeria Vermelho, Galeria Chão, Wignall Museum, Track 16 Gallery, Irrational Exhibits, Luna Anais Gallery, Irvine Fine Arts Center, and Midnight’s Watchtower. Forthcoming shows and performances in 2023: Flux Artspace, Philosophical Research Society, Wonzimer Gallery and 18th Street Arts Center.
I've Got To Tell You Something (diptych,) 2021 Hand stitched quilt with cloth and thread, 720 x 144 inches, Digital video, 00:20 minutes, Duration: 365 days, 1,095 hours (March 15, 2020 - March 15, 2021) Location: Mt. Wilson, Action, Direction, and Production: Amanda Maciel Antunes, Cinematographer: Amanda Maciel Antunes and Sonia Hernandez, Music Composition: Philip DuPertuis, nfs
Memory Grid, 2019–22 Digital photography of inkjet prints with thread, 5 x 5 inches each, dimensions variable, nfs.
Erin Morrison
Erin Morrison’s work is informed by issues of social justice, reproductive rights, and the implications of the expansion of Western Colonialism on global relations. Often spanning the languages of abstraction and representation, she embraces analog methods of production including gypsum cast bas-relief, printmaking and ceramics as a means of bringing in the viewer to have a physical dialogue with the intricacies of the work.
Penny (Wishing Well) was produced at the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic, when Americans received their first stimulus checks. The artist found the Penny a uniquely positioned object as the least valuable piece of currency that is easily lost, forgotten, or tossed in a fountain to make a wish.
Transition 1-6, reflect on the moment of transition during the labor of the artist's second child. They are intended to show the great strength and power of the body to bring another into the world, in the most simplified language of abstraction. Made while the artist lived in Hong Kong during the pandemic under a strict quarantine policy that kept her and her family within the city limits for two years. The exercise of painting and collating papers became a way to pass the time.
Morrison studied painting and sculpture at Memphis College of Art and UCLA, where she received her MFA in 2014. Her work has been featured in publications including Hyperallergic, The Hong Kong Economic Journal, The Contemporary Digest, Juxtapoz, LA Magazine, FLAUNT, The Los Angeles Times, and New American Paintings. Morrison has acted as co-curator for multiple events including Collect For Choice, fundraiser for The Brigid Alliance hosted by The Binder of Women (2022), amongst others.
Transition 1-6, 2023, ink and acrylic on rice paper mounted to Aquarelle, 300 g/m2, 18 x 12 inches, $1,100 each
Penny (Wishing Well), 2020, enamel and oxidized copper on polymer-gypsum, 36 x 36 inches, $13,000
Jacky Perez
Born Jacqueline Perez in Los Angeles county, she goes by Jacky and does business as La Conejita. First-generation born and the last of her paternal line, she learned at an early age the value of hard work through handiwork, witnessing the creativity behind necessity. Her grandfather was a carpenter and her grandmother was a seamstress. She inherited his calluses and her precision.
Working predominantly in sculpture with readymade objects and materials, Jacky Perez finds poetry in the residue of the everyday. As a fabricator living and working in Los Angeles, she deals with the debris of the industrial world daily. In her work as an artist, she seeks to interpret and redefine our relationship to these elements by examining the roles they play in altering our lived environment. Her work combines language and assemblage to investigate histories, both shared and personal, alongside themes of labor, loss and legacy.
Interested in the underlying connections we have with our refuse, she studies the process of how the precious becomes suddenly profane. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s methods of “assisting,” “rectifying” and “reciprocating” his ready-mades, she similarly reworks old, discarded objects to seek out new narratives. Incorporating the hand wrought with the manufactured, she looks to confront the rigidity of the past with the tenderness of the handmade. Through altercation and reinvention she demonstrates the malleability of purpose, and by extension, our notions of identity in order to transform the previously profane into something precious.
(left to right) Heavy Headed Swagger, 2022 M1 steel helmet, 3⁄8” heavy duty zinc security chain, 1-1/8 x 4-5/8” brass snap hook with round fixed eye, screw collar loop, light fixture, light bulb, electrical cord, electrical switch, and electrical plug, 7.5 x 11 x 96 inches, $1,200
Para todo hay remedio, menos la Muerte (Tecate Light), 2023 Silkscreened wood, screws, Durham’s container, red fringe, light fixture, light bulb, 120v outlet, electrical cord, and electrical plug, 20 x 10.5 x 4.75 inches,
Temporary Autonomous Zone, 2022
Cement, wood, steel, fiberglass, electrical wiring, electrical plug, lighting fixtures, light switch, 20w grow light, and monstera deliciosa plant, 40 x 26 x 20.5 inches, $1,500
Alicia Piller
Los Angeles-based artist Alicia Piller was born and raised in Chicago and received her Bachelors of Fine Art Painting and Anthropology from Rutgers University in 2004. While working in the fashion industry, living a decade in New York City, and several years in Santa Fe, Piller cultivated her distinctive sculptural voice. Continuing to expand her artistic practice, Piller completed her Masters of Fine Arts in Art from California Institute of the Arts in May of 2019, focusing on sculpture and installation.
Piller is currently represented in Los Angeles by Track 16 Gallery. Her work is part of the Hammer Permanent Collection, Glendale College Collection, Forrest Kirk Collection, the Pam Royalle Collection, and Janine Varrois Collection. Her sculptural work was featured on the cover of FULL BLEDE, the Lumina Journal (Sarah Lawrence College,) and the Los Angeles Times.
(wall)
Acid Rain, Dissolving Emissions & Old Ideologies., 2021 Vinyl, resin, latex balloons, gel medium, laser prints, plastic, and foam, 100 x 96 x 132 inches, $15,000 (floor)
Diversity of Voices, Re-hydrating. Resisting Contamination., 2021 Vinyl, resin, latex balloons, gel medium, laser prints, steel, and recycled full bleed magazines, 54 x 113 x 70 inches, $30,000
Madaline Riley
Dancer Madaline Riley describes her work as located somewhere between art and life. She believes all of reality to be surreal and uses a wide range of mediums to capture it. Her twenty-plus years of dancing in various styles has led to her work in photography and video, and paint. Riley likes to capture life around her in a grounded yet completely new and imaginative ways. She sees all art as stemming from experience and sensation in the body and uses this as her locus for creating; working from self-intuitive and improvisational states.
When Skin Feels Like Glass, 2021
Digital video, 00:23 minutes
Director: Madaline “Mad Linez” Riley, Choreographers: Madaline “Mad Linez” Riley and Brynn Bodair in collaboration with the dancers, Producers: Brynn Bodiar and If I Was Your Body, Performers: Julia Gonzales, Shan Hafez, Joshua “Sage” Morales, Lam Nguyen, Reagan Ricossa, Sherwin “Beast” Salonga, and Keilan Stafford, Director of Photography: Spencer Jezewski, Musical Composition: Mid-Air! and Elliot Sellers, Additional Music: Amnesia Scanner, Deli Girls, and Sega Bodega, Costume Design: Salina Wright, Assistant Director: Brynn Bodair
Elena Stonaker
Elena Stonaker is a Los Angeles-based, multi-media artist known for her playful yet laborious work in textile installation, painting, sculpture, design, video and participatory experiences.
She is deeply interested in exploring the crossover between art, healing modalities and creation mythologies. Using softness, beauty and comfort to create a safe space to explore shadow and discomfort, Stonaker creates hyper-feminine surreal worlds based on archetypal visual language. This can be especially seen through her series of “Big Mamas;” larger-than-life, soft feminine figures meant to invoke a sense of childlike wonder and respect for the largeness of the universe we live inside.
Stonaker’s work has been published and exhibited worldwide.
Celestial Mama, 2023 Hemp, cotton, recycled denim, polyfil, embroidery floss, thread, and beads.
72 x 72 x 72 inches, $10,000
Camilla Taylor
Camilla Taylor is recognized for their monochromatic and intensely introspective works on paper and sculpture which utilize figurative and architectural forms. Taylor’s artworks reflect the viewer’s internal lives as well as collective issues we experience as a society.
An accomplished artist exhibiting in traditional gallery spaces, they also create installations in intimate and unusual locations, such as site-specific works in a swimming pool, desert garden, and other locations.
Raised in Provo, Utah, Taylor attended the University of Utah and received a BFA in 2006, and an MFA from California State University at Long Beach in 2011. Taylor lives in Los Angeles, CA, with their partner and three cats, and teaches printmaking at UCLA.
Witness, 2022 Waxed ceramic with underglaze.
21.5 x 17.5 x 17 inches, $10,800