INNER LINKS

Cynthia Ortega is an interdisciplinary artist living in Los Ángeles, exploring neo surrealism as a first generation Mexican American. She primarily works with acrylics, ink, and color pencil. Ortega experiments with color and patterns to achieve surreal paintings. She uses a limited color palette and under paintings of cool tones that are topped off with warm tones to feel nostalgia and timelessness. Many of Ortega’s paintings are depicted through anthropomorphism to contortions of figures, incorporating familiar objects or a dream dreamt from the night before. She has exhibited artworks from central to southern California including Rancho Palos Verdes, Fullerton and Bakersfield. She has a mural painted in Long Beach at Retro Row Ink where she is also working as a tattoo artist. Ortega received her AA for Transfer at Porterville Community College (2017) and is working towards her BA at California State University of Domínguez Hills.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Daniela Garcia Hamilton (b.1995) is a first generation Mexican-American painter. Her work explores the rituals and traditions she experienced as a child of immigrant parents. Color and pattern is integrated throughout her work as she describes the vibrancy of her traditions through portraits of her family members. Settings are fabricated to draw attention to social-political commentary on past and current immigrant experiences. As she completed her B.F.A. at CSULB, she began to reflect on her traditions through the American lens. American tile patterns are used as the veil through which she remembers these events. Her work has been exhibited throughout California and abroad including Mexico City, Amsterdam, and Sweden, with galleries such as Artbug Gallery, Luna Anais Gallery, Artshare LA, the Irvine Fine Arts Center, Residency Art Gallery and Thinkspace Projects. She has been a keynote speaker for the undocumented commencement at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and continues to hold a strong connection to her Mexican-immigrant roots.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Born in Athens, GA (1979) and raised in Jacksonville, FL, Otha Davis III also known as Vakseen is a self-taught, museum-exhibited visual artist, and a diamond and multi-platinum music executive/producer. While working on hit records has played a driving force in his career, Vakseen has been an active realist painter since moving to Los Angeles in 2011. Known for his vibrant, pop culture-influenced acrylic paintings, his artwork has been exhibited by museums, galleries and major brands around the world.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Elizabeth Munzón (b.1990) is a Long Beach CA based oil painter of Mexican descent born in the San Fernando Valley and raised in Sylmar, a suburb of Los Angeles. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) with an emphasis in Figurative Painting and Drawing and a minor in Marketing from California State University, Long Beach in 2017. Munzón’s work often addresses her Mexican-American ethnic identity by finding parallels between her personal relationships and Mexican mythologies, traditions and folklore.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Zoxer started as a graffiti writer when he was 13 years old. As time passed his older brother being a writer himself, would encourage Zoxer to not write as much but to draw instead. His brother would say things like, “You should put one of your drawings on paper on the wall with the can–that would look hard.”

Exhibition: Inner Links

John Galan is an emerging international artist and teacher. His work focuses on the inextricable connection between humankind and natural world. Having grown to appreciate the connection between the physical body, particularly the gut, and mental health, John now looks to the foods and healing practices passed down by his ancestors to help treat his body and mind. The ongoing series combines the universal archetypes of the lungs, brain, and heart with symbolic imagery from contemporary Chicanx culture and cuisine. With each artwork, Galan reminds himself and others of their inherent strength (cactus lungs), wisdom (corn brain), and light (pomegranate heart).

Exhibition: Inner Links

Nia Simone spent her early childhood in Compton, California. It was not until she turned seven that her life would change, and she would spend the rest of her formative years in Columbus, Ohio. By the time Nia was a teenager, she was criticized for being “different,” causing her to channel her disdain for being set apart through her art. This further allowed Nia to form a connection to her viewers through a shared feeling of not belonging–allowing Nia to see how powerful her empathetic paintbrush can truly be.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Los Angeles-based artist Rebecca Laws was born in 1990 in the Mojave Desert of Southern California. Her favorite sound is the deep, quiet void of a nighttime snowfall. Her favorite smell is the piquant earthiness of desert creosote after a rain shower. She is a Libra-Cancer-Cancer.

Exhibition: Inner Links

I’m a native Angeleno, first generation Mexican/ American. I’m a self taught artist and I’m queer too. I started my career in 1998. In 2013, it took a sharp turn when I read a quote in an Alexander McQueen biography. In it, he referred to himself not as a black sheep, but as a pink sheep. This idea of being different led me to create my series SHEƎP. My LITTLEZ are a sub series of SHEƎP. and are inspired by things I love.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Rerun is a Los Angeles based artist/vandal. That Illustrate his life experience through his paintings of cats. Shining light on various topics to see the world in a different perspective.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Los Angeles artist Ramón Vargas makes paintings that draw from his own life experiences to amplify and investigate the cultural realities of Brown communities. His figurative paintings blend realism with a surreal sense of color and place, often incorporating heavy symbolism, repeating patterns and flat geometrical elements. Utilizing a representational approach, Ramón alternately celebrates and subverts prevailing concepts of identity, tradition and interpersonal relationships. Throughout his career, he has held arts-related administrative, faculty and consulting positions for non-profit and grassroots organizations, and is a known mentor for arts education and community outreach in Los Angeles and Orange County. In addition to painting, he is also a muralist and printmaker and has shown his work in Los Angeles, New York and throughout California.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Randi Matushevitz is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles best known for her large-scale mixed media drawings, video, and installation projects that explore raw human emotions and the delicate nature of the human connectivity. Her drawings, paintings, and installations have been exhibited in galleries, art fairs, cultural centers, and museums in the US and Abroad. Her artwork is collected publicly and privately. Public acquisitions include Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Brain Center, Las Vegas, NV, the Marjorie Barrick Art Museum (Las Vegas Art Museum Collection at UNLV), Las Vegas, NV, Southern Glazer Wine and Spirits, Miami, and the Enter Art Foundation, Berlin, Germany. She is the awardee of a 2023-24 California Arts Council Artist Fellowship.

Exhibition: Inner Links

On a daily basis I am a creator. Most days currently I spend painting, and building art. I paint on found objects a lot, mostly wood from discarded desks and tables and repurposed wine boxes. I usually have one or more different series that I am working on so if I don’t feel inspired to do one, I can distract myself with another and still feel like I’ve been productive. But most days I still wake up and paint.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Perseus Lira is an Italian artist, who now lives in Los Angeles, California since 2021. Pietro was born in 1985, in Legnano where Milan’s Province in Italy. Perseus and his family lived in both Lombardy (northern Italy) and Sicily (southern island of Italy), growing up in the north, a Sicilian heritage, Perseus revealed these origins and reflected them in his artworks now. 

He studied classical dance for many years – perhaps this choice to use his body as an exercise in harmony came from his love for the severe magnificence of Sicily’s temples, the richness of its Baroque, the deep blue of its sea and the inexplicable amalgam of its almond cakes. Harmony is unattainable without discipline and so, with the idea of following a path of beauty in his life, he studied and received his BFA from Brera Fine Arts Academy in Milan, specializing in the restoration of contemporary artworks in 2007, and MFA in 2010.

Lira worked for the restoration of Amundsen’s glass slides in Norway, and also worked in London. After that he went back to Italy and started focusing on working on his artworks while teaching fashion design illustrations. Perseus started from a cultured and classical approach to the human figure, but as he gradually apprehended the truth about his life and himself, he began to reflect on exploration and research in his work, though this did not make him an experimental artist, but rather an experimenter. He cultivates careful watchfulness towards the invisible, but will dedicate the same attention to the tomato purée he never fails to make each summer, in a family rite that is first and foremost a way of being thankful to life. For him art and life are mutually dependent, and there are no limits to exploration. Perseus Lira’s artistic practice contemplates the use of rigorous techniques, excellent materials, and long preparation in the search for original forms of expression – where trial and error are both a limitation and a new horizon.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Steven Rahbany is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. His work explores queer and cultural identity, mainly through memory representation. His work has been exhibited in group and solo shows around the country, at galleries such as The Houston Contemporary Art Museum, TAG Gallery, Other Art Fair, and Art Share LA.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Phoebe lives and works in Los Angeles alongside her ride or die, Das Bibi the cat. A self-taught oil painter, Phoebe first learned how to paint using a “How to Paint Clowns and Characters” book from the 1960’s.

Exhibition: Inner Links

Randy de Leon, a.k.a. REBORNZ, is a native of Los Angeles, California, who picked up the love for art at a very young age; he drew funky animals ever since he was a kid. As a young adult in the late 90s and early 2000s, he explored every opportunity to express his creativity in the form of Graffiti in the street art scene.

To pursue his career and gain recognition for his art, he didn’t exactly lead a very smooth life and he got into trouble a lot of times while trying to express himself such as hanging around with a Los Angeles tagging crew to slipping out at night to cover the streets with his art. It got so serious that he got himself jailed, where he got the chance to meditate on how to lead a decent path and be a better artist that people could look up to.

This triggered him to create a new identity for himself and strive for other means to survive and maximize his creativity. Hence, he made up the name ‘REBORNZ’ in 2004 to indicate that he wants to leave the past behind and discover a better way forward. Luckily for him, he developed his art and graduated with a degree in communication arts.

Exhibitions: Street Schooled, Inner Links

Born in Tehran, Iran, Sara Janti is a mixed media artist and jewelry designer who currently lives and works in Southern California.

Sara has always had a deep connection to creating objects, her recent works tell her stories of life and own experience as an Iranian woman who is living in diaspora.

Influenced by the recent movements in Iran and the role of Iranian women leading the movement, by mixing images from old Iranian artifacts and self portraits, she has unveiled a series of works that describe Iranian women who are fighting for their own basic human rights. Her mixed media pieces are a reflection of the current status in what is happening and how it is affecting lives.

Exhibitions: There From Here, Inner Links

Sara No Special Name is a painter and a nail artist. She makes not-very-serious art about living in LA, the internet, and Ladyculture. She also makes yogurt and cereal ads as her day job.

Exhibitions: There From Here, Inner Links

Los Angeles based multi-media artist specializing in fine art painting. My style varies from day-to-day, always drawing upon daily interactions and stories from the past & present to fuel the next creative outlet. I enjoy collaging together art history, modernity and humor into a somehow cohesive and intriguing composition. These long-term layered compositions create surreal storylines and meaning that is dependent on the viewers interpretation.

Exhibitions: Ideas of Practice, Inner Links