Paper Route

Ann Weber makes monumental sculpture out of found cardboard boxes exploring the themes of relationships, community, and sustainability. Weber’s sculptures have a mystery or double meaning to them. Neither entirely representational nor abstract, but something in between, she wants the viewers to bring their own associations to the artwork. She received her BA in Art History from Purdue University and an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts studying under artist Viola Frey, whose large-scale sculptures greatly influenced Weber’s work. Weber lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 

Finnley Kirkman is a self-taught multimedia artist flirting with the complex power dynamics inherent to human relationships. The uncomfortable tension between the empowered and disempowered undergirds her work across media. Her practice incorporates photography, textiles, painting, video, and sculpture.

Arezoo Bharthania is an interdisciplinary Los Angeles based artist. She earned her MFA from CSU Long Beach and her MA from CSU Northridge. She has exhibited in venues around the world. She is the recipient of Museum manager award of Lancaster Museum of Art: CEDER and COTA Dean purchase award of Kleefeld Museum, Long Beach. She had her solo exhibition at LA ArtCore in 2023.

Leigh Salgado is a nationally exhibiting artist based in Los Angeles. Her undergraduate studies were in Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts at UCLA. Afterwards, she attended the Santa Monica College of Design, Art & Architecture. Her signature style: hand-cut paper transformed into painting, was first executed in the ‘90s. Harkening back to the Mexican medium of papel picado, it has led to numerous shows: LAUNCH L.A. Gallery, MOAH (the Museum of Art & History, Lancaster, CA), LAX airport Tom Bradley International Terminal, Oceanside Museum of Art, Vincent Price Art Museum and Brand Library & Art Center, among many other venues.

Chelsea Dean’s studio practice includes printmaking, drawing, photography, sculpture, and collage techniques. She reconfigures the tenuous boundaries between architecture, home life, personal artifacts, and the inherent messiness and transmutability of domestic ideals. Her process involves meticulous and emotionally charged exploration, documentation, collecting, and reimagining of the urban and rural landscapes she calls home. Recent work is informed by her field studies and found objects from abandoned homesteads in Wonder Valley —a sparsely populated High Desert region of Southern California which experienced a building boom brought on by the United States Small Tract Act in the late 1930s. Yet, by the early 1960s, thousands of homesteaders abandoned their desert homes and cabins, leaving the landscape dotted with tangible evidence of lost dreams. By layering collected elements and information Dean has observed and gathered, her recent work simultaneously embraces and pushes back against the entropy setting in on the long lost fantasies of others.

I have been an artist since age 15. I paint, draw, and make mixed media collages. BA in Fine Art-Painting from UCLA. My work is expressive, often edgy, sometimes serene and calm.

RUDY COLE is a Panamenian artist who resides in Pasadena,California. He studied art at Pasadena City College, Art Center College of Design, and the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative art. Rudy’s field of expertise are paper collage with mixed media using charcoals, pastels and acrylic. He is also known for his outstanding life like charcoal portraits of cultural, political, and famous figures. Rudy Cole has featured in solo exhibits at Bergamot Station, Pasadena Central Library, Walt Girdner Photo Studio & Gallery, The Inn at Spanish Bay, and group shows throughout California.

From the moment when, at 7 years old, I stood on a New York subway platform with my mother and sister watching the trains coming in with colorful drawings, I have been intrigued by graffiti. To most, graffiti is just a form of vandalism, but in truth graffiti it is a natural expression of people’s feelings and emotions. Photography has always been my passion and since my childhood I’ve used the urban landscape as my inspiration, finding beauty where others may see grime. My work is a combination of my photographs; at times using anywhere between 5-100 photographs, hand cut and individually applied. Some pieces may include painting, stenciling, reclaimed barn wood, corrugated metal and found objects. All of my work is then applied onto a wood panel and finished off with several coats of resin.

I’m Reginald Tucker (Artist name R.Tucker), an artist passionate about exploring the abstract and in particular the materiality of paper. I fuse geometric precision with sculptured abstraction, meticulously crafting works that play with color combinations and contrasts reflecting a fusion of abstract themes alongside embedded commentary on culture, design, and fashion. My artistic journey is grounded in innovation and my development of the Recycled Abstract platform and a transformative composition technique using recycled rolled magazines to create 3D paintings and collages. These magazine abstracts or ‘magistracts’ offer a tangible, interactive experience where texture and depth merge to captivate the senses, while the patterns, words and arrangement of the magazine themselves work to communicate my message. This innovative approach has been acknowledged through exhibitions in LA, Long Beach and Miami in both physical and digital media formats.

Pulling from personal narrative as well as a lifelong collection of vintage paper and ephemera, Somsara’s work invites the eye to linger on and re-contextualize the familiar. As seen in the mid-century ideal much of her imagery references, rarely are things as they appear. Her collage and mixed-media work weaves in layers of interpretation, hidden messages, and plays with the seemingly random connections between things. Somsara has a deep desire to find magic in the everyday that surrounds us, while exploring the profound inner world that exists in each of us.

Folklore is the human attempt to pass on truths. Henry Glassie said it best, “it stresses the interdependence of the personal, the social; the aesthetic, the ethical, the cosmological; the beautiful, the good, the true. Practically, folklore is the study of human creativity in its own context” My art can be summed up as confessions of paper, a way to visually communicate truths, accessing the space occupied by folklore. Paper conceals and communicates meaning, and can be destroyed and overlaid in various modes. I begin a piece by abstractly representing an image in paint, which I then cover with paper: scraps found, created from pulp, or hand illustrated. I then peel away the paper, leaving a construction bearing a nonlinear but viscerally personal connection to its origin. The accumulated papers mimic the debris that sticks to memories; it mirrors waking life’s uncanny transfiguration in our dreams. Where realism trusts only what can be tested and seen, folklore presents a world vibrating with meaning, a morally charged and heavily fated universe that rejects logic in favor of the non-linear.

Exhibition: L.A. Abstracted, This Town Has HeART

Chenhung Chen is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist whose mixed media drawings, photography, sculptures, and installations navigate modernity through her transforming of mainly found industrial materials. Chen’s work investigates physical, social, and spiritual structures and how they intersect in contemporary culture.

Born in Beigang, Taiwan Chen has lived and worked in Taipei, Taiwan, New York, N.Y., and Los Angeles, CA. During a couple of residencies and international traveling experiences, Chen is situating herself between cultures and expressing herself from a global perspective.

Exhibition: L.A. Abstracted

Farzad Kohan’s sculptures and paintings explore themes like love, migration, and identity, and often incorporate appropriated media and found objects. Partially inspired by his personal history and surroundings, Kohan places an emphasis on form, allowing the successive stages of art making to become analogous to diasporic experience, as diverse, sometimes opposing, elements are sampled, brought together, and accumulated. These apparent stages are integral parts of each finalized work. Kohan’s formalistic process is revealed, for example, as he layers then strips abstract works through painting, collage, décollage, and sanding, creating built-up yet weathered surfaces that are at once chaotic and methodical. Allusions to the passage of time, gradual transformations, and hidden stories are found in the tactile details of his treated panels.

Exhibition: There From Here