There from Here

Brittany Delany (she/her) was born in Boston, Massachusetts and is based in Los Angeles, California. As she grew up playing sports and learning dance moves from Janet Jackson music videos, she found dance homes in several communities including hip hop, jazz, contact improvisation, modern and postmodern dance. She loves to research, teach and perform around the world.

Exhibition: There From Here

I have spent my life fantasizing about an island only at a distance. Born in the United States but raised by grandparents from the island, I experienced varying perspectives of what it means to be Caribbean. As a person of the Puerto Rican diaspora, I reference magical realism in order to explore a place I only hold in familial memory. What is cultural authenticity when a major access point to history and identity is through the gaze of stereotypes constructed at the intersection of colonialism and capitalism? I explore this question through painting, drawing, and collage to unearth the soft, but painful tensions between myth and reality.

Exhibition: There From Here

Mark Acetelli was born in Detroit into an artistic household. Mark’s mother herself was a painter and some of his earliest memories was the smell of turpentine and oil paints. Growing up surrounded by his mothers work, she inspired and encouraged him to become an artist.

Mark’s paintings are inspired by the intensely personal introspective journey of life, from the ever changing complexities of love, loss, birth and transformation. The context of his work he describes as “Simple expressions of complex thoughts created by capturing the physical mixed with the spiritual.” He seeks to evoke a feeling rather than a defined image. Mark’s application of paint is an extension of that thought process. Using traditional brushes along with palette knives, rags and his hands, he continuously builds up and tears down, adding and subtracting, stripping away layers to achieve greater clarity and emotion. He uses primarily oils and encaustics to create thickly layered canvases with texture and depth.

Exhibition: There From Here

Wallace May is a Los Angeles based artist. She studied art and design at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her current body of work is mainly acrylic and watercolor paintings that center memory and nostalgia.

Exhibition: There From Here

Tony Pharo is a Multidisciplinary Artist, whose work is conveyed with a raw and transparent spirit, celebrating emotion and conviction. With a visceral color palette that hits you in the eyes and a disarmingly playful tone, he tears down barriers to the soul. Born in 1988, his creative voice is raw and new (literally), as he has been using his creative voice for only six months; as a true conduit of his generation and their potentially pointless search for meaning and purpose amidst a sad, cruel life in a flawed world. He brings a new joy and experience to this world with each passing day.

Exhibition: There From Here

Tom has been exhibiting his work since 2006. He has shown in venues in the Los Angeles area and greater California, including the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, The Lancaster Museum Of Art, The Torrance Art Museum, The Advocate + Gochi Gallery, LA Artcore, and bG Gallery. He has been awarded Best In Show for “Invisible Realities” at the Satsuma Gallery and “Who Do You Think You Are?” at the San Fernando Valley Art And Cultural Center. He received the City Managers Award in the 32nd Annual Cedarfest at the Lancaster Museum Of Art. He was recently invited to attend a Kapaipai Professional Artist Development Workshop hosted by the Lancaster Museum Public Art Foundation and was awarded a grant from the Los Angeles Center For Cultural Innovation to cover the cost of participation. Tom has a BFA in acting from SUNY At Purchase. Primarily self-taught as an artist, he has also studied with Franklyn Liegel at the Art Center Pasadena, CA.

Exhibition: There From Here

Timo Saarelma (b.1977 Turku, Finland) studied photography and videography in Oslo National Academy of Arts in Norway, and completed his studies receiving his Master in Fine Arts degree in 2009. Timo Saarelma lives in Los Angeles, California since 2014 and works as an independent artist and freelance photographer.

Saarelma’s works have been exhibited in various exhibitions in USA, Finland and other countries. In 2015 he worked as a resident artist in an artist-in-residence program in Oaxaca, Mexico. In 2016 he worked as an artist-in-residence and had a solo exhibition at Galleria Liliput Experimental in Puebla , Mexico. In 2019 Timo Saarelma’s photographs were on display at the Calafia: Manifesting the Terrestrial Paradise -The MexiCali Biennial exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California.

Exhibition: There From Here

Spookyharris is a painter, muralist, sculptor and writer who uses humor, pathos and nostalgia as tools to reflect and process the idea of the short and beautiful bursts of life that encompass the human experience. Spookyharris is the artist-in-residence at Strand Brewing Co where he continues to work on a 250 ft plus “living mural” that reflect themes on on-going beer releases. He is also the founder of a small gallery within, Cheap & Tacky gallery.

Exhibition: There From Here, Spring Benefit and Art Auction

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

Marcie grew up in LA and is known for her use of bold colors as well at her subject matter. Her first tools were acrylic and water color paints, until college introduced her to an array of different mediums and techniques, including oil painting, this not only reinforced her love for this passion but helped her grow as an artist.

Exhibition: There From Here

Karina Vazquez is one of the twenty-one artists exhibiting in our There From Here show.

I grew up garbage picking in the alleys of Detroit in the 1970s and developed a preoccupation with the fate of discarded things. In my late teens a dozen 1950s portable TV sets at the curb came home with me. I had no idea what I was going to do with them but I knew they weren’t meant for the landfill. My early 20s were spent visiting antique stores buying kitschy vintage Life Magazines. In my late 20s I expanded my appliance acquisitions into commercial dryer doors and taught myself cabinet making using How To manuals. In the late 90s I started my own product placement agency and spent the next twenty years using the medium of television to increase awareness of my clients’ products. In 2018 I closed my business and decided to revisit my stored collection of vintage TVs. One big change in those 20 years was technology. I discovered an online archive of newspapers that opened up endless high-resolution advertisements and introduced me to events from the 1940s to 1960s to capitalize on as subject matter. Since the big wooden console televisions that were once the centerpieces of 1940-60 family life were taking up too much space in my workspace I sheared the stylishly designed fronts off of the sets and mounted them on wood. This began a new iteration of my work creating new opportunities to explore the darker side of the “good old days.”

Exhibition: There From Here

Born in Helena, Arkansas, Johnny Taylor grew up in and around Memphis, Tennessee. Early inspirations were MAD Magazine, Star Wars, and the rock band KISS. When he entered school, Johnny drew variations of these subjects ad infinitum. This interest in drawing led to a job producing a weekly comic strip at age 10. Thus encouraged, the young cartoonist determined that he would always make art.

Taylor began painting as a student at the University of Memphis (BFA, Art History, 1996). On New Year’s Eve of 1992, he made a resolution to paint three paintings a day, every day, for the entire year. By the end of 1993, Taylor had begun exhibiting the fruits of his labor. Showing paintings regularly ever since, he has not strayed far from the hard-edged cartoon style that marked his initial efforts. Primarily painted in acrylics with screen printed and stenciled elements, Taylor’s output has tapered from his earlier, dizzyingly prolific period.

Exhibition: There From Here

Jen P. Harris (she/they) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose multifaceted practice combines research, painting, and collage to engage with the many pasts that shape our present. Harris holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.F.A. from Queens College of the City University of New York. She is a recipient of a 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, and grants from the Puffin Foundation, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and Iowa Arts Council. Her paintings and installations have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States. The New York Times, Columbia Journal, Guernica Magazine, CultureCatch, and The Philadelphia Inquirer have reviewed or featured her work. Harris is a current contributor for the artist-run publication The Coastal Post and maintains a studio in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles.

Exhibition: There From Here

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

Exploring the real and the referential, parallels of light and consciousness underpin Donna Gough’s conceptual framework. Linking elements from drawing, sculpture, installation and light-based media, her practice is an ongoing enquiry into concepts of the ‘unknown’ and the illusion of time (ourselves) flowing from the past towards the future as a subjective experience of consciousness.

Gough’s approach to installation and neon aesthetics is often focused on conceptual wordplay, exploring the relationship between art and the duality of language through the complexity of the human experience. She is interested in the effect light has on our psychology and spatial perception, with its inherent ability to confront the eye and mind of the viewer.

Exhibition: There From Here

Jina Chae is a Los Angeles-based artist who was born and raised in Korea, where she earned her BA in Textile & Design from Chung-Ang University. She has worked as a fashion designer for 10+ years in Seoul and LA.

Longing to fulfill her dream of becoming an artist, she searched for a way to blend her design skills and experience with her passion for the arts. Her first foray into the art world came in 2018, working as a creative director for an art gallery in Seoul, where she curated multiple exhibitions featuring emerging artists. Now living and working in LA as an artist under the name ‘Coolprettyfreak’, she hopes to empower other women and immigrants to explore the arts.

Exhibition: There From Here, Rainbow Shift

Christine Rasmussen is an American artist raised in Pakistan, Vietnam and the United States. Now based in Los Angeles, Rasmussen earned a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley. Her work has been featured in multiple juried exhibitions, a number of solo exhibits and various publications. She has works in the collections of Imagery Estate Winery, the Hilbert Museum of California Art and various private collections worldwide. Rasmussen is represented by George Billis Gallery LA.

Exhibition: There From Here

Christian Spruell is a SFAI alumni and Skowhegan alumni. He has exhibited many works throughout the states, but predominantly in California and New York.

Exhibition: There From Here

AnnLi Tico is a Bay Area native and a Los Angeles based artist, who graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara with degrees in Art and Economics in 2021. Her work spans multiple mediums, and focuses on the expansiveness and intricate details of the natural world, as well as the living spaces we create for ourselves. Through the use of found materials, pattern, and repetition, she attempts to create work that captures the feelings these places evoke, and is playful and inviting to the viewers.

Exhibition: There From Here

Andy Wilcox is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. At Cal Poly Pomona he teaches design studios at all levels with an emphasis on interdisciplinary practice, urbanism and the found conditions of wilderness within the vast infrastructure of Los Angeles. As an artist, he uses found imagery reorganized into new associations and contexts to explore wildly integrated ideas of landscape as the social and cultural construct it is.

Exhibition: There From Here