Obsession and desire play an integral part in being an artist, not only in literal and conceptual terms, but also as they make work. While being compelled to create, dig around inside ideas, obsess and respond to the turmoil of the outside world, connect to the inner personal world of thought, it is the physicality, patience, endurance, decision making, and deliberate concentrated process that drives the artist, often towards uncertain outcomes…

In order to have a practice, an artist must harness obsession and desire, and their mind, body and skillsets, with discipline and determination.

This exhibition is a collection of work by artists from the USA and the UK who are exploring obsession and desire as conceptual content as well as it being a theme and force behind their practice.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Eunkang Koh

Claire Scully

Lexa Walsh

Julia Schwadron Marianelli

Claire Potter

Tyler Calkin-Low

Carrie Lederer

Stewart Easton

Jennifer Garza-Cuen

Galen Brown

Jean Brennan

Betsy Enzensberger

Josh Galarza

Frances Melhop

Kelly Popoff

Fold / envelop / lick and seal / a pale tint of red / non-existent // cover / enclose / words of injuries translated / A821 // to be involved in / within and without / entrances and exits / of a color intermediate between red and white // Mn2+/ holding moderately radical socio-political views / arrivals of departures / hysteria / to be moved emotionally / tickled / cut / to perforate / pink justice // pick / pierce / puncture / wound // a surgeon’s knife / circularly diagonal rectangles / layered / terra cotta / covers / sheets / paper on paper / a containing structure // light / bluish red hues // +1 Ag+ / concealing and revealing / intimacies / body and mind / violent exhaustion / thin and flat / rosy / ultra violet / halides of silver in four-flap arrangements // rolls of flesh / exposed scrolls / light-stained / undeveloped // 255, 192, 203 / fragments of fixed impermanence / mute tellers of providence // AgX / compound chemical / within and without / across the contours of open wounds / between red and white / in the absence of something // a color / folded / enveloped / sealed and licked

Jennifer Garza-Cuen

Koh’s, Images of Food with # explores trends in food images in our culture; beautiful images of food people post on various social media outlets. This Images of Food project shows how images of food have become an important and interesting subject matter in the contemporary world where food images become more popular than actual food. This new phenomenon has affected how Koh, as an artist, sees food we eat and images of food.  

We socialize and interact with others while we are cooking and eating. In the contemporary world, however, the definition and function of meals have been changed as more people eat alone and have diet restrictions because of food allergies and/or their desire to lose weight. These new phenomena affect how we consume and interact with food. People get pleasure out of looking at food instead of actually eating it.  As a result, images of food are flooding social media sites, magazines, TV shows and specific types of Youtube videos called “mukbang” in which people watch others eat, as our lives turn from having food to watching food culture.  

Since social media came to our lives, our life styles and how much we show of our personal lives has drastically changed. Images flood social media; food images are ubiquitous. People enjoy images of food on social media because they reveal not just what we eat from day to day, but also communicate where we eat, our social class, our taste, what gives us pleasure, and what we think gives others pleasure. Our aesthetic choices have changed as constrained by the frameworks of each social media platform.

Koh’s artwork relies on the process of capturing images of food. She uses watercolor/ gouache painting and drawing as well as printmaking and 3 dimensional sculptures to create images of food to explore these trends of images of food in the contemporary culture.

HITHERSIDE

Silver love

Letters fall

            zigzag from the eaten heart

            of soft

            leukocyte moon-

            flowers

he gazes

            watches narrow syllables catch

            in the lashes of

            her damp upward eyes

at nightfall

in her

he creeps

            scratches nocturnally

            a tiny   blind   witherstern dragon

A tombstone starts

            begins to crumble under the weight of her sigh

She beckons

            calls him through the beak of two cupped hands

            moss lips agape

            --circadian ghost

by Australian poet Claire Potter

Outer Wilderness: the third journal of a sequence of events that occurred over a vast period of time in an undefined region of deep space.

Outer Wilderness is the conclusion to a long term project which has interrogated our relationship with physical and emotional environments. In this book we look out into the depths of the universe. The viewer is invited to investigate the unfamiliar and potentially hazardous landscape of these projected unknowns.

Each landscape forms part of a mysterious journey across a universe of strange worlds of undiscovered life. Touching on a primal curiosity for adventure and the inevitable childlike desire to poke things with a big stick to see what they do.

“Sincerity is the most important aspect of my art making process.”

Galen Brown

Small Gestures is an ongoing project centered on mapping and translating social experiences. During the last few years, as digital technologies have facilitated the mechanics of our society, they have also distorted our relationships and our definitions of community. This work seeks to leverage these devices, applications, and platforms to generate embodied experiences and ways of knowing.

The works begin by generating 3D models from the hand movements of common social gestures such as handshakes and hugs. The models then become brightly colored 3D printed miniatures, large-scale sculptures, and dynamic digital forms. By producing multiple versions of each gesture, the series questions the objectivity and truth implicit in data capture and visualization. These models do not resemble the human form, yet they are direct records of human experience. These abstract yet indexical forms also exist without context, open to interpretation and playful misrecognition.

The Gestures are presented both physically and digitally, in an effort to change the viewer’s embodied relationship with this data to form new relationships to social experience.

In her most recent work, Schwadron Marianelli uses text phrases that function as titles to begin many of the paintings. These text fragments refer to both the natural environment and the human psyche. One painting, “Suppression Tactics” was conceived of as she considered the wildfire conditions in west alongside the systemic ways that information is kept from the people who need it most. Similarly, in the painting “Disturbed Sites,” she is using the pink filter of fire retardant, dropped from planes and left on the post-Caldor Fire landscape to refer to the way that these disturbances can be both uncanny and generative. The text matrix as the first layer is meant as a place holder for thought as well as a visual structure to organize the painting itself. In other paintings in the series, she imagined the landscape communicating directly through leaving its own organic mark versus translating it into text myself. In works such as “Bank Breach” and “Weed Impunity” I am painting on top of fabric that has been bundled dyed in advance with local plants, literally embedding the plants themselves into the cotton. I imagine the finished painting as a kind of collaborative gesture with the landscape. 

A Memoir began with a survey of a large collection of vintage family snapshots. Popoff made a small square viewfinder to isolate moments in the photos that resonated with her own past. Through the process of painting these details, she hoped to capture a shared viewpoint of a deeply felt childhood.

Taking One For The Team is a large scale installation of exuberant award forms and a participatory sound element. This new body of work explores hierarchies, power, value and endurance sparked by events in recent years. Melhop Gallery º7077 is showing a small number of these awards created by Lexa Walsh in response to various stories of “taking one for the team.”

By definition, Taking One for the Team means to willingly undertake an unpleasant task or make a personal sacrifice for the collective benefit of one's family, friends or colleagues. As the global pandemic and unrest continue to unravel in our exhausted communities: How have we taken one for the team? What does that term mean to us personally? Through these stories we will learn what this means collectively in our current climate, and offer some Cheer in return.

The loving works are an exploration into the Tibetan Buddhist teaching of the Lojong Practice.

Lojong is a mind training practice based around a set of ‘slogans’ which are used as a focus of contemplation to broaden the awareness and train the mind.
This practice has been transferred to work with the form of hand embroidery which Stewart Easton uses to create non narrative based abstract embroideries.

Forbidden Fruits (Orthorexia) by josh Galarza

Composed of editioned intaglio seed packets in laser-engraved lock boxes, Forbidden Fruits illustrates the antagonistic relationship between an orthorexic and the various foods he believes are unhealthy and dangerous. In such a relationship, perfectly normal foods become intensely frightening and forbidden—and therefore desperately alluring. The key hangs beside the lock boxes to underscore that the orthorexic himself is the only obstacle to normal eating. Perhaps the most insidious eating disorder, orthorexia can easily manifest under the guise of “health” and “wellness,” the latest words appropriated and manipulated by diet culture, one of the most racist, sexist, and classist social constructs of our time. At its worst, my own orthorexia only allowed me to eat chicken breast, broccoli, carrots and leaves for days or weeks at a time. It’s typical for men suffering with eating disorders to be entirely unaware of what’s happening, and even more typical for them not to seek treatment due to stigmas and shame. Forbidden Fruits intends to plant a seed of conversation around this topic. For this work, I chose to illustrate my four most debilitating food rules/beliefs: legumes are poison, the human digestive system cannot process grains, sugar is not food, and toxins in potatoes prevent nutrient absorption.

THE GARDEN UNIVERSE 

It all stems from a personal curiosity about nature, our connection to it, and a fascination with its immense power. Lederer watches the current of a stream—the ripples, patterns, the innate navigation of water unfailingly maneuvering obstacles—and remembers this flow as a process to emulate in her own work. With faith and intrigue she continues to question: what lies just around the bend of unknown nature’s terrain? 

Lederer’s daily, up-close encounter with nature is the fifty-foot journey through her family garden, from her home to the studio. The garden becomes a metaphor for the universe. She also mines many other sources for inspiration, including Indian miniatures, Persian rugs, biology, fractals. 

This video was shot in an ecologically rare dwarf pine plain in the New Jersey Pinelands that abuts a U.S. Military aerial bomb training site. The soundtrack was recorded separately on-site.

EYE Want Candy

Essay by Teri Barnes

The exhibition EYE Want Candy at Melhop Gallery º7077 is a scintillating collection of artworks with themes of obsession, desire, and memory coated in bright hues to entice its audience. Yet this brightness hides some of the darker themes running through the work – from responding to the pandemic and loss of connection, to toxic air from wildfires all around. From food to nature to abstract objects, the exhibit is perfect for late summer gazing and longing, as well as contemplation over the last two years.

Entering the gallery, we are greeted with examples of otherworldly creations and obsessive art practice. Claire Scully’s piece, “Outer Wilderness” invites us to imagine a landscape like none we have seen before, with saturated tones of red and voluptuous tentacles. Scully creates imaginary planets and botanical specimens in her latest work, showing us her version of a universe where perhaps we are not alone. Tyler Calkin-Low’s “Small Gestures” and “Big Social Process” seem like they might occupy that same strange landscape, but they have such a human backstory. These works are created by mapping human hug interactions, with Calkin-Low making a 3D print of that movement to create each abstract piece. When covid was at its worst and social distancing was required, hugs seemed more like harm than care, but we longed for that interaction and connection. These gestures are poignant in their meaning and are imbued with playfulness and vibrancy. Adding figures to this strange utopia is Stewart Easton with his piece, “Man and His Creation,” where patches of embroidered color tell another story of an invented world. Like Calkin-Low, Easton’s work also revolves around connection, here showing results from a live Instagram sewing circle during covid lockdown – bringing together people from around the world, using the Buddhist Lojong practice to meditate on color and breathing. By setting focus on stitches, Easton sought to ease the tension and stress lockdown put on the community. Galen Brown’s “Untitled” series shows that obsession in practice can also produce meditative, calming results. Each repeating line vibrates with varied intensity – from soft pastel colors against black like a Licorice-Allsort candy of the top work, down to bold clash in the bright pink and green of the bottom piece.

In the small alcove off the main space, we find an example of memory of traumatic events in Julia Schwadron Marianelli’s piece “Weather Comes to You.” Reflecting on the fires that ravaged Lake Tahoe and forced evacuation from her home in Summer 2021, Marianelli’s painting disguises the damaged forest with flora and fauna that have regenerated or that fell and carpeted the area. Josh Galarza also employs nature in his piece “Forbidden Fruits (Orthorexia),” but with a tongue-in-cheek delivery. (“Orthorexia is the unhealthy focus on eating in a healthy way.” (WebMD)). Galarza’s “Virulent Vineyards” seed packets locked in their plastic bio-hazard boxes are both inviting – who wouldn’t want to plant these special art seeds, and cautionary – could something bad happen if we DID plant these seeds? We take all kinds of supplements and vitamins for vitality, but many times we look past the side effects of all these unnatural contents – they could be doing more damage than good. Continuing the idea of strange landscapes are Carrie Lederer’s pieces, “Nicotiana in the Cosmos, I and II”. The flowers and leaves in her paintings seem familiar, yet the space-like background or deep microscope organisms with unfamiliar textures and unnatural colors make the scene hard to place and feel like toxic versions to steer clear of. Another Stewart Easton embroidered work “Aura,” feels like this figure would be at home in these strange lands depicted in this small space.

In the side hallway we find a series of mixed-media pieces by Lexa Walsh titled “Taking One for the Team.” These brightly colored “medals” take on the idea of longing to come in first place to win the trophy or ribbon to proudly display for all to see. Walsh grew up as the non-sporty one with 15 siblings in the house, so being the artist of the bunch, she created her own ribbons and accolades, showing that we still yearn for recognition. Multiple abstract embroideries by Stewart Easton also line the hall – each creating a narrative of whimsy, distracting from the persistence of covid lockdown while bringing calmness against the fear. Near the end of the hall is another Marianelli painting, “Disturbed Sites.” This painting depicts the remnants of the fire retardant used to put out the fires from above during 2021’s wildfires in the lake Tahoe region. The bright orange of the flame retardant becomes overwhelming to the forest floor beneath. Pairing well with the juxtaposition of planes doing harm while also doing good, (saving homes, lives, and ecosystems), is the video piece by Jean Brennan, “Pollen.” This mesmerizing slow-motion recording of pollen puffing up out of the branches, a forced pollination of an endangered species of dwarf pine tree while military aircraft fly practice deployment and attack runs overhead, speaks to how man can both help nature – by shaking the pollen loose to help the bees and birds spread life, and harm – the sound barrier being broken directly overhead as well as the fuel and carbon emissions that planes give off that hurt the environment.

In the back portion of the gallery, we find food – beautiful, candy-colored, glorious food. Eunkang Koh’s series “Desire: Sweets I Dream” makes our mouths’ water with visions of sweets and pastries of all varieties. The intricate details and sumptuous colors make gluttony look less like a sin and more like a great time. But, not everyone can eat such treats – with gluten allergies and sugar addiction rampant, many people cannot eat these sweet treats without getting sick. And we all learned that too much of a good thing can be bad for us. Betsy Enzensberger’s resin popsicles look like you could eat them, which belies the toxic nature of working with resin itself. These perfect summer specimens ooze (literally) child-like appeal and tasty goodness. The mysterious quality of Jennifer Garza-Cuen’s “Lumen” series balances out the overt desire of food with the desire of femininity. The soft pinks in the series create a soft noir where we long to know more about the subject or object of focus. Using expired photographic paper, folded and creased into intimate envelopes, Garza-Cuen exposed the paper to the sun, creating mysterious soft abstract lumen prints. Frances Melhop’s series of “Whisper Portraits” also speak to the lore of femininity in the iconic dress, with abstracted figures inhabiting that ideal. Pink becomes less mysterious here and more charged with the history of the abused women photographed by Donna Ferrato in the 60’s and 70’s. These works are a response to Ferrato’s series acquired by the Lilley Museum.  These monotype “portraits” are also multi-layered, allowing for surprise with each new iteration – like the “whisper game,” you never know what the final version will be. Kelly Popoff’s series “A Memoir” is also charged with history, only it is her own history mined for visual reference. Painting memories from childhood we find a different version of longing and desire – one that makes details fuzzy and monochromatic, a nicotine-stained palette of the 40’s and 50’s, and a child’s questioning of the unknown and misunderstood adult goings-on. Popoff shares her dark recollections of a religious family and rituals, that when one can only see at belt-level, remains a mystery in memory.

EYE Want Candy is full of desire, obsession, and memory, with dark undertones and covid lockdown history – and we are invited to visit strange landscapes, taste sweet treats, or bask in the brightly colored world Melhop Gallery º7077 has created for us, with a reminder that every story has two sides, whether we choose to see the candy-coated version, or the sharp-edged reality is up to us.

TERI BARNES

short bio

PARTICIPATING ARTIST BIOS

 JEAN BRENNAN

BRENNAN received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Sierra Nevada University in 2019. She holds a Masters degree in Communications Design from Pratt Institute and a Bachelors in World Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. In 2003, she completed an apprenticeship in ecological horticulture with the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UCSC. This diverse course of study informs a love for plants and language and a transdisciplinary approach to making. Jean has exhibited in solo and group shows in New York, Amsterdam, California, the Hudson Valley, and Nevada. She is a Professor in the Graduate MFA Communications Design Department at Pratt Institute. 

As an interdisciplinary thinker, Jean works at the intersection between ecology, language, alchemy, and the body. Recurring themes include a fascination with atmospheric forces, plants, phenomenology,  and color. Using the lyrical essay as method, she loosely assembles scientific research, historical and popculture references with personal reflection, to explore our relationship to the natural world, interspecies dependency, and models of resiliency. Jean uses design to publish, archive, and visually score projects that may include installation, video, sculpture and performance.

EUNKANG KOH

KOH received her B.F.A. from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, South Korea and M.F.A. from California State University, Long Beach, California. Koh sees within our contemporary society a new illusion created by a systemic world since the invention of the internet and social media. She works in various media- printmaking, bookart, drawing, painting and installation to address social phenomena in our contemporary consumerist society.

Eunkang has shown her devotion to art and the art making process. She has had significant solo exhibitions that include Main Gallery, The Society of Northern Alberta Print-Artists in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; and La Taller in Bilbao, Spain.  Koh also has participated national and international group exhibitions such as Centro Civico Pati Limona in Barcelona, Spain; Art Space Jungmiso in Seoul, South Korea; Mei Lun Gallery at Huan Fine Art Institute in Changsha, China; and Central Booking in New York City, New York.  Koh has been invited to artist-in-residencies including Seacourt, Bangor, Northern Ireland, Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium; Gualan Original Printmaking Base in Shenzhen, China; Chhaap Printmaking Studio in Baroda, India and Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California.   

 Koh is Associate Professor teaching printmaking and drawing in the Art Department at the University of Nevada Reno.

GALEN BROWN

BROWN was born in Reno in 1959 and raised in both Reno and at King’s Beach, Lake Tahoe. He was a dedicated junior ski racer on the Reno Falcons ski team and later the Lake Tahoe Ski Club, and a quiet loner in school who lacked direction until a ski accident rendered him immobile for six months. He began drawing from his bed while healing. 

Brown commenced classes at the San Francisco Art Institute and stayed for the duration of his formal art education, earning a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts in 1988 and a Master of Fine Arts in 1990. He continued studying in China and New York, and for the following 20 years Brown resisted selling his work to collectors, preferring to keep his bodies of work together. 

In 2019 the Nevada Museum of Art installed his solo exhibition Sine Cere, across 3 of their expansive gallery spaces and purchased Sine Cere, the title piece, one of the large 8 foot radius circle drawings for their permanent collection.

A large body of Brown’s work was featured in Tilting the Basin, the Nevada Museum of Art survey exhibition of contemporary artists working in the state of Nevada in 2016, which also traveled to a second Museum location in Las Vegas in 2017. His work is also in the permanent collection of the Nevada Arts Council, and the newly founded Clear Creek Collection at Lake Tahoe.

The quality of Brown’s work was acknowledged with the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation artist’s award in 2017.

LEXA WALSH

Artist, cultural worker and experience maker based Oakland, CA  

Walsh makes projects, exhibitions, publications and objects, employing social engagement, institutional critique, and radical hospitality. She creates platforms for interaction across hierarchies, representing multiple voices and inventing new ways of belonging, not only for people, but also for collections and archives.

Walsh is a graduate of Portland State University’s Art & Social Practice MFA program and holds a BFA in Ceramics from California College of Arts and Crafts. She was Social Practice Artist in Residence in Portland Art Museum’s Education department, received Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Award, the CEC Artslink Award, the Gunk Grant, the de Young Artist Fellowship, and Kala’s Print Public Residency Award. Walsh has participated in projects, exhibitions and performances at Apexart, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Cité de la Musique, the de Young Museum, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Exploratorium, Kala Art Institute, Mills College Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, NIAD, Portland Art Museum, SFMOMA,  Smack Mellon, Taipei Artist Village, Walker Art Center, Williams College Museum of Art, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has done several international artist residencies, tours and projects.

Her upbringing as the youngest child of fifteen in a house full of trophies (that were not hers) informs her work, as does practicing collectivity while coming of age in the Bay Area post punk cultural scene of the 1990’s.  She founded the experimental music and performance venue the Heinz Afterworld Lounge, worked for many years as a curator and administrator at CESTA, an international art center in Czech republic, whose team created radical curatorial projects to foster cross-cultural understanding. Walsh co-founded and conceived of the all women, all toy instrument ensemble Toychestra. She founded and organizes Oakland Stock, the Oakland branch of the Sunday Soup network micro-granting dinner series that supports artists’ projects. Currently, she is launching the Bay Area Contemporary Arts Archive (BACAA), is a virtual Artist in Residence at the Frank Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University for the upcoming exhibition Shall Make, Shall Be: The Bill of Rights at Play, and is creating a large series of ceramic and mixed media award forms, Taking One for the Team. 

JULIA SCHWADRON MARIANELLI

SCHWADRON MARIANELLI is a painter and faculty of the Fine Arts Department,at Lake Tahoe Community College. Her paintings have been written about in multiple publications including The Brooklyn Rail, The Bangkok Post, and Contemporaryartdaily.com. She has shown her artwork across the country as well as internationally. She was a Visiting Professor of Painting and Artist in Residence at Chiang Mai University from 2010 - 2011, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Iowa from 2007-2009. She was a founding member of the “Matzo Files,” an artist flat file project inside Streit’s Matzo store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2004.

Julia received a Joan Mitchell fellowship in 2006. She completed her BA in Studio art at UC San Diego in 1998 and her MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art in 2004.

She currently lives and works in South Lake Tahoe with her husband and two kids.

STEWART FRANCIS EASTON

Breaking the traditional boundaries of craft, Stewart Francis Easton’s work fuses together hand embroidery, sonic art and music.

Drawing upon and using folk song, story and social history as a starting point Easton works with the space and weight of story to create large scale wall-based pieces which emphasize the passage of time within a single panel. Easton emphasizes the need to create using the hand as it is in this process that a connection is made with the story allowing a slowing down and immersion in the moment. Most recently Easton has been exploring the connection between the process of hand embroidery / expansion of awareness / and abstract forms into a body of hand stitched works documenting a daily practice of stitching meditation.

STEWART FRANCIS EASTON (B. 1976, United Kingdom) has had a number of solo/ group shows both in the UK and USA. His work is part of private collections in the UK and Internationally.

Stewart Francis Easton lives and works in London, UK.

TYLER CALKIN-LOW

CALKIN-LOW is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who examines social habits and anxieties through play and improvisation. His multi-modal practice uses objects, performance, video, augmented and virtual reality, machine learning, and motion capture, often in recursive combination. Responding to current developments in consumer technologies, and most recently to pandemic tech practices, he constructs interactive and immersive propositions for interpersonal experience.

His work has been exhibited and performed in art and educational institutions around the world, including in Venice; Beijing; Kathmandu; Gimpo, South Korea; Guadalajara, Mexico; London; Berlin; New York City; and Los Angeles. He received his MFA in Art and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts and is currently an Assistant Professor and Head of Digital Media at the University of Nevada, Reno.

CLAIRE POTTER

Claire Potter is the author of three poetry collections and numerous essays and translations. Her poetry has been published in Poetry Chicago, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Best Australian Poems, New Statesman, and Poetry Ireland Review and translated into Chinese and French. She studied at the University of Western Australia, and the University of NSW, and has a Masters in Psychoanalysis from Université Paris VII and in Psychoanalytic Infant Studies from the Tavistock Institute. She teaches at the Architectural Association London where she also runs the AAWriting Centre.

CARRIE LEDERER

LEDERER is a painter, sculptor and installation artist who exhibits her nature-inspired work across the United States. Lederer is a recipient of the prestigious Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Award, and she has completed public art commissions for Facebook, The City of Palo Alto, UCSF Medical Center, Art Source, Hudson Valley Seed Co, NY, and private collections. She has built site-specific installations for Turtle Bay Museum, de Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and many others. Lederer has work in private collections including Oakland Museum of California, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Stanford Medical Center, First Western Trust Bank, and Prudential Insurance Co, NY. Her work was profiled in a cover story for MUSES, published by MSU Department of Arts and Letters, and included in New American Paintings. Lederer’s work has been widely reviewed in publications including ARTnews, San Francisco Chronicle, Diablo Magazine, and SquareCylinder.com.

About Lederer’s recent public art projects:

In 2019 Lederer created The Land of Magic Awaits, a 10’ x 40’ mixed-media mural for Facebook’s Artist in Residence program at their new Fremont campus. With this project, viewers are enveloped by the imagery and urged to make discoveries that are camouflaged into the mural (“find the fox,” for instance).

Last year (2021) Lederer was commissioned by the City of Palo Alto to participate in a public art program called Uplift, a series of temporary murals to enliven the downtown streetscape—her 8’ x 10’ mural is titled Lost In My Abstract Garden. She was also commissioned by Elevate Art Menlo Park to create a 5’ x 15’ mural for the Menlo Church Teen Center which is titled Under the Wide Sky we Gather.

All three mural projects are interactive, and they encourage viewers to knit together their own stories and interpretation. Each time viewers see the work, they will find something new.

Lederer currently lives and works in Oakland.

CLAIRE SCULLY

SCULLY is a multi-disciplinary professional Illustrator / author / educator specializing in drawing. With a focus on pattern and line and how images are constructed through details and the importance of the minutia within visual language. In her own personal research and drawing practice she strives to answer the questions of ‘what lies beyond the horizon’ by looking at the notion of landscape, memory [individual and collective] and projections of the unknown.

Scully's work explores a variety of themes including the relationship between ‘man’ and his environment, the ‘silent struggle’ between Nature and Humanity. Her work explores ideas of personal / collective identity through visual language.She has a keen interest in traditional drawing methods and classical techniques and its place within modern contemporary illustration / image generation. Her multidisciplinary nature of drawing / image generation, also explores the importance of inspiration, in as much as what you draw from as draw with, crossing the boundaries into collage, moving image and sound. Her work plays with narratives and scale and moves through strange utopian [dystopian] worlds and parallel universes with juxtapositions of the unexpected.

BETSY ENZENSBERGER

ENZENSBERGER is a Southern California-based pop artist who is known for her whimsical resin sculptures. Her flagship Original Melting Pops™ series has had international recognition and acclaim. She has exhibited with galleries domestically in Los Angeles, Miami, Des Moines, Dallas, Charlotte, and New York, and internationally in Hong Kong, London, Stockholm, Belgium, Hamburg, and Byron Bay. Born and raised in New York, Betsy graduated from Tulane University’s fine arts program and apprenticed with the renowned sculptor Eric Johnson in Los Angeles.  She now resides and creates in Palm Springs, CA. 

JOSH GALARZA

GALARZA is an award-winning author, multi-disciplinary visual artist, and Montessori educator of fifteen years whose creative research centers around vulnerability, male gender performance, body liberation and queer issues. In 2021, Galarza graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno with a BFA in art and a BA in English and went on to teach printmaking at the university. This fall, he will undertake an MFA in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he will also teach. Galarza’s first young-adult novel, The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky, is currently on submission to publishers. He is represented by David Dunton of Harvey Klinger Literary Agency.

KELLY POPOFF

Artist and educator, Kelly Popoff, was born in Akron, Ohio and lives and works in Greenfield, MA. Kelly’s recent honors include: Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Drawing 2020, The Clowes Fund Fellowship and Residency, Vermont Studio Center 2019, Millay Colony Fellow 2018, The Artist’s Resource Trust Fellowship and Residency, Vermont Studio Center 2017, The Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation Grant 2017, a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation 2016, Finalist Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Painting 2016. Recent solo shows include At Home with Our Histories at The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, O Children at Herter Gallery, The University of Massachusetts and Rock on Doily at Augusta Savage Gallery, The University of Massachusetts. Kelly has exhibited in international group shows including shows curated by jurors such as Carter E. Foster (Curator of Drawing at the Whitney Museum of American Art), Richard Klein (Director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum), Trenton Doyle Hancock (contemporary artist), Camilo Alvarez of Samson Projects, Rachel Wolff (art critic and writer) and Deborah Rockman (contemporary artist).

FRANCES MELHOP

MELHOP is a photographer and visual artist, born in Christchurch, New Zealand, now living in the USA. She worked globally in the fashion industry as a photographer, constructing imagery; conceptualizing, shooting, and directing stories for publications such as Vogue Italy editions, Vogue Australia, Elle Portugal, and Marie Claire Italy.

In 2009, Luerzer's Archive named Melhop one of The World’s 200 Best Advertising Photographers for the images she created for the campaign of Descamps, France. In 2014 she was awarded the NNDA Comstock Innovator of the Year Award for her arts and community work at St Mary’s Art Center, in Virginia City, Nevada.

Melhop’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide. She works in photography, stitching, printmaking, and oil paint, exploring the tensions between the virtual and physical ways we experience the world.

Melhop has taught Photography, Introduction to the Arts, Printmaking, Drawing and Visual Foundations, at University of Nevada, Reno, Truckee Meadows Community College, and Western Nevada College.

In June 2020 she opened the contemporary art gallery, Melhop Gallery º7077, at Lake Tahoe, Nevada presenting local, national and international artists.