Life is Collaborative

Spencer Byrne-Seres is an artist, designer, and arts administrator based in Gainesville, FL. He creates collaborative and socially engaged platforms that build nuance and complicate our understanding of the world around us. Sometimes he can be found teaching sculpture and foundations classes, or leading workshops on art handling, conceptual art, and social practice. These days he is often working on exhibition designs for artists and art spaces through his studio Visitor Projects. Spencer graduated from the Art and Social Practice Program at Portland State University, and until his recent move to Florida, served as the Exhibitions Director at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. You can email him at [email protected]. Roz Crews is an artist and educator currently living in rural North Florida. She likes making art projects about specific people and places, and thinks about her practice as a service that can be activated in a variety of circumstances including but not limited to: universities and colleges, public schools, commercial and non-commercial galleries, art festivals, and bars. In addition to multidisciplinary projects, Roz makes drawings and paintings, and has a very full archive of digital photographs documenting the lives of people around her as well as have a 2-D and 3-D archive of objects and ephemera primarily recording art events in Portland, Oregon. Roz decided to get off social media so I could redirect my scrolling time towards long-form reading and writing; so please add her to your newsletter and sign up for hers here: [email protected]. 

Aliza Nisenbaum was born in 1977 in Mexico City, Mexico, and lives and works in Harlem, New York. Her early work consists of small, intensely painted still-lifes of flowers and large, delicate, yet colorful abstractions. In 2012, Nisenbaum began working as an art and English teacher at Tania Bruguera’s project, a community center called Immigrant Movement International (IMI); there, she painted intimate portraits of the Mexican and Central American immigrants who frequented the space. Patricia Treib was born in Saginaw, MI, and lives and works in Brooklyn. Solo exhibitions have been held at Kate MacGarry, London (2019); Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm (2018); Bureau, New York (2017); Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Le realtà ordinarie, curated by Davide Ferri, at the Palazzo de Toschi, Bologna (2020), and The Samovar, Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2019). She has participated in residencies at the American Academy in Rome (2017), the Dora Maar House (2014), MacDowell (2013), and was a recipient of the 2017 Artadia Award and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Precog is an independent magazine that explores science, technology, techno plastics, cyber culture and feminism. https://precogmag.xyz/ Florencia Escudero's sculptures include soft and handmade components printed with digitally-rendered imagery.  Feminist theory, cyber culture, and an embrace of various techniques such as digital photo collage, hand sewing, and silk-screening place each sculpture in the realm of both the machine-made and the handmade.  As the artist notes, "When making these pieces I am thinking about the history of feminist art that looks at the objectification of women's bodies. I want to flip the expectation and look at how objects become human."  Escuderois also an editor and founder of Precog Magazine. She received an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 2012.  She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. https://florenciaescudero.com/ Gaby Collins-Fernandez (b. USA, 1987) is an artist living and working in New York City. She holds degrees from Dartmouth College (B.A.) and the Yale School of Art (M.F.A., Painting/Printmaking). Her work has been shown in the US and internationally, most recently at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama Nathalie Karg Gallery, Danese Corey, and currently in an exhibition at the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. Her work has been discussed in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail and artcritical. She is a recipient of a Fellowship at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, and a 2013 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Art Award. Collins-Fernandez is also a writer whose texts have appeared in publications such as the popular Painting on Paintings blog, The Miami Rail, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her translations with Kimberly Kruge of Golden Age Spanish sonnets was published in 2015 in Riot of Perfume. Collins-Fernandez is also an editor and founder of Precog Magazine, and is a co-director of the New York-based art and music collaborative, BombPop!Up. Her work is in the collections of the Bowdoin Museum of Art, Maine, and the Alex Katz Foundation, NY. www.gabycollinsfernandez.com Kellie Konapelsky is a designer and art director that works primarily within the arts and culture. She has over ten years of experience and specializes in art direction, publishing, and exhibition design. She sees her practice as a collaborative multidisciplinary process by working closely with photographers, illustrators, filmmakers, writers, and architects. She is currently is the designer and co-editor for Precog Magazine and has worked with select clients such as Museum Kurhaus Kleve, LACMA, and Carnegie Museum of Art. Kellie is a graphic design instructor at Parsons School of Design. She holds a BA in design from UCLA and an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University. www.kelliekonapelsky.com

Jaqueline  Cedar was born in Los Angeles, CA in 1985  and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  In 2009 she received an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Carroll House, Keene State College, (2019), Cat Head Press, Indianapolis (2019), Marsh Gallery, Indiana  University (2017), Crush Curatorial, Chelsea (2016), Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston (2016) and 106 Green Gallery, Brooklyn (2014). She has also been included in exhibitions at Hesse Flatow, New York (2020), Drawer NYC (2020), David Risley Gallery Velvet Ropes,  Copenhagen (2018), Zero Zero Velvet Ropes, Los Angeles (2018), Underdonk, Brooklyn (2018), The Hole Velvet Ropes, New York (2017), and Ortega y Gasset, Brooklyn (2017).  Press includes Huffington Post, New American Paintings, Gorky's Granddaughter, Painters'  Table, and The Boston Globe. Cedar's paintings and drawings address uncanny scenarios where characters engage themselves and one another with sincerity and purpose. Moments of desire, self-reflection, and lack of control motivate postures filled with bravado  and vulnerability. jaquelinecedar.com / @jaquelinecedar Good  Naked (Brooklyn, NY) is an exhibition space  curated by Jaqueline Cedar. Projects hover around the intimate and awkward with a focus on work that engages tactility, humor, movement, and play. goodnakedgallery.com / @good_naked Ashley  Ekstrum is a painter and multimedia artist  based in Knoxville, TN. She received her BA in Studio Art with a minor in Multimedia Design from Pepperdine University in 2017 while working as a Director’s Assistant at the Weisman Museum. She is currently working as Associate Director of Gallery 1010 and  a Graduate Teaching Associate while pursuing her MFA in Painting and Drawing at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. ashleyekstrum.hotglue.me / @ashleyekstrum Sound  and editing by Andy Demczuk Andydemczuk.com / @andydemczuk

Kati Gegenheimer is a painter, writer, and educator currently based in Philadelphia, PA. She received her MFA in Painting & Printmaking at Yale School of Art in 2013 and a BFA in Printmaking & Art History from Tyler School of Art and Architecture in 2007. Kati Gegenheimer is a painter of experiential presentiment whose works align the sensibilities of foreboding hope. Pattern work and traditions found typically in folk art are employed to depict objects and places not of commemoration but instead as aspirations: these are lauded moments yet to come. This forecasting through the act of making is similar to the act known as scrying. The Cambridge dictionary defines scrying as, ‘to see what will happen in the future, especially by looking into an object such as a mirror or glass ball.’ Kati’s thickly painted surfaces do not immediately transport as the fabled crystal ball would purport to do, I would suggest that the shaped canvas or the framed image act as a site of divination. What appears with the fixed shape rarely alludes back to the compositional device afforded by the framing or form. Instead, it acts as a launching point for themes to play out. Rough impasto surfaces work to reinstate that this is not mere fantasy but that what the painting suggests are facts. Feelings, through the act of painting, become facts. - Mark Thomas Gibson more info at https://katigegenheimer.com/ @kati_gegenheimer Mark Thomas Gibson is represented by Fredericks and Freiser Gallery, (New York, NY), M+B Gallery, (Los Angeles, CA) and Loyal Gallery, (Stockholm, Sweden). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University and lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. more info at: http://www.markthomasgibson.com/ or @darthgibson

Tarrah Krajnak was born in Lima, Peru in 1979. Krajnak was orphaned as an infant and adopted into a transracial family from the American coal country. This early experience of racial difference continues to drive her interest in identity, belonging, and inherited histories. Krajnak is an Associate Professor of Art at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at Honor Fraser Gallery, as-is.la gallery, Houston Center for Photography, SUR Biennial Los Angeles, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Center for Photography Woodstock, SF Camerawork, Philadelphia Photographic Arts Center, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Photo Madrid, Photo London, Belfast Photography Festival, and Unseen Amsterdam. Her work has been published in the LA Review of Books, Nueva Luz, Strange Fire Collective, and Camerawork. She received grants from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Texas Photographic Society, and most recently from the Harpo Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in Glasstire, Artforum, and Contemporary Review Los Angeles. Krajnak is a 2020 Lightwork AIR Recipient. She will open a solo exhibition in October 2020 at Filter Photo in Chicago, and is currently working with DAIS books on a forthcoming publication of her poems and photographs. Instagram: tarrahkrajnak_studio Alexander Keefe writes about art, media and aesthetics. His work has appeared in magazines including Bidoun, Art Asia Pacific, Artforum.com and Tank.  He did graduate work in Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian at Harvard University, and has divided his time between the United States and India since 1995. Recently he has been investigating the history of the dancer Shanta Rao and working on the exhibit A Slightly Curving Place, at HKW in Berlin. Centered around a multi-authored audio play and a video installation, the exhibition, curated by Nida Ghouse, responds to propositions opened up by Umashankar Manthravadi in his practice as a self-taught acoustic archaeologist.  Instagram: aakeef 

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