Alexander Kroll

Alexander Kroll is a painter that works mainly in an abstract expressionist style. However, his works have fluorescent color palettes and are made on a large-scale to bring them into the contemporary art world. The colors in his works are layered and work together in ways that create a kind of rhythm in the works. It also allows viewers to see the process of how Kroll’s works came to be. Painting, for the artist, is a conversation in which one mark leads to the next; and one completed work leads to another.

His work has been exhibited at CB1 Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), ACME, (Los Angeles, CA), Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Torrance Art Museum, (Torrance, CA), Jessica Silverman Gallery, (San Francisco, CA), The UCLA New Wight Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), The Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles, CA), The Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA) and many others. Kroll received his BA from Yale University followed by MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2008. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Adam Sorensen

“Landscape painting affords me a wealth of tradition and influence, and provides a platform that seems familiar and recognizable. 19th century romanticism, Japanese woodblock prints, and Abstract expressionism all factor into my works vocabulary. I work primarily in a reactive sense. A certain rock may lead to another, which in turn may lead to a specific tree. The scenes I end up composing, function as both utopian and eerily post-apocalyptic. Both of which can be seen metaphorically as social concerns in contemporary life. By inviting the viewer in visually, I ask them to recall where we have been, explore where we are now, and confront where we may be headed.” - Adam Sorensen

Adam Sorensen lives and works in Portland, OR. He had a solo show of his work at the Portland Art Museum in 2011, and shows extensively around Portland and Seattle. The artist has work in the collection of the Boise Art Museum, Seattle University, Portland Art Museum, Progressive Corporation among others. His paintings have been shown nationally.

Akio Takamori

Takamori was a seminal figure in ceramic art, whose work over the past thirty years has left an enduring impact on the Pacific Northwest arts and the medium itself. His work is often autobiographical, drawing on his life in Japan, his family, and mythological themes. He is known for his coil-built figurative sculptures in which the narrative painting defines the form.  Takamori explored themes of cultural identity by engaging the history of Eastern and Western aesthetics. Bold form and color defines his body of work, which is highly expressive of human emotion and sensuality.

Akio Takamori was born and raised in Japan. He has been exhibiting in the United States, Europe and Asia since the mid 1980s. Takamori received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1976 and his MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics, Alfred University in 1978.

Takamori’s work is included in numerous collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Los Angels County Museum of Art, Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Ariana Museum in Geneva, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grants (1986, 1988, 1992), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2006), and the USA Ford Fellowship (2011). Takamori was a professor of art at the University of Washington. He lived and worked in Seattle.

Amir Zaki

A firm believer in the transformative power of the photographic image, Zaki images are rooted in the history of the medium and uses it to shed light on the means of representation. Over the last 16 years, Zaki has pushed the physicality of the photograph’s two dimensional construct, allowing it to exist on its own and also exploring its own object-ness. In order to capture and record the original site, Zaki’s representations depict the complexity of place in terms of interactive evolving experience, an ongoing ecological intervention. The artist responds to the shifting contemporary landscape where nothing is permanent, constructing his own visual language to illustrate an entire mythology of place.

Amir Zaki lives and works in Southern California. He received his MFA from UCLA in 1999 and has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since graduating. He is a full professor at the University of California at Riverside. His work is included in many museum collections including the Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

Brad Winchester

Winchester combines his training as a painter with his current interest in process, material plurality, and postconceptualization. In his recent work, Winchester began by reconsidering painter’s linen as a sculptural and structural problematic. Using methods of deconstructing, dying, and re-presenting in unexpected ways in three dimensional space, Winchester challenges our relationship to and preconception of art objects. Winchester’s effort to lay bare his process emphasizes the equal importance of conceptualization and actualization in this work.

Winchester received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. He currently lives and works in Seattle, WA.

Claire Cowie

Claire Cowie uses a variety of media to reference the natural world around her home in Seattle, as well as around the world. Cowie utilizes symbols of the natural world such as birds, insects, and a variety of plant-life, as well as heavily using the negative space in a work. By using watercolor and ink in the areas around her subject Cowie references the fragmentation between the natural world and us, as well as of memory. The colors and shapes in her work create dream-like landscapes that pull in characteristics of urban architecture.

 Claire Cowie lives and works in Seattle, Washington, where she is a lecturer at the University of Washington. Cowie attended both the North Carolina School of the Arts (Winston-Salem, NC) and Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO). She received her MFA from the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). Cowie’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including shows at the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA), Takeda Biennial (Oaxaca, Mexico), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Shenzhen Art Institute (Shenzhen, China) and the Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Lake Oswego, OR). Her work is included in the collections of the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA), Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA), Safeco (Seattle, WA), and Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), among others.

Fay Jones

Fay Jones’ work conveys the intimacy of mind, emotion, and spirituality. As a whole, Jones’ paintings echo a tremendous sense of humanity. The pieces meld figures, animals and symbols to conjure up existential meaning of human experience. Her characters become signifiers, representing the watery depth of the unconscious.

Fay Jones received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1957. Awards she has received include the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors grant in 2013, the Seattle Art Museum’s 2006 Poncho Artist of the Year award, grants from the NEA in 1983 and 1990, the Washington State Arts Commission in 1984, and La Napoli Art Foundation in 1989. Her work has been extensively collected in the Northwest, and is included in the collections of the Portland Art Museum and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Oregon, and the Seattle Art Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, as well as the Cities of Seattle and Portland. Major exhibitions include a 2007 retrospective at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University, a 1997 traveling retrospective with the Boise Art Museum, and exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, WA, the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, and the Palm Springs Desert Museum in California.

Efrain Almeida

Efrain Almeida is a sculptor using wood as well as bronze to create realistic sculptures that reference sexuality, religion, nature, humanity and personal identity on an intimate scale. He also uses the medium of watercolor to create works in conversation with his sculptural pieces. Almeida references his own history and memory of his home country of Brazil as well as the art historical canon. Almeida works on a small scale drawing the artist in and creating an intimate relationship between the viewer, the artwork, and the exhibition space. Almeida has had five solo exhibitions at James Harris Gallery, the latest show being “Trance” in 2017.   

 Almeida was born in the state of Ceará, in 1964. Currently, he lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. His most noteworthy exhibitions have included Marcas – a retrospective show concerning his work held in 2007 at Estaçăo Pinacoteca, in Săo Paulo – and his participation in the 2010 Bienal de Săo Paulo. His work figures in various public and private collections in Brazil and abroad, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (USA), Museu de Arte Moderna de Săo Paulo, Săo Paulo (Brazil), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporânea, Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (Japan).

Evan Nesbit

Evan Nesbit's primary focus iss spatial abstraction where his burlap canvases were meticulously crafted through a process of dying, sewing and extrusion of acrylic paint pressed through the weave of the material. By dying the support structure and driving the pigment medium through it, the artist seamlessly integrated the medium with the support, creating an aesthetic teleology of flatness and pictorial organization. Nesbit continues his use of pushing pigment through the reverse side of the substrate, and now photographic images have been introduced by printing on a vinyl matrix. His markings compliment and disrupt the physical traces of reproduced photograph, trapping the image between the mechanical and the painted gesture. Nesbit’s new paintings allude to the inevitable commodification of the digital image but through his use of highly saturated color and neon tones of paint, the works situate themselves between the historical and contemporary painting antecedents in which artists incorporated found or mechanically produced images.

Evan Nesbit (b. 1985) lives and works in Grass Valley, CA. Nesbit received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and his MFA from Yale University in 2012. He has been awarded the Yale University Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Prize for painting. Other recent solo exhibitions include: Van Doren Waxter, New York, Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy (2017); Koki Arts, Tokyo, Japan, Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles, CA, 11R, New York, NY(2016. His work has additionally been included in numerous group exhibitions, such as: Sargent’s Daughter, New York NY (2017) 88 Projects Berlin, Germany Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France (2015).

Mary Ann Peters

“I work from the premise that images are never neutral and that they sustain layered meaning from the inception of an idea to the completed piece. Historical narratives, architecture, science, personal heritage, politics and questions of perception have all played a part in my thinking over the years.  I look for seemingly disparate elements that can coalesce and redefine a topic.  I have traveled extensively, most frequently in non-Western cultures. Traveling has informed my understanding of the global roots of aesthetics. It consistently defines for me those social practices that provide outlines for cultural inquiry, including which ethical questions should be considered or supported. In the end I work to the afterimage of the viewer and the potential discourse that might ensue.  The kiss of death for any artist is the work that no one can remember.”

- Mary Ann Peters

Mary Ann Peters lives and works in Seattle, WA  She received an MFA from the University of Washington in 1978. She has received numerous awards including an Art Matters Foundaton Grant, New York that allowed her to travel to Paris and Mexico City to research the migration from the Middle East after World War II, a grant from The New Foundation, Seattle in 2014,  a MacDowell Fellowship in 2010, a Jentel residency in 2009, the Northwest Institute of Architecture & Urban Studies in Italy (NIAUSI) residency in 2003 and the Neddy Fellowship from the Behnke Foundation in 2000. Collections include Microsoft, Seattle Art Museum, 4Culture, Tacoma Art Museum, and others.  

Mark McKnight

Mark McKnight practice is an ongoing engagement with the craft and materials of “traditional” black and white photography. Through careful use of the fundamental tools of his medium—framing, composition, use of light and shadow—he produces an embellished reality through bleak, darkly printed photographs that foreground his subjective, existential, and poetic concerns.

Mark McKnight (b. Valencia, California, 1984) is an artist based in Los Angeles whose work has been exhibited and published throughout the United States and in Europe.Most recently, he was an artist in residence at Shandaken, Storm King Art Center, NY. In 2017, he published NOUNS, a book of photographs that was released at the LA Art Book Fair. Most recently, his work was exhibited at Park View, Los Angeles, 2017; BBQLA, Los Angeles, 2017; Human Resources, Los Angeles, 2017 and Arturo Bandini, Los Angeles, 2017. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, 2015; and Strongroom, Los Angeles, 2015. Previously his work has been included in exhibitions at OPEN HOUSE, Los Angeles, 2016; The Pit, Glendale, 2016; M+B, Los Angeles, 2015; Christophe Guye, Zurich, 2015; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, 2013; Riverside Art Museum, 2013; Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles, 2010; San Francisco Arts Commission, 2009; and as part of the New York Photo Festival, 2008, among others. In 2009 he traveled to Finland on a Fulbright Scholarship. He earned his BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007, and his MFA at UC Riverside in 2015.