12/2019
Rema Mansi-Contradictions in Contrast 

Rema Mansi grew up with a love and passion for art, but decided to pursue other interests after graduating from New York University. Since she moved to the Bay Area four years ago, Rema has dedicated her time to pursue her childhood dream of becoming an artist, taught herself to draw, and further developed her talents under her mentor Momo Zaho.

11/2019
Valentina Campos, Zach Aaron Ben
Mamalas. The Spirits of Seeds

Valentina Campos is a third-generation Bolivian artist. Her artworks evoke the feminine mythologies of traditional seeds and the Andean agro-centric symbolism. Since 2000, she has been creating a series of paintings, entitles “Mamalas”, reflecting sowing rituals, the role of women in the Andean cosmo-vision, and the protection of biodiversity. Her illustrations have been published in various local stories, magazines, posters, and books. “May the Ayllu Blossom” is her first written children’s book. Valentina has worked with the NGO “Centro de Diseño Artesanal y Cooperativa Campesina, Arte Campo”, Santa Cruz, Bolivia, with Guarani, Chiquitano and Ayoreo communities, a project designed to assist in affirming indigenous art. Since 2005 she co-founded “Uywana Wasi” a Cultural Affirmation Learning Center outside Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Zach Aaron Ben was born into the largest farming community on the Navajo Nation reservation located in Shiprock, New Mexico. Following his father’s teachings, Zach collects natural pigments and uses them in his artwork, honoring the sacred art of sandpainting.

Growing up I had the honor of learning these magical teachings of nature’s aesthetics from my father. I had the opportunity to witness and participate in many Navajo ceremonies, specifically the Yei Bi Chei (Night Way), a nine-day, nine-night ceremony. Within the Yei Bi Chei ceremony my father and I sand painted sacred healing Deities. I witnessed the magical process of nature’s forces at work. This is where I learned the importance of natural pigments used. The pigments represented the Dine culture and the makeup of our physical world, we then use it to heal our people. Knowing this and many other teachings I followed my father into his art studio observing his paint strokes to the way he laid the sand onto the surface”.

10/2019
Eunice Liu, Natalie Jauregui Ortiz
Delicate Dichotomy

Eunice Liu marries traditional handmade mark-making with digital strategies to create drawings and animations that explore relationship between traditional content and digital artifice. Her recent drawing series Wuchang depicts Chinese iconic mythological gods 黑白無常, paying homage to the deities of justice and fortune in Chinese folk religion; rewards and punishes. Chinese contemporary culture inherits concepts of yin-yang and wen-wu (cultural attainment and martial valour) in consonance with Confucian moralization of good and evil. Her works reflect on the duality in indigenous Chinese traditions by analyzing its dichotomy of moral judgment and sensual-religious convention, which have persisted into the 21st century.

Natalie Jauregui Ortiz is a painter of modern life, based in New York and San Francisco. She creates paintings through layers of oil paint that create stories of the human condition. Her focus especially centers towards visualizing the female experience – of being in-between, beginning with her own process of individuation. bwtn sure, I don-t know, maybe is a story unfold to describe a place of ambiguity and uncertainty. It is a series of paintings that use motifs and figures to depict an intertwined togetherness that is held with delicacy and intent. It carries a landscape of ambivalence, from doubt to indecision, of one’s identity and reality. 

9/2019
Vincent James, Andri Yasinsky
Nature Landscapes

Vincent James is a lifelong musician and photographer who formally began focusing his creative eye on making photographic art with rural and urban nature in 2014. Based in Oakland, California, Vincent has extensive knowledge of not only the many locations for iconic landscape images throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, but also of weather patterns and the seasonal light at those sites. He has a technical comfort level that enables him to maximize his tools – his cameras and post-production software – in the service of his art. Vincent combines all of this with his artistic vision for capturing unique moments to create ethereal, moody, and often breathtaking images.”Visual Song” is a small collection of hits captured from some of his favorite locations in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.

Growing up in Ukraine, Andri Yasinsky was exposed to the yet untouched beauty of the Crimean and the Carpathian mountains, where he used to spend time on his own or with a group of like-minded friends, hiking and taking photos on his 35mm old Soviet film camera. It had a significant impact on his forming personality and eventually on his artistic pursuit as a landscape photographer. And so, expressing himself through the art of photography in the outdoors only feels right to Andri even until these days. One of the major themes across all of his work is a disappearing wilderness and our own perspective on it as if we were simply visitors here. Andri doesn’t simply take photos in a way to make them appear real; he displays the real in a way that reveals itself in the photo.

8/2019
Anas Etan
The Hidden Face

Through time, humans have created systems, mastered them, and become controlled by them. Robots with machine learning/thinking begin to roam, protect, threaten, and lead us to an “easier” life.

On the other hand, monsters and aliens lurk, hiding inside our bodies and also try to take control. When life’s face-to-face activities change to the virtual, we can lose our sense of reality. Identity becomes unclear, so it’s not easy to believe what is “real”. Luckily, we are still confident, open-minded, and optimistic by accepting new ideas and ways of life.

Through this dynamic, his works express and symbolize a new global, social, and cultural civilization that is mutating with the help of our new technologies.

7/2019
Muse Art Club
Golden Zodiac

Muse Art Club was founded by Alison Fang and a group of inspiring middle school and high school students on Nov. 12, 2016. The club aims to inspire more children to pursue art and implement its lessons into daily life. Golden Zodiac is a celebration of the traditional Chinese zodiac, where each painting represents one of the 12 horoscope animals.

6/2019
The Illusion of Control: Queer Landscapes

Suki Berry is a multidisciplinary artist and the spotlight of our pride month showcase. Her works invite the viewer to savor luscious color, unbridled movement, and authentic spontaneity. Underneath her indulgent landscapes, is a complex deconstruction of what it means to experience the joys and sorrows of queer femininity. Altering shape and composition is a way of challenging attitudes, fears, and unwritten rules of our environment. Her work speaks of places unseen, but at the same time comforting and familiar, like memories of a place where we feel we have been before but can’t quite recall.

05/2019
Sensaciones del Caribe

PAINTINGS BY ADRIAN GOMEZ
Adrián Gómez Guzmán (1962), a Costa Rican artist who lives and works in San José, Costa Rica, initiated his artistic endeavors at the age of 10 in the city where he was born, in the Cartago province, 22 km east of the capital city.

Being a self-taught artist since the beginning, he is his own harshest critic and remains receptive to all opportunities to learn. Figurative works of art of Adrián Gómez Guzmán from the very beginning included many themes among which were also traditional landscapes, still life and works painted in a traditional academic style.

However, it was not until 1980 that his individual exposition indirectly indicated his emerging interest in African descendant groups present in the Caribbean region of his native Costa Rica. The initial traces of gravitating towards this new theme were expressed in his paintings through presence of colorful details and representative characters. These elements initiated the henceforth present link to the topic of African descendancy and later prompted him to create his first series titled “Espacios de juego…” (“Playgrounds…”) with paintings that recreate the fellowship and joy characteristic of children’s playing especially on a swing or a hammock.

Later his quest to enrich his pictorial world resulted in creating two series “Mujeres del viento…” (“Women of the wind…”) and “Caribe Soy…” (“Caribe I am…”) which strengthened his imagery and ability to evoke feeling and understanding of what his “Caribe,” spaces of peace, harmony, color and play, all linked to the richness of the Caribbean color, means to him as an artist.

03/2019
Rebel Girls

Celebrating Women’s History Month this March will be artists Tanya Herrera and Sherri Lu. Herrera is Pyrographer and heat artist who has been burning pyrography in the traditional method for 9 years, 6 years on leather, and 4 years on bone. Lu is a visual artist and printmaker whose artwork primarily consists of linocuts: carving linoleum blocks and turning them into prints.

LING SHERRI LU
Ling Sherri Lu is a visual artist and printmaker who currently resides in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Her artwork primarily consists of linocuts: caving linoleum blocks and turning them into prints.

Sherri was born and raised in New York City. She graduated from SUNY Geneseo with a Bachelor’s Degree in Film & TV Productions. She has previously edited the “Parts Unknown” CNN travel show starring the late Anthony Bourdain. After a series of life changing events, Sherri moved to the west coast and began living her dream as an artist in the fine arts. “And I gotta tell ya, the West coast really is the BEST coast!”

2/2019
Raw & Tender

In celebration of our Tendergold Gallery’s 1 year anniversary in February, IAMA will be bringing the spotlight back to our original inspiration, the Tenderloin. James Hutchison, an artist and resident of Tenderloin, will showcase a series of abstract paintings fueled with haunting imagery and passion. His work will be juxtaposed by sharp black and white photographs of the neighborhood and its people by Adriana Cuevas. Our exhibition, Raw and Tender, gives us a glimpse behind the curtains of a historical neighborhood well-known for its underground art scene and nightlife.

PAINTINGS BY JAMES HUTCHISON
James Hutchison is a painter living in the Tenderloin.
His work is a haunting mix of bright colors and violent imagery. He is painting in the tradition of Basquiat.

1/2019

“Adequate Images” by Anton Ermakov

Anton Ermakov is a self-taught painter working primarily in oil, splitting his time between figurative and landscape subjects. Based in Montreal, he has recently been included in shows held by the Society of Canadian Artists and the Federation of Canadian Artists, taking the Grand First Place Prize at the latter organization’s Annual International Representational Show for his painting “Embracing your Dreams Dunnigan.”

While the figurative work focuses on capturing thoughts and glances, the landscapes are more adventurous, meticulously layering abstract shapes in order to create highly stylized, boldly colored vistas that leave room for interpretation.