Far away is NOW

Alicia Escott @Alicia_Escott

Statement: Alicia Escott is an interdisciplinary artist based in the land we currently call San Francisco, she practices in solidarity with thinkers across fields undoing the colonial construct of “nature” as a thing separated from us and our world. Escott work is informed by how we each negotiate our day-to-day realities amid an awareness of the overarching specter of climate-chaos, mass-extinction— and the social unrest this rapid change and unprocessed grief produces. Her work makes space for the unspoken individual and collective experiences of loss, heartbreak and grief. they approach these issues with an interstitial practice encompassing: writing, drawing, word-making, painting, photography, video, sculpture, social-practice, composting, seed-planting, and activism. Alicia’s work has been shown in over 100 art-institutions, galleries, and alternative spaces— including exhibitions at: Berkeley Arts Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The San Francisco Maritime Museum, The Berkley Art Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbra. A founding member of the collective 100 Days Action and half of the Social Practice Project The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, Escott’s work has been featured in The BBC, Smithsonian Magazine, The Economist, The New Yorker, MOMUS, The San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, and many others.

Brett Amory @brettamory

Statement: Brett Amory is an interdisciplinary artist whose multidisciplinary practice is rooted in the intersection of quotidian and habitual engagements with the everyday world. Working primarily in painting and installation, he explores unnoticed moments and how digital technology reshapes them. His work extends the familiar into the unfamiliar, investigating the authenticity of life in a digitally-mediated environment. Through his art, Amory navigates the complex relationship between the physical and digital, highlighting both the connection and disconnection inherent in contemporary life. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; and de Young Museum, San Francisco. Brett Amory earned a MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from the Academy of Arts University. He lives and works in Oakland California. Brett Amory's interdisciplinary art practice investigates the interstices between the ordinary and the unfamiliar. His work captures glimpses of visual perception prior to interpretation. Exploring overlooked routine moments, Amory reveals the transformation of daily experience in the digital age. His art contemplates how pervasive technology alters one's sense of mundane activities like waiting, commuting, or washing dishes. Amory's visual language prompts inquiries about the authenticity of lived experience in a digitally mediated world. His isolated figures resonate with a renewed poignancy - evoking both the social fragmentation and the yearning for meaningful connection wrought by endless digital distraction. Ultimately, his thought-provoking art reveals the nuanced influence of artificial intelligence and virtual identities on our tangible, human realities. Amory's work navigates the complex entanglement of the physical and digital in contemporary life.

Charlotta Hauksdottir @charlottamh

Statement: Charlotta María Hauksdóttir is an award winning visual artist based in California, who uses photography, collage and mixed media in her work. Residing in the USA for over 20 years, she still draws inspiration from her home country Iceland. Her work centers around the unique connection one has to places and moments in time, and how memories embody and elevate those connections. Hauksdóttir received a BA in Photography from the Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome, Italy and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She also holds a Diploma in Creative and Critical Thinking from the Iceland Academy of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited around the world, with solo exhibitions in the USA, Russia, and Iceland as well as numerous group shows and photography festivals. Her photographs have been published in several magazines and books, as well as a monograph “A Sense of Place - Imprints of Iceland” published by Daylight Books that is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, SFMOMA, and Princeton among others. Hauksdóttir’s work is also part of numerous private and public collections such as Stanford Health Care and Reykjavik Museum of Photography. I was inspired to begin photographing the Icelandic landscape 20 years ago, after I moved to the United States and realized how closely my homeland was connected to my identity and sense of being. Starting out as an emotional response to the landscape I have over the years noticed changes and am now incorporating the effects of climate change into the work. By hand cutting the photographs and layering them in various patterns the removed parts of the images speak to these changes and the disappearing landscape. In some pieces glaciers have been cut out revealing black, suggesting their absence, and in others text on global warming represents the urgency of the situation. Using topography patterns, where visible layers overlap hidden ones, suggests erosion and suppression over time. The human biological patterns, such as those of fingerprints, retinal veins or brain circuits address our personal connection to nature and the responsibility for our impressions and impact. Recently I’ve been inspired by nature’s resilience, where grass can often be seen growing out of concrete cracks. In those pieces nature can be seen growing underneath indicating renewal and hope. I am also wrapping photographs around branches and weaving the landscape together to symbolize both the destruction and the ability to take action.

Francis Baker @francis_baker_studio

Statement: Francis Baker is an artist, living and working in Oakland, CA. For 30 years, Baker has been engaging with alternative process photography exploring themes of social justice, inequity, homelessness, mental health, and the human condition, along with consumerism and its continued impact on the environment. Baker’s recent project focuses on society’s plastic consumption as an object lesson of how human behavior is the dominant influence on climate change. Baker continues to exhibit his work nationally being included in exhibits in New York, Chicago, Santa Fe, San Francisco and other cities, as well as, internationally in Paris and Switzerland. Baker received the inaugural fellowship residency award at The Image Flow, in Mill Valley, CA. He has also received a fellowship to the KALA Art Institute, in Berkeley, CA. Baker’s work was included in the De Young Museum and featured in their Fine Arts Magazine. Baker was the recipient of the Klompching Fresh ’23 exhibit award. Baker's work has been published in magazines and journals including Analog Forever, 7x7, Tricycle Magazine, Divergents Magazine, Diffusion X, and, as the cover of The Hand Magazine, a journal dedicated to alternative process photography and printmaking.

Hughen/Starkweather @hughen_starkweather

Statement: The work of Hughen/Starkweather explores landscapes impacted by engineered systems that control and distribute water. As this infrastructure is increasingly, inextricably woven into landscapes, how might these natural and engineered systems fail or succeed together as climate extremes exert unforeseen pressures? The artwork Bounces like an echo references atmospheric rivers, and the repeated cloud-like forms mimic the shape of California as an island as rendered in a 1666 Dutch map. The work Coastal squeeze references the global increase in seawall construction to protect shoreline homes and infrastructures as tides rise and storms intensify. The unintended consequences of this shoreline armoring include pushing water and wave energy to neighboring areas, disrupting the natural replenishment of sand on beaches until they narrow or vanish, and increased inland mining/ocean dredging of sand to replenish the beaches, which leads to further disruption of ecosystems.

Lisa Kairos @lkairos

Statement: Lisa Kairos makes dynamic abstract landscapes to get lost in; her work is inspired by the intersection of environment, perception, beauty, and technology. A California native, Lisa received her degree in fine art with an emphasis in painting at UC Santa Cruz in 1990. She has exhibited in group and solo shows and at art fairs throughout the United States. Her work is held in many private and corporate collections and she has completed numerous commissions for public and private spaces. She currently lives and works in San Francisco. My abstract paintings explore themes of change and transformation through the subject of landscape. I approach making my work the same way I explore a place: over time, in layers, with shifting perspectives. Layers of ink and paint mimic the geological formations revealed by satellite maps and colors drawn from the earth and sky converge and surprise. These paintings often pivot around visual interruptions, where crisp divisions in the picture plane suggest shifts in perspective and time . Sometimes areas of a painting are cut away entirely, marking the ephermeral nature of our environments. Atmospheric passages mingle with cartographical and technological references, resulting in a complex visual matrix, sometimes quiet and subtle, other times bursting with energy, like the landscape itself. The places that inspire my paintings become a lens through which I make sense of the world and time that we are living in. I am particularly attracted to landscapes that have endured human interventions and dramatic changes over time, usually the remainders and margins of urban space or remote locations that have been shaped by extraction, use, infrastructure, and sometimes restoration. Other times I focus on physical and ephemeral dynamics in the landscape, such as geological formations, fire, water systems, and weather events. I am drawn to areas where one type of space transitions to another: earth to sky, shadow to light, burn pile to ash, tidal marsh to open water. I look for a resonance of opposites, a moment of slippage and surprise, a glitch of unexpected beauty; where one thing becomes another, I find a metaphor for personal transformation.

Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang

Statement: Since 1999 Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang as a collaborative team have been visiting Kehoe Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore in Northern California.They have rambled 1000 meters of tideline of this one beach hundreds of times to gather plastic debris washing out of the Pacific Ocean and from this one beach have collected over two tons of material. By carefully collecting and "curating" the bits of plastic, they fashion it into works of art that matter-of-factly show, with minimal artifice, the material as it is. The viewer is often surprised that this colorful stuff is the thermoplastic junk of our throwaway culture. Many people don’t know about the oil=plastic equation but every year thousands of barrels of oil and natural gas are extracted then used to make plastic. Offshore oil drilling, tanker oil spills, tar balls washed ashore, and plastic, lots of it, are all part of our exposé as we develop an artistic response to the problem of petroleum and plastic pollution. A toy replica of an ATV gas guzzler that washed ashore displayed on top of a pile of black beach plastic from Kehoe Beach is our ah-ha and ta-da. Viewers are encouraged to take a close look and hopefully, discover in the mess of shards and fragments, recognizable objects then ask themselves, could that comb have once been mine? and ponder — what can we do with the wreck of our petroleum-based consumer culture?

Ron Moultrie Saunders @ronmsaunders

Statement: Ron Moultrie Saunders, New York native, studied landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a photographic artist who creates photograms: photographs that are made without the use of a camera. His work explores story and mythology as a gateway to talk about cultural history, family mythology, and personal identity. And he’s a longtime resident of San Francisco. Saunders holds a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a charter member of Minnesota Street Projects Artist Studio Program, and a recipient of of two Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission and a Kala Art Institute Fellowship. His art is featured in the San Francisco Arts Commission Civic Art Collection with permanent work located across the city. He has exhibited at the San Francisco International Airport, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Rena Bransten Gallery, and at the San Jose ICA. And he completed two public projects for BART this year.

Stacey Goodman @staceydgoodman

Statement: Stacey Goodman splits his time between Oakland and Sebastopol, California. Currently working in mixed materials, he is interested in creating immersive experiences using video, found objects and performance.

Francis Baker @francis_baker_studio

Statement: Francis Baker is an artist, living and working in Oakland, CA. For 30 years, Baker has been engaging with alternative process photography exploring themes of social justice, inequity, homelessness, mental health, and the human condition, along with consumerism and its continued impact on the environment. Baker’s recent project focuses on society’s plastic consumption as an object lesson of how human behavior is the dominant influence on climate change. Baker continues to exhibit his work nationally being included in exhibits in New York, Chicago, Santa Fe, San Francisco and other cities, as well as, internationally in Paris and Switzerland. Baker received the inaugural fellowship residency award at The Image Flow, in Mill Valley, CA. He has also received a fellowship to the KALA Art Institute, in Berkeley, CA. Baker’s work was included in the De Young Museum and featured in their Fine Arts Magazine. Baker was the recipient of the Klompching Fresh ’23 exhibit award. Baker's work has been published in magazines and journals including Analog Forever, 7x7, Tricycle Magazine, Divergents Magazine, Diffusion X, and, as the cover of The Hand Magazine, a journal dedicated to alternative process photography and printmaking.