Hunter Gatherer

Alex Uranga @Alex_Uranga

Alex Uranga has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area his entire life. He lives and works in Oakland, California and holds a BFA from the California College of the Arts. He is the co-founder of Glue Projects, an artist run gallery space in San Francisco, and is a former resident of Art Farm Nebraska.

Statement: I find the stages of mechanical process to hold psychic states both internally and externally emotional. Drawing from historical narrative, popular culture, and ritualistic practice, my work looks for structures both anxious and laxed, fluid and structural, domestic and industrial, in a back and forth of additive and subtractive gesticulating.

Bec Imrich @bec_imrich

Bec Imrich (b. 1992) is an artist and writer, born in Cambridge, MA, and living/working in San Francisco while lecturing in UC Berkeley’s department of Art Practice. Imrich’s interdisciplinary practice moves between drawing, photography, and sculpture.

Statement: My work mines the liminal space where elements of vaguely ominous domestic environments and paranoid interior worlds intersect with the shared pressures of internalized capitalism, alienation, and (environ)mental precarity. The images that I draw are often side doors to processing buried memories, but they usually work in reverse—forging significance out of the quotidian as a way to process the world. My approach to images is slippery. I use the practice of drawing to isolate particular elements, remove/confuse context, and foreground an overworked/belabored sense of time, extending the cadence to slowly digest images that are a pebble in my shoe, or cause emotional flashbacks to other times/places/ideas/occurrences.

Carly Semon @carlysemon

Carly Semon is a Bay Area based visual artist investigating the laws of boundary, brink, and edge through material research and painting. Her background in the physical sciences mixes with ideas of surrealism, sensation, and the human form to offer a unique attention on reality. She experiments with growing biomaterials at her home in Oakland and makes paintings in her studio at Hunter’s Point Shipyard in San Francisco, CA.

Statement: I’ve been growing the sun in a plastic kid’s pool since my 26th birthday. It takes consideration to provide a material with incentive to become animate, but once believing in itself, growth abounds passively. An object initiated into its own right. I’m interested in the chemistry of belief, or what it takes to arrange small freedoms along an amorphous trail of questions. Fixing my attraction to an evolving state. Responding dynamically. I found a book called Light sitting on the curb of Waller Street last year. Much of the narrative surrounds this ‘beach’ in space called the Kefahuchi Tract : “A broth of space, time, and heaving event horizons; an unpredictable ocean of radiant energy, of deep light. Anything would happen there, where natural law, if there had ever been such a thing, was held in suspension.” M. John Harrison. I did what I needed to do to erect this into my line of sight. Now information may be a substance.

Carolina Cuevas @carolinac16

Carolina Cuevas (b. 1998) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator based in the Bay Area. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts and her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. Her practice is rooted in the history of altar-making and the intricacies of language, primarily within American and Caribbean society. Both evolving and adapting to their surroundings, altars, and language are vital sources of inspiration to discuss the joining of community, creating rituals, and oral traditions. Cuevas combines materials, such as textiles and clay, with found or foraged materials to depict these ideas. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Minnesota Street Project, Berkeley Art Center, the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, San Jose’s Quilts and Textile Museum, International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemét, Hungary, and Kansas City Artist Coalition. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Barclay Simpson Award, Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, Cultura Power Fellowship, and the Knight Foundation. She has her work in the permanent collection of San Jose’s Quilts and Textiles.

Statement: Hand to fabric, hand to clay, a hand to alter/altar. The work I create is about the meeting of the body and material. My practice explores ideas surrounding the history of altar-making and the intricacies of language. Both always evolving and adapting to their surroundings, altars and language are vital sources of inspiration for me to discuss the joining of community, creating rituals, and oral traditions. I’m interested in combining materials, such as textiles and clay with found or foraged materials to create and discuss the body, altars, and language. My work focuses heavily on traditional craft processes such as backstrap weaving, basket weaving, natural dyeing, hand building in clay, and candle making. I use these processes to challenge the idea of altars and craft practices in contemporary spaces.

Dareal Calderon @F.resyght

New York native, Bay Area transplant who is making work as an attempt to recontextualize religious iconography and narrative.

Statement: The work itself does not require a statement. It is a response to a question, or a series of questions, that are felt rather than asked explicitly. The numbers within the work are subtle allusions to significant figures within Catholic/Christian text. In some way the work, which is really the adornment of the act of collection, is partially proposing that collecting/acknowledging is the first step in world building and implies death as separateness from what we exist near and around.

Erik Bender @round2ricky

Erik Bender is an artist living and working in Oakland, CA. He received a BA in Art Practice from University of California Berkeley and has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at various galleries including Et Al gallery in San Francisco,CA, pt.2 Gallery in Oakland, CA as well as Goodmother Gallery, Tlaloc Studios and Franchise Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.

Statement: Bender’s work intersects drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking processes to create works that perpetuate a discrete visual and material vocabulary. His structural compositions house forms inspired by the strangeness and magic of both the natural and unnatural worlds— energetically transmuting them into mysterious hybrid images that exist in a constant state of emergence—an amalgam of loose figuration and abstract symbolism.

Harley Healy @harley.healy

Harley Healy (b. 1997) is a visual artist living in San Francisco, CA. She received her BFA in Photography from California State University, Long Beach in Spring of 2022. For the last year, Healy has been using her own shadow as a medium. This body of work began as a material exploration of a found belt buckle and soon began telling the story of displaced bats, and whether we have control over our lives and narratives at all. This resulted in an artist's book and a three-act play that traveled from New York to Colorado and ended in California. Healy enjoys the art-making process as a means of creating larger-than-life narratives, this act of storytelling is central to her practice.

Statement: Harley Healy investigates the blurring and ever-changing boundaries between public, psychological, and personal space. Emphasizing feelings of loss and longing is apparent in the innate deterioration, misinformation, and miscommunication between these worlds. She is interested in seeing the deprivation of information and degradation as a form of its own. Considering the passage of time as a loss, but with that privation, a new narrative is born- riding on the cusp of fact and fiction. Her work often employs written language and performance culminating most often in acts of gift-giving.

Joseph Blake @0ddfather

Joseph Blake is an installation artist working in printmedia. He lives in Oakland and runs a gallery out of his house with his roommate Joel Lithgow. It's called This is a House Gallery.

Statement: You take another hit and start blacking out. As your mind slips your grasp you make out an uncanny murmur: “The better to prepare you for strange truth… Let me explain those shapes you see ahead… They are not towers but giants.”

Kiran Sahgal @yay_kiku

Kiran Sahgal is a ceramic artist living in Oakland, California. Sahgal spent his formative years in Ojai, California. There he apprenticed under the guise of Mark Churchill. It was when he transferred to California College of the Arts that he began building sculpture. Sahgal received his BFA in ceramics from CCA in 2022. He now manages the sculpture and ceramics studios for the college. His work has been shown in galleries around the Bay, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Kyoto. You can find his sculptures hidden around here and there.

Statement: I am seeking comprehension through materials and temperature. Approaching sculpture with a background in traditional pottery I am interested in the lines that inform an object’s purpose. Understanding which fundamental qualities can be shifted and repurposed, I am attempting to blur the line of functionality. I stubbornly cling to function as a means to give my work a reason to be. This piece is from the school of form with no function. A place that I don’t typically tread. A sculpture contains many good and bad days. I’m left wondering what this object will do now that it exists. What will it see when I am long gone?

Landon Pointer @Shenronsixfive

Landon Pointer (b.1999) is an Oakland-based painter pushing the boundaries of traditional art, exploring the intricacies of human relationships. Focused on the nuanced connections between youth and adulthood, his canvas reflects the interplay of elements like sports, color, culture, and personal relationships. Inspired by the multi-dimensional components shaping the human experience, Landon constructs immersive worlds where memories unfold with vibrant clarity. Childhood experiences of a nomadic lifestyle, driven by poverty and racism, provide the foundation for themes of race and social inequalities subtly woven into his art. Reflecting on diverse facets of life, Landon finds solace in his artistic practice, turning each painting into a journey of insights and personal growth. His multimedia approach incorporates acrylics, oils, wax, sage, and aerosol, creating a rich and layered expression of his artistic vision.

Statement: In my life, I always found a way, I found a canvas, i found an outlet, and now, my mission is to echo the beats of resilience and creativity for kids coming from lower-class families. Raised in the struggle, my single mom fought to survive, sculpting our own path where none existed. Art wasn't just a passion; it became my lifeline, breaking barriers I never knew could crumble. I want every kid, regardless of their circumstances, to believe that dreams can rise from the most unexpected places. Museums and galleries, once distant realms, should be spaces where they see reflections of themselves, not as outsiders, but as creators. Growing up in a diverse yet poverty-stricken circle, I understand the power of overcoming adversity. I hope to inspire the youth to embrace the kaleidoscope of their own stories, finding strength and creativity in the face of adversity. I’d like to create a world where every child, no matter where they start, knows that their asq dreams are valid, their stories are heard, and art isn't just a luxury but a language that transcends boundaries. Love, Landon

Lily Koch @Sometimesagreatnotion7

Lily Koch was born and raised in San Francisco and received a BFA from Mills College in 2023 with a focus on ceramics. She recently had her first solo exhibition in the Adobe Books Gallery.

Statement: Interdisciplinary artist Lily Koch thinks of herself as an archivist of imagery. In her recent paintings, she explores what is revealed when one continues to seek out and return to a certain visual motif. She is interested in the intersection between figurative and abstract, memory and dream, interior and exterior and the reality that emerges from opposing truths existing at once. By obfuscating and layering vaguely familiar snapshots, Koch invites the viewer to employ personal association to direct the narrative; the resulting revelation acting as a sort of mirror.

Lora Mathis @lora__mathis

Lora Mathis is a poet, artist, and writer. She makes use of a variety of mediums including text, sculpture, photography, painting, and time-based art. They are interested in making as a way to dig into humor, depth of feelings, and personal symbology. Since 2014, Mathis has performed poetry solo and alongside collaborators, including musicians Matty Terrones, the HIRS. Collective, and choreographer Angel Acuña. She is the author of The Snakes Came Back (Metatron, 2023), Here I Am In It (Burn All Books, 2021), and The Women Widowed to Themselves (Party Trick Press, 2020). Her visual work has been presented at MRKT Gallery (San Francisco, 2024), Sunday (Los Angeles, 2015), Junior High (Los Angeles, 2016), Bunker Projects (Pittsburgh, 2017), Ship in the Woods (Escondido, 2019), Swish Projects (San Diego, 2021), and more. She lives in Oakland and frequently works between there and San Diego.

Statement: Lora Mathis is interested in memory as an excavation, as well as an active layering on. Tracing organic forms through additive sculpture, their work looks at rot and shadows. The threads and torn-apart nylons they use speak to the nonlinearity of healing, which they see as similar to untangling a ball of thread. Stars and disembodied lines of poetry push through holes in the fabric, and act as reminders of strength. Leaves and melted candles offer glimpses of magic. Mathis is as interested in the shadowy depths of inner worlds, as they are in branching outward into a larger realm of collective dreaming. They let the interplay of these worlds live in the work’s material build-up.

Mareiwa Miller @maredoesthings

Mary Lou Grace Robison @marylougrace_

Robison earned her bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of San Francisco where she awarded the Departmental and Leadership Award as well as the Mary and Carter Award. Grace was honored at Carnegie Hall for her gold key portfolio by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in 2019. Robison has been featured by various publications such as The Dementia Springs Foundation for her work exploring Alzheimer’s disease, as well as The Furrow Magazine, The Ignatian Literary Magazine, AJCU Newsletter, and Being Patient. Her work has been exhibited in galleries such as The Bedford Gallery, Bass and Reiner, Gllry Garage, MRKT Gallery, SOMArts and 120710 Gallery in Berkeley California. She recently was one of the recipients of the 2025 Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards. Grace is currently a student in the Master of Fine Arts program at San Francisco State University where she also teaches.

Statement: My practice intertwines elements of memory, femineity and trauma, drawing heavily from my experiences with domestic abuse and familial history. My creative process has been fueled by the act of rediscovering personal and family archives, including objects, images and spoken stories from family members. Each object holds a specific narrative, memory or traumatic experience that has shaped my upbringing and relationship to my gender. By replicating these archives through painting, photography and mixed media, I am able to reclaim and redefine these traumas in my own way.

Michael Diamond @m.ichaeldiamond

Michael Diamond, born in Los Angeles, graduated from the California College of the Arts in 2018 with a focus on painting. He has been living in Oakland for the past decade. Recently, he has shifted his artistic exploration towards sculpture, particularly in the medium of paper mache. His recent venture into paper mache sculpture explores the reinterpretation of personal narratives through everyday objects, integrating designs, motifs, and structures that reflect the histories embedded in urban artifacts.

Statement: My paintings speak on my experience walking in the city, pulling formal elements of color, textures, and patterns from the nuances of urban landscapes. I find myself ruminating on the histories that objects hold, combining designs, motifs, and structures to think about how my personal story can be reinterpreted through everyday objects.

Milo Moyer-Battick @milo.moyerbattick

Born in 1990 and raised in northern Vermont, Milo Moyer-Battick earned a BFA in printmaking from the University of Southern Maine in 2012. His artistic practice marries elements of photography, geometric abstraction, and pop iconography, resulting in process-based paintings characterized by playful deconstructions of form. Moyer-Battick's meticulous mark-making techniques and clinical draftsmanship contribute to the intricate tapestry of his work, which finds its home in Emeryville, CA.

Morgan Corbitt @not_morgan_corbitt

Morgan Corbitt (b. 1997) makes collage-style oil paintings that straddle the lines between realism and representation. Using photographs from her camera roll as a reference, she distorts and multiplies these images, re-contextualizing them in the process. Her work explores our relationship to the object-world. She received a B.A. in Studio Art from San Francisco State. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place with Good Mother Gallery (2021) and Adobe Books (2022). Corbitt lives and works in San Francisco.

Statement: I make collage-style oil paintings composed of images that range from the everyday (gates, locks, pigeons) to discarded second hand goods (glass swans, porcelain statues) to tragicomic scenes and signage (PSA’s, cars on fire). Removing these objects and images from their original setting and placing them in conversation with other images allows them to take on new meanings. I’m interested in the interactions created by these combinations of imagery, and how these combinations resonate differently according to the audience.

Naomi Hawksley @num.nuum

Naomi Hawksley (b. 2000) is an artist based between San Francisco and Seoul. Her practice is concerned with the public and private viewership of women, choice fatigue, and the nature of contemporary morality. Naomi has exhibited with Et Al, Sulk Chicago, Night Club, Weatherproof, Upper Market, Southern Exposure, & Co-Prosperity and is currently working as a curator at London-based platform odyXxey.

Nicholas Johannes Valvur @Mental_castration

No.

Paige Valentine @trophy___wife

Sophie Smith @sophie.danger.smith

Sophie Smith (b. 1999, Los Angeles) is a mixed-media sculptor based in Oakland, California. Smith graduated from California College of The Arts in 2022 receiving her BFA in sculpture. She has had work in shows in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The upcoming group exhibition Hunter Gather at 120710, opening June 29th, will mark her curatorial debut.

Statement: She considers herself a hunter, gatherer, forager, and thief: Her practice is an intricate dance of collecting, obtaining, stealing, and rescuing. Smith compulsively amasses trash, treasures, ephemera, mementos, souvenirs, trophies, and consolation prizes, viewing these objects as fragments of a forgotten story. She attempts to create homes for abandoned pieces, elevating their status through material juxtaposition and context so they can share their story. The items she collects act as pieces of encrypted messages, thoughtfully grouped and arranged to reveal a message greater than its individual pieces. Smith is drawn to this means of communication for its shielded vulnerability, truths hidden through a code and a cipher. She likens it to a young girl divulging all their secrets in a lock-protected diary, a sense of safety and security created by a flimsy crackable lock.

Stella Kudritzki @stellakudritzki

Stella is a fine art photographer and mixed media artist based in San Francisco, currently pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in Photography at California College of the Arts. She works with found imagery, collage, and alternative processes to piece together moments that reflect her personal experiences and a broader feminine narrative. Over the past couple of years, Stella has been developing a body of work focused on Girlhood, exploring the complexities of growing up and self-identity. She often employs her sisters as surrogates for herself, using them to relive and uncover past memories that seem buried. Through the lens of her camera and a variety of photographs, Stella creates a poignant memorial of her own life and the feminine experience, weaving together personal history and collective memory.

Statement: Remembering Jane In thoughts of gathering, Stella has been working with a collection of photographs from one woman’s family archive, dating back from her early childhood to the presence of her grandchildren. Stella deconstructs these images, isolating and magnifying intimate details—hands, facial features, and expressions—that traverse generations. Her granddaughter's ear completes her young face, as one hand gesture mirrors another. These fragments converse with one another besides the lines of the marble tile, echoing a family tree. Remembering Jane, offers a nuanced view that transcends traditional American portraiture, seeking to remember the intimate, often overlooked details of familial bonds.

Tess Aykanian @chiquitatessita

Tess Aykanian, b. Los Angeles, is an Oakland, California based ceramicist and painter. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics from California College of the Arts in 2022. At the heart of her artistic exploration lies the conviction that time, far from being a force of decay, is a transformative agent of embellishment. Taking inspiration from archeological ceramics, tools and aesthetics as well as the Californian landscape she grew up in.

Statement: Through material explorations, Aykanian searches for visual mysteries. Her work is centered around the idea that time is not a device of destruction but a device of ornamentation. She finds inspiration in the way archeological objects and elements of the natural world have physically changed over time, and how our interpretive meaning of them has evolved. The cracks, tears and degradation of an object act themselves as further embellishment and not the absolution of the original work and surface details. The utilization of locally foraged wild clay infuses her pieces with the essence of the California landscape, this recurring motif not only serves as a thematic underpinning but also informs her distinctive color palette, evoking the essence of her surroundings.

Thomas Lewis @im_linkedin

Multi media artist living and working in San Francisco.

Statement: My work is rooted in the south and has strong ties to my home state of North Carolina.

Tracy Ren @t_r_a_c_y__r_e_n

Tracy Ren is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture. They graduated from CCA in 2018 with a BFA in Ceramics, and will be joining the Cranbrook MFA program in Sculpture this fall. They have shown with numerous galleries across The Bay Area, LA, and NYC, including but not limited to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Pt. 2 Gallery, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, TSA LA, Melrose Botanical Garden, Wing On Wo & Co, and Cone Shape Top.

Statement: Art making, for me, has been a potent form of cultural, spiritual, and emotional way finding. Though my work comes from a deeply personal place, my goal is not necessarily to tell my own story, but to offer objects that viewers can resonate with on varying levels. I work intuitively, calling on natural materials for their energetic richness and craft processes for their inherent poeticism. Many of the forms in my work can be traced back to traditional Chinese art, architecture, mythology, and herbalism. The piece for Hunter Gatherers is a patchwork of things found and foraged. It’s a box of memories laid open, a tangled web yet to be untangled. It is part love letter to my time here in Northern California, part goodbye.

Yaxkin Fuentes-Barrientos @yaxkinfuentes

B. 2001, San Jose, California - Based in San Francisco, California

Sophie Smith @sophie.danger.smith

Sophie Smith (b. 1999, Los Angeles) is a mixed-media sculptor based in Oakland, California. Smith graduated from California College of The Arts in 2022 receiving her BFA in sculpture. She has had work in shows in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The upcoming group exhibition Hunter Gather at 120710, opening June 29th, will mark her curatorial debut.

Statement: She considers herself a hunter, gatherer, forager, and thief: Her practice is an intricate dance of collecting, obtaining, stealing, and rescuing. Smith compulsively amasses trash, treasures, ephemera, mementos, souvenirs, trophies, and consolation prizes, viewing these objects as fragments of a forgotten story. She attempts to create homes for abandoned pieces, elevating their status through material juxtaposition and context so they can share their story. The items she collects act as pieces of encrypted messages, thoughtfully grouped and arranged to reveal a message greater than its individual pieces. Smith is drawn to this means of communication for its shielded vulnerability, truths hidden through a code and a cipher. She likens it to a young girl divulging all their secrets in a lock-protected diary, a sense of safety and security created by a flimsy crackable lock.

Annie Artell @idontkissartell

Annie Artell is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. They earned their BFA in Ceramics from California College of the Arts.

Statement: Annie Artell approaches her practice as a medicinal endeavor. Artell forges fragments from their daily encounters with the world as a microcosmic way to make sense of an often nonsensical existence. Their recent work is inspired by the term “Disjecta Membra”. It is an obscure term used in archaeology that refers to the methodology of reassembling a text or artifact by piecing together its broken shards, attempting to assemble a whole by collecting its scattered fragments. Artells practice is not only a reflection of fragments made whole but also a ceremonial process of mending herself back together.