Modern Pleasure

Alex Ehmer @alexehma

Statement: Alex Ehmer is a local bay area artist and arts administrator born and raised in San Francisco CA. Alex graduated SFAI with a BFA in printmaking in 2019 and currently has a studio in the American Industrial building in San Francisco’s Dogpatch district. Alex has worked, exhibited, and curated at various art institutions and local galleries throughout their art career. Some such spaces are SFAI, Walter and Mc Bean Gallery, Burnt Oak gallery, 500 Capp Street, Fleetwood SF, Berggruen Gallery, and Mrkt Gallery. Alex’s art practice consists of intertwining various mediums of printmaking, sculpture, and performance in order to explore the complex natures involving childhood phycology, trauma, and the body and how it stores memory. In curatorial practice , Alex tries to investigate collaborative natures with galleries and various communities intertwining within the ecosystem of the Bay Area art scene. Whenever curating Alex always try and provide some aspect of open call to each exhibition in order to provide opportunities for these said communities.

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.

Anya Steuer @art.de.anya

Anya Steuer is a multidisciplinary artist whose illuminated, functional sculptures draw from anatomy, ecology, and the tension between what is seen and what is obscured. Growing up on a small sheep farm in Grass Valley, CA, she developed an early fascination with living forms and the structures that support them. Now based in Oakland, she brings this curiosity into her studio and fabrication work. Steuer is a Shuchat Grant recipient and completed a scenic painting residency at Cobalt Studios in upstate New York. Her work has been exhibited at River Gallery (OR), and she currently works as an art fabricator and plaster artist.

Statement: I create multidisciplinary work that explores the structures of human and animal bodies, embracing both their elegance and their oddity. Guided by a fascination with anatomy, I use bold color, tactile surfaces, and materials such as air-dry clay, wire, and sculptural fabrication techniques to exaggerate what usually remains hidden beneath the skin. My deep love of nature anchors my process—each piece is a conversation between organic form and the physical act of making. Recently, my practice has expanded into illuminated sculpture, where light becomes both a functional object and an emotional force. These lamps transform the spaces they inhabit, shifting mood and meaning as they interact with their surroundings. In this way, my work remains alive: changing, responding, and revealing new layers of what bodies—and environments—can be.

Chinzalée Sonami @_hi_pala_

Chinzalée Sonami is an Oakland-based visual artist working primarily with clay. Sonami's clay objects and installations are often grounded in themes of boundedness, containment and permeation drawn from her spiritual practice, interest in celestial bodies, and mythology. Her works also reflect her cultural roots spanning across the Bay Area, France and Tibet. Sonami's ceramic practice is dedicated to her father and named "Pala" after the Tibetan word for father.

Statement: My sculptures explore the shifting line between openness and restriction. Nets, lattices, and vessels serve as recurring forms — structures designed to hold, yet defined by their voids. I’m interested in how boundaries operate: how they protect, contain, and divide, but also how they let light, air, and uncertainty through. Each piece investigates a state of tension, suspended between order and collapse. The spaces between the lines become as significant as the material itself, revealing that containment is never complete. Through this balance of fragility and strength, I aim to evoke questions about what it means to hold, to release, and to exist within the limits we construct for ourselves.

Gabby Severson @saucygabby

Gabby Severson is an Indigenous visual artist working across photography, beadwork, basketry, and sculpture. Rooted in her upbringing in Oregon, her work engages with themes of identity, memory, and culture drawing inspiration from her Siletz heritage. She earned her BFA from Parsons School of Design and is currently getting her MFA in Fine Arts from California College of The Arts.

Statement: I take photographs as a way to record evidence of my Siletz identity rooted in lived experience. These images become a vessel for memory, a trace of a moment that resists forgetting. These images are then translated into digital patterns, which I map out and execute bead by bead. Working with plastic fuse beads, the process of creating these sections one by one is meditative; it allows me to witness the image slowly come together while engaging in the repetitive, tactile act of weaving. Once complete, I often scramble or remix the pattern, reflecting the complex, layered, and sometimes fractured experience of being a mixed Native person. I blend traditional techniques with synthetic materials such as plastic beads and synthetic sinew. The fuse beads, petroleum-based and globally sourced, carry their own contradictions connecting my work to extraction. I play with these tensions: What does it mean to be Native and make art from synthetic matter? What does it mean to use a material that has caused trauma to the land? My beadwork allows me to live within moments of connection to my Indigeneity, embodying personal memory while. I am investigating the photos, objects, and places that shape my lineage, revealing how my identity is formed through kinship, silences, and traces from the past.

Jaelynn Walls

Kris Jeyeun Chang @je.yeun

Kris Jeyeun Chang (b. 1996, Los Angeles) is a Korean-American ceramic artist whose work explores contemporary cultural identity through traditional forms. She studied Ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Royal College of Art, where her research was centered around Korean Art History and contemporary subcultures.

Statement: Using traditional Korean wheel-throwing techniques, Chang creates her versions of historic forms such as the moon jar and maebyeong vase. These works are ornamented and recontextualized through her personal interpretations of the symbolic meanings embedded in these vessels. References to the respective dynasties of the jars are made through various methods of surface design and combined with a contemporary cultural analysis. Drawing inspiration from subculture, feminism, and her cross-cultural heritage, Chang's works reimagine historical Korean objects as vessels for contemporary identity and memory.

Margaret Kammerer @clay.obj

Margaret Kammerer is a cross-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of ceramics, sculpture, and digital culture. Her practice explores the evolving tension between physical and virtual spaces—blending the immediacy of internet culture with the deep material history of clay. Through hand-built ceramic forms, underglaze painting, and references to meme aesthetics, Kammerer transforms ephemeral online gestures into enduring sculptural objects. Her work is both humorous and critical, asking what it means to live, laugh, and love in the age of digital oversaturation. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Queen City Clay in Cincinnati Ohio, where she continues to teach, experiment, and develop a practice grounded in both tactile craft and technological curiosity. BFA - Columbus College of Art and Design 2019 MFA - University of Cincinnati 2024

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.

Mica Scallion-Ford @flwr.patch

Textile, electronic media and 2D-visual artist Mica Scallion-Ford explores their art/work nexus in Los Angeles, California. They log most hours experimenting with form and material at their loom in Lincoln Heights, weaving second-hand threads into use-as-art objects. Additionally they explore sewing, internet gleens, video & sound, and a host of other media in their artistic practice which spills in and out of their profession as a high-level fine art A/V technician and all around handy-them.

Promise Callahan @ca3trato

Promise Callahan (b. 1997, Michigan) is a queer artist examining gender, BDSM and power dynamics through fiber, oil pastel and mixed media.

rel robinson @rel.robinson

rel robinson (b. 1995, Los Angeles) is an artist and writer based in San Francisco. Working in and around photography, fiber, research, text, and archival methodologies, her practice superimposes the affectual and the abject and aims to develop a language with the ephemeral. Most recently, she has exhibited at Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato; Anthony Maier, Mill Valley; Anglim Trimble, San Francisco; BRIDGE, Delhi, India; Los Angeles Melrose Botanical Garden, Los Angeles; Glogauair, Berlin, Germany; Gallery 16, San Francisco, CA; Delaplane, San Francisco, CA; Et al., San Francisco, CA; and staircase, San Francisco, CA. She holds a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, is a current MFA candidate at UC Berkeley, and is the founder of conventional projects, an artist-edition publication.

Tali Halpern @totally.doomed

Tali Halpern (b. 1994, Chicago, IL) lives and works in Chicago. Tali’s work explores the complexities of queerness, sexuality, desirability, gender, and its aesthetics as well as topics surrounding addiction and recovery through a mixed media fiber practice. Their work is informed by collage, exploring the layers of intersectionality in art, identity, spirituality and existence. Fiber is a soft medium in contrast with the often challenging themes in their work. Neither static nor flat, they are tactile and in direct relationship to the body. They use self-portraiture as witness to flesh, feelings, addictions, traumas, growth, and joy. Then through collage, they piece and mend the broken, unite the solitary, and combine completely different facets into one, in an attempt to heal. In sharing work about vulnerabilities, often deemed taboo and shameful by society, they reject shame while offering solace and connection to viewers alienated by similar struggles. Their works have been exhibited at Twelve Ten Gallery (Chicago), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Chicago) and de boer (Los Angeles), among others. MFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA Hampshire College.

Jaelynn Walls