Zephyr Coating

Ashley Spencer @https://www.instagram.com/ashleysartdump/

Spencer received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Eastern Illinois University in 2023 and completed her Master of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in 2025. Her work has been exhibited extensively, with recent shows at the ICA SF, SOMArts Cultural Center, Novack Gallery, and Playspace Gallery, among others. In 2025, she participated in the MFA Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition and received an Honorable Mention Thesis Award. She has been recognized with numerous accolades, including the Barclay Simpson Award, the Murphy Cadogan Award, and multiple scholarships throughout her academic career. Spencer lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Statement: Ashley Spencer (San Francisco, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects her worldly perspective as a mixed-race queer creator. With ten years of experience in ceramics, sculpture, and mixed media, her art delves into complex themes like the Black experience, hauntology, and women’s bodily autonomy. She addresses generational grief through her work, which often uses a blend of various mediums to explore time and material history. Ashley initiates thinking about how the work is as much about the process as the final product, inviting viewers to engage with both contemporary issues and historical narratives. The materials she uses become tools for storytelling, rituals, and manifestations of folklore, weaving narratives that speak of heritage, beliefs, and the unseen. The act of arranging and rearranging such materials can also be seen as a dialogue with spirits and tales that hover just at the edge of perception. Every twist of a twig or coil of hair echoes with the voices of ancestors, myths, and legends, enriching the present with their whispers. Through them, she engages with a legacy that is living and breathing, inviting us to explore the enchanted and the unknown.

Brian Bartz @https://www.instagram.com/brian_bartz/

Bartz completed an MFA in art practice at UC Berkeley in 2020, and received a BA in fine art from Reed College in 2017. His work has been shown across the United States, including at the Berkeley Art Museum, Well Well Projects, Pallas Gallery, Soldes Gallery, and more. He is currently an adjunct professor in art and design at the University of San Francisco. Bartz lives and works in Berkeley, CA.

Statement: Brian Bartz (Berkeley, CA) is an interdisciplinary sculptor and educator. Through his work, he seeks to defamiliarize our collective relationship to technology, presenting viewers with speculative objects which complicate our understanding of how a “device” might look or function. More recently, he has been particularly captivated by the poetics of communication technologies such as radio and satellites, and the ways they interact across landscape and place. Some of the research interests which animate his work include depictions of terraforming in science fiction, militarization throughout the cold war, and the relationship between technology, mysticism, and the cosmos.

Colby Claycomb @colby_claycomb

Claycomb received his Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and then was selected and received a grant to attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Artist Residency, 2009. Claycomb lived and worked in New York City from 2010 to 2019. He then returned to the Bay Area in 2019. Most recently, he was a SECA Award Nominee in 2022 and 2024. He has exhibited his work extensively in the Bay Area and New York. Claycomb lives and works in San Francisco. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Davis in 2006. Later that year, he was selected and received a grant to attend a post-baccalaureate program at Pont-Aven School of Painting and Sculpture in Pont-Aven, France.

Statement: Colby Claycomb (Citrus Heights, CA) is a sculptor who primarily works with found objects, ceramics, and construction materials. Hovering somewhere between hope and play, anxiety and catastrophe, Claycomb reflects on the unpredictable nature of objects through sculpture, exploring purpose and redefinition. His personal experiences with materials, together with the constant desire to find balance between positivity and pessimism, drive Claycomb’s practice and manifest in a process that is both playful and physical. Claycomb’s work is a mix of craft, construction, destruction, and ready-made objects. Through sculpture, he reflects on the unpredictability of human nature, create stories, personal myths and deconstruct old ones. It is through this practice that he is able to create a purpose for himself, to keep investigating his own relationship and hope of a higher being.

Jada Simone Haynes @https://www.instagram.com/blkvang0gh/

Haynes was the recipient of the Freemon Gadberry Award in Art and the Freemon Gadberry Award in Sculpture in 2022 and received the New York Studio School scholarship within that same year. Haynes' work has been exhibited at notable venues such as the Afrofuturist Center, Arden Fair, Bass & Reiner, Gearbox, Gallery 1202, Holland Project Gallery, The Little Raven, Mercury20 Gallery, Root Division, The San Francisco Gallery, Textile Arts Center, WAL Public Market Gallery, and represented in the Letterform Archive Collection. They earned a dual Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art and Design from the University of California, Davis. During their time at UC Davis, Haynes served as Lead Director of the Basement Gallery and completed an independent honors thesis under the mentorship of Azin Seraj and Darrin Martin. Haynes currently resides and practices in the Bay Area, where they contribute to the field as a Collections Associate at the Letterform Archive.

Statement: Jada Simone Haynes (San Ramon, CA) is a Black non-binary archivist and multidisciplinary artist who is deeply engaged in exploring the nuanced aspects of Black queer existence, resistance, and resilience. In their creative practice, they are particularly drawn to abstracted images and the transformative potential of knotted and knit fibers to serve as conduits for the density of personal and collective grief, security, memory, and desire. These vessels and tapestries that weave fibers, verses, and vision create a constellation of experiences that delve into the textures of these themes and their futures.The work reflects a dedication to storytelling through various dimensions, a convergence that’s committed to blending the realms of archives, phenomenology, and art practice where the past is dynamically engaged and inherited by the present.

Jessy Slim @_slimfactory

Slim earned her Master of Architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2021, following a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014. In 2022, Slim participated in the Detroit Month of Design, contributing to the LATITUDE Architecture Alumni exhibition, which highlighted the work of Cranbrook alumni and students from the Architecture department. Slim lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Statement: Jessy Slim (Oakland, CA) creates work that explores the space in between—a conceptual place that deconstructs, reframes, and re-examines our surroundings, the systems in place, and their broader implications. Her research-driven practice is guided by intuition and memory, and spans architecture, installation, sculpture, and photography. Through these media, Slim critiques power and authority, acting as an iconoclast and developing ways to question and understand the inherent nature of the world around us. Informed by her own experiences of displacement, Slim’s work embraces her personal history through the lens of a Lebanese immigrant. She frequently incorporates chickpeas—an ingredient emblematic of Levantine cuisine and Lebanese identity—to express the fragmentation of cultural and political identities in both physical and cognitive spaces. The temporality of her sculptures remains in flux, indefinite and evolving. By centering chickpeas as a commodified, ethnically appropriated, borrowed, and forgotten material, Slim seeks to preserve their cultural value and amplify their significance.

Julia Kerley @earthtriplet

Julia Kerley (Los Angeles, CA) is an artist who primarily makes ceramic sculptures and installations. Working in the modality of clay is a uniquely formative experience for herself and the earth she graciously works with–an experience rife with transmutation and alchemy. She constructs heavily textured, modular ceramic sculptures based on historic, often religious or ritualistic, references. The resulting objects represent experiments in the invention of self and the complexity of an identity shaped by memory.

Statement: Through this queering of the boundary where self ends and object begins, she re-creates these ritual objects in service of a re-imagined history–one rich in multiplicity of gender, class, sexuality, and cultural background. The objects thereafter embark on their journey of selfhood, somewhere suspended between life and death, objecthood and selfhood, now positioned in the empowerment of their history. Each work also contains an element of performance. The interaction between artwork and audience extends the meaning of the work beyond the artist, and situates these glitched historic vessels within other people and into the occasion of now. Kerley’s Capture study unfolds and expands non-linearly; structure and outcome co-evolve through her contingent thinking and activity. She analyzes CAPTCHAs' philosophical, technological, and socio-political implications within a digital and textile matrix. Ideas of control, labor, security, and identity surround the basis of the work in relation to matrixial theory and Glitch Feminism, creating a handwoven topographical textile aimed at understanding the expansiveness of the cyber and physical world.

Lola Collins @https://www.instagram.com/p/CXbtMZ2hIs0/

Collins earned an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in London, UK, in 2023, following a BA in Art History and Anthropology from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, in 2020. Her artistic practice has been featured in several solo and group exhibitions across the US and Europe. She has shown at prominent venues, including the Brooklyn Museum, Diego Rivera Gallery, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Her recent work was featured in Intrinsic Tools at the D.C. Art Center in Washington, D.C., in 2024 and Crossing Borders at Millbank Tower in London, UK. Collins lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Statement: Lola Collins (Washington, D.C.) investigates the possibility of form and space, and their relationship to her lived experience as a Black femme moving through the world. Her work consistently centers the historical, the social, and the temporal—treating each as inseparable elements within the structures she creates and deconstructs. Through painting, sculpture, public work, performance, and text-based art, Collins explores the act of building—not only as a physical gesture, but as a conceptual and emotional process. For her, building inherently involves both deconstruction and reconstruction. These processes may unfold literally or metaphorically, and often occur simultaneously within her practice. This layered approach mirrors Black life and the ways in which individuals within the Black diaspora continuously rebuild, reframing their pasts, presents, and futures to more authentically represent their identities.

Maddi Minicozzi @https://www.instagram.com/inconsistentswag_/

Maddi Minicozzi (New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and creative director whose work explores the intersection of sculpture, conceptual furniture, and socially engaged installation. Her practice began in Industrial and Interaction Design, where she developed a deep interest in how form and function influence human connection. This background continues to inform her approach, which is grounded in usability, aesthetics, and empathy. Over time, Minicozzi’s work has expanded beyond traditional design into a more fluid and collaborative realm—merging object-making with curatorial strategies and community-based practices. She is particularly interested in the social lives of objects and the ways built environments shape human experience. Her projects aim to create space for connection, visibility, and care, using design as a storytelling tool and a form of mutual aid.

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.

Narges Poursadeqi @https://www.instagram.com/narges.__p/?hl=en

Narges Poursadeqi (Tehran, Iran) is a conceptual artist blending elements of politics, religion, and history, using curated materials such as archived photos, videos, and sound to tell complex stories. She has shown in various institutions, including prominent venues such as Hamzianpour & Kia Gallery, Artists' Television Access, Central Stage, Gallery Bergen, Glockenbachwerkstatt, SOMAArt Cultural Center, Sales Forth Tower, and Kala Art Gallery.

Statement: Narges Poursadeqi (Tehran, Iran) is a conceptual artist blending elements of politics, religion, and history, using curated materials such as archived photos, videos, and sound to tell complex stories. Poursadeqi’s practice centers on using symbolic vessels, such as childhood toys like kaleidoscopes and View-Masters, to serve as containers for often difficult narratives. These vessels transcend mere representation, acting as transformative objects that bridge the gap between the artist, the artwork, and the audience. Her works invite the viewer to interact with the hidden, sacred life of historical materials, creating immersive experiences that evoke emotional responses and challenge perceptions. Recently, Poursadeqi has been focusing on fiber-based artwork in response to the sociopolitical climate in Iran. Through installation, she pays tribute to the resilience of Iranian women and honors those who have lost their lives fighting for freedom. Dawn follows the story of a girl who was stoned to death in 2015. Her identity remains unknown to the public. The cyanotype print depicts her death in the midst of an altar with stones and mud lying at the bottom of the work. Poursadeqi includes a participatory element, inviting the audience to engage in acts of wrapping, tying, and deconstructing the pieces. Each act of deconstruction becomes a symbolic gesture of defiance—a thread unraveled from the fabric of oppression. In the process of weaving and reconstructing, new patterns of resilience and resistance emerge. The work reveals the power held in the hands of those who dare to challenge the status quo, inviting contemplation on the intertwined threads of womanhood, life, and the longing for freedom.

Nathan Lynch @nathanlynchart

Nathan Lynch (Pasco, WA) grew up in an agricultural community in the high desert of Columbia River Basin. Lynch’s recent exhibitions include More Than What My Hands Can Hold at Gallery 16 and Same Blue as the Sky with Studio Ahead. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wildlife Conservation Society for seabird nest designs on Año Nuevo Island, Farallon Islands and Channel Islands. Lynch, a 2011 Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, studied with Ken Price at the University of Southern California and earned an MFA at Mills College with Ron Nagle. Lynch is an Associate Professor of Ceramics at California College of the Arts.

Statement: His concerns for political conflict and environmental upheaval are filtered through notions of absurdity, hand fabrication and the dramatic devices of storytelling. As a sculptor and performance artist Lynch has made collaboration and experimentation major components of his practice. Lynch’s sculptures draw inspiration from political theatrics and the fragility of power, exploring recurring human patterns of ambition, vulnerability, and folly. His abstract forms mimic the personas, positions, and posturing of public figures—appearing inflated, yet sagging under an implied weight, as if buckling under pressure. Lynch is particularly interested in the formal beauty of these objects and their ability to encapsulate, in abstract terms, the tension between human ambition and inevitable disappointment. In his recent work, he shifts his color palette from visceral pinks and creams to darker, opaque blues—reflecting layers of private and public experience, and signaling a movement between vulnerability, access, and protection. Lynch explores current political and cultural landscapes through the lens of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where the boundaries between reality and its representation are blurred. His sculptures engage with ongoing discourse about truth and its manipulation in contemporary American politics, responding to the growing skepticism about what is real and what is constructed. Lynch’s recent exhibitions include More Than What My Hands Can Hold at Gallery 16 and Same Blue as the Sky with Studio Ahead. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wildlife Conservation Society for seabird nest designs on Año Nuevo Island, Farallon Islands and Channel Islands. Lynch, a 2011 Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, studied with Ken Price at the University of Southern California and earned an MFA at Mills College with Ron Nagle. Lynch is an Associate Professor of Ceramics at California College of the Arts.

Nathan Sheu @https://www.instagram.com/enolabyrinth/?hl=en

Nathan Sheu (San Francisco, CA) is a designer and artist who bridges traditional craftsmanship and emerging fabrication technologies. He creates furniture and sculptural objects that explore the intersections of material memory, digital precision, and sustainability. Drawing from his background in woodworking, CAD design, and ecological materials research, Nathan’s practice reflects a deep interest in reimagining the lifecycle of objects.

Statement: His pieces often blend analog techniques—such as hand-turning and joinery—with digital methods like CNC carving and 3D printing, resulting in timeless and forward-thinking works. Sheu’s projects have explored themes ranging from emotional reassurance to ecological regeneration, often using reclaimed or unconventional materials to question assumptions about value, permanence, and form. Through the thoughtful integration of nature, technology, and handwork, his work invites viewers to engage with furniture and objects as living, evolving narratives. Sheu holds a BFA in Furniture Design from California College of the Arts, with minors in Industrial Design, Ecological Practices, and Computational Practices. He currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA, where he continues to develop projects that merge functionality with poetic material exploration.

Samuel Wildman @https://www.instagram.com/samuel_the_serious/

Wildman received his MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley and a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a passionate and frequent collaborator and has received grants from 4Culture, SDOT, and the City of Seattle Arts and Culture. Samuel has been awarded residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residency, Monson Arts, Sou’wester Arts Week, Signal Fire, MADArt, and others. He is the recipient of the 2023-24 Graduate Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award. His work has been mentioned in Sculpture Magazine, and his collaborative project “bevintage” was listed by Creative Capital as On Our Radar. Wildman lives and works in Berkley, CA.

Statement: Samuel Wildman (Berkeley, CA) works in sculpture, video, and installation. As a handyman and a dad, his practice is rooted in the strange and sometimes mystical bodies of knowledge embedded in the soft labor of caretakers, baby whisperers, and fixers. He describes his practice as a comfortable, home-like space that finds definition in the moments when familiarity falters. His objects and installations are inspired by the unpredictable forms produced when social and political absurdities appear as normalized, familiar, and home-like situations. He uses his practice to bring the depth and focus of highly disciplinary fields—like industrial ergonomics, ecology, ceramics, literature, and woodworking—into dialogue with each other under an organizing agenda of care and criticality.

Sara Cruz @___sprinting

Cruz has won several awards such as the 2024 International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award and the Arthur E. Nelson Ceramic Award in 2023. She has been published in Sculpture Magazine January-February 2025 issue. Cruz recently graduated from California College of the Arts with a BFA in sculpture and currently resides in San Francisco, CA.

Statement: Sara Cruz (San Diego, CA) grew up near one the most contested border regions in the world. Migratory flows, familial threads, and the US-Mexico Border have all been crucial subjects in her artistic practice. Cruz's work takes the exploration of the Latin American identity within her own lens, but also within the context of syncretism. Syncretism as the merging of culture, merging of iconographies, of history, of current contexts, where the Indigenous aspects of Latin America and decolonial aspects merge into what we see as the “melting pot” of the Latine experience. The materiality of resistance is a medium or a conduit for change. Cruz takes the idea that resisting, or expressing issues or concerns about the world using art and sculpture, has given me the opportunity to explore different ways in which I can critique or resist aspects of our world, and create something to send a broader message.

Sholeh Asgary @sholehasgary

Asgary’s debut album, آبان (Aban), was released in 2024 through Sming Sming Books and Crystalline Morphologies to critical acclaim. A member of UCLA’s Art|Sci Collective, her work is featured in the 2024-25 Getty Pacific Standard Time Atmosphere of Sound exhibition and has been presented by institutions such as Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, The Lab, / slash art, and Stanford University. Asgary is a 2023 Artadia Finalist, and her Audio Archive Booth is short-listed for a 2025 Creative Capital grant. Her practice is featured in Art in America’s 2022 “New Talent Issue” and reviewed in international publications. She has received support from institutions such as Headlands Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Bemis Center, Culture Hub, and ARoS Kunstmuseum, and her awards include a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, a California Arts Council Grant for MAJLES, and funding from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation for her compositional work for Dance Elixir. Asgary is a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and California College of the Arts and serves on the Southern Exposure curatorial council. She holds an MFA from Mills College and a BA from San Francisco State University.

Statement: Sholeh Asgary (b. Tehran, Iran) is an interdisciplinary artist and performer whose practice engages sound, hybrid forms, and performance to investigate, memorialize, and express the complexities of joy and survival inherent in diasporic and refugee experiences. Her primary material and deepest conceptual concern is sound. Through site-specific installations, sculptures, performances, archival projects, and collective collaborations, her work challenges colonial assumptions of what is heard, proposing new futures. As a performer, Asgary approaches sound as an embodied, fugitive force, processing voice, objects, field recordings, and prepared instruments through electronics to create an unsettled, slippery vocality informed by traditional Iranian singing.

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.