For LRLX season 8, we have invited four curatorial teams to curate a single exchange each. We are thrilled to welcome:
Aggregate Space Gallery | October 19, 2021
Conrad Meyers is a curator, educator, and advocate for the visual arts. Trained in architecture and engineering, and later in sculpture and video, Meyers works with artists that use a variety of media, technologies, and scale in their projects. Meyers is a supporter of experiential artwork in the Bay Area, that is to say, visual artwork that needs to be physically observed to be fully appreciated. He fundamentally believes that the importance of visual art is the present-tense interaction between art and viewer that creates a non-replicable conversation that has the ability to profoundly change a human being’s relationship with the world. In 2011, he co-founded Aggregate Space, an Oakland non-profit video and installation gallery, screening facility, fabrication shop, and design studio. In addition to being the director of the gallery, Meyers has curated their lecture and film series.
Trina Michelle Robinson explores the relationship between memory and migration through film, sound, archival materials and text. Her work has been shown at galleries and film festivals throughout the country including including the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, San Francisco’s Root Division and Southern Exposure galleries, and New York’s Wassaic Project. She told the story of exploring her ancestry with The Moth Mainstage on stages throughout the country including New York’s Lincoln Center and NPR’s Moth Radio Hour. She previously has worked in print and digital media as a managing editor and production editor and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Fine Art at California College of the Arts where she was awarded the 2020 graduate Yozo Hamaguchi Award.
Willis Meyers is passionate about the intersection of art and technology and directly supports the Oakland arts community through ASG alongside working full-time in the IT field. While leading ASG’s strategy and growth and implementing tech tools like a new website and CRM database for ASG, she has held positions in the IT and Exhibit Design field for institutions such as Bay Area Video Coalition, Ninth Street Independent Film Center, Children’s Creativity Museum, and more. She holds a BFA (sculpture) / Minor (art history) from Herron School of Art and Design and received an MFA (sculpture) from SFAI in 2008.
Jessica Zhou and Sabina Kariat | December 14, 2021
Jessica Yuru Zhou (she/they) is a writer and technologist learning to slow down in San Francisco. They are a Kearny Street Workshop IWL fellow, a 2021 Pride Poet, and contributor to diasporic publishing collectives Intergalactic Gaysians and Sinostories. Most recently, she was a part of a vast, collective, labor of love to help launch Kernel Magazine, a publication examining technology's role in shaping our collective future, and exhibited work with Southern Exposure’s group show, “Antidotes to Confusion.” At the moment, she's pondering care and maintenance work, digitally diasporic methods of cultural disarrangement, SEO divination, and the ways we find one another online. You can find her elsewhere at www.jyz.digital.
Sabina Shanti Kariat (she/her/they) is an illustrator, animator, and educator from the Bay Area, currently based in Istanbul, Turkey. She has created animations for films about the civil rights movement, Asian American history, the unjust criminalization of refugees, and loss of native languages among immigrants. Sabina has worked as a teaching artist throughout San Francisco with students from pre-k through high school, and has held co-creation workshops with Adivasi (indigenous) activists in rural India, and with Syrian-Turkish youth in Istanbul. She is interested in illustration as a way to combat erasure, education in its capacity for unlearning, and diaspora as its own form of world-building, time-bending, and memory-preservation.
Laura Hyunjhee Kim and Alice Yuan Zhang | February 15, 2022
Laura Hyunjhee Kim is a multimedia artist who reimagines on/offline (non)human interactions and feelosophical experiences of the body. Kim received the inaugural ArtSlant Award in New Media (2013) and was an artist-in-residence at the Internet Archive (2017). In 2020, she received the Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award and the Black Cube Video Art Award. She is the author of "Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs" (The Accomplices / Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2019) and the coauthor of "Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital Media Object from the Onto-tales of the Digital Afterlife" (Open Humanities Press, 2019). She received a PhD in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance (IAWP) from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Kim is an Assistant Professor of Visual and Performing Arts at The University of Texas at Dallas. She lives and works in the company of neighboring birds, squirrels, and wild rabbits of Texas.
Alice Yuan Zhang 张元 (she/her) is an artist, educator, community weaver, and first-generation migrant currently living and working on the land of the Tongva and Chumash people. She hosts socioecological entanglement in layered realities across digital browsers and AR as well as somatic exercises and porous exchanges. Her research-based participatory practice traverses interconnections of liberatory grief, decolonial play, intergenerational time travel, and networked solidarity. Alice is a co-founder of virtual care lab, an open assemblage of people learning to trust each other in remote connection.
Jeremiah Barber and Surabhi Saraf | April 19, 2022
Jeremiah Barber is a visual artist whose work examines how we perceive and are perceived by our natural environment. Barber has exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Headlands Center for the Arts and CUE Art Foundation, NYC. In addition to his work as a solo artist, Barber collaborates as a member of 100 Days Action, which produces projects at the intersection of art, activism, and social engagement. Barber was a 2015 recipient of the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation. He teaches sculpture at University of California, Davis.
Surabhi Saraf is a media artist, composer, and founder of the Centre for Emotional Materiality. Her practice explores the intersection of technology, healing and activism. Surabhi has performed solo at Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennial, Greece, Currents International New Media Festival, Santa Fe, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, SF among others. Her collaborative work has been performed at NETMAGE 10 International Live Media Festival, Bologna, Soundwave Biennial ((8)), ((7)), and ((5)), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Surabhi is the recipient of Eureka Fellowship Award 2015 by the Fleishhacker Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artist award and the Artist + Process + Ideas Residency at Mills College Art Museum (2016). She was a 2019 Technology Resident at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and 2020 resident at HarvestWorks, NY. Surabhi is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.