Cogratulations Stephanie Deumer , our New Work: Focus on Los Angeles, 2022 Grantee!
As well as to our FINALISTS, Sean Grattan, Shima Tajbakhsh, Megan Mueller, Rachel Zaretsky, Matthew Lax, Jenny Yurshansky, Emily Baker, and to ON OUR RADAR artists Zara Kuredjian and Ben Cuevas.
Stephanie Deumer is a Canadian visual artist currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. Deumer holds a BA from the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California. She was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, and has been awarded grants from the Canada Arts Council, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Bar-Fund LA. She has been an artist in residence at Factory Media Centre, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada (2021); Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Alberta, Canada (2018); Cerritos College, Cerritos, California (2016); and The REEF, Los Angeles, California (2015). Her work has been profiled in ArchDaily, Dezeen, CalArts’ 24700, and featured in The Art Newspaper, World Architecture, Time Out Riyadh, Palm Springs Life, and Creative Boom, among others. She has exhibited internationally in Canada, the United States, the UK, Ecuador, and Saudi Arabia.
In 2022, Deumer participated in Desert X Al’Ula in Saudi Arabia, creating her largest installation to date: a solar-powered video installation that cultivated native plants. As part of her continued exploration of simulacra and immersive environments, the work brought to life the spectacle of biological reproduction through technological and visual means.
UNDER THE SAME SUN (2022), mixed media installation (interior view), 29.5 x 17 x 10 ft
HADHAD (42 minutes, HD video, 2012) video stillSean Grattan works primarily with digital video, utilising cinematic devices to frame performances that privilege the exchange of ideas over emotionally driven narrative. Early work was largely free of dialogue, devised around uncomplicated elements and procedures that deconstructed plot-oriented action, challenging dominant conceptions of productivity and progress. With later work, script writing emerged as the foundation for Grattan’s videos, a process wherein academic research is merged with language and behaviours drawn from Western society and pop culture. The result is an analytical hybrid of theoretical discourse and conventional dramatic dialogue, a quasi-scholarly argument set within a movie-like framework. The actors become vessels for an amalgam of concepts, delivering socio-political exposition via distanciating gestures and vocal intonation, creating an awkward and sometimes humorous relationship between form and content.
NO CITY IS IN THE CITY; (2022) installation, aluminum bars, acrylic sheets, print on paper, fresh flowers, Soil.Shima Tajbakhsh Born, Iran. Lives and works in Long Beach, CA. “I work in a range of media, and I am interested in nonlinear narratives that shift from generation to generation and can be read through fragments of architecture. The time-based, sculptural configurations in my work represent a constant liminal state wherein cultural and social edges rub up against other boundaries, encounter other timelines, and bridge histories. Much of my work is concerned with questioning the material conditions of bodies and borders.”
3074 WISHIRE BLVD. (2022) Inkjet Prints 112 x 58 "Megan Mueller (b. 1982) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California at Santa Barbara (2015), a BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University (2008) and a BA in Political Science from George Washington University (2004). Mueller’s work has been exhibited at various national and international venues including The Fulcrum Press, The Brand Library, Charlie James Gallery, Noysky Projects, Dalton Warehouse, Field Projects, New Wight Gallery at UCLA, High Desert Test Tests, GLAMFA, Transformer, TSV Berlin, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art.
https://www.meganmueller.com/
Matthew Lax is an experimental filmmaker, artist, and writer who is also a quadruplet. Working through documentary and narrative filmmaking techniques, Lax collaborates with non-actors to explore new forms of reciprocity, intimacy and storytelling. The resulting films extrapolate from the participants' real-life dynamics, as found amongst families, lovers, hobby clubs, athletic teams and kink communities, focusing on behavior and language, disability, animality and queerness. Lax’s films and video installations have screened and been exhibited with the Viennale (Austria), IHME Contemporary (Helsinki), MIX New York, table (Chicago), Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), REDCAT, and The Drawing Center (New York), among others. Lax’s organizational projects include those held at Anthology Film Archives (NY) and Human Resources LA. Lax’s writing has appeared in publications including MARCH Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), ArtPractical, and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (CARLA), as well a catalog contribution with the Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX) and a limited edition zine with Inga Books (Chicago). Lax is currently the artist-in-resident at the Camera Obscura Art Lab in Santa Monica, CA.
Production stills from workshop sessions for A TIRED DOG IS A GOOD DOG, PART TWO. Filmed at Automata, Los Angeles, January 2023.
Rachel Zaretsky is an artist and educator working to understand our relationship to the social space of memory. Her work spans video, performance, photography and installation. Her practice contends with the public’s evolving needs and shifting contexts of commemorative spaces such as monuments and memorials. Through the perpetual process of collecting, archiving and editing digital media, Zaretsky explores how we collectively process loss in the digital and physical realm. She received her MFA in Art from the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design and her BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been exhibited Human Resources, 18th Street Arts Center, and UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles; it has also been screened in New York and Germany.
http://rachelzaretsky.com/
BETWEEN MEMORY AND A RECORD (2022) Video still. 
Jenny Yurshansky’s practice is deeply informed by being a refugee, born stateless to parents fleeing from Soviet-era Moldova. Through a research-based approach, she explores the trauma of displacement, interrogating notions of belonging and otherness within the frames of landscape, historical documents, and social constructs. Formally, this manifests as absence, loss, or erasure. Her long-term projects form intertwined narratives and span the mediums of sculpture, photography, installation, and writing. In 2023 Yurshansky’s solo exhibition “Rinsing the Bones” will open at 18th Street Art Center. The Center for Art and Craft has also selected her to participate in their inaugural Teaching Artist Cohort. In 2022 she had a solo exhibition at American Jewish University, “There Were No Roses There,” for which she also received an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. In 2021 she was commissioned to create new work for which the group exhibition was titled “We are all guests here.” at Bridge Projects. That year she was also the inaugural Alumni Artist in Residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Numerous institutions have invited her across Los Angeles to host community-based workshops, lectures, and artist walkthroughs, including MOCA, Wende Museum, Skirball Museum, Bridge Projects, Armory Center for the Arts, Oceanside Museum of Art, Barnsdall Art Center, Heart of Los Angeles, Beverly Hills City Arts Programs, Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Fulcrum Arts, UCLA, Art Center, California Institute of the Arts, Cal State Fullerton, Pitzer College, Otis College, Chapman University, and American Jewish University. Her recognitions include being awarded the City of Los Angeles Artist Fellowship in 2019.
https://jennyyurshansky.com/Jenny_Yurshansky/Jenny_Yurshansky.html
WE ARE ALL GUESTS HERE (2021) Lampworked glass, silver fuming, silicone, polyolefin, PVC vinyl, and shadows 8’ x 8’ x 8’. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer
BLOCK 2 (2020) hydrostone, silver, urethane, nylon fiber, concrete colorant.On Our Radar: Zara Kuredjian is an LA-based artist with an interdisciplinary practice focused on materials relationship to liminality and the ethereal. She is deeply engaged with the porosity and liquidity of matter and its relationship to time and energy. Within her practice, material agency is a paramount consideration for how work is developed. The expression of a material's properties is considered through their inherent qualities as well as how they
react to other materials and forces. Her fascination with liquidity and porosity have led her to engage with processes such as mold-making/casting and photography. Within her practice, questioning human experience and its relationship to material is as important as thinking through matter and its relationship to the cosmos. This tenuous relationship between emergence and return, flesh and earth, is an idea that she often works through
by approaching bodily relationships to material and site. Work is frequently presented in the form of sculpture, installation, and photography and often establishes space in which a participant may wonder about their relationship to time, place, and corporeality. Zara was granted an MFA in Visual Art (2020) with an emphasis in Sculpture, Object, and Installation from the University of California, San Diego as well as an MA (2017) and BA (2015) in Visual Art from California State University, Northridge.
http://www.zarakuredjian.com
KNIT VEINS (2013) installation; knit wool and silk 40 x 12 x 12 feet (detail)On Our Radar: born in Southern California in 1987, Ben Cuevas (he/they/she) is an artist whose work is rooted in concepts of otherness and intersectionality, inspired by their queer, non-binary, HIV-positive, and Latinx lived experience. As these multiple components inform their practice, identity directly influences their work, which is naturally interdisciplinary. Cuevas received their B.A. in mixed media installation art & photography at Hampshire College, in 2010. A central part of Cuevas’s work is based in textiles, underscoring queer/feminist ideologies within the long and gendered history of women’s work with fiber-based materials. Cuevas also speaks to queer histories and the idea of the archive through photo-based pieces centering images of sexual minorities from past into the present. This can be seen in their piece Ghosts of the Trucks of the Westside Highway, and their ongoing photo series titled Reinserted. Cuevas’s artworks have been shown across the US with exhibitions held at Craft Contemporary (formerly The Craft and Folk Art Museum) in Los Angeles, Museum of the City of New York, The Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York City, and others. Several books and publications feature Cuevas’s work, such as DUETS: Ben Cuevas & Annie Sprinkle in Conversation, published by Visual AIDS, and Queer Threads: Crafting, Identity, and Community, edited by John Chaich and Todd Oldham. Acclaimed as a public speaker, Cuevas has given talks at institutions including Brown University, Indiana University, Ohio State University, The Museum of Sex, and the Fire Island Artist Residency.
(All Artists’ Images Courtesy of the Artists, unless otherwise described.)