Is embroidery a skill you learned as a child, or something you developed later on? My mother taught me to sew when I was a little girl, just simple stitching, and it was something I’ve always done. I never had any formal training. I don’t use proper stitches. I don’t use techniques that have a…
Bryan Kring is an Oakland-based book artist and graphic designer. His enchanting images and dark humored writing are often enhanced with interactive mechanisms that pull you into another world held in the palm of your hand. I visited him in the studio to see more of his work in person and ask him about his…
I stand in front of a question written in obsidian shards. I don’t speak obsidian. I’m not sure anyone does. I’m not even sure Jimmie Durham does, and he’s the one who wrote it. I try to translate. “God! You’re, the a do sad ads (oa) ash… bread as a broad goo?” That can’t be…
Dustin Harewood brings to canvas colliding worlds, where east meets west, both above and below sea level. His works mesh the importance of our climate and the heavy hand that media has, using the imagined to discuss our human footprint. Heavily influenced by the submerged landscapes, Harewood has used his memories to create a vibrant and…
Hiba Schahbaz is a Brooklyn-based artist who works in the centuries-old art form of miniature painting. She trained in miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan and received an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in New York City. Schahbaz, a Muslim woman of color, speaks critically and poetically about western…
Your background is in photography, it was what you were focusing on when we were in the MFA program together at SF State University. How did you first get into making drawings? I know that’s what it seems like, because both my BFA and MFA are in photography, but I have been drawing since I…
After five years of intense engagement with water-based media, painter Maja Ruznic turns again to oil painting in an ongoing exploration of trauma and its untold traces in the series Soil as Witness. Examining trauma’s traces through the photographic medium in “Spectral Evidence”, author Ulrich Baer argues that traumatic events and the memories they produce cannot, by the…
A boy in red pajamas, perhaps eight years old, walks quietly and with purpose to an area in the woods where he is partially overlapped by a moss-covered tree, bending a vine or a limb out of his way as he passes. What must be morning light coruscates slowly up the tree and along the…
I am sitting in a small theater within the Orange County Museum of Art on Friday, April 15th between two of my favorite artists, my girlfriend Maja Ruznic and one of my closest friends Kim Kei. We’re watching the new documentary “Eva Hesse” while eating some sweet and sour turkey jerky that we snuck in, and sobbing. We’re watching the…
Above a girl who sits on a floor, is a ball suspended in air. Her arms are raised. The question of whether she threw it or is ready to catch escapes your mind because of the way in which time doesn’t exist here. In stillness, raised arms can only accept the invisible; there is no…
