Sid M. Duenas work with multiple mediums, including text, drawing, mark-making, collaging, and digital spaces. His most recent work focuses on text—in original poetic form, transcriptions of conversations, or snippets of readings—which are transferred to surfaces that are further worked with drawings, marks, or other images. He is concerned with the charting of intractable distances, both physical and perceptual, and in particular, the distances that exist between home-island and mainland. The artist periodically travels to Saipan to work and continue his collaborations with his father on their family land. He conjoins different mediums to reinforce meaning, exercise mental projection, and reveal truths about his physical and imagined localities, searching for the most accurate description of his diasporic experience.
Duenas has had solo exhibitions at the artist-run galleries in Los Angeles Mandujano Cell (2018), Artist Curated Projects (2017), and Safe Space (2016). His works have been exhibited at Material Art Fair in Mexico City, Mexico (2019), Converso in Milan, Italy (2019), ‘Ae Kai Cultural Lab/Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Honolulu, Hawai’i (2017), LAXART in Los Angeles, California (2017) and Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California (2017). In 2014 he received a grant from Art Matters Foundation. Duenas graduated with a BA in graphic design from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California (2002), and attended The Mountain School (2010), and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California (2014-2015).
FW: AIR: March 22–May 1, 2021
Nikita Gale is a Los Angeles-based artist who uses ubiquitous consumer technologies as frameworks to consider how individuals potentially reproduce their relationships to objects within their relationships to political, social, and economic systems.
Gale’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York); LACE (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Rodeo Gallery (London); Ceysson & Benetiere (Paris); and in Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Their work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Mousse, Artforum, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. The artist currently serves on the Board of Directors for GREX, the west coast affiliate of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems and is a visiting lecturer in UCLA’s Design Media Arts program.
FW: AIR: August 23—October 2, 2021