LiftOff 2023 Catalogue

Heidi Alonzo cuts recycled billboard ads into geometric shapes to create pieced and quilted works. Her work explores the infinite patterns of symmetry based on the triangle and how patterns of connections to memory and life inform who we are. 

Karlie Anderson is an oil painter whose work mainly revolves around portraiture as a gateway to human connection as she tackles a variety of topics surrounding healing, politics, and the human experience. 

Sydney Brown is a metalsmith, jeweler, installation and performance artist. Her work speaks to the themes of matrilineal history, loss, motherhood and memory. Her Practice relies heavily on labor, time and ritual. 

Adrienne Defendi's interests in memory, materiality, and narrative inform her photographic expression and artistic process.  Integrating photography and printmaking, she charts elements of loss and ritual, and the possibilities within reiteration and experimentation. 

Ian Gerard Fabre is an 80’s baby and native Californian hailing from the Sacramento Valley. As of late his work explores the intersections around capitalist critique, globalization’s toll and westernization’s impacts. 

Michael Favagrossa's art takes on the role of ‘critic’ of the industrial ag complex, as well as documenting the struggle towards self-sufficiency.  As a farmer and artist, his perspective gives him the opportunity to educate the consumer through art/life/farm, played out through his installations, sculptures, and actions. 

  Monica Galvan’s love of art stems from her childlike nature of curiosity. She has always been vigilant within the many environments in which she engages, noticing the residue of time around every corner since she can remember. This interest has led her to the world of art for its tactile qualities and means for creation.

  Rachell Hester contrasts the references through her process of mark making on a canvas using nature and natural materials to create artifacts. The lacunae or missing parts that exist in tracing these objects through history is reflected in the process and rendering of these forms onto canvas. 

Katharine T. Jacobs is a multidisciplinary artist haunted by the human body and the corporeal plight which she conceptually explores via sculpture, installation and photography. Her fine art visual work is a somatic autobiographical narrative of her lived experience as a chronically ill, disabled, single mother. 

Josie Lepe’s gaze is that of a Mexican immigrant, Latina mother, based artist and a

photojournalist by trade. She redefines the visual representation of what she calls the

Latines community. 

Natalie McBride is a ceramicist and painter based in the SF bay area. Her work centers around the psychological evolution of her coined genre “Existential Black Womanism”. 

James William Moore is a lens-based artist known for creating surreal and thought-provoking cinematic experiences steeped in kitsch and camp through photography, video, projection mapping, and installations. 

Hunter Ridenour’s surreal and confronting photography combines traditional dark-room

processes with alternative printing methods, transparency film, mirrors, and collage. 

Lucia Znamirowski is an artist, educator, and MFA graduate of 

San José State University. Lucia’s work focuses on memory and forgetting, post-post modernism, and the recursive nature of identity. 

  Andrew McNeely is a writer, editor, curator, and currently serves on the curatorial committee for the forthcoming exhibition (Un)disciplinary Tactics: Beatriz da Costa, part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time 2024.