Graduates 2014

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James Cathey

The goal of my work as a sound artist and a photographer is to document the dance between the organic and the synthetic. I love the juxtaposition of textures and the tension between nature and human habitation. The patterns of decay and erosion that occur in the environment, despite the efforts of humans to contain it, are to me extremely compelling. I am fascinated by the accomplishments and failures of adaptation, which resonate on both the macro and micro levels. The beauty and chaos of growth and degeneration have influenced my work both in sound and visual art for many years.

After composing many soundscapes and capturing the patterns of growth and decay, it was only natural that I progressed into filmmaking. My background in construction, electronics, and fabrication compliments and enables my desire to successfully integrate my treated films into an installation framework. I wish to further establish the visual medium as a non-linear, yet personal experience that can emphasize and promote the frail beauty of the natural world.

www.zendebris.com
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Cathy Ellis

In these paintings idealism and disaster coexist with more everyday concerns like eating, sleeping, work and recreation. I begin with a landscape or architectural structure that captures my attention. This area then becomes a stage where I introduce a loose narrative based on common human experiences, both real and imagined.

My current body of work consists of two dimensional paintings that use bright color and a combination of figurative and abstract elements.  I use color to impart a cultural vernacular: burlesque red, astro-turf green, hunter orange, dirty-pool blue. I live by the Laguna de Santa Rosa, a flood plain of nearly seventy-five hundred acres.  Water all around me makes its way to the sea, not in a nice rushing river, but by seeping slowly in oily puddles, listing in gullies by freeways, and shimmering in endless flooded fields. This backdrop of water informs my paintings, providing a backbone onto which my imagination moves forward.

www.cathyellis.org
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Clare Little

I like to make stuff. My current body of work began with an interest in the Baroque and Rococo, as movements where nature found itself metastasized in design. Envisioning poltergeists of nature just below the surface of the wall, gradually
breaking the barrier and confronting civilized mental and physical space. Challenging the hierarchy of man verses other and the outermost boundaries of home.

https://clare-little.squarespace.com/
alittleclare@yahoo.com

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Maria Rendon

The impression of what is not there interests me as much as what is there. I am attracted by the notion that our present reality will exist only as a glimpse in an instant, a day, or a year later. Through chance, systems, and the use of ephemeral materials, I make paintings inspired by the space between reality and perception, the present and the absent, the normal and the abnormal.

https://www.mariarendon.net
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Sommer Roman Sheffield

The mysterious exchange between an individual and the material world is of continual interest to me.  What does our immateriality have to do with materiality?  On one hand the physical and material environments that clothe, shelter, and decorate us are meaningful and vital.  On the other, the way we produce, consume, and discard “material stuff” is often destructive and detached from an understanding of our actual needs and desires.  What sort of psychological, spiritual, emotional, and corporeal relationship or exchange occurs in both the making and encountering of physical objects?
These ideas are explored through collecting and manipulating the material discards of our culture (clothing, curtains, oops house paint, furniture…etc).  Long hours, laboring with my hands, and intuition are central to my process… and serve in altering the materials’ once mechanical & mass-produced identity to one of authenticity, bearing the mark of the hand.  Relying on the sensate, the objects draw in the viewer, and set the stage for contemplative encounters and exchanges.

www.sommerroman.com
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