YOUR MOOD ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
September - November 2024
Through mark-making, collage, fashion, and video, nkiruka oparah’s work engages with abstract and figurative language to question ritualized ideas of time, selfhood, and intimacy. Using drawing, collage, and poetry as tools for research, oparah explores Black and African traditions of time and consciousness; color and how it functions formally and psychologically; as well as ideas of opaqueness, improvisation, and DIY sensibilities to uncover alternative possibilities for being.
June - August 2024
Sam Claude Carmel (they/them) is a Queer Transgender multi-media conceptual and installation artist, curator, author, and psychedelic harm reductionist based in San Francisco. Graduating in 2019 from Mills College with a B.A. in Queer Artist Studies, Carmel’s artmaking practice is focused on Queer and Transgender representation within art and culture. They are founder of Liminal Space SF, San Francisco’s Trans-centering art gallery located in SoMa.
March - May 2024
Beril Or is a visual artist, educator, and curator from Turkey, based in Oakland, California. Herinterdisciplinary works explore time, memory, trauma, and healing and move between comfort and disturbance. She has shown in galleries such as Marin MOCA, Your Mood Gallery, /room/ /slash, SOMArts, Root Division, Berkeley Art Center, Palo Alto Art Center, ICASF, SOEX, Galeri Nev, and Zilberman Gallery. In 2009 she received the State Contemporary Artist Award in Turkey and 2019 the Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, among others. Beril holds an MFA in Art Practice from San Francisco State University and BFA in Sculpture from Hacettepe University.
December 2023 - February 2024
Nancy Nguyen is a Bay Area painter from San Jose, California.
Her practice is informed through personal relationships with land, water, and belonging. Nancy examines cultural dissonance — a term she uses to define the disconnect a child has with their immigrant families. Currently working on a series based on water, Nancy looks for parallels in ecological events, familial history, and its intersection with Buddhism and shamanistic rituals.
Oil is imperative in her process on canvas and realizes itself psychologically. Carrying a resemblance to water, the mutable quality of oil leaves space for contemplation. She draws from a place of tension, holding a record, an awareness of land, innate behaviors, or systems of beliefs. The interdependence of material and ancestral quandary locates moments of refuge in the work.
Nancy graduated with a BFA in Pictorial Studies at San Jose State University in 2020. The artist received her first solo at Swim Gallery this past year, and recent group exhibitions include Bibeau Krueger and Pt. 2 Gallery.
September - November 2023
tamara suarez porras (they/she) is an artist, writer, and educator from (south) Brooklyn, NY, and based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
tamara’s work examines experiences of knowing, remembering, and forgetting, working across photography, writing, installation, filmmaking, and performance. tamara has exhibited nationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, School at the International Center of Photography, En Foco Touring Gallery, and Deitch Projects in New York City, as well as fusedspace, Root Division, The Growlery, and Embark Gallery in San Francisco, CA. tamara’s writing has been published on The Brooklyn Rail, Art Practical, and 48hills.
tamara is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Photography+Imaging and Journalism and of California College of the Arts with a dual MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies. tamara is a Lecturer in the Art Practice department at Stanford University, and has also taught at the University of San Francisco, California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State University, and the International Center of Photography. tamara is a member of Black Hole Collective Film Lab and the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure.
June - August 2023
Bec Imrich is an artist, writer, and educator born in Cambridge and working in San Francisco. Her interdisciplinary practice is grounded in drawing and photography. She holds an MFA in studio practice and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies, both from California College of the Arts.
Statement
My grandmother used to set provisional booby traps in an attempt to track who entered her space, but would inadvertently set them off herself, further fueling the anxiety and paranoia that caused her to create them in the first place. I’m interested in mining the liminal space where elements of vaguely ominous domestic environments and paranoid interior worlds intersect with the shared pressures of internalized capitalism, alienation, and (environ)mental precarity. Taking the allegory of a futile booby trap as the starting point for my practice, I make sincere yet unavailing protection devices that often collapse, confuse, and conflate the 2d-image space into sculptural armatures and supports— these flattened sculptures and sculptural images are symptom of this vacillation between internal perseveration and external stimuli, tracing the “ending fatigue” that accompanies muddling through the protracted, drawn-out end of the world.
March - May 2023
Ava Morton (she/her) is an artist, writer, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ava’s writing and artistic practices are entwined and often focus on archives, linguistics, sound, and the boundaries of the body. Her artistic practice is interdisciplinary, stemming from archival research and often manifests as sculpture, installation, and video. In her most recent sound and installation-based work, she teases out the friction between collective and personal memory; she is currently fashioning sound collages spliced together from found audio, her recordings taken in transit, and recordings from family archives. She has exhibited in various art spaces including, Minnesota Street Project, Embark Gallery, Root Division, Pitzer College Art Gallery, Canyon Cinema Salon, PLAySPACE Gallery, and Hubble Street Gallery. Her writing has been published in Sightlines and 48hills.
Ava is a graduate of UC Santa Barbara with a BFA in Studio Art and Biological Anthropology and of California College of the Arts with a dual MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies.