Nocturnes flyer design by Crystal Dawana. Image by Ocean Escalanti.
Nocturnes
July 14 - September 1, 2024
Opening Sunday July 14, 2-5pm
Nocturnes features work by:
Nocturnes presents Personal Space's sixth exhibition and marks the gallery's one year anniversary. The dreamy, languid, moody atmosphere imparted by the show's title, conjures those hazy, magical hours between dusk and dawn, dark and light -- a time so slippery it could perhaps only be captured by art. The eight artists gathered here -- hailing from Atlanta, London, Los Angeles, New York, Mexico City, and the Bay Area -- share interests in this liminal realm. Traversing textile, painting, and sculpture, their works rest somewhere between past, present, and future by offering spaces of refuge, pondering ecology, and considering acts of care, while honoring ancestral histories and beliefs. Bodies and bodies of water feature prominently, shape-shifting and embracing their interdependence with nature and the alchemical aspects of materiality. Seemingly eerie, witchy, and sometimes unsettling, the works give way to hope, transformation, and the start of something new -- each their own note in this overarching score.
The opening includes live music by Agnes Martian, refreshments by Village, art cake by Lisa Nuñez-Hancock, and savory treats by Leah Tumerman.
Aida Lizalde with their ceramic sculptures. Also visible, a painting by Alicia Reyes McNamara.
Left to right: Personal Space director Lisa Crallé with artists Ocean Escalanti, yétúndé olagbaju, and Nancy Nguyen.
Artist Sylvia Fragoso with her ceramic sculptures
ARTIST BIOS
Ocean Escalanti is an indigenous visual artist and writer currently residing in Oakland, CA. She is a natural dye enthusiast providing workshops on urban foraging and dyeing techniques. She has presented at the San Francisco Public Library, Contemporary Jewish Museum, and BAMPFA. Ocean is also print monitor at Max's Garage Press in Berkeley and vends her self published works at zinefests and art book fairs across the US. She works as a facilitator at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, CA, a progressive Art Studio serving artists with developmental disabilities. Her work involves themes of the human/nature symbiosis and the magic within the urban experience.
Sylvia Fragoso started making art in her early twenties after joining NIAD Art Center. Over the past thirty years she has produced hundreds of ceramic sculptures, prints, drawings and fiber works. Making art is deeply tied to family, community and gift giving for Fragoso. Most of her work is made in dedication to a family member, a NIAD studio facilitator or rooted in her Catholic faith. Her sisters, nieces, nephews, churches and angels are the consistent subjects for her works. Her ceramic sculptures are often homages to domestic and spiritual spaces; she frequently renders her grandmother’s past home in Mexico or churches visited in her lifetime. Sylvia Fragoso has exhibited globally at numerous galleries and art fairs, and her work resides in many private collections.
Rachel Frank lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She is the recipient of grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, and Franklin Furnace Archive. Her performance pieces have been shown at HERE, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Select Fair, and The Bushwick Starr in NYC, The Marran Theater at Lesley University, Franconia Sculpture Park (MN), and at The Watermill Center in collaboration with Robert Wilson. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include MOCA Tucson (AZ), the SPRING/BREAK Art Show (NYC), Thomas Hunter Projects at Hunter College (NYC), Standard Space (Sharon, CT), and Geary Contemporary (NYC). She works as a licensed wildlife rehabilitator at the Wild Bird Fund in Manhattan.
Aida Lizalde is a multi-media artist based in Mexico City, originally from Aguascalientes, Mexico. They immigrated to the Central Valley of California with their family at fifteen. Lizalde obtained a Bachelor's degree in Studio Art with a minor in Art History from the University of California, Davis, and earned an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, completing their studies in 2023. Throughout their career, Lizalde has received many awards and fellowships, including the Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowships in Painting and Sculpture, the 2023 Miami University Young Sculptors Competition's William and Dorothy Yeck Award, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, the Young Space Grant, the Hopkins Endowment for Studio Art Students, the Crocker Kingsley Art Award, and the Herb Alpert Scholarship for Emerging Young Artists. They have also been a resident artist at Archie Bray, MASS MoCA, AZ West, the Vermont Studio Center, and Casa Lu. Lizalde's work has been exhibited at several galleries and museums, including Alfred University, The Dairy Center in Denver, Axis Gallery in Sacramento, Galeria 54 in Mexico City, The School of Visual Arts Curatorial Project Space in New York, the Sierra Nevada University Gallery in Tahoe, Holland Project Gallery in Reno, CCA Hubbell Street Galleries, Southern Exposure, and SOMArts in San Francisco, Chandra Cerrito Contemporary in Oakland, the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles, and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato among others.
Alicia Reyes McNamara is originally from Chicago and currently lives and works in London, England. Reyes McNamara creates works which draw upon both Mexican and Irish (their parent's cultural heritages) mythology and folklore in order to make work that speaks of navigating gendered and cultural identities and questions how to negotiate the idea of cultural authenticity. Their work was recently included in Christie's “Women to Watch” (2023) and earlier at Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition in the Liverpool Biennial and at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Reyes McNamara recently had solo shows at Five Car Garage, Los Angeles and Niru Ratman in London. Their work has been presented at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Lismore Castle, Lismore; and participated at the Skowhegan School of Painting Residency, Maine. Other residencies and awards include: South London Gallery Graduate Residency 2016-17; Kiosko Gallery in Bolivia through Gasworks and Triangle Network, Bemis Center For Contemporary Arts, Jerwood Bursary, and the Chisenhale Studio Summer Residency.
Nancy Nguyen is a painter from San Jose, California. She received her BFA from San Jose State University in Pictorial Art. Her practice is informed through personal relationships with land, water, and belonging. Through oil paint, 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. She draws from a place of tension, holding onto a process, an awareness of land, innate behaviors, and a place for the unfolding. The interdependence of material and ancestral quandary locates moments of refuge in the work.
yétúndé olágbajú (b. 1990) is a research-based artist, producer, and residency director living on Ohlone and Tongva lands (Bay Area & Los Angeles, CA). Their work roots in a single question: What must we reckon with as we build a future, together? With no set answers or expectations, olagbaju unravels intricate connections as a means of highlighting our interdependence. They are interested in how our familial, platonic, romantic, and ecological bonds are affected by what we confront in the reckoning. Inspired by the divine and the everyday within Blackness, they use the moving-image, the sculptural, and the collaborative in order to explore possible futures. Through their social practice they have co-founded and are a member of numerous artist and worker-led collectives, each with liberatory missions and values. An advocate for non-hierarchical working structures, they embrace shared leadership models that challenge white supremacy, by actively rejecting disposability and power hoarding — two of its guiding tenets. They hold an MFA from Mills College and are the recipient of multiple awards including a YBCA 100 award and a Headlands Center for the Arts fellowship. They were a recent award finalist with ART X Prize, organized by ART X Lagos and was a resident at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts [Deer Isle, ME] and Center for Afrofuturist Studies [Iowa City, IA]. They began a commission and year-long residency at 500 Capp Street in winter 2023.
Zipporah Camille Thompson (she.her.hers) is a weaver and sculptor based in Atlanta, Georgia- indigenous land of the Muskogee. Thompson explores alchemical transformations through clay + woven textiles. Chaos, metamorphosis, and triumph are examined through ancestral narratives patchworked with black/brown liberatory and imagined geographies. Materialized into altars, sculpted shapeshifters, and hybrid landscapes, Thompson’s work investigates hope, myth, magic, and reconstructed power through limitless spirituality. She received her MFA from the University of Georgia and her BFA from the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and shown in spaces, nationally and internationally. Zipporah Camille Thompson is a 2024 South Arts Georgia Fellow for Visual Arts, a 2023 recipient of the Margie E. West Prize, a 2021 MOCA GA Working Artist Project Fellow, a 2020 Artadia Atlanta Awardee, a Watershed Zenobia Scholarship Award grantee, an NCECA Multicultural Fellow, and an Idea Capital Travel Grant recipient. Thompson is represented by Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, GA. She is a history addict, roller-skater, and lover of unicorns, zombies, the moon, tarot and all things fantasy.