Fibre artist and textile designer Ealish Wilson creates bespoke sculptural textiles that showcases materiality and craft. Her architectural and whimsical constructions are inspired by travel, fashion, photography, and traditional sewing techniques. Each piece contrasts the old with the new, building layers of constructed and deconstructed elements.

The art of making is at the heart of every step of the work. Making is not just an end point, but the very first step in the creation of each piece. Early samples, images, and textures are worked and reworked throughout the process. Materials are often converted to digital form, manipulated, then returned to textile to be meticulously finished by hand. 

Drawing on aesthetic traditions from Japan and the arts and crafts movement, Ealish’s personal touch is evident in all she produces. Whether the piece features many hours of smocking work or patterns carefully manipulated to trick the eye and create depth, the result of this meditative process is a work of timeless beauty and intricate simplicity.

Bronwyn Dexter is Bay Area visual artist and per-forming musician. When she’s not blowing up the stage with her Cowboy Glam Rock band, Raven Marcus, she can be found covered in ink in the printmaking lab. A Seattle native, Bronwyn moved to San Francisco in 2009 and has been building communities in queer culture, art practice and musical awareness ever since.

Charming Voltage Electrophotographic Works By Kerry Laitala:

This body of work resides at the direct intersection between science and superstition, belief and manifestation. The materials range from vintage letter-press blocks to Mexican “Milagros” that are often left at churches and other places of worship. These objects, in the shape of hearts, legs, and kneeling forms, become talismans that help people with ailments, and desires that need to be met. A milagro representing an ailing heart might be left at a shrine to mend an aching heart. The work also takes into consideration Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I am interested in the way that “Objecthood”, and the aura of “Objecthood” has a market-place significance as opposed to time-based works that I have made over the past 25 years that have at their core an exploration of ephemeral experience. Similar to past works I have made with moving image, these photographs explore the projection of meaning onto inanimate objects. I am interested in the ways that the phenomenology of the process imprints a shimmery image made without a camera. The film is exposed by the build-up of ions that create a corona discharge on the surface of conductive objects. I take 4x5” format film, and using a generator of electricity, charge the atmosphere around these objects with ions that cause the film to be exposed.

I have made photograms, or as I call them Cinegrams making images directly onto photo sensitive film in the past using a flashlight to expose the film. The shadowgraphic trace of objects are left on the emulsion of the film. For this body of work the light that is generated comes directly from electricity and it is the corona discharge that creates the photographic impression.

I studied film and photography at Massachusetts College of Art and obtained my masters degree at SFAI in 1997. My website is: www.kerrylaitala.net

My current collection of artworks, entitled What I Bring, is as much an exploration of home as it is a product of the nomadic lifestyle I lead. I am a professional live in your house and care for your pet, boat or emu sitter and over the past two years my boyfriend and I have moved on average once a month to befriend twenty-seven animals. Sometimes we only move a block, other times we cross the Bay Bridge. In November we moved ten times and each time I carefully reevaluated what I had brought with me. Was the blender essential? 

As a frequent traveler one of my most cherished possessions has always been luggage, not for the style or the label but for what it can hold. Each unpacked article feels much like a discovery, a rebirth of an item, a new possibility. As a transient artist mobility is a regular consideration in both the form and scale of my works and I enjoy playing with the idea of unexpected containers or vehicles for my work. 

I have often been accused of wandering and now it seems it is a prerequisite for my lifestyle. With this heightened awareness of the certainty of change, of fluctuating physical spaces, I am constantly being challenged to reevaluate how I define home and what I must carry with me. 

I find myself opting to carry metal roller skates and a stack of my mother’s handmade soaps in lieu of ample clothing. I do not skate but I have never seen orange wheels quite like these and the soap’s scent reminds me of another home. In most houses I sleep on the bedside farthest from the door, I conceal the bedroom mirrors with a sheet to discourage nightmares and search for the spot where I will create my assemblages. I introduce myself to the current residents, the cats and dogs who are the only witnesses of our presence in the home. I am a house sitter but at the root of it I am an artist trying to make art and find a home within myself.

Renee McKenna, MA, lives and works in the Sunset District of San Francisco with her husband, 2 children and their dog.  Renee divides her time between her private hypnotherapy practice, teaching art to children, working with Art in Every Classroom, Inc, the non-profit that she helped found and doing her own artwork nights and weekends.

Renee's love of the sky, the sea and the city of San Francisco is reflected in her work. She has worked in acrylic for many years, and recently began experimenting with alcohol ink. 

 Though Renee is an accomplished painter and sculptor, her first love is public art.  Renee has many painted murals and mosaics in the Sunset District, including the 400 square foot tile mosaic at the South Sunset Playground  title "Nature Stream.". 

The themes of my paintings are memory, quiet places, impermanence, movement, energy, despair and hope. My influences are Buddhism, Minimalism, Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Calder, Richard Diebenkorn, Agnes Martin, and Paul Klee.

Painting is my meditation. It keeps me grounded in the present moment where reality is happening. My paintings do not reflect reality. They often depict imaginary places or memories I've conjured up while brushing, scrubbing, scrapping, dripping, or dropping paint on surfaces receptive to my inner world. I am searching for a way out of the darkness and for a place to belong, a place to call home. Meanwhile, I create quiet places to rest on my journey home.

I make art that promotes social justice. Some of the work especilally the stickers and banners deal with current social issues, while some of my work focuses on the Mexican Revolution, particularly, Emiliano Zapata and unknown soldados/soldaderas of the revolution.  3 years ago I created a genre called "PoliPop".  Since then, The PoliPop Guild has put up street art and murals in over 30 states, 3 countries, and major cities threw out the U.S. including S.F., L.A., San Diego, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., New York, and beyond.