Colleen Mullins' work, for the last several years, has focused on an area of Sonoma County in which her family camped in their VW van in the 1970's, based both on personal exploration and an archive of her father’s work dating back to the 1940’s. In addition, she has work of great breadth, from flamboyant high-end luxury cruise ship revelers to the urban forest of New Orleans, as well as work in the book arts.

A 3rd generation San Franciscan, Mullins recently relocated to her hometown from a 22 year stint in Minnesota, where she taught college level photography and book arts until last year. She was the 2013 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board (her fourth), a two-time recipient of the McKnight Artist Fellowship (1998 and 2011), and a recipient of the Women's Studio Workshop Production Grant, with which she produced a limited edition artist book, Opening Day. Opening Day recounts her father's crossing of the Golden Gate Bridge on Opening Day, crossing together on the 50th Anniversary, and the crossed wires that occurred when her father succumbed to senile dementia.  Her work is in several national museum collections including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Southeast Museum of Photography.

My work explores creating visual and psychological tension by imposing an abstract motif on to the implied objectivity of a photograph. Or vice versa, depending on how one approaches it. One of my goals is to engage the viewer as a participant in the board game I create in the process, to linger more before proceeding to the next image. 

The photographic subject matter (thus far) consists of the face and body, since these are stimuli that appeal to us on a primal level, to that somewhat scary 'lizard brain'. We seem to have an insatiable appetite for these subjects, given their prevalence in the media. To alter their integrity in the manner I do can elicit a negative reaction for withholding what both nature and nurture make us desire, or else a reflective one by interrupting one's quotidian sensory experience. 

I'm a self-taught photographer armed with a Nikon and case of curiosity. Through my photos, I try to capture life's "tiny treasures" by infusing everyday objects and street scenes with a sense of magic and beauty. Using color and composition, I create endless possibilities out of things often overlooked in our daily lives.

I believe in continuous observation, experimentation and change.  Change is an integral part of nature.  The only way to have change and possibly progression is to experiment and even let accidents and mistakes happen.  From every accident and even mistake there is something to be learned and from each learning experience new elements and forms emerge which can bring about progression. 

Many, many years ago I was a wee, little girl from Kingston, Jamaica migrating to New York City and soon after to New Rochelle, NY. Even then, dreams of artistry danced in my head. When I was a girl, my artisanry came through in the clothes, tools, and structures I had to make for my dolls and action figures.

Throughout my 12+ years as an urban planner, I continued to add painting, sketching and metalwork to the repertoire. This collection, Urban Jewels, showcases jewelry inspired images of my travels through various cities.

Mark Pinto is a retired Marine helicopter pilot, retired Buddhist priest, and a social artist. He creates political, anti-war work, as well as abstract, landscape and wildlife photography. He is teaching digital photography at San Jose State University. 

I have enjoyed being a professional graphic designer in San Francisco for over 20 years. A couple of years ago I received my certification as a Traditional Chinese Medicine-based Feng Shui Practitioner. My practice helps individuals and businesses with health, wealth and relationship issues. I have always been very spiritual and have recently aligned my faith and principles with my everyday life. My "life's work" is sending a message that life can be great for anyone because we all deserve it and are all equal. This I convey with more clarity and simplicity as days go by, and is apparent in my design, feng shui and art work.

 My new "Sun On Earth" series consists of wood stain paintings on wood boxes. The process includes many layers of stain to produce the effect of dimension. The entire surfice is flat. Many think it looks carved or weaved. The title of the series comes from the idea that the sun is everywhere, shining it's rays on earth. This inevitable act of nature can't be changed or stopped.  It just is.  We are connected to this as we are to everything that exists. We are one. We are not separate. Look deep into these images and find your place of peace.

“I delight in the unforeseen, the happenstance, the incongruities of things!”
—The Impoverished Landscape Painter Reflects on Art, by Carla Sweet Chlouber

The fragility of life and its ever-changing nature, both beautiful and tragic, sometimes ugly, compel me as to explore what gives us meaning and hope.  Over the last ten years, my work has considered our relationship to other animals and the earth, exploring ideas such as communication, compassion and sustainability.

My most recent body of work is a “collaboration” backward through time, inspired by the writings and poetry of my mother, Carla Chlouber, and her father (my grandfather), Arthur Sweet. Within my mother’s papers we found a trove of her and my grandfather's unpublished poems and writings, which were hidden in old trunks and file cases—scraps of family history.  Using fabric and embroidery, along with printmaking, encaustic, acrylic and oil paint, these mixed media pieces hold for me a haunting beauty and a transformation of family, love and loss.  

Exploring their writings has made me see the past differently, not as something that ends, but as ever continuing. 

Belinda Lee Chlouber 

We use our senses to help us understand our position in space-time. Vision is our main sensory input for the world we exist in. The human brain has some built-in limits beyond which it cannot properly interpret visual information. I use this limit to express the workings of the subconscious. Also embodied in my work is a sense of scientific realism; the elements and information of a natural system can be reduced and modulated and still exhibit characteristics of that natural system and to me this is proof that information is a true and robust representation of our universe. Clean lines, simple shapes, self-similarity on varying scales, and pure, changing color are my palette; information systems and data-sets are my subject matter.

I use mathematics and engineering to formulate physical space-time distortions: displaying static images through time while squeezing and folding the images’ space into 3-dimensional layers. Using industrially prefabricated LED technology, and custom electronics and firmware, I collapse space and re-map it onto the time axis. By re-displaying information in this manner I give the viewer a glimpse into space-time as seen through my eyes. It’s an automatism whereby I fold my own perception of space-time in an effort to understand what it means to exist.