Artists Archive
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Edna Vazquez | Photo credit Tania Gómez-Daza
Edna Vázquez is a fearless artist and songwriter whose powerful voice and musical talent transcend the boundaries of language with songs deeply rooted in universal human emotion. She has traveled far and wide spreading her message of light, love and cultural healing.
Learn moreErika Vogt (b.1973, East Newark, New Jersey) is a Los Angeles based artist represented by Overduin and Kite in Los Angeles and Simone Subal Gallery in New York City. She received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from New York University. Solo exhibitions include: The Engraved Plane, Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2012); Geometric Persecution, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles (2010); Room Gallery, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA (2010); and Daniel Hug, Los Angeles, CA (2008). Selected screening and group exhibitions include: Affective Turns at Pepin Moore, Los Angeles (2012) and Made in L.A. at The Hammer, Los Angeles (2012), Foam, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2011); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2011); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2010); Whitney Biennial, New York, NY (2010) and Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY (2009).
Learn moreJose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and Tony-nominated producer. A leading voice for the human rights of immigrants, he founded the non-profit media advocacy organization Define American, named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. His best-selling memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, was published by HarperCollins in 2018. Most recently, he co-produced Heidi Schreck’s acclaimed Broadway play What the Constitution Means to Me, which was nominated for a Tony Award for “Best Play” and is streamable on Amazon Prime Video. In 2020, Fortune named him one of its “40 under 40” most influential people in government and politics.
In 2011, the New York Times Magazine published a groundbreaking essay he wrote in which he revealed and chronicled his life in America as an undocumented immigrant. A year later, he appeared on the cover of TIME worldwide with fellow undocumented immigrants as part of a follow-up cover story he wrote. He then produced and directed Documented, an autobiographical documentary feature film that aired on CNN and received a 2015 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Documentary. Also in 2015, MTV aired White People, an Emmy-nominated television special he produced and directed on what it means to be young and white in a demographically-changing America.
Among accolades he has received are the Freedom to Write Award from PEN Center USA and honorary degrees from Emerson College, Colby College, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Passionate about the role of arts in society and promoting equity in education, he serves on the advisory board of TheDream.US, a scholarship fund for undocumented immigrant students.
A product of the San Francisco Bay Area, he is a proud graduate of San Francisco State University (’04), where he was named Alumnus of the Year in 2012, and Mountain View High School (’00). An elementary school named after Vargas opened in his hometown of Mountain View, California in August 2019.
Learn moreWith the publication of her debut book, The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio became the first undocumented finalist for a National Book Award. Her book was also named by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2020 and was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Time, NPR, The New York Public Library, Book Riot, Vulture, and the Library Journal. Karla has written about immigration, music, beauty, and mental illness for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Glamour, Elle, Vogue, n+1, and The New Inquiry, among others. She lives in New Haven with her partner and their dog. She is a graduate of Harvard University and a doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at Yale.
Learn moreMona Vatamanu (Romania) and Florin Tudor (Switzerland) live in Bucharest, Romania, where they have been working together since 2000. Their practice spans film, photography, painting, performance, and installation, and reflects the social upheavals of post-communist Eastern Europe. The duo has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America, and has been featured in the 2008 Berlin Biennial and in the Romanian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Vatamanu and Tudor have had residencies at Basis Voor Actuele Kunst in Utrecht, AIR Vienna, and Project Room at Ludwig Museum in Budapest, among others. They received first prize in the 2006 Fair:Play Video Festival in Berlin. Vatamanu and Tudor are represented by Lombard Fried Projects, New York.
Peripheries
Moscow's Poplar Curse, New York Magazine, April 17, 2011.
Learn moreIn her practice, Patricia Vázquez Gómez (she/her) investigates the social functions of art, the intersections between aesthetics, ethics, and politics, and the expansion of community-based art practices. She uses a variety of media to carry out her research: painting, printmaking, video, exhibitions, music, and socially-engaged art projects. The purpose and methodologies of her work are deeply informed by her experiences working in immigrant rights and other social justice movements. Her work has been shown at the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Reece Museum, Johnson City, TN; Cascade Paragon Arts Gallery, Portland, OR; Art League Houston, Houston, TX; and Linfield Art Gallery, McMinnville, OR, and also in apartment buildings, neighborhoods, community-based organizations, and schools. She has received support from the Ford Foundation, Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Oregon Community Foundation, Oregon Metro, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Patricia teaches at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Portland State University. Her work can be explored at patriciavazquez.art.
Patricia is a 2022/3 Golden Spot Residency awardee.
Learn moreLonnie van Brummelen (Born 1969, Soest, NL) and Siebren de Haan (Born 1966, Dordecht, NL) are an Amsterdam-based collaborative. Van Brummelen and de Haan have been working together since 2002, creating films and installations that question the boundaries of the public realm. Their documentarian methods often look closely at the geopolitics of Europe, using 16mm and 35mm film and text. Presentations of their work have been included in international exhibitions at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2011), Project Arts Center, Dublin (2009), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2009), and MoMA New York (2008), and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007).
Learn moreVideotones is a neurodiverse digital media collective that employs homegrown, collaborative editing practices, exploits the hidden potential for accessibility in cheap consumer technologies, and adheres to a vision of filmmaking that privileges improvisational experimentation and nonlinear play over predetermined outcomes to make their idiosyncratic brand of music and video art. Since its inception in 2018, the project has yielded three full-length albums of experimental music as well as countless short video works. In the Videotones universe, authorship is dispersed—each project born out of a process of equal participation and nonhierarchical decision making, resulting in work that is discordant, polyvocal, awkward, hilarious, mysterious, fragmented, joyful, and deeply affecting.
Since 2020, Videotones has been sustained under the auspices of Elbow Room, a 501(c)(3) community art studio and gallery space dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Elbow Room provides art materials and mentorship in painting, drawing, creative writing, sewing, digital media, music, hand tool woodworking, ceramics, and many other forms of artmaking.
Joel Stotesbery is a multidisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR. Over the past decade, he has explored a process of making abstract video diaries he calls Videotones. This process eventually merged with his role as a caregiver in Portland’s intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) community, and was incorporated into an ongoing collaboration with a group of neurodivergent artists. Today, Videotones is a loose collective of artists working out of Elbow Room, a nonprofit art studio and gallery space Joel helped found in 2020 that is dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. They meet online and in-person to create hybrid works encompassing abstract video collage, narrative shorts, animation, electronic music, and sound design.
Andy Louie is a multimedia artist from Portland, OR. He uses digital drawing software and traditional drawing materials to capture what he sees in the world. Recurring subjects include people, animals, and environments. His videos, animations, and digital art have been exhibited at Gallery 114, Portland; Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College, Portland; 1122, Portland; and the Hollywood Theatre at Portland International Airport, Oregon. He has been a central collaborator in Videotones since its inception in 2018.
Endale Abraham's off-kilter, often surreal drawings are distinguished by their soft touch, attention to detail, sinuous line work, and hybrid subjects. He has been honing his rendering skills for many years, and has developed a talent for capturing wonky and humorous likenesses, which he often endows with farcical or mocking handwritten names. Boldly taking on new subject matter with focused goofiness and versatility, Endale captures perspective space, charming details, and striking contours with his signature linework and style. In his work with the Videotones collective, Endale’s curiosity and quietly absurdist humor are able to shine. His meandering curiosity and quietly absurdist humor have become vital ingredients of Videotone’s leftfield digital stew.
Mohamed Omar was born in Somalia and moved to Portland, OR when he was five years old. By his own account, his work is rooted in a deep concern for color:
“I get inspired by the colors of the sky, bright sunsets, primary colors, bold colors. I really wanted to use certain greens, so I painted the Statue of Liberty. I think of colors and different shapes, sometimes words. When I’m out in the community, I feel OK and special and I see different things like cars, trucks, and bricks. When I see paintings like yellow, black, red, and blue, and red cars, I choose those colors. Or the sunset. And I like different colors.”
While his early paintings exhibit a meditative simplicity, over time he has been drawn increasingly towards figurative gestures and has developed a playful, expressive style all his own. In his loosely rendered scenes, quilt-like images of cartoon characters and jungle cats are cobbled together from discrete blocks of color. He augments his patchwork scenery with words whose rainbow lettering resembles train car graffiti and refrigerator magnets in equal measure. Like the bright sunsets he reveres, his works invite you to bask in their warmth. In addition to his work as a visual artist, Mo is a member of the audiovisual collective Videotones and records music under the name M. Omar. His debut album Mo’s World was released on cassette via Cityland Tapes in 2023.
Chanel Conklin has a deep interest in pop culture and current events that she merges with images from her personal life, altering and distorting them through the use of digital collage, sculpture, and video. In her work, figures from current events, horror movies, pop music, the New Testament, and her own life are recast in an epic and surreal struggle between the forces of good and evil. In 2023, she published Love Chanel, a full color art book showcasing her prolific collage practice. Chanel is a longstanding collaborator in Videotones, where her horror-inflected provocations add a lurid edge to every project she works on.
Jamond Williams brings his works on canvas and paper to life with fluid lines and breathtaking color palettes. Portals, faces, and ghostlike creatures that collide, layer, and intersect are recurring images in his work. Dots, grids, and squiggles create visual staccatos that bounce along his landscapes and bring an astoundingly bright rhythm to his scenes. He regularly uses familiar line patterns and repetition to achieve his effects, but just when you think you have become acquainted with his aesthetic, he mystifies you with a new and brilliant cacophony of vibrant color, composition, and character. Jamond is often compelled to draw windows, covering entire canvases with layers of portals, each providing a fractured glimpse into one of his surreal and magical worlds. In addition to his 2D work, Jamond has made forays into video, performance, sound design, and music as a member of the Videotones collective. His first album, Flat on the Sides, was released on cassette by Cityland Tapes in 2023. Learn moreVishal Jugdeo (b. 1979, Regina, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist. His work across video, installation, performance, sculpture, and text experiments with narrative, blurring fiction and truth. His artworks emerge from what he considers archive oceans, amassments of intimately-gathered video and sound, often captured with interlocutors he meets during his research in places like Guyana and India, sites of his familial lineage, and Los Angeles, where he lives.
Jugdeo's recent experiments with collaborators working with game-engine software (Miljohn Ruperto, chris velez, and cielo saucedo) utilize the technology to imagine an otherwise, in a moment of escalating crisis. Jugdeo is Assistant Professor of New Genres in the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. Find more information here.
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