Staking Claim

Join Craftswoman House on Saturday May 9^th, 5-10pm for Staking Claim an exhibition and video screening at 50 Bucks Gallery in Pomona. Staking Claim is a show of all women artists staged around ideas of agency, generation and the occupation of female spaces. Inspired by homesteading foremothers of the west, Staking Claim features site-specific installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, performance, and video.

Works by: Shiva Aliabadi, Sydney Croskery, Future Force Geo Speculators, Jacqueline Bell Johnson, Lorraine Heitzman, Audra Graziano, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, Conchi Sanford, Erica Ryan Stallones, and Amanda Sutton.

Videos by: Min Choi-kyung, Akina Cox, Clare Kelly, Mayte Escobar, McLean Fahnestock, Lilly McElroy, Christina Pettersson, Isabelle Lutterodt, Yoshie Sakai, Molly Shea, and Jennifer Stefanisko.

This one night only exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Pomona Art Walk.

Shiva Aliabadi

Shiva Aliabadi’s work has most recently shown at the Torrance Art Museum in “Another Thing Coming,” the Yokohama Triennial in Tokyo, Japan, and “Tip the Wink” at the Institute of Jamais Vu in London, England.  Her work is included in New American Paintings, #115 Pacific Coast Issue, New American Paintings, #117 MFA Annual, and Christopher Knight’s article in the L.A Times, “Object Lessons at Torrance Art Museum’s ‘Another Thing Coming’.”  She is a graduate of Otis College of Art and Design’s MFA Fine Arts Program. 

Sydney Croskery, I Was Going to Do That, drawing

Sydney Croskery is a third generation Los Angelean, who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work is generally about society, over-stimulation, and consumption. Whether it be highlighting the over-stimulation or attempting to make it quiet, Croskery makes object driven work in digital or digitally printed mediums as well as handmade or drawn works to highlight and cope with societal noise of contemporary life.

She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has participated in group shows at Raid Projects, LACE, Angles Gallery, 18th Street Center, Antena gallery in Chicago, has done performances at the Getty Museum, the Deitch Art Parade in NY, the Jack Tilton Gallery, and was included in a show on performance at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Future Force Geo Speculators

Future Force Geo Speculators is a collaborative group founded by artists Carole Frances Lung, Ellen Rothenberg and Christine Tarkowski. Their impulse to form this collective stems from their common interest in the use of "textile" as a creative and social medium. Though each artist intersects with the material within their creative production, each capitalizes upon unique aspects of "textile" as cultural or historic carrier. Their themes of collective or individual exploration include: histories of textile and garment manufacturing from cottage industry to global production; craft/art/design dialog; social and 

gendered histories of labor; and textiles as surface, sculpture and architecture. The mission of FFGS is to function as an artist collaboration, which through research and production furthers the collective knowledge and output within this field.

FFGS's creative practice engages in a pluralistic production research format. We value the physical process of hand and studio based making as well as project driven research to generate ideas and artistic solutions. Our terrain of output is variable in that we do not prioritize one form of making over another. Forms of output include architecturally scaled works, public proposals, propositional models and drawings, texts, performances, social actions, publications, and installations. We are interested in exploring the studios' relationship to historical production, the interweaving of American craft and manufacturing traditions, utopic communities, notions of Sci-Fi Feminism, and the monumental relative to the inconsequential. 

Jacqueline Bell Johnson, Sunrise on Copper Grass, site specific installation

Jacqueline Bell Johnson is an artist living and working in the Los Angeles Area. After earning her MFA in Visual Art from Claremont Graduate University, she proceeded to organize, curate, and exhibit in a string of pop-up shows often under the group LGT!. Most notably, exhibiting an installation at Human Resources LA in 2014, and a recent series of exhibitions, panels, and lectures in Tokyo and Ashikaga, Japan.

Her own work consists mostly of installation and sculpture, and the occasional collaboration. Jackie’s work explores the intersection of organic and architectural structures, by utilizing repetition of form and craft processes, with an undercurrent of feminism and the feminine experience. http://JacquelineBellJohnson.com

Lorraine Heitzman, Woodsies Gone Wild 2, Assemblage

Born in New York, Lorraine Heitzman attended Goddard College and the Art Students League before earning a BFA from the University of the Arts and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During the following years in Chicago, Heitzman was represented by the Nancy Lurie Gallery and was included in shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Chicago Cultural Center, Navy Pier and Randolph Street Gallery. In Los Angeles, she designed furniture, interiors and jewelry and sometimes found herself in the art directing/art department end of the ubiquitous movie and television industry. She also taught in many afterschool art programs. In 2008, Heitzman returned to the studio, where she began work that combined her past experiences encompassing decorative and functional art with her love for collage and assemblage. 

In 2014, CurveLineSpace presented a solo show of her work featuring her assemblages and on May 23, she will be exhibiting her architectural collages at Winslow Garage in Silverlake. Since August 2014, Lorraine has been a guest blogger for ArtCricketLA and posts monthly about issues related to being an artist in Los Angeles.

Audra Graziano, Macro Bend, 38x38", oil on canvas, 2015

Audra Graziano was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2003, graduating with the Pratt Institute Fine Art Award for Outstanding Merit in Painting, and the Pratt Circle Award for Academic Achievement. She received her MFA from California State University Long Beach, where she was the recipient of the Windes and McClaughry Corporate Gallery Award, the Elizabeth Vyse Scholarship, and graduated with the College of the Arts Distinguished Achievement in Creative Activity Award in 2014. She has exhibited her work in group and two person exhibitions in various locations, including New York City, Los Angeles, and Berlin. She currently works and lives in Los Angeles, California, where she is adjunct faculty at Cerritos College, and California State University Long Beach.

Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, This is Not a Garden, Variable size, Newspaper Yarn, 2014

Snezana Saraswati Petrovic is a 2D, 3D and 4D artist, independent curator, gallery director, academic and an award-winning set/costume designer. She exhibited her work in venues such as Los Angeles MOCA and Stedijilk Museum, Amsterdam. She is recipient of numerous awards both in USA and Europe, such as “Golden Arena” for Production Design in feature movie “Harms Case” or “Ovation” for the costumed design in Large Theatre category. Snezana is a recipient of the UC Regents Grant and National Endowment for the Arts for the collaborative project “Song And Dances of Imaginary Lands” She holds a MFA from University of California, Irvine and a BFA from Belgrade University, Serbia. She is a resident artist at the Beacon Arts Building in Inglewood, CA.

Conchi Sanford

A Third Culture Kid is a child who is born into a culture and lives for an extended period, at least five years, in a second culture. The blending of the two cultures by the child results in the third culture. As a bilingual Air Force brat, Conchi Sanford is a classic 3CK. By the time she was seven she had lived in three foreign countries, travelled to five countries and more than 25% of the Continental United States.

Conchi is a sculptor and painter living and working in the Los Angeles Area. Currently Conchi holds a Master in Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate University. In 2010, she returned to school, after a ten-year tug-of-war between corporate America and her need for artistic expression.

Conchi is currently on the board of directors at the dA Center for the Arts Pomona. Recent group exhibitions include Finders Keepers, ArtShare LA; FRESH 2014, Juried by Matt Gleason, South Bay Contemporary; ArtShare LA Pop Up Gallery Juried Show; MAS ATTACK 6 @ Torrance Art Museum; All You Can Eat, Bunny Gunner Gallery; LAnCV, Coachella Valley Arts Center. In addition Conchi has curated several shows including University of La Vern Law School Ontario, Breaking Illusions, Scientist as Artists; Strange Comfort, dA Center for the Arts; What I have to Offer, Fullerton, CA. She is looking forward to a solo show in the summer at Long Beach Public Library.

Erica Ryan Stallones, Moon Robes, Performance documentation, 2015

Erica Ryan Stallones lives, works, and teaches art in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2011. Primarily a painter, Ryan Stallones has exhibited her work throughout the greater Los Angeles area and nationally. Her performances and video installations, which allow for collaboration and interpretation on the part of both the performers and the audience, have shown at numerous artist-run and alternative art spaces; including Eastside International, Highland House, and ArtShare LA. Ryan Stallones’ work has been featured in various print and online publications, including The Huffington Post ImageBlog, Dublab, Lost at E Minor, and The Claremont Graduate University Student Art Journal.

Amanda Sutton, Invasive Nature, installed at HomeLA San Marino, 2015

Amanda Sutton is a dancer, sculptor and performance artist, often exploring the intersection between the three. The objects and experiences she creates live somewhere on the edge of reality and the uncanny, and are informed by her investigations of impermanence and time.