Egoless
The ‘Egoless’ project is an examination of the relationship between ego and creative expression, and an investigation of priorities in the effort to separate the two. We encouraged our renowned artists to bravely put themselves in a completely vulnerable creative position for this exciting exhibit requiring them to relinquish their self-expression to another artist that may not be so sympathetic to their vision. This palpable vulnerability felt by our artists has spurred exciting dialogue about the artistic process, the nature of creation and its ultimate purpose that we cannot wait to share with our entire community. This August Femina Potens invites you to discover a unique beauty in art when one simply lets go.
The actual process of “Egoless” is best described as a modern art round robin. The game was simple: In May 2009 we divided our fifteen participating artists into five groups of three. Each team produced three pieces. Within the teams each artist had a month to start their own creation. In June each artist handed over their piece to another member of the group to continue the artwork for that month with absolutely no restrictions. Then in July the artworks were passed yet again to another artist to finish the work. The project successfully ended after three months with 15 completely unique pieces that are a testament to the power of artistic surrender. The finished product is communal art that refuses exaltation of the individual, but rather for a community that boldly releases traces of individual ego.Artist Beth Grin poignantly expressed the project as, “somewhat nerve-racking to hand over my work unaware of the outcome. Then I reminded myself the only way to be egoless (even for a moment) is to simply “let go.”
Our entire artist list includes: Annalee Lanier, ABR, Britt Howard, Beth Grin, Emily MacDonald, Ehren Reed, Erin McElroy, Lilea Duran, Jeeti Singh, Julie Sutherland, Lydia Daniller, Stephanie Mufson, Sera Mac, Shelly Monahan, Sarah Lippincott.
Ehren Reed, Annalee Lanier, and Lydia Danlier
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| Start Ehren Reed | Middle: Annalee Lanier | End: Lydia Danlier |
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| Start: Annalee Lanier |
Middle: Lydia Danlier | End: Ehren Reed |
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| Begining: Lydia Danlier |
Middle: Ehren Reed |
End: Annalee Lanier |
Ehren Reed
Ehren Reed was born and raised outside of Chicago and graduated with a BA in International Studies from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. She has resided in San Francisco for the past nine years and she received a BFA with High Distinction in Painting & Drawing from the California College of the Arts. Ehren’s recent work relies upon books and other found materials as she blends together traditional craft, contemporary media and remnants of consumer culture to investigate contemporary culture, politics and interpersonal relationships.
Annalee Lanier
Annalee Lanier was born in San Francisco in 1975, and spent her childhood and early adult life in New York and New Jersey. After receiving a BFA from The Cooper Union in 1997, she spent a few years working for the school before moving to Los Angeles in 1999. In Los Angeles she worked in the film and television industry, making a name for herself as a photographer and graphic designer.
Lanier’s time in Los Angeles provided her with many opportunities to travel and occasional high profile exposure including exhibitions in New York City and Los Angeles. Her design work has appeared on national television, in nationwide magazines, and on billboards in New York City’s Herald Square and on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Since her return to San Francisco in 2005, Annalee has continued her work as a freelance graphic designer and photographer, working for local musicians, artists, and businesses.
She is currently working on a book of her photographs.
Annalee’s recent artwork consists primarily of abstract photography, though she is also a capable painter and illustrator, moonlighting as a portrait artist on occasion. Her photography is fairly formal, with a consistent interest in architecture, nature, and abstraction. Annalee’s goal with her photographs is to disorient the viewer with manipulation and distortion of space, depth, and scale using simple framing tricks and a keen eye for composition. Often the photographs function aesthetically as paintings, replacing the sense of space with defined compositions of color, texture, and light.
Lydia Daniller
Lydia Daniller is a photographer based in San Francisco that focuses on portraiture. She enjoys joining with artists of all sorts to create images that reflect their current artistic persona. Her portraits have appeared in numerous publications including Art Papers, S.F Bay Guardian, and S.F Weekly. Having received a degree in comparative literature from U.C Berkeley, she’s interested in the narrative elements of photography. He loves photography’s ability to hint at a story, but then, ultimately, to leave us questioning. While traveling Daniller choses to connect and create intimate experiences with her camera. She orchestrates people and spaces to create photographs that look like dreamscapes. This process ultimately changes her position as a traveling outsider to a traveling collaborator.
Shelly Monahan, Sera Mac, and Julie Sutherland
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| Start: Shelley Monahan |
Middle: Sera Mac |
End: Julie Sutherland |
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| Start: Julie Sutherland |
Middle: Shelly Monahan | End: Sera Mac |
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| Start: Sera Mac | Middle: Julie Sutherland |
End:Shelley Monahan |
Shelley Monahan
Shelley Monahan is drawn to inane moments, awkward expressions, and uncomfortable human interactions. Her work explores the ambivalent feelings that are a result of reflecting upon her suburban heritage. Shelley’s installations combine visceral subjectivity with precise and impeccably clean displays. Hers is a surrealist take on the intersection of science and more subjective human experiences like lust, gender, reproduction and death. Her objects represent both the truth and the illusion required for humans to understand the world around them. In 2006, Shelley graduated from The Academy of Art University in San Francisco, receiving a BFA degree in Sculpture after also studying illustration, ceramics, and metalwork. In addition to object making, she also explores similar themes through contemporary realist painting. In the Bay Area, Shelley has participated in numerous group shows and open studios, as well as completing a teaching residency at School of the Arts, and an internship at Root Division, both in 2008.
Sera Mac
Sera Mac is primarily a self-taught artist. She was exposed to a wide array of art forms as child, realized she had some talents, and continues to build upon those talents today. From her teen years to today Sera has shown her artwork abroad and stateside, collaborated with other artists, and organized art shows. She paints, draws, photographs, shoots videos, and makes music. She has a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and spent many of her post graduation years traveling. Sera Mac has worked for several professional artists as an assistant but is happily not a professional artist herself. Much of Sera’s art work touches on desire, awareness, and place but mostly she enjoys exploring the limitless possibilities and forms that art can become.
Julie Sutherland
Julie Sutherland in an artist living and working in San Francisco. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art and Art History from Mills College in Oakland, CA and shows her work locally. Her paintings, prints, and mixed media drawings often explore the grey area between political issues and personal experience, especially in regard to gender, violence, history and landscape. Sutherland’s current body of work deals with political history and gender issues through an often humorous (and queer) appropriation of style or imagery.
Beth Grin, Erin McElroy, and Sarah Lipponcott
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| Start: Erin McElroy |
Middle: Sarah Lipponcott |
End: Beth Grin |
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| Start: Sarah Lipponcott |
Middle: Beth Grin |
End Erin McElroy |
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| Start: Beth Grin |
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End Sarah Lipponcott |
Beth Grin
Beth Grin, a native New Yorker, attended the Fashion Institute of Technology earning a degree in advertising design and communications and continued her studies at the Art Students League. She possesses an insidious interest with a myriad of mediums including painting, sculpture, graphic design, and photography. Currently, she continues an exploration of mediums infusing them together mostly focusing on mixed media work with found objects.
Erin McElroy
Erin McElroy grew up traveling around the East Coast, and likes to make all sorts of things, ranging from photo-transfer paintings to little gardens to recycled bicycles. In sixth-grade, Erin made a coat of arms out of felt that read “Never Bored!”, and pretty much that sums it up. Erin’s artwork explores the visuality of uncommitted identity, the path and history of the ambivalent gaze, and flickering moments of collective memory. Particularly interested in fears sculpted by micro-macrocosmic correlativity, Erin’s work perpetually questions the psychology of inner and outer spaces.
Sarah Lippincott
Sarah Lippincott earned her Bachelors degree from The Art Institute of Atlanta with a “Best in Portfolio” show award. Sarah’s residences in New England, the south and the west coast throughout her life has influenced her artwork. Other inspirations have come from her studies abroad in the Netherlands, Paris, and Belize.
Her appreciation of nature, the concern for our planet’s fragile ecosystem, and the complexities of human interaction and emotion impact her outpouring of paintings, charcoal pieces and line drawings. Family history from Italy and the Napa Valley in California has brought forth a passion in emotionally infused and unique pieces. Sarah is multi-talented in the art venue.
Work includes illustration, fine art, and graphic design. She has done work for the Atlanta Street Stage Festival, and produced a public mural that gained mayoral approval and media recognition.
Britt Howard, Jeeti Sighn, and Lilea Duran
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| Start: Jeeti Sighn |
Middle: Lilea Duran |
End: Britt Howard |
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| Start: Lilea Duran | Middle: Britt Howard |
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| Start: Britt Howard |
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Britt Howard
• She was born in Los Angeles, but does not say she is from there.
• As a child she wanted to be an astronaut or a doctor when she grew up.
• The raddest animal ever is the albatross. If you dispute this then clearly you have never been to a special website thattells you all sorts of interesting facts about them.
• It has come to her attention that she will eat just about anything so long as it has the label “cinnamon” in direct relation to it.
• She does not own an umbrella.
• Both of her ring fingers are longer than her index fingers. Scientific research has noted that this could be suggestive of higher than normal levels of testosterone while in the womb. In palmistry this is indicative of a creative mind.
• For her, making art is more about the emotionally exhaustive process than the finished product.
• She spends a great deal of time staring through things. This bothers some people.
• She would like to own a tractor one day, maybe.
• She enjoys panda bears especially when they have tea together. However, this does not mean that she wants you to give her things that are “panda-related” i.e. t-shirts, porcelain figurines or notepads from Japan with pandas on them. She simply likes them. With the exception of Kim who always has fun presents and sometimes they do have a panda bear on them. Kim can buy her “panda-related” things.
• Her favorite color is green and she was apathetic to the death of Bambi’s mother, however she did cry 3 times in the most recent prequel of Star Trek.*
• She has never beaten her younger sister at Scrabble or finished a game of Monopoly.
• She is quite certain her sister cheats at both Scrabble and Monopoly.
• She finds it odd that penguins are birds yet they swim and cannot fly. Nature what?
• Also, she makes a habit of running full speed towards brick walls.
• She has absolutely no navigational sense of direction. If it weren’t for gravity she would have a difficult time negotiating between up or down.
• She believes artists are physical philosophers, realizing their ideas through tangible manifestations.
• Tetris was fun.
• She was terrible at Tetris.
• She believes that only self-proclaimed idiots refer to themselves in the third-person.
*The aforementioned crying was not a full-blown “weeping”
Jeeti Sighn
Jeeti was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to the United States as a young child with her family. She studied and received her Bachelors in Art from San Francisco State University with a major in painting/art history and a minor in psychology. Currently she is working as a gallery manager/curator at the Academy of Art University and has a studio at the Art Explosion. For more information about her work you can contact her at athenathirteen@yahoo.com ,visit her site at www.jsrandhava.com, or her blog at www.jeetisingh.blogspot.com .
Lilea Duran
I remember being 12 years old the first time I stood in front of the mirror and eyed myself with disgust. My friends at the time were all early bloomers and as their bodies developed I began to be teased over the fact that I still wasn’t wearing a bra or had yet to begin my menstrual cycle.
I would come home and pick myself over with a fine toothed comb. I would magnify each imperfection and dwell and silently pray that one day this would come to an end and I would be able to stare eye to eye with my bullies.
The scene repeated itself as I grew older. Each time something improved I found more to see wrong in myself. In the spring of 2008, I was age 22. Slightly older, but not much wiser I stood in front of the mirror once again. I recall being particularly out of patience with the zig-zags of stretch marks along my thighs and rear– scars left behind from my yo-yo dieting in high school. Something must have been in the air because instead of reaching for a towel to cover up I grabbed my camera.
I began a series of photographs that highlighted these imperfections. My set up was amateur to say the least, my camera wobbled atop a tissue box and an old desk lamp lit my way to self discovery. The pictures produced introduced me to a new person, someone the mirror had failed to show me. As I stared at the captured images, each imperfection became a work of art before my eyes.
Since this experience the focus of my photography has turned to conceptual self portraiture. Besides helping me cope with my body image issues, my work tells stories of loneliness, rejection, thoughts on marriage and motherhood, sexuality, and the expectations society has placed on the female form. This type of photography has helped me handle many of my personal issues and pain caused by inner battles. Drawing inspiration from avante-garde film makers like Maya Deren and Willard Maas, surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, and fellow photographer Cindy Sherman I continue this line of work in hope that other women will find a voice in my visuals and feel more at peace knowing that we are in this journey together.
Stephanie Mufson, ABR, and Emily MacDonald
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| Start: Stephanie Mufson |
Middle: ABR |
End: Emily MacDonald |
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| Start: Emily MacDonald |
Middle: Stephanie Mufson | End: ABR |
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| Start: ABR | Middle: Emily MacDonald |
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Stephanie Mufson
Stephanie Mufson is an artist based in the mission district of San Francisco. She began her formal art education education at the University of Denver in Colorado in 1998 where she studied Fine Art and Graphic Design. After 2 years there she took a hiatus from her studies to pursue her second love of traveling and went to explore the world around her. In 2001, Stephanie resumed her formal education at the Maryland Institute College of Art where she graduated Cum Laude with a BFA in General Fine Arts in 2003. Since then Stephanie has shown and sold her work in galleries, boutiques and non-traditional spaces in San Francisco, Berkelely, El Cerrito, San Jose, LA, and Baltimore. She has painted live with ArtNowSF! and the Pacific Art Collective at Space Gallery in San Francisco and at the 2007 San Jose Jazz Fest, and performed at the 2007 Makers Faire along side Brent Green of the highly acclaimed “Nervous Films.” In 2008 she was awarded Best in Show at the “Dream Chamber” art show in SF. She has been commissioned to do a number of paintings, tattoo designs and murals. She has also curated her own shows and has been interviewed by/ featured in both online and alternative print magazines.
ABR
I hope my works are something to be laughed at and felt- with honesty derived from personal stories, that people can relate to in their own ways with a smile and have a chuckle at here and there.
“Seriously”.. no i dont take myself that seriously- i like to think of myself as a quirky, kind of nerdy, and silly person, who likes the importance of laughing at oneself and with others, while my serious side can sometimes be heavy but calm and quiet. I enjoy smushing my ideas, playfulness, and personality around to create my bodies of work. Influenced by, the darker side of a childhood; flipped into peculiar and fun times with the imaginary protection of an animal around. Fearful moments made brighter where Animals share an understanding of mindfulness, care, and secrets. These paintings of child moments are mixed and matched along with current ongoing stories, playfully using Animals to express emotions often hidden by humans.
As a child with a marine biologist studying mother, employed as a zookeeper, most often visiting was “weekends at work”. I became fascinated early on as a constant observer of animal behavior, pockets full of doodles of zoo things, and playfully imagining these animals as my chit chat friends.
Canadian born, raised on the island of Oahu, Hawaii as one of seven Hawaiian Japanese children in a blended family. After the death of their second mother, drawing and painting grew as an avenue to communicate quietly and express emotions with hints of lightness and the ability to laugh at ones self. Painting as a quiet and constant observer being influenced by the surrounding world and its odd balance of happiness and struggle.
Emily MacDonald
Emily MacDonald is an Oakland based artist, exploring the link between the natural world and the human body. She studied at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, received her bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from Mills College, and is currently a resident artist at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. For the Egoless show, she has focused on sculptural work, exploring the idea of spheres as a form that is without a single viewpoint to integrate with the work of her fellow artists.
