Garden Party

Garden Party is the first open call issued by the Collective Arts Incubator. We received work spanning various disciplines and technologies, but all addressing the brilliant energy innate to our natural environment. The work has coalesced into a vibrant thicket of sound, image, and object, embedded within the network of verdant planters, yards, and public spaces that make Los Angeles a bizarre but beloved suburban Eden. As we face an extended drought in Southern California, we are forced to claim ownership of our green amenities and recognize their indispensable role in our lives. This collection makes plain the resilient vitality of nature’s flora, which enlivens all other forms of life and encompasses some of the most stunning complexities known to man.

Adrienne Adar

Adrienne Adar is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography, sound, and interactive installation. Inspired from natural forms and structures, her work addresses issues of visual and audio language, and technology’s influence on our perception and sensory experiences of everyday life.

Frank Fu

Frank Fu is a performance artist and experimental filmmaker born in Inner Mongolia, China. His work challenges the white box settings of galleries and museums, his endurance performances and interventions examine his identity as an artist, often commenting on the politics of the art world.

Yves Gore

Dark Fantasy. Strange Beauties. Death and the Recyclables; these are the common themes in Yves Gore’s art. Pen and Ink is her go to style. Occasionally, there is a dash of gold paint and royal blue, then pulls of neon colors. She also models sculptures out of recycled materials and thrift shop findings, giving fantastical glory to unwanted items. Born in Borneo Island, East Malaysia, Yves Gore has a perpetual fascination with all things odd.

Caden Gray

Caden Gray is a singer songwriter whose current project Sob Sister addresses gender and masculinity through the lens of pop music. His self-produced album Pansy, will be released this Fall.

Eden Mitsenmacher Tordjman

Born 1987 in the USA; works in Rotterdam and Tel Aviv. Combines performance, video and installation to take a critical yet engaging view of social, polit- ical and cultural issues.

Ayse Melis Okay

Ayşe Melis OKAY, is an inter-disciplinary artist. Born in Istanbul, Ayşe Melis OKAY, lives and works in Los Angeles. She completed her MFA in Arts at California Institute of Arts (2016). Okay is known for her ethnographic approach to art making alongside fantasy scenes. As an inter-disciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and video, her work addresses notions of cultural, gendered and racial differences, and transitions and transformations of things through material. While questioning what defines an individual and relativity of its boundaries, her work also traces the footprints and memories of the personal lives and powers. Discovering the meaning through and interpreting the reactions of material and nature are spontaneous temptations that always shape her work. Thinking of the natural instincts and power that are shaping our lives, many metaphors and resemblances between nature of things and power of politics can be found. Therefore, she analyzes these perceptions of politics and aesthetics within notions of individualism, selfhood, and difference. Examples of her work, shows the porous and re-definitive nature of boundaries between the bodies of self and other through the use of transitive materials: a sculptural installation of a gooey controlled by magnets wandering in and around a ceramic shell questioning shapeless forms and identities of single and multicellular organisms discovering Freudian readings of the viewers perception.

Juna Skenderi

An Albanian-born artist, Juna Skenderi seeks to merge her passion for film and her obsession with craft. Her ink drawings are meticulously and slowly created with black ballpoint pen. Her mixed-media work are mainly products of deliberate and meditative processes.

Monkey Pod Flowers (vintage service dish sets + novelty lights) — *Monkey Pod Flowers* (vintage service dish sets + novelty lights)

Kristopher Swick

Kris is an architectural designer with a wide range of experience. He studied architecture at MIT and UC Berkeley, and has produced arts programming in various venues and forms.

Martin Velez

Martancho is a Colombian musician, sound engineer and digital artist with an MFA in Music Technology from the California Institute for the Arts. Martancho is interested in finding new useful ways to connect music, technology and art while having a lot of fun doing so. He enjoys making lots of different noises (even music), building interfaces for expressive user interaction and musical performance, multimodal sensor systems and sound installations. He is also an experienced live and studio audio engineer, who has worked in a wide range of musical genres, from traditional Andean music to metal and jazz, doing the role of mixing/recording engineer, producer and performer as well.