The New Arts Foundation

AIR CONDITIONING

Curated by Greg Jenkins

Ross Edward Doyle
Siena Foster-Soltis
ann haeyoung
Max Harper
Vanessa Holyoak & Antoine Chesnais
Christine Yerie Lee
Catherine Menard
Antonio Okun
Liz Quezada-Lee
malavika rao
Elle Reck
Punitive Worm (directed by Nikki Ochoa)
Yanbin Zhao
Zengyi Zhao

Film Program
Organized by Advik Beni
Gavati
Manaka Nagai & Kaori Takahashi
abbi page
Rob Rice
Linx Fong Selby
Seokyoung Yang

Bios

Ross is a painter living and working in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA from Calarts, and is a co-founder of Goes To Ocean, a studio space and artist-run gallery.
www.rossedwarddoyle.com
@ross_edward_doyle

Siena Foster-Soltis is a writer and artist born and based in Los Angeles California. Her work focuses on the abject, corporeal memory, allegory, food, mythos, and exhibitionized cycles of self-imposed violence. She studied at California Institute of the Arts and currently spends her time workshopping her plays in small performance venues across Los Angeles and New York City.  
www.sienafs.com
@sienafs

I tell stories and create scenes about technology, labor, and the future. Sometimes what I make is analog and stationary, sometimes it’s digital and time-based. I take my visual cues from science fiction and horror, and use the inefficient, grotesque, and surreal to counteract dominant narratives of technological progress and neoliberal futurity. I am interested in the way the body is disabled, distorted, and hybridized in the name of efficiency and progress.
www.a-tbd.com
@ann_tbd

Max Harper is a filmmaker and installation artist from Los Angeles. His work is focused on body, labor, death, and shelter. His film works have screened at Frieze LA and REDCAT, and his photography has been shown at Galeria Mola in Portugal. He has received support from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture.
@eddiefresnel

Antoine Chesnais and Vanessa Holyoak are a Los Angeles-based artist duo working across installation, photography, sculpture, and video. They construct uncanny, minimalist environments that allude to mediation and memory, intimate and ecological loss, and the cognitive overload of the present. Their work has been shown in Mexico City, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, and in Los Angeles at LA Artcore, AU PAIR, Harkawik, Eastside International, Human Resources, and the California Institute of the Arts, among other venues. They attended Cove Park international artists residency in Helensburgh, Scotland in 2021 and Casa Lü residency in Mexico City, Mexico in 2022. Chesnais holds a diploma in Photography from l’École des Gobelins and works as a landscaper. Holyoak holds a BA from Barnard College of Columbia University, a dual MFA in Photography & Media and Writing from CalArts, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Media & Culture at USC. Her first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, was published by Sming Sming Books in May 2023.
www.vanessaholyoak.com
@vanessaholyoak
@antoinechesnais

Christine Yerie Lee is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist working in video, performance, drawing, and sculpture. Lee’s practice explores performativity and identity-formation, often using the body to articulate resistance to dominant power structures by generating imaginative narratives for the future. Drawing from Korean and American folklore, global histories, and pop culture, she builds interconnected worlds where fantasy and reality collide, creating a new place for cultural, psychological, and socio-political discovery. Lee received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She recently participated in the Crosstown Arts Residency program and received the CAA's Visual Arts Fellowship. Currently, she teaches video art at Pomona College and will be AIR at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in 2024. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.
www.christineyerielee.com
@yeriesh

Catherine Menard is a Los Angeles based artist working across a range of different media including video, performance, installation, painting, and sculpture. She often unites these elements to create site-specific and immersive environments that may amount to "total works." Menard trained classically as a ballet dancer for over 10 years, graduated from Idyllwild Arts Academy as a Theatre Performance major (2005) and received both her Bachelor of Science in Spatial Experience Design (2014) and her Master of Fine Art (2023) from ArtCenter College of Design. She has trained theatrically with Playhouse West (Sanford Meisner), clowning at The Elysian Theater, Butoh with master Oguri (student of Hijikata) as well as with master Hiroko Tamano of Harupin-Ha Dance Theater. She has studied shamanic practices with The Foundation for Shamanic Studies, Jungian Psychology with Pacifica Graduate Institute, and divination with The Golden Dome School and the Philosophical Research Society. She has been internationally recognized for her permanent public artwork—Pasadena Armenian Genocide Memorial—completed in 2015 and located in Pasadena Memorial Park. She has lectured at Glendale Community College, has presented for Place By Design at the SXSW Eco Conference in their inaugural year, and served in panel discussions at the Brand Library and Art Center which explored “Art as a path to social justice and collective healing.” Menard most recently exhibited and performed at The Box in downtown Los Angeles.
www.catherinemenard.com
@catherinemenard___

Antonio Okun is an artist based in Los Angeles who specializes in sculpture and ceramics. His work focuses on his relationship looking to childhood nostalgia through the lens of adulthood. This careful looking touches upon themes of mental health, queer identity and going up in a biracial Latin American household. Often the work can be described as an emotional journal entry to something long forgotten. Antonio has received degrees from USC (BFA) and California Institute of the Arts (MFA) and is currently working as both a teacher and artist.
www.antoniookun.com
@a.okun

malavika rao (she/they) is a fiber artist, ceramicist, painter, writer, and teacher living and working in Los Angeles. In their work, malavika is drawn to craft as it grants them the power to travel through time. The knowledge of craft is typically passed through interpersonal relationships, generally between women, and malavika believes that these relationships are inextricably linked to craft. These relationships are the intertwining threads of what sustains the practice of love. Through time travel, malavika is able to communicate with the past to further understand it, and envision multiple futures. In both their art and their teaching, malavika aims to create new worlds at the intersections of these pasts and futures, for herself and for her community, in the hopes that these spaces can be powerful realms of healing, resistance, and love.
www.malavikarao.com
@malt.liqua

Elle Reck is an experimental animator, fabricator, and film director originally from Massachusetts. She graduated from California Institute of the arts with a BFA in Experimental Animation.
www.vimeo.com/ellereck
@elllerosy

Nikki Ochoa is an ancient baby from Kudzu Covered Forests.
UCLA BA 2015 Cal Arts MFA 2023

Punitive Worm is a joint project from partners Nikki Ochoa + Mas Guerrero.

Punitive Worm is an experimental performance entity rooted in live improvisational sound, elaborate costuming, and exploring raw energetic expressionism in forms that vary with every incarnation of the work. Based in Los Angeles, collaborators unify to perform wherever Punitive Worm finds pulse. The work manifests as 20 or more players, to the duo. The poetic improvisational nature of this project commands total presence, simultaneously morphing with and without its collaborators. Currently Punitive Worm explores loving irreverence through abstracted poetic narratives. We are inspired by poets of color and their ability to face disappearing with anarchist and alternative narratives brought forth by sound, sculpture, and writing. How can the colonization of art and people be combated? With, “Poems that shoot guns,” as Amiri Baraka writes, “Poems are bullshit unless they are teeth or trees or lemons piled on a step.” Making poetry that exists in physical space is the aim.

www.nikkiochoa.com
@vomitchild

Zhao Yanbin’s film and installation works focus on the interpretation of “distance” in the sense of temporality and spatiality, as well as the ruptures and relations it creates on the historical, political, cultural, and personal level. He received an MFA in Film from California Institute of the Arts.
www.yanbinzhao.com
@zhao.yanbin

Zengyi Zhao was born in Jinan in 1999 and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts. He is pursuing a Master's degree at the ArtCenter College of Design. He is an artist who primarily uses photography and video as his creative method. In his work, he visualizes the connections between individual life and the grand narratives. Discussing the presentation and impact of different sociocultural phenomena such as modernity and spectacle. His work has been shown nationally & internationally, including at the Three Shadows Photography Art Center (CHN), SEOUL International Photographic Exhibition (KOR), and The Boomer (UK), among others, such as 4C Gallery and Gong Gallery in LA.
www.zengyizhaoart.com
@zengyi_zhao

*All works in the Air Conditioning film program were commissioned to create a short film anthology centered on the themes of the exhibition.

Gavati is an artist from India, currently based in Los Angeles. She is interested in questions of identity in contexts such as gender, the domestic environment and the nation-state. She has a cross-disciplinary practice spanning performance, illustration and film. Her work responds to tropes and standards present in commercial media practices, including those of television broadcasting and political propaganda. Gavati is the co-founder of Artists in Revolution Collective (AIRC). She received her MFA Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts.
@rainingontheinside

Manaka Nagai is a filmmaker based in Tokyo, Japan and Hamburg, Germany. Her works are often inspired by her own experiences with a tad of surrealism. Born in Tokyo and raised in Los Angeles, she often writes characters who are looking for a place where they can belong. She received an MFA in Film at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK) from Professor Angela Schanelec and Dr. Belinda Grace Gardner.
www.manakanagai.tumblr.com
@kodeskinos

Kaori Takahashi
@kaori_to_inu

abbi page (they/she) is a Jamaican-American writer, filmmaker, performer, and educator originally from outside of Atlanta, Georgia. They use multimedia intertextual art practices as a way of expressing their understanding of, as Tiffany Lethabo King writes, “the unimaginable metaphysics of black livingness,” particularly black queer livingness. they are deeply invested in Black Feminist Metaphysics, incompossible world-building, and BIPOC and queer community healing. they are currently pursuing their MFAs in Creative Writing and Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts. they are a recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Fellowship and the Ethel Robinson Award as well as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. they are also a member of the Haus of Glitter Performance Lab based in Providence, Rhode Island, a BIPOC and queer-affirming, feminist art collective.
@crabbicakes

Rob Rice is a filmmaker and producer from western Massachusetts, based in LA. He did an MFA at CalArts and worked as a CRISPR engineer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard before that. His first feature, Way Out Ahead of Us, was produced by Matt Porterfield and premiered at FIDMarseille 2022 before going on to screen at RIDM, ICA London, Black Canvas, São Paulo and many others. His recent work as a producer includes Lucy Kerr’s Family Portrait (Locarno 2023), Tyler Taormina’s forthcoming Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point starring Michael Cera, and the debut from Advik Beni.
www.redmilkroe.com
@public.monies

Linx Fong Selby is an artist and director based between Los Angeles and Montreal. She softens the edges of her many mixed identities through documentary and fiction hybrid single and multi-channel video works. In 2012 she co-founded Atelier Cèladon art collective. Her 2014 short film, "Tremor" was awarded at AmerAsia Festival 2014 and screened at Cold Call Productions Film Festival in 2016 and her 2020 film Pueblo Mágico, a narrative documentary about her US/Mexico border hometown premiered at Center Never Apart and showed at galleries in Canada, the US and Mexico. She received a degree in cultural studies from McGill University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Film Directing from California Institute of the Arts.
www.linxselby.com
@linxfongselby

Seokyoung Yang (she/they) is a curator, poet, and filmmaker dedicated to artistic experimentation. Born and raised in South Korea, she investigates the correlation between anomaly of language, diasporic bodies, and internal loss through moving images and texts. She received her BFA in film and video program at California Institute of the Arts. She currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
www.seokyoungyang.com
@dir.sk0

Beneficiary

This project is supported in part by an arts grant from the City of West Hollywood.