A Slow Conflict by Orange County-based artist Yevgeniya Mikhailik is a study of the forces that shape the Earth's landscape, both naturally occurring and resulting from human activity. The immensity of the Earth and the slow pace of its development are impossible for an individual to fully grasp in a single lifetime, a comparative blink-of-an-eye to the age of the planet; but our ability to relate to events and changes that we personally struggle with - growth, aging, scarcity, instability, social conflict, etc. - can be a link to understanding and relating to phenomena in the natural world. By drawing parallels between geological events and personal-scale changes as experienced by an individual or a group, A Slow Conflict aims to evoke empathy towards the evolving natural environment in the same way we empathize with each other. It asks the viewer to imagine engaging with the real landscape as intimately and intensely as we do with ourselves and other human beings, to experience the natural world slowly by being present and attentive, to attempt to understand its processes, and to observe the ways in which our involvement in and disruption of the environment has a lasting effect. ***** Nevarez and Tevere's new work Layers of the City reflects on spaces in Santa Ana, both inhabited and boarded up, of immigrant owned entities that passed through generations only to be pushed out by rising rents and revitalization plans. The stories of Santa Ana are the stories of Sunset Park in Brooklyn, of Pilsen in Chicago, and of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles - neighborhoods where real estate speculation supersedes communities. With these processes in mind, Nevarez and Tevere wrote a song that follows the composition and form of a cumulative song. As the song progresses, so do the amount of voices singing the chorus. In the end, a larger assembly of bodies and voices come together, perhaps forming a community, a resistant cumulative process. ***** For the third phase of Lucas Murgida's evolving project, None of This is Real, participants are asked to bring an unwanted brass key to the Art Walk on Saturday, February 2nd. Murgida will take the unwanted key, melt it in a furnace, and pour into a mold to create a new key. He will then give that new key back to the owner and the participant can use that key to open the door of a custom made wardrobe that Murgida constructed. Participants will then be able to have a 2-minute solo experience inside of the wardrobes meditative and transportative interior. Recognizing that not everyone has an old key, Murgida will be broadening the definition of "keys" to include anything that allows a person to exit one space and enter another space regardless of whether or not it's a "mental" space or a "physical" space. This expanded definition of keys can include but is not limited to: ideas, people, places, things, memories, or traditional bits of metal. Murgida will have paper and pens available for people to create anonymous written descriptions of their unwanted keys to trade for one his custom made molten-poured keys. Regardless of shape a participant's key takes, he would like to encourage people to participate in an "exchange" and "transformation" in some capacity in order to give up something and let something go in order to be transported to a new perspective. The experience is free and open to participants of all ages and abilities. Through performance, installation, photographic documentation, and social practice, artist Lucas Murgida creates situations that allow audience members to experience very private moments in very public situations. Thematically, his projects address ideas of service, perception, liberation, privacy, power, and labor by utilizing his employment as research to inform his art practice. Having dissected his careers as a professional cabinetmaker, busboy, locksmith, and yoga-teacher, the artist utilizes the mundane aspects of human existence - such as furniture, locks, teachers, and service professionals - as raw material to craft artistic experiences. Murgida's most recent research, working behind the scenes in the adult film industry, spawned an artistic investigation into the intimacy-of-the-self through the lens of judgment, privacy, commerce, privilege, and the utility of the body as a tool of labor. As current Grand Central Art Center artist in residence, Murgida has taken over the storefront gallery as a location of research and development of new ideas. It is a space for the open possibilities of discoveries through GCAC's philosophy of listening, assisting and connecting, with the institution providing the artist as much freedom as possible, with no expectations required in terms of concrete outcome.