Please join us on Friday, May 31st, 6:00 to 9:00 PM for the closing reception of CALIFORNIA LOVE, with a curator walkthrough of the exhibition followed by artist talks with Sarah Favreau and Milly Skellington, moderated by Daid Roy, as well as Sandy Kupfer aka iLuvvLife and Preston Douglas Boyer, moderated by Esteban Gonzalez aka ques0fresco. 6:30 PM: Walkthrough with curator Preston Douglas Boyer 7:15 PM: Artist talk with Sarah Favreau and Milly Skellington, moderated by Daid Roy 8:00 PM: Artist talk with Sandy Kupfer, aka iLuvvLife, and Preston Douglas Boyer, moderated by Esteban Gonzalez, aka ques0fresco About Preston Douglas Boyer Preston Douglas Boyer (b.1995) is a multidisciplinary artist who works between painting, fashion, and performance, whose work considers how these forms are physical manifestations of the spiritual journey. His paintings are both remnants of performances and starting points for installations, addressing how surfaces can allude to both beauty and darkness through examining contemporary cultural conviction. Website: www.prestondouglas.us Instagram: @prestondouglasboyer About Sarah Favreau Sarah Favreau is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. They earned their BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2015. In late 2015 Favreau was hospitalized for a 7 month period, requiring an immediate break from painting. Shortly after they moved to NYC, working as a set designer into the fashion editorial space. Amidst 2020’s Covid lockdown, Favreau began painting again as a way to quell the anxiety and uncertainty of the period. They chose to pick up where their 2015 work left off, and began making small, sculptural paintings that investigated the intuitive relationship between color, form, and light. Favreau’s present work expands on this; exploring intimacy in the landscape of trauma through the use of color as a physical, emotional space. Each piece invites the viewer to find safety or unrest depending on what they, as the audience, individually brings to the experience. The forms are hand built and hand painted with oil. The surfaces and structures are intentionally imperfect to acknowledge the artist’s hand in the creation of each piece, and in turn, the value of human touch. Website: https://sarahfavreau.com/ Instagram: @_sarahfavreau About Esteban Gonzalez Esteban Gonzalez is a Colombian born designer and creator. He graduated from CCAD in Columbus OH, and has been independently tattooing and designing ever since. He has collaborated with East Fork Pottery, Vada Vada records, and Freight Studio as notable clients. He now resides in LA. QuesOfresco is a type of cheese that is historically immigrant with roots at the US/Mexico border. The word queso has many slang meanings between English and Spanish that range from themes of money, love, lust, strategy, etc. He will use duality themes of life/death ; belonging/longing ; good/evil: “My life has always been split between 2 places, 2 cultures, 2 languages. I do a lot of visual imagery research with these ideas in mind.” “I hope to create pieces that are timeless, but are rooted in love. I think the cheesy-hopeless romantic latin- in me comes through when designing.” Instagram: @ques0fresco About Sandy Kupfer Sandy Kupfer’s life and work occurs at the intersection of vision, emotion, sensation and creativity. The world and its experiences, emotions, and sensations, manifest in painting, fashion design and music. Working in an emotive style, Kupfer’s approach—from color palette to the layered use of texture to the blurring of realism and abstraction—is intended to move others and spark emotion, thought and receptivity in the audience. Website: https://www.sandykupfer.com/ Instagram: @sandykupferpaints About Daid Roy Daid Roy is a multidisciplinary artist and educator known for their sculptures, paintings, and photographs. They received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University, where they were a recipient of the Yale School of Art Social Justice Initiative Grant (2020). They also hold a BFA in Photography from Otis College of Art and Design. Roy’s work is guided by the declaration that art is a practice of freedom inseparable from everyday life. Roy’s sculptures draw on the visual language of rocket science, as they deploy durable materials common to the aerospace industry such as fiberglass, resin, and kevlar. The sculptures also circulate through videos, paintings, and drawings, wherein Roy documents physical components of the rockets and their launches. In 2016, Roy founded BLACKNASA, a space agency aimed to teach rocketry and the ideals of space exploration to underrepresented youth groups. Animated by Roy’s sculptural practice, BLACKNASA views rocketry as a science, a creative practice, and a universal language. Roy also takes up photography, sound, and various other media that meditate on contemporary American identity, collective thought, and possible futures. Traversing mediums, Roy’s work is united by the principle that art and life are endlessly intertwined. Instagram: @daidroy.jpg About Milly Skellington Milly Skellington is an artist born and raised 17 miles south of Hollywood on the outskirts of LA. Skellington uses symbols in painting and sculpture as a dialogue around the role of the artist and the impact of shared pop cultural icons and imagery. By defamiliarizing the imagery through various manipulations, Skellington reanimates an intimacy in the object of art through emphasis on materials and techniques with a deep cultural position, including oil painting and marble carving. Alongside this, the artist builds robots, codes machines, and uses performance to find new means of producing art in the 21st century. Living between LA and East Village NYC, Skellington has studied at Otis College of Art and Design in LA (BFA), Hunter College in New York (MFA), and has taken graduate art courses at Goldsmiths in London, as well as technology courses through Harvard. Instagram: @structural_fantasy