Fizzing Portals

Jiayun Chen, Dominique Go, Qijun Liu, Yuchi Ma, Malaya Malandro, Libbi Ponce, Lainey Racah, Camille Wong

September 21 – October 15, 2023

In choosing places of intuition, renewal, imagination, ritual, wonder, and refuge, Fizzing Portals proposes outlooks of self-care as a socio-political means to shape liberatory individual and collective identity and/or outcomes. The exhibit's works embody stances of rest, reconnection, and resilience through diverse strategies and modalities across sculpture, video, performance, photography, drawing, and installation. Fizzing Portals maps the generative potentialities of incubating within self-determined parameters as a communal gesture of reclaiming time, place, and identity.

Jiayun Chen grew up in Wenzhou, China, though she is now living in Los Angeles, California. She earned her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2020 and is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate at USC Roski School of Art and Design.

Her art practice is characterized by slow-processes by engaging with drawing, trophy-making, painting, sculptures, and installation-making. She is currently interested in language—and in particular, how language functions as a communication tool and the slippages that occur inevitably. Drawing from social phenomena to biblical stories, her practice tends to twist the familiar through wit, humor, and the poetic.

Dominique Go (b. 1999) is an interdisciplinary, Los Angeles based artist on Tongva land who emigrated from Manila, Philippines to America in 2001 and received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2021. Through many mediums (drawing, assemblage sculpture, video, and ceramics) she uses poetics and earnest ironies that amalgamate sociopolitical history with the fantastical to further explore topics of love, care, ecological and human disenfranchisement, wholehearted conviction, and fun. Most recently her series of works is interested in a loving nostalgia and the limitations that occur when translating typical human conventions of love in plants, fruits, objects, bureaucracy, and land.

Qijun Liu graduated from the University of San Diego with a visual art degree and an art history minor. Her works tend to explore and reflect on observed phenomena through a conceptual practice that uses video, installation, sculpture and performance. A sense of absurdity and repetition are often embedded in her work. Rather than imposing a solution to a psychological conflict or societal construct through the works, she aims to ask questions about these observed phenomena. Many of her works cohere around the word ‘relations.’ She draws inspiration from observations in her daily life, a mundane living state that everyone experiences, trying to see the social or cultural factors that have formed our ways of living and capture the ephemeral and subtle connections between things.

Born in Being, China in 1997, then uprooting to Texas by herself at age of 11, Yochi is a parachute kid, a filmmaker and an artist of international identity currently based in LA. After earning her undergraduate degree at USC studying film and tv production, Yuchi is now an MFA student at UCLA’s design media art lab.

Working mostly in videos but now extending beyond to coding, game design, collage, and more. Yuchi’s works are personal, yearning to find home, in order to close a gap between the self and the rest of the world.

Malaya Malandro (NY, NY) works in a variety of media, including installation, painting, and poetry. Malandro investigates the dynamic of connective unending between audience, author, and the physical spaces they coinhabit. She explores world making and world ending through an ontological lens, observing the sense of inescapability between a perceived self within expanding planes of reality and relative identity: physical, temporal, and metaphysical. Malaya Malandro currently lives and works between Los Angeles and New York. She holds a BA from Fordham University, NY in both Graphic Design and Architecture with an Urban Studies focus.

Libbi Ponce (they/them, she/her) is an Ecuadorian artist, born in 1997 to a family of musicians, making sculptures, 360-degree videos, installations, and performances. Ponce explores themes of Latinx-Futurism through a sculptural practice of world-building incorporating an ambitious range of materials including steel, bronze, resin, polyurethane, mortar, grout, terracotta, and glass. Inspired by the erotic and anthropomorphic motifs from ancient Andean ceramics, Ponce constructs tactile sculptural objects which probe discourse on grief, intimacy, and historic folklore.

They have attended the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Oxbow Artists' Residency, Yale Norfolk Undergraduate Residency, and ACRE. Exhibitions include terciopelo at Selenas Mountain, BASE REMOVED at the Museo Antropologico y de Arte Contemporaneo, and Skyway 20/21 at the Tampa Museum of Art. They hold a BFA in Studio Art and BA in Philosophy from the University of South Florida. In 2021, Ponce completed a Fulbright Creative Research Fellowship in Ecuador. Libbi is the founder/director of galeria juniin in Guayaquil, Ecuador and Co-Director of Coco Hunday Gallery in Tampa, FL. Libbi is currently based between Ecuador and Florida.

Lainey Racah is a multidisciplinary artist and poet working in painting, installation and video projection, informed by studies in poetry and performance and a deep interest in material process and its relationship to the body. Her work explores themes of environmentalism, fluidity, and strategies of visibility and collectivity through engaging with queer genealogies. Performance and process – stains from fluid movement, material traces left from bodily action and the passage of time – form and shape the work. Her interest in holes, cuts and fragments are conceptual, processual, and material markers in her research and practice. This interest represents her concern for the interstitial, the byproduct, the contradiction; thinking about what it means to make work through a queer lens and body, prioritizing fluidity and imagining the alternative, and engaging with legacies of queer art and writing.

Racah holds a B.A. in Art with a minor in English from UCLA, where she received the Emma B. Keller Fine Arts Scholarship, and an MFA from the USC Roski School of Art with a Performance Studies Certificate. Racah has shown her work in New York and Los Angeles, including a solo, site specific exhibition along the Los Angeles River as part of the curatorial project Some Clouds.

Camille Wong (they/she) was born in Oakland, California and holds B.A.s in Art and Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are a research-based artist invested in finding invisible dynamics of power embedded in technologies, social infrastructures, and the built environment. Their approach spans interactive websites, experimental video, sculpture, and writing, to reveal the extensive influence of power obscured within the texture of social spaces. Drawing from disciplines within digital humanities, urbanism, and experimental geography, their work observes how humans produce that space that in turn, shapes them.

Their work has been shown at the Art, Design, & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has exhibited their work throughout Los Angeles including the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Monte Vista Projects, and Art Share LA. They received the Faculty Award of Distinction in 2017. In an effort to stimulate cultural discourse regarding underrepresented voices, they founded Cult Club, an online literary arts magazine dedicated to the intersection of arts and culture. They are currently pursing an MFA at UCLA in Media Arts.

LA Artcore is a non-profit art space dedicated to the creative exploration, discovery, and expression of Los Angeles and global residents while supporting the careers of established and emerging contemporary artists.

Artcore reflects the global perspectives of Los Angeles by engaging contemporary artists as the visual and performing conduits of and for the residents and communities in which they live, work and serve. Since 1979, LA Artcore has mounted twenty-four exhibits in the two gallery spaces as well as supporting programs.

LA Artcore is committed to cultivating an environment that values the voices of artists, curators, staff, volunteers, visitors, and its surrounding community/ecology. The gallery embraces diversity of all identities including race, gender, sexuality, socio-economic background, and ability; also, proudly champions equity through inclusion and accessibility. Artcore’s endeavor toward programming a space that reflects its values remains continuous and expansive – shown by their efforts in shifting the curatorial and programmatic current through collaboration and radical learning.