S. Yi Yao Chao (b. Canada) is from Hong Kong. They enjoy the aimless labours of running a space and articulating fragmentation. Aoandaoband (Sam Chao with Toni Zhao) takes the high speed train to Guang Zhou to complete their debut for Times Museum 4th Bayan Commune residency: Bald spot of an eight year old balloon. The duo hosted DIY balloon mapping and future abstract doodle workshop lead by average 10 year old residents in the Huang Bian neighbourhood. These materials and routes were arranged and made movable to support and recognize structures of kinship and companionship (e.g. alternative family), and provide public seating for active withdrawals (fadai). Currently in Hong Kong and at a walking distance, they are organizing fax concentrated correspondence from Asia Art Archive for Cities on the Move, a transurban event city exhibition installed 7 times in 7 cities in 1997. They also moderately make cheesecake and home sit for Books and Co, a second hand bookstore and coffee shop.
Jennifer Donovan is an interdisciplinary artist and translator based in the Tijuana-San Diego border. She works between literary (writing and translation) and visual practices to grapple with power relationships embedded in bodies, language and geography. Her practice addresses the ontology of boundaries and liminal spaces through the presence/absence phenomena. Her work has been exhibited at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Centro Cultural Tijuana, Museo Carillo-Gil and Museo de la Ciudad de México, among other spaces. In 2017, Les Figues Press published her English translation of Enfermario by Gabriela Torres Olivares.
Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert. He lived with poet CD Wright in Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico; Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and Providence, Rhode Island before he moved, last year, back to California. As a translator, he spends time in Latin America, Japan, and Spain with some regularity. His recent books include Be With (poems), The Trace (novel being adapted to film), and Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems (translation).
Evan Kleekamp is a writer, researcher, curator, and performer. They codirect Les Figues Press in Los Angeles. Evan’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Fence, and Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics. They are the author of two chapbooks, 13 THESES ON STATE-SPONSORED BLACK DEATH IN AMERICA (Kastle Editions, 2016) and Once Upon A Time I Was Michael Thomas Taren (Ghost City Press, 2017)
Jane Lewty is the author of Bravura Cool (1913 Press: 2013), winner of the 1913 First Book Prize in 2011, and In One Form To Find Another (Cleveland State Poetry Center: 2017) winner of the CSU Poetry Center Open Book Prize in 2016. She has also co- edited two essay collections, Broadcasting Modernism (University of Florida Press, 2010) and Pornotopias: Image, Desire, Apocalypse (Litteraria Pragensia, 2009).
Andri Luescher (b. Bern, Switzerland) is the Principal at Schneider Luescher. He holds a Masters of Architecture from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (2008). Luescher currently teaches at Cal Poly Pomona and is a visiting design critic at the University of California Los Angeles, Cal Poly Pomona and Rice University.
Aryana Minai (b. 1994) lives and works in Los Angeles. Minai received a BFA from Art Center College of Design and is a 2020 Yale MFA candidate. Shortly after being born in Southern California, Minai migrated with her family back to Iran. Geometric patterns from Islamic architecture are the basis of Minai’s abstractions. With these forms, Minai creates paintings and sculptures that do not adhere to strict, former rules and compositions. Minai approaches her paintings through an architectural lense that allows her to look at her materials as building materials. Through the process of deconstructing, adding, subtracting and layering, Minai addresses the experience of the body being in constant transition between two places. Minai’s work has been shown in Los Angeles in spaces such as Arvia, Soft Core, Now Space & Central Perk Gallery, and TSA. She has also exhibited at the Bombay Beach Biennale.
April Martin was born in Kenora, Ontario in 1987. She is a recipient of The International Sculpture Centre’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, as well as the Legacy Grant from Women’s Studio Workshop, the John Kurtich Travel Scholarship and the Arts + Science + Culture Initiative Grant from the University of Chicago. She has installed permanent outdoor works in Humboldt Park in Chicago and Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota. Exhibitions include various spaces in Montreal and Chicago as well as in Finland (Galleria Varina), Calgary (UAS), and Milwaukee (The Suburban). Martin has participated in International residencies including AZ West (California), ACRE (Wisconsin), Women’s Studio Workshop (New York), Teton Art Lab (Wyoming) and Emergency in Switzerland. She holds a BA from McGill University (2009) and a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal (2014). In 2016 she completed her MFA in Sculpture at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently based on Manitoulin Island, Ontario. In September of 2018 she will be a ceramics Artist in Residence at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto.
Zeenat Nagree is a writer and researcher frequently engaging with the visual.
Mayra A. Rodríguez is a poet and translator from Bogotá, Colombia. Rodriguez is the recipient of the Anne Waldman Fellowship at Naropa University (2019), and former Postdoctoral Fellow at The John F. Kennedy Institute of Northamerican Studies, Freie Universität Berlin (2018). Rodríguez lives and works in Berlin.
Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya lives in Richmond, Virginia where he is currently doing his MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. The James River passes through there until it finally spills into the Atlantic. He grew up in El Paso (TX) and New Mexico where he could walk to the Rio Grande. Over the summers growing up, he would visit his Grandmother’s houses where they happen to live on the same street. A few blocks away, an underground water cave spills close to a mountain close by where you can swim. There are race horses there, but beware, turtles with long necks like to bite at your toes!
Anton Schneider (b. Mexico City, Mexico) is Principal at Schneider Luescher. He holds a Bachelors of Architecture from the University of Southern California (2003). Schneider is a visiting design critic at the University of California Los Angeles, Cal Poly Pomona, University of Southern California, and Woodbury University.
Gabriela Torres Olivares was born in Monterrey, Mexico. In 2008 she moved to the beautiful border city of Tijuana, and in 2015 she moved to San Diego, where she currently lives. She is the author of three collections of short stories: Están Muertos (2004), Incompletario (2007) and Enfermario (2010), the last of which was translated into English by Jennifer Donovan and published by Les Figues Press in 2017. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals, including Vice, Playboy, Confabulario and Entropy, among others. In 2015-16, she was awarded a grant from the National Foundation for Culture and Arts in Mexico. Her first novel, Piscinas Verticales won the Border of Words Award in 2017 and was published that same year by Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro.
Nadia de Vries is the author of Dark Hour (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018). The poems featured here are from her second book, White Meat (forthcoming), a collection of poems about genetic madness. She lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Joshua Marie Wilkinson‘s most recent book is Meadow Slasher (Black Ocean 2017).
Elisa Wouk Almino is a writer, editor, and literary translator from Portuguese. Currently the L.A. senior editor at Hyperallergic and editor of Harlequin creature’s online translation platform, her writing and translations have appeared in Guernica, Paris Review Daily, The Millions, The Nation, Hyperallergic, and Words Without Borders, among other places. In 2017, she published This House, a book of her Ana Martins Marques poetry translations. She is also the editor of a monograph on the American abstract artist Alice Trumbull Mason (forthcoming Spring 2020). She teaches online translation classes with Catapult and beginning January 2020 she will be teaching translation at UCLA Extension.
Mia You was born in South Korea, raised in the United States, and currently lives in the Netherlands. She is a lecturer in English literature at Universiteit Utrecht and the author of I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007).
CLOSE DISTANCE 