***additional works by: Alex Gross, Natalia Fabia, Shepard Fairey and Victor Castillo were also included.


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

• Alex Gross is based in Los Angeles, California. In 1990, he received a BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In the summer of 2007, Gross’ first retrospective museum show was held at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California. Gross is a recipient of the Artist Fellowship from the Japan Foundation, and several faculty grants from Art Center College of Design. In 2006, Chronicle Books published The Art of Alex Gross, the artist’s first monograph. Discrepancies, Gross’ second fine art book was published by Gingko Press in 2010, and accompanied an exhibition of the same name. 2012 sees the release of the artist’s third fine art book, entitled Now And Then, The Cabinet Card Paintings of Alex Gross. Published by Gingko Press, Now And Then contains 98 mixed media paintings on antique photographs. Gross' work deals with themes of corporate branding, consumption, celebrity and globalism.
   
• Brett Amory was born in 1975 in Chesapeake, Virginia. He has lived in the Bay Area of California for the past 15 years, living in San Francisco for 13 years before relocating to Oakland in 2009, where he is currently based. Amory attended The Academy of Arts in San Francisco. Amory’s ongoing series of works entitled Waiting portray studies of urban life through fragmented cityscapes and anonymous, isolated figures. As the title suggests, the Waiting series is about how we rarely experience living in the now, always awaiting what will come next or obsessed with what has already transpired. In our age of distraction, being in the present is difficult to achieve, often prevented by constant internal dialogue, preoccupation with memories of the past and/or concern for the future. Amory’s work attempts to visually represent this concept of disconnection and anticipation, conveying the idea of transient temporality.
   
• Dylan Egon  was born in 1966 in New York City and is currently based in Jersey City, NJ. He studied Anthropology and Archeology at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. He later studied Film at City Tech University in New York. Egon currently works in tabletop design and product styling of commercial photography for luxury fashion editorial and advertising clients. His personal artwork combines his talent in assemblage, love of objects and extensive knowledge of the history of design. In a review for The New York Times, Benjamin Genocchio referred to Egon's work as “sites of cultural compression, fetishization and wonder.”
   
• FAILE is a Brooklyn-based artistic collaboration between Patrick McNeil (b. 1975, Edmonton, CA) and Patrick Miller (b. 1976, Minneapolis, MN). Since its inception in 1999, FAILE is known for their pioneering use of wheatpasting and stenciling in the increasingly established arena of street art, and for their explorations of duality through a fragmented style of appropriation and collage. During this time, FAILE adapted its signature mass culture-driven iconography to a wide array of media, from wooden boxes and window pallets to more traditional canvas, prints, sculptures, stencils, multimedia installation, and prayer wheels. While FAILE's work is constructed from found visual imagery, and blurs the line between “high” and “low” culture, recent exhibitions demonstrate an emphasis on audience participation, a critique of consumerism, and the incorporation of religious media and architecture into their work.
   
• Haroshi, born in 1978, is a self-taught Japanese artist, currently based in Tokyo. He creates full-scale, three-dimensional, wooden sculptures with used skateboard decks. As a passionate skater from his early teens to present, Haroshi possesses a thorough knowledge of the anatomy of a skateboard and all of its parts including the deck, trucks and wheels. He often scavenges, collecting broken skateboards to recycle the parts and use in his work. With no formal art training, Haroshi has adapted the determined perseverance and DIY ethos of skate culture, into creating works of art. Recently commissioned by NIKE CEO Mark Parker, Haroshi re-created a pair of SB Dunk sneakers with incredible detail and accuracy, made from decks used by several different NIKE pro-skaters — the work was featured in his debut solo exhibition in the United States, Future Primitive.
   
• Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen was born in 1986, and is currently based in Oslo, Norway. He is a self-taught artist whose creative production revolves around classic figurative painting, presented in a contemporary manner. The atmosphere in his subject matter is often depict in a limbo or dream-like state. Despite his realistic approach, photographic accuracy is not what he seeks to achieve.
   
• How & Nosm (Raoul & David Perre) are twin brothers who work collaboratively as graffiti artists and muralists, and are currently based in New York. They were born in the Basque country of San Sebastian, Spain, and raised in Dusseldorf, Germany. In their teens, they honed their graffiti skills during their travels, painting in over 60 countries around the world. In 1997, during a visit to New York, they were invited to join the legendary TATS CRU. In 1999, they permanently relocated to New York, a move that led to their transition from tagging and spray painting to creating refined, large-scale murals and paintings on canvas. Recent works by How & Nosm feature a sparse color pallet of red, black and white, placing an emphasis on their meticulous line work and intricate patterns.
   
• Jim Houser was born in 1973 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the city where he currently resides. He is a self-taught artist and an honorary member of the Philly-based artist collective Space1026. Houser’s installations create a mapping system, cataloguing his psychological states over the course of a particular period of time. His work explores the cadence of speech, science and science fiction, sickness and disease, plants and animals, time travel, ghosts, the art of children, secrets, radio, codes and code breaking, words that sound beautiful and mean something terrible, and words that sound horrible but mean something wonderful. Houser’s collages, paintings and installations have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States, Europe, Australia and Brazil. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Recently, Houser released a vinyl record of instrumental music composed to accompany his installations, the songs are currently available on iTunes.
   
• Marco Mazzoni was born in 1982 in Tortona, Italy, and is currently based in Milan. His portraits feature isolated figures floating within empty white space or solid color backgrounds, facial features are often obscured by the wings of birds and butterflies, or the leaves and petals of floral studies. He takes a realist approach to skillfully render the faces—a focal point of his subjects, while unpainted silhouettes subtly suggest the shapes of their bodies, creating a dichotomy that is both lush and delicate.

• Natalia Fabia is of Polish descent, born in 1983 in Burbank, California, and currently based in Los Angeles. In 2007, she graduated from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Inspired by light, color, punk rock music, hot chicks and sparkles, her work has been featured in numerous gallery exhibitions and publications.
  

• Nicoletta Ceccoli, based in San Marino, Italy, is an award-winning illustrator of over 30 children’s books. Her whimsically allegorical paintings portray doll-like female figures interacting with birds, insects, lizards and other wild creatures in a dark and dream-like fantasy world.
   
• POSE was born Jordan Nickel, in 1980 in Evanston, Illinois, and is currently based in Chicago. Best known for his progressive letter style and technical precision, he began practicing graffiti in 1992 on the CTA's elevated train line during the golden age of Chicago graffiti. In 2004, he received a painting degree from Kansas City Art Institute, keeping his work as POSE a separate affair. As a fine artist, his mixed-media studio works reference pop and comic art, skateboard graphics, collage, graphic design, sign painting and graffiti. Pose is a member of The Seventh Letter, an acclaimed West Coast artist collective and, in 2007, was inducted into Mad Society Kings (MSK) a world renowned crew based in Barcelona.
   
• Revok was born in 1977 in Riverside, California, and is currently based in Los Angeles. In 1990, he began writing graffiti, a passion he has continued for over 20 years. In 2011, his work was included in the Art in the Streets exhibition at the MoCA in Los Angeles, as well as the Street Cred exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of Contemporary Art.
   
• Shepard Fairey was born in 1970, in Charleston, South Carolina, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received a BA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1991. In 1989, Fairey launched an ambitious campaign of stickers and posters featuring a stenciled image of the wrestler Andre the Giant. In the two decades since then, his artwork has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums around the world. Fairey designed the iconic “Hope” graphic for Barack Obama, used during the 2007-2008 presidential campaign. In January 2009, during inauguration week, the “Hope” image was acquired by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and became part of their permanent collection. In February of 2009, a mid-career survey of Fairey’s work over the past 20 years was the subject of his first major museum exhibition at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. In 2010, the show traveled to The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA, and Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH. Fairey's work is included in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC.
   
• Sit, born in 1976, lives and works in Amsterdam. In his NOIR series, he examines the troubled relationship between mankind and the animal kingdom through a bold black and white palette. Sensual textures of fur and feathers are rendered in dark brush strokes in contrast with pale, soft skin tones of female nude figures and the rigid bone of animal skulls.
   
• Souther Salazar was born in 1978 in Hayward, California. In the early 1990s, as a teenager in rural Oakdale, Salazar made photocopied cut-and-paste mini-comics and ‘zines. After graduating from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, he moved to Los Angeles where he lived and worked for ten years before re-locating to Central California, where he is currently based. Salazar’s artwork transports the viewer into a vibrant and endless world of overlapping narratives and dreamscapes—half-remembered, half-imagined places where stories can develop and take on a life of their own. Utilizing a wide variety of freely mixed media, found objects and layers of assemblage, his work evokes the wonders and imagination that many of us abandoned in childhood. Salazar exhibits his collages, paintings, drawings and sculptures in dense and frenzied installations that encourage exploration and discovery.  
   
• Tara McPherson was born in San Francisco in 1976, raised in Los Angeles, and currently based in New York. In 2001, she received her BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA with honors in Illustration and a minor in Fine Art. McPherson is a painter, poster artist and freelance illustrator. Her artwork has been widely published and exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. An image of McPherson's painting, Searching For Penguins, was published in a New York Times article about Jonathan LeVine Gallery in March of 2010. As an illustrator, McPherson has created comic art, covers, advertising and editorial illustrations for DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Warner Brothers, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Kidrobot, Punk Planet, Dogfish Head Brewery, and Nike among others. She’s produced numerous gig posters for musical artists and rock bands such as Beck, Modest Mouse, Mastodon, Death Cab for Cutie and many more.
   
• Victor Castillo was born in 1973 in Santiago, Chile. Following a disillusive experience with art school, Castillo collaborated with Caja Negra, an independent experimental art collective in Santiago, creating mixed media sculpture and video installations. In 2004, the artist moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he established his painting style with references to vintage comics and cartoons. Influenced by seeing the work of Spanish old world masters, Goya in particular, he soon adopted aspects of classical painting in his work. In 2010, Castillo relocated to Los Angeles, California, where he is currently based. Castillo’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide including the Apocalypse Wow exhibition at the Museo D’Arte Contemporanea in Rome, Italy. He has created large-scale indoor murals for numerous institutions such as the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile; the Museum of Modern Art in Chiloe, Chile and the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, Spain.