Material Performance

Jennifer Boyd (she/her) (@jenniferboydstudio) is a multi-disciplinary artist questioning our digital lives. Growing up in Cupertino, California, during the digital revolution situated the artist in a constant state of flux between awe and dread as she watched Cupertino change her community and the world.

One of the questions asked in Boyd’s work is how the digital age impacts people both individually and globally through the promise of connection, while the ever-present pressures of perpetual connectivity alter the relationships we have with ourselves and each other. Each work queries the literal, psychological, and emotional effects of life mediated and organized by screens.

Lately, Boyd’s practice is interested in the human residue we leave behind - the biological as well as the material, and how both can be evidence of our lives from and beyond the digital era.

Mo Zhou (she/her) (@zhoum04) is an artist working across sculpture, assemblage, and installation. Taking everyday objects and their subtle incongruities as a starting point, she explores the unstable relationships between bodies, objects, and social space: how objects guide movement, how environments shape habits of looking, and how seemingly personal judgments and choices are influenced by our surroundings. Her attention extends from overlooked objects to the relationships that unfold through them, often taken for granted because they are so deeply embedded in everyday life. She works with the friction between materials to create a gap between established expectations and the actual experience of her work. In an increasingly smooth society, she wants to bring friction back, allowing familiar relationships to be felt anew and reexamined through moments of resistance and hesitation.

mozhoustudio.com

Farzaneh Hajighasemi (she/her) (@farzaneh.hajighasemi) is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist based in California, working across installation, sculpture, textiles, and performance. Her practice explores intergenerational memory, displacement, unbelonging, in-betweenness, and femininity. Drawing on Iranian mysticism, particularly alam-e mesal, the imaginal world between the material and spiritual realms, she reflects on living between cultures, places, and identities. With a background in architecture and a personal connection to handmade traditions passed down through generations of women, she works with Termeh silk textile, handmade paper, and architectural forms. By deconstructing Termeh, she reveals its delicate threads and uncovering the cultural roots woven into its fabric. Its paisley (boteh) patterns, traditionally associated with the cypress tree, inspire forms that speak of femininity, resilience, freedom, and mortality. Through Persian garden imagery and cypress-inspired structures, she creates spaces that connect home and exile, presence and absence, continuity and loss, while exploring the bonds between generations and the memories they leave behind.

Alex Escobedo (@alex3scobedo) is a multi-disciplinary artist who allows ordinary objects, unfinished gestures, gifts, remnants, and failed attempts to gather without forcing them into resolution. Through improvisation and play, uncertainty becomes not an obstacle to overcome, but a way of remaining available to experience.

Melina Alhadeff (she/they) is an artist often and always interested in memory. She’s currently working on the figure of the alter-ego and its expression through motion and objects. This research is linked to another study on the city of Los Angeles and its urban development over time. She’s interested in anomalies, singularities and dysfunctions as a way to understand the structure of systems and their present existences.

Francesca Maestas (@francesca_maestas) is a Tewa, Navajo, and Cherokee artist enrolled in Pojoaque Pueblo Santa Fe NM. She is based in Santa Fe NM and Los Angeles CA. Specializing in 3 dimensional art, Francesca works with various materials including clay, willow and plant matter, sinew, and stones. Clay’s vulnerability allows space to question expectations of traditional pottery and femininity. She explores the fluidity of the natural world centering water in her work while focusing on the critical necessity of this vital life source. By intentionally combining these earth-based materials, her work highlights the duality of fragility and resilience. Central to her practice is an exploration of the powerful connection between women and water, combining ancestral traditions with contemporary sculptural forms.