Artist Profiles

Catalina Antonio Granados

Catalina Antonio Granados was born in Mexico City in 1990. She received her BA in Spanish Literature at UNAM and did her BFA at NYU Steinhardt. Currently she is pursuing her MFA at Columbia University. She is interested in analyzing the performance of colonial tools that the US empire uses over Latin America and its people, especially the control of discourse through politics of translations in asylum applications of Latin Americans in the US, and the narratives imposed on immigrants within the courtrooms. She approaches this by trying to develop tools influenced by radical theories from Latin American pedagogues, Greek theatre and toys.

Catalina Antonio Granados, BFA 2018.

Chris Bogia

My studio work reflects my ongoing interest in interior design and decorative art. I think about the way domestic objects and spaces can become charged with personal meaning beyond their intended use and how that meaning could be visualized. Formally, I employ many of the strategies and materials that interior designers use, but without a “client” or even a room, I can be as abstract, impractical, and personal as I want to be. I imagine that my work sits in a shifting queer space between contemporary art and decorative art, courting and resisting both worlds simultaneously.

Chris Bogia, BA, concentration in Studio Art, 2000. I am currently participating in the inaugural exhibition of Ruschman Gallery in Chicago, and have an upcoming exhibition with Art in Buildings in January at 125 Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan, as well as participating in the 2020 NADA fair with Mrs. Gallery.

Lu Rose Biltucci

At this moment, I’m making works in pursuit of emotional alchemy, investigations of feeling that spring from the personal and reach gently out towards the world. Such is the aim of a little spell, made in listening to grief over kaleidoscopic loss. In writing this work I sought out the corners of the losses, dusting the seams of the room. Within the collaborative scheme Garage Sessions Improvisation, my collaborator Cole Stapleton and I met over common ground in the time of quarantine. Through curious sound and movement, we look to alchemize our shared grief over living through a time of seemingly endless collapse. In all works, this reckoning is done with an eye to future growth.

Lu Rose Biltucci (they/them), who also works under the artist name heart body, earned their BFA in Studio Art from NYU in 2018. Spanning media and disciplines, from poetry, sound, drawing, textiles to the occasional sculpture, their work ultimately leans towards healing, stretching out bound up knots of ecological and cultural histories to dream possible futures and defy the supposed scarcity of our present. New textile work will be on view in November 2020 within a collective blanket fort for artist Monilola Ilupeju’s exhibition at Galerie im Turm in Berlin. A forthcoming collection of fourteen poems, published by Flatpack Publications, will be made available as print-at-home broadsides and an accompanying release of video readings for each poem on Flatpack’s IGTV, starting late October 2020.

Candice Chu

I went to pick up some cheap flowers from the bodega for a drawing. As I stood in front of large wilting lilies and dyed carnations, I heard a frenzied screeching and saw several birds flying overhead. A large bird of prey with brightly colored wings held a smaller bird in its beak. The sound I heard wasn’t from the captured bird as you’d imagine, but from the other swallows, who in equal parts alarm and grief circled above the scene, confused and frantic, moving from branch to branch, unable to stay still.

Over the course of the next few months during the pandemic, I would see several dead birds on the street, their wings often splayed open on the sunlit asphalt, with their wing feathers fanning out. I wondered if these were things I had never noticed before or if more birds were dying.

The accompanying drawings are all graphite on watercolor paper and contemplate the shadow of feminine forms.

Candice Chu, MFA 2015. I completed my MFA in studio art from NYU in 2015 and also have a degree in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University. I have been teaching undergraduates and making work for the past several years and view both practices as part of a bigger project of humanism. https://candicecchu.com

Nayda Collazo-Llorens

Fleeting words and phrases create a non-linear narrative in this silent video that explores the transient nature of thoughts and memories. The work takes advantage of the inaccuracies of the optical character reader (OCR) used to convert a scanned image of the aged typewritten document into text.

Nayda Collazo-Llorens, MFA in Studio Arts, 2002. Solo exhibitions include Unmappings at LMAKgallery in New York City in 2018; Recorded instance plotted movement at Oolite Arts’ Window Project Space in Miami Beach in 2018; RE_SIGHTINGS at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, MI, 2016; and Debajo de la casa at El Cuadrado Gris in San Juan, PR, 2016. Her work was part of Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, 2017–19. Other recent projects have included ELF (Extremely Low Frequency), a video produced in collaboration with writer Ander Monson, and the multimedia performance ELF, in collaboration with composer Ashlee Busch. www.naydacollazollorens.com

Samhita Kamisetty

Samhita Kamisetty was born in Portland, Oregon and grew up in Bangalore, India where she is now currently based. She graduated from New York University in 2019 with a BFA in Studio Art.

She is engaged in the symbolism of “abundance” within the home and how the loneliness of a physical place unfolds to form something “fruitful” and “whole”. Her process stems from observing ways in which domestic spaces and her immediate environment are activated by the richness, texture, shape and character of objects that carry traces of decay, accumulation, mending, and growth. It is also a way of recognizing and preserving stories, rituals, movement, tradition, ceremonies, and things of her South Indian heritage that function beyond the decorative and are able to transcend place. Her approach to making is to intuitively imitate these processes of layering and overlaying through drawing, printmaking, paper-making and ceramics.

Samhita Kamisetty, BFA in Studio Art, 2019, samhitakamisetty.com

Cooper Lovano

This is a memorial for Arkan Hussein Khalaf, a boy who was killed in Celle, Germany in April of this year.

I think memorials have the power to help grieving community members and keep someone’s name in public discussion and memory. There are many racially motivated attacks in Germany recently, and I am looking for ways to honor the victims and provide support to loved ones when possible.

The questions I am thinking about in making recent memorials include:
-Are they built with the person’s family and immediate community in mind? Or are they meant to be an educational tool for people who do not know about the victim’s life?
-What can be done that is a practical source of support for the victim’s family?
-What sources am I pulling from in learning about their story myself? If I provide links to websites, what are the biases and backgrounds of the organizations I am linking to?
-How does not belonging to the racial group being attacked influence how and why I choose who is being memorialized? Am I making sure to avoid white savior complexes and thinking about getting credit for or benefiting in any way from telling their story?

Cooper Lovano, NYU Studio Art, 2017

Lara Saget

My work makes materially visible the limitations of logic. My practice is fueled by the belief that not all facts are absolute. The truth is bigger than the brain will ever cognitively understand, it’s limitless.

I start with historic sourced marble, potently compressed matter. I don’t know where the matter has been or who has held it before me. I trap historic sourced marble in metal. Logically, the heat of the metal cracks the marble. However, I have found that this is not always the case. When heated to the same degree, the materials co-habitate. The separation between them is circumstantial, temporary, everything material is temporary. Within something as basic as stone or found NASA electrode graphite lives a story that is impossible to cognitively know or understand.

I introduce flowerfood to tree. Flower food consumes tree. Maybe trees speak a language that humans have gone deaf to. If I allow my head to open, I’ll see with something bigger than my eyes.

There may be no answers, nothing concrete to hold onto. But there are patterns; my charge is to distill the patterns in order to reveal new archetypes and, in doing so, crystallize the transience of certainty.

Lara Saget received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University (2012) and her MFA in Fine Arts from New York University, Steinhardt (2018). Her work has been exhibited in the US and abroad in varied spaces including Art Ichol, Maihar, India; Fortnight Institute, New York, NY; 80 Washington Square East Gallery, New York, NY; Studio 106, Los Angeles, CA; Wells Studio, Paris, France; Peninsula Art Space, Brooklyn, NY; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Art Helix, Brooklyn, NY, and more. Lara co-founded Studio 200, a community-based art collective and open forum for exhibitions, interdisciplinary workshops, performances, and new residency program. Larasaget.com

Anatashia Saminjo

Anatashia’s work appropriates images of American popular culture to dissect themes of mass consumerism and excess, ultimately speaking to the cycles and hierarchies found within the capitalist structure. Since working in time-based mediums, she depends on film, the cinematic experience, and mass media as a means to understand the ironic, uncanny, and absurdities of life’s constructions.

Since graduating from NYU in 2019, Anatashia has been working as a graphic designer in Singapore. Her work can be found at www.anatashiasaminjo.com.

Nathan Storey

Nathan Storey is an experimental artist and poet living between New York and Texas. His studio practice questions our relationship with iconography, reimagines the queer as the natural, and proposes new ways of seeing. Through engaging methodologies of collage, print, and performance, Storey composes installations, happenings, and images that reckon with the body, language, culture, and nature.
His work is informed by printmaking as protest, queer ecology, liberation, subjectivity, sexuality, the unconscious, over saturation, mysticism, and world-making.

Recent projects include installations and performances at Castillo de Luna, Rota-Cádiz; Prattsville Art Center, Prattsville; PS120, Berlin; Assembly Room, New York; 80WSE Gallery, New York; and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York.  Storey holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from New York University. In 2019, they founded SUBLIMATION, supporting intersectional, experimental, and interdisciplinary works by underrepresented and queer artists in New York’s Lower East Side. Website: nathanstoryarchive.com

Gabrielle Vitollo

WARPING is my first venture into animation that explores the crosspollination between painting and digital technologies. I began digitally animating my physical abstract paintings in order to make my work accessible to people who otherwise could not witness my paintings live due to travel restrictions. My digitally animated paintings incorporate the pulsations of bodies, the timbre of sounds, the divergences and intersections explored through medium specificity and hybrid re-mixing. In WARPING, I strove to create an experience that reoriented the viewer into the present – like witnessing a moth transform from a chrysalis, or a portal by which the world is born anew.

Gabrielle Vitollo is a painter and polymath investigating the intersections between corporeality, technology, and art history. She is the recipient of awards including the Fulbright Research Grant for Painting & Printmaking (Germany, 2018-19), the DAAD Scholarship for Fine Art (2020-21), the Martin Wong Scholarship (2016-17), and two Elizabeth Greenshields grants (2011 & 2013). Vitollo’s work has been exhibited at Galerie der Hochschule für Künste Bremen, Kunstpunkt Berlin, The Knockdown Center, 80WSE Gallery, Castor Gallery, Pennsylvania’s Center For Women In the Arts, and The Listasafn Arnesinga Art Museum. She is currently based in Berlin, Germany. More at http://www.gabriellevitollo.com

Chloe Walecki

BARS is a 15:41 minute video piece, that uses sound and music mixing, typography and language, and 2D animation to go through a series of deeper and sacred meanings, symbolisms, confessions, and jokes. The content ranges from deeply personal and historic to unanimously a part of the human experience. I am interested in the things that don’t make sense to anyone else but me, only revealing enough where the audience can tell the thing is meaningful without knowing how — because having things that are important to only you is how you know that you exist. Holding on to the idea that everything is connected, I organize the parts of the video in a way that, when the parts create a whole, all of the seemingly random content holds value and autonomy (and is indeed not random at all), implying that if everything in this video is connected, then what beyond it isn’t?

Chloe Walecki, BFA in Studio Art, 2020, chloewalecki.com

Alston Watson

Brainworks and House’n are two projects in which I have accomplished my goal of merging black traditions in electronic music with the ethos of Y2K design aesthetics. Embracing obsolete media has become a large time and money consuming obsession, but it’s important to me because physical media can stand the test of time. Even when it doesn’t, it becomes nostalgic and beautiful in its decay. All of my recent work is draped in mid-2000’s nostalgia, and the yearning for past visions of the future. The dystopia written about in sci-fi novels has come true for us in more ways than one, but our reality never looks as cool as it’s fictionally depicted. In these two projects, I wanted to present the work as being futuristic in design, while the content itself holds the inherent politics of black dance music and afro-futurist rhetoric.

Alston Watson NYU Studio Art BFA Class of 2019 House’n is my latest release. I produce new music monthly and DJ occasionally for Harvard student radio WHRB 95.3 FM. https://www.gum.computer/

Christopher Yang

In this video series, I ruminate on subjects spurred by the pandemic ranging from the expanding presence of cyberspace to the abject nature of viruses. Through free association, I look to exhibit and probe my anxiety surrounding these issues.

Christopher Yang, BFA in Studio Art , Class of 2018, christophertyang.com