SHE MOONAGE DAYDREAM:
Facundo Argañaraz, Leah Guadagnoli, Desirée Holman, Kara Joslyn, Max Maslansky, Liz Robb, Tamra Seal, Emily Weiner, and Cate White

CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions is pleased to present She Moonage Daydream, an exhibition exploring fantasmas, gender aesthetics, identity tropes, and the female versus male gaze. In honor of gender fluid favorite - David Bowie, the exhibition is titled after his 1971 single Moonage Daydream. The song tells of an alien messiah whose fate as a 'soul lover' was to save the world from impending doom.

I'm an alligator, I'm a mama-papa coming for you
I'm the space invader, I'll be a rock 'n' rollin' bitch for you
Keep your mouth shut, you're squawking like a pink monkey bird
And I'm busting up my brains for the words

Keep your 'lectric eye on me babe
Put your ray gun to my head

Press your space face close to mine, love

 Freak out in a moonage daydream oh yeah

Don't fake it baby, lay the real thing on me

The church of man, love, is such a holy place to be
Make me baby, make me know you really care
Make me jump into the air

Keep your 'lectric eye on me babe
Put your ray gun to my head
Press your space face close to mine, love
Freak out in a moonage daydream oh yeah

Keep your 'lectric eye on me babe
Put your ray gun to my head
Press your space face close to mine, love
Freak out in a moonage daydream oh yeah

Keep your 'lectric eye on me babe
Put your ray gun to my head
Press your space face close to mine, love
Freak out in a moonage daydream oh yeah

Freak out, far out, in out (D. Bowie, 1971)

 

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Facundo Argañaraz lives and works in San Francisco. His current practice is aimed at confronting and living within the conditions of contemporary aesthetics, exposing the banality and entropic characteristic of modern constructs and the erosion of content through time. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he studied illustration and painting from a young age and later earned a degree in law and political science from the University of Buenos Aires. He has exhibited internationally, and has had recent exhibitions at Highlight Gallery, the Popular Workshop, Queen’s Nails Projects, David Cunningham Projects, The LAB, and MCCLA, all in San Francisco; Greene Exhibitions (Los Angeles); Arizona State University’s Museum (Tempe, Arizona) The Contemporary Austin (Austin, Texas); and Sonoma Valley Museum of Arts (Sonoma, California).

Leah Guadagnoli lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. After receiving a BFA in Painting and Art History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she received an MFA in at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including with 247365 (New York, NY); Formerly Gallery (Brooklyn, NY); Mason Gross Art Gallery (New Brunswick, NJ); and Krannert Art Museum (Champaign, IL). In 2016 she was awarded a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and received the Yaddo Artist Residency Grant in 2015. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Roll Magazine, and Maake Magazine.

Desirée Holman is an artist based in Oakland, California. Her multi-sensory work positions groups of individuals and theatrical tools, like costumes or props, in settings that illuminate ideas of identity. Her work attempts to occupy British anthropologist Victor Turner’s notion of liminality, a transitional state of ritual wherein participants fully engaged in performance inhabit a series of new, hybrid identities. Holman holds a Masters degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Earning critical acclaim for her work, Holman was awarded a San Francisco Modern Museum of Art SECA award in 2008 and in 2007 received the Artadia: Fund for Art and Dialogue award. From 2016-2017, she will be returning to SFMOMA as a fellow in the Film & Performance Department with a new works commission. Solo exhibitions of her work include the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2009), Montreal’s SKOL (2016), Denver’s Black Cube Nomadic Museum (2015), and the Berkeley Art Museum’s MATRIX program (2011). International exhibitions of Holman’s work include the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Berlin’s Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Milan’s BnD, and Toronto’s YYZ. Reviews of Holman’s work have appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, Los Angeles Times, NY Arts, Artillery, San Francisco Chronicle and Artweek.

Kara Joslyn is based in Los Angeles. She received a BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2008, completed post-baccalaureate studies in Painting at Columbia University, NYC in 2011, and a MFA at University of California San Diego in 2016. Recent exhibitions include a two-person show at Land and Sea (Oakland, CA), and group shows at Bizkaia Aretoa Universidad del Pais Vasco (Bilbao, Spain), Egyptian Art & Antiques (Los Angeles), SPF 15 (San Diego), and Alternativa Oncé (Monterrey, Mexico). Upcoming exhibitions include: a two-person show at LVL3 (Chicago), and a solo exhibition with Mark Moore Gallery (Los Angeles). Joslyn received the Russell Foundation Grant for her work with Holography, is a current graduate teaching fellow in visual arts at UCSD, and was a two-time nominee for the Robert Motherwell Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture.

Max Maslansky lives and works in Los Angeles. His recent solo exhibitions include Dutton (New York), The Finley (Los Angeles), Honor Fraser (Los Angeles) and Galerie Sébastien Bertrand (Geneva, Switzerland). He has exhibited nationally and internationally including Night Gallery (Los Angeles), ltd (Los Angeles), Regina Rex (New York) and Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University (Orange), among many others. His work was included in the 2014 ‘Made in LA’ at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Maslansky is the host of “Riffin” a bimonthly comedy and interview program on Kchung Radio.

Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, Liz Robb currently lives and works in San Francisco. She creates textured surfaces and sculptural forms with natural materials such as wool, cotton, jute, and indigo. She completed her BFA in Fashion Design at the University of Cincinnati and her MFA in Fibers at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Robb has exhibited nationally and internationally including PDX Contemporary (Portland), Den Breughel (Haacht, Belgium), Transmission Gallery (Oakland), Marin Community Foundation (Novato), and Sanchez Art Center (Pacifica). Last year she completed a residency at the Icelandic Textile Center in Blönduós, Iceland.

Tamra Seal’s light oriented sculptures have form drawn from cinematic imagery. Referencing telephone booths, swimming pools and flying saucers, Seal fabricates her sculptures with synthetic materials in fluorescent colors creating works that are otherworldly, strange and affective. Seal was originally trained as a painter at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Turning to large scale sculpture/installation, she earned an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. Engaged in a hybrid practice, Seal creates three-dimensional works and often proceeds to photograph and animate them towards a sculpture-photo-meld. Oscillating between 2D and 3D perceptual phenomena, her work challenges the viewer to contemplate their individual sensory experience. Recent exhibitions include 2 x 2 Solos: Pro Arts, Ever Gold, Interface and City Limits galleries. Seal lives and works in Oakland.

Emily Weiner lives and works in New York City. She received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University (2003) and her MFA in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts (2011). Exhibitions include: Soloway (Brooklyn), Regina Rex/Harbor (New York), The Walter Phillips Gallery (Alberta, Canada), Sargent's Daughters (New York), Kravetz Wehby (New York), and Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia). She is faculty at The School of Visual Arts in NYC and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Residencies and awards include: Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome (2015); artist-in-residence at The Banff Centre, Canada (2012); and artist-in-residence at Camac Art Center in France (2011). She co-runs Soloway, an artist-run gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and The Willows, an occasional apartment show series in Brooklyn Heights. Her writing on art has appeared in ArtForum, Domus, and Time Out New York, among other publications. She is interested in how symbols move between the collective unconscious and individual perception. Her works juggle icons, geometries, and material motifs which have been revived, reshaped, and recoded over time.

Cate White is a visual artist living and working in Oakland, California. Having spent her formative years in the back-woods culture of guns, 4x4s and meth in Northern California and the majority of her adult life in various stages of mental and material abjection, White is familiar with societal margins. Much of her work is informed by her life on these margins, both in subject matter and philosophical perspective. She received her MFA from John F. Kennedy University's Arts and Consciousness program in Berkeley, CA in 2012. While primarily a painter, she also works in sculpture, video and bookmaking. She received the 2013-2014 ProArts 2x2 Solos Award, the 2014-2015 Tournesol Award from Headlands Center for the Arts, and is currently a grantee at the Roswell-Artist-in-Residence program in New Mexico. Her stop-motion animation video Around the Corner is currently on view at The Oakland Museum of California and her 10-volume book series The Book of Life is available from Half Truth Press on Amazon.