IRINA CONTRERAS is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist and educator whose projects engage language, site and dispersal. She received her BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2004 with additional coursework done in the Social Research Department at UCLA and Fine Arts at San Francisco Art Institute. She is a staff writer for make/shift Magazine, editor in chief for LOUDmouth Magazine and a contributor to the recent anthology Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity. Her beginnings in writing and politics began as a day wandering through the San Fernando Valley with little purpose but trouble and ultimately ended at the Hong Kong Café to see the band MDC (Millions of Dead Cops), join the LA chapter of Riot Grrrl and participate in the walk out for racist anti-immigrant Prop 187. This ensured a place in her heart fond for punk rock and the diy scene, bombing, “performance” and making out in alleys closely connected to a future engaged in social change, dialogue and roof raising. Without this and a familial history invested in the pipefitters union, race car driving in Pacoima and farm work, her consciousness would be lost in a strip mall in Woodland Hills.

In Christie Frields "All For From Nothing", four duplicate cartoon images are plastered to a wooden structure,as is often seen bus stop shelters and scaffolding. The cartoon depicted "Milk Tickets for Babies, in Place of Milk," was created by Thomas Nast in 1876. In it, a rag doll sits on a ledge, surrounded by vouchers, signs, and a hand thrusting a coupon that reads "THIS IS MILK BY ACT OF CON (GRESS). In it, Nast, one of the most famous cartoonists of his time, addressed the leading issue of the day: the debate about money at the end of the Civil War. Because the North printed money to fiance the war, effectively abandoning the gold standard, debate raged about how to deal with the 'greenbacks' - the funny money. "Hard" gold standard guys like Nast argued that greenbacks should be destroyed - burned to get back to the 'real' gold standard. They referred to paper money as the "rag baby", and were deeply suspicious of its value. Nast's cartoon expresses the general anxiety over representation. Well before René Margritte's "Ceci n'est pas un pipe", Nast and the hard money camp were denouncing the funny money, wary of congressional powers to declare value out of thin air. Fast forward to 2008 PATRIOT ACTS. In her bus stop, two rag dolls sit, perched together, waiting for the bus perhaps. Both wear black and white stripes -- A referee shirt, a bar code, a prison garb, a foot ball jersey. Both wear bling and have computer character faces (a wink and stick tongue out). Boy rag doll wears an inverse Nike slogan on the heel - the Hermes sign for money, while girl rag doll sports Chinese characters for prosperity. As the Fed lowers interests rates and the House passes a stimulus package to combat our economic decline, as we reel from the spinoff effects of sub-prime fueled housing bubble, Frields dolls wait for the bus to arrive. Waiting and waiting and waiting for this public service, if it still exists.

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In Zeal Harris's recent work, the kind of stories she paints are often narratives of personal experience.  These are daily lifetestimonials with socio-political significance. For Harris, the personal is political, and the personal is critical.  Consequently, she's interested in fascinating, funny, and poignant life experiences which contain layered themes to discuss topics such as race, prejudice, gender, sexuality, culture, and class.

Sara Hendren is an artist-researcher, or a research artist, depending on the project at hand. She is interested in origins, systems, and communities of many kinds: natural history, genetics and DNA, epistemology, and socio-political institutions and practices. She is trained in visual arts, European history, and social science research, and lately she’s exhibited paintings and drawings around the U.S. She is currently at work on a public project about jury duty, the first in a series she’s planning, called Tools for Historical Imagination.

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In his most recent sculptural work, Vincent Johnson uses vernacular architecture particular to the landscape of Southern California as a site for formal experimentation that investigates social and political aspects of space.

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Hillary Mushkin's work in video, animation, installation and print explores how virtual and physical places are imagined and used. Over the past several years she has been particularly interested in how nostalgic American ideals of comfort  and security shape our environment and society. In her most recent work, the trajectories of the contemporary American idyll and remote control militarism intersect.

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The films of Meena Nanji focus on the global diaspora of post-colonial peoples and the disruption and replacement of cultural values, traditions, and ideologies that result from these migrations.

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Through experiments in rhythm, presence, and contact, Adam Overton's work plumbs the depths of the bodymindperson, to map the intimate distance between individuals, as it encourages conscious experimentation with common and alternative avenues of interpersonal exchange. A fascination with the practices and challenges of awareness, acknowledgment, and [co]existence are currently fueling his investigations.

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In her sculptural practice, Rebecca Ripple  challenges the voice, by imbedding it in matter. Ripple is interested in how language functions within the mind and how the mind relates to both abstraction and physicality.

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Susan Silton's work explores how observations are shaped and distorted by socialization and media, and how perception both frames and limits our definitions of identity. This conceptual framework is supported by the use of diverse media—including photographic-based processes, video, installation, and offset lithography—which 
collectively challenge viewers' assumptions about what and how they perceive.

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Materiality, in Pam Strugar's work has an uncomfortable, uncanny,exorcizing relationship to a complex and unorthodox mating with the body, spirituality, feminism, eroticism and depth psychology. What she strives for in her art practice is the idea that there is room for creative exploration in the realm of resistance. Strugar reaches an understanding of the social content and its unseemly contradictions to redefine and explore them through installationand performance.

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Shirley Tse utilizes sculpture as a process of negotiation between physics, formal structure and economics. Her most recent work is a meditation on the materials and forms of ancient and modern militaristic objects.