New art exhibit uplifts pandemic era artists
May 13, 2025 11:39 AM
by Natalie Marrero
A new retrospective showcases the work of artists who participated in Beach House and Camera Obscura Art Lab Artist in Residence programs between 2020 and 2024, but whose work was never displayed publicly due to the pandemic closures.
The new exhibit, titled “Santa Monica Artists in Residence, 2020 – 2024,” will be on view at the Annenberg Community Beach House from May 15 through Oct. 5, 2025.
Throughout four years marked by a global pandemic, whose effects continue to resonate today, the artists featured in this exhibit embarked on diverse creative journeys — delving into the remnants of consumer culture, embracing the vitality of the natural world, and envisioning transcendent cosmic landscapes. They offer considerations of bodily autonomy, climate change and displacement, the parameters of “home” and “outside” and seriously playful manipulations of color, form and dimension.
Join the Cultural Affairs Division on May 18 from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Beach House for the opening reception for this exhibit. RSVP here.
The reception follows the Beach House’s second edition of Take A Moment: An Unplugged Series in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month.
The Annenberg Community Beach House residency program began in 2009 with the opening of that facility and unfortunately was closed during the pandemic. The Camera Obscura Artist in Residency program is a 14-week studio residency program hosted at the Camera Obscura building in Palisades Park for six artists each year. The Cultural Affairs division is delighted to soon announce the awardees for the next two fiscal years.
Artists featured in “Santa Monica Artists in Residence, 2020 – 2024”:
“Numbed,” 2012
Born in Long Beach, CA and raised in Seoul, South Korea, Chuck Hohng creates work that reflects the complexities of cultural duality. Navigating life between Korean and American identities, Hohng uses visual language to bridge cultural gaps and explore belonging. He holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Southern California and an MFA from Art Center College of Design.
Hohng’s mixed media works often function as cross-cultural conversations, using symbolism and form to unpack questions of identity, displacement and connection. His practice has taken him to exhibitions and art fairs across the U.S. and internationally – including France, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and the U.K. His work consistently offers a poetic meditation on how cultural nuance shapes personal and collective narratives.
“Neighborhood Cats,” 2025
Dakota Noot is a Los Angeles-based artist and curator whose colorful and fantastical practice explores queer identity through hybrid animal-human figures. Originally from North Dakota, Noot draws on his rural upbringing and fuses it with vibrant, otherworldly imagery. His work spans drawing, painting and installation, often building immersive worlds that are deeply personal and playfully defiant.
Noot holds a BFA from the University of North Dakota and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. He has exhibited widely in Los Angeles and beyond, with solo and two-person shows at Highways Performance Space, MuzeuMM, and PØST. Group exhibitions include Charlie James Gallery, Shoshana Wayne Gallery and the Torrance Art Museum. He is also the co-founder of “Scream Queen,” a nomadic curatorial project with Christopher Velasco. Noot teaches throughout Southern California and was a featured artist at the 2018 Slamdance Film Festival.
“Santa Monica Pier Studio View,” 2021
“Jean and Lamont,” 2021
“Camera Obscura Art Lab Window View,” 2021
Edwin Ushiro is a Southern California-based artist originally from Maui, Hawaii. His layered, light-infused paintings draw heavily from childhood memories, Hawaiian folklore, and Japanese ghost stories, combining nostalgia with the surreal. His mixed media technique – ink and acrylic over Lucite layered with traditional drawings – produces haunting, dreamlike visuals that reflect themes of memory, storytelling and spiritual echoes.
Ushiro earned a BFA with Honors in Illustration from Art Center College of Design and began his career in the entertainment industry as a storyboard artist and visual consultant. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Grand Palais (France), Museum of Kyoto, and the Honolulu Museum of Art. His monograph, “Gathering Whispers,” was published by Zero+ Publishing. Ushiro has also created murals for POW! WOW! festivals in both Hawaii and Long Beach. He currently lives and works between Los Angeles and Maui, continuing to explore the cultural layers of his heritage through his evocative visual language.
“Portal,” 2023
Flora Kao’s installations respond to the psychological toll and alienation of contemporary urban life. Based in Los Angeles, she creates site-responsive works that bring attention to the unnoticed rhythms and structures that shape our built environment. Through repetitive forms and ephemeral materials — such as paper, sound, light, and plants — Kao invites moments of reflection within otherwise mundane or institutional spaces.
Her work isolates subtle sensory details, often transforming everyday patterns like city grids or electrical hums into poetic, immersive systems. Kao challenges passive encounters with architecture by crafting “drawings in space,” prompting viewers to pause and re-engage with their surroundings. Her practice is rooted in a deep awareness of the body, space and the fragile beauty hidden in urban repetition.
“Original Copy #23,” 2024
Georgina Reskala is a Mexican-Lebanese artist living in Santa Monica. Her photography-based practice explores memory, narrative and cultural displacement, often blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction. She received her BFA and MFA from California College of the Arts and studied under influential artists Larry Sultan and Chris Johnson.
Reskala has exhibited at prominent venues including Zona Maco (Mexico City), Seattle Art Fair, Photo LA, and the Venice Institute of Contemporary Art. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Frye Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, and Museo de Arte de Zacatecas, among others. Represented by PDX CONTEMPORARY ART in Portland, Reskala continues to push the visual boundaries of storytelling through experimental photography and mixed media installations.
“(In)/Animate Objects, Doll J8, J9, J10, J17, J18, J19, J20, J23,” 2019
Marsian De Lellis is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist whose work memorializes the lives of the obsessive and overlooked. They blend sculpture, installation, puppetry, and time-based media to tell visual stories that explore animism, neurodivergence and desire.
De Lellis grew up in Greater Boston during the 1980s, a formative time that shaped their sense of otherness and preoccupation with fear, hysteria and fantasy. Their work often features performing objects, cutouts, wearable forms and immersive environments. With a distinct narrative approach, De Lellis creates intimate, sometimes unsettling, explorations of identity, memory, and obsession that resonate with deep emotional and psychological nuance.
“On Being Here 04,” 2024
“On Being Here 01,” 2024
Marzieh Karimi is a Los Angeles-based visual artist whose work investigates memory, absence and presence through photography. Originally from Tehran, Iran, she received both her BA and MA in photography from the University of Tehran and completed her MFA at California State University, Northridge, where she also teaches.
Karimi manipulates photographs to construct imagined spaces that reflect emotionally charged past experiences. Her practice plays with the tension between visual truth and fiction, offering subtle narratives of personal and collective memory. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and often evokes a sense of longing, displacement, and introspective connection.
“Congruent Corner,” 2023
Matt Reynolds is an animated filmmaker, artist and educator raised in the California Bay Area. He received an MFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts in 2016. He was an invited artist in residence at GlogauAIR Berlin in 2013, and the Santa Monica Camera Obscura Art Lab in 2020. Consistent across his work in animation, sculpture, and graphic arts is a fascination with the grotesque and fantastical. His sculptures, made primarily from Styrofoam and stucco, articulate a personal visual lexicon that melds cartoon exaggerations with anatomical and architectural forms to create playful - yet menacing - hybrid morphologies. Reynolds currently teaches animation and media arts through the non-profit organization LA Promise Fund.
“Misericorde 14z,” 2025
Nataša Prosenc Stearns is a Slovenian-born visual artist and filmmaker whose immersive video installations and films explore identity, subconscious worlds and the alienation of modern life. Working between Los Angeles and Ljubljana, her multi-channel video works and nontraditional projections layer space, image and time to create a dreamlike visual language.
With an MFA from CalArts and a background in painting, Stearns’s art has been exhibited at major venues including the Venice Biennale, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Centre Pompidou. Her work embraces the interconnectedness of all things and reflects a poetic meditation on presence, memory and transformation.
“Behind the Curtain,” 2023
Raphaele Cohen-Bacry is a visual artist whose practice centers around perception, presence and the emotional resonance of abstract forms. Her work challenges viewers to step out of the overstimulated pace of modern life and reconnect with stillness, wonder and introspection.
Using gesture, color, and layered mark-making, Cohen-Bacry creates artwork that feels both intimate and universal. She believes art offers a rare opportunity to pause and feel — much like falling in love. Her practice seeks to engage viewers on a visceral level, inviting them to slow down, reflect and be present.
“You Can’t Take That Away From Me,” 2014-2018
Sichong Xie is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist whose work combines performance, sculpture, and installation to examine identity, memory and cross-cultural transformation. She often uses wearable architecture, costumes and masks to reimagine traditional sculptural forms through the body and movement.
A graduate of CalArts, Xie has created performances and installations at venues such as the Wende Museum, MASS MoCA and the Watermill Center. Her work brings personal history — such as her grandfather’s architectural drawings — into public dialogue, using materials like bamboo scaffolding and mesh to explore transience, labor and heritage within global contexts.
“Untitled (Pink Stacked Landscape),” 2023
Sophia Allison is a Los Angeles-based visual artist working across sculpture, drawing and handmade paper. Her practice is rooted in material exploration and personal narrative, often weaving together memory, intuition and layered storytelling.
With an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Allison’s work has been exhibited across the U.S. and abroad, including Craft Contemporary (LA), the Palm Springs Art Fair, and exhibitions in France and South Korea. Her delicately constructed forms and tactile surfaces prompt reflection on fragility, resilience and the emotional texture of lived experience.
“Eaton Fire Sketches #4,” 2025
Susan Chorpenning’s work bridges light, reflection and intuition with a long-standing commitment to feminist activism and site-responsive installation. Having exhibited widely in New York, Paris, Germany and Los Angeles, Chorpenning’s practice draws influence from California light, meditation and personal history.
Chorpenning was a leading voice in the Women’s Action Coalition in NYC during the 1990s and continues to use her art to challenge systemic invisibility. Now based in Altadena, Chorpenning’s work embraces improvisation and material play, transforming light, color and “whatever comes to hand” into meditative visual experiences.
“Bound,” 2025
Victoria May’s work reveals the tension between control and chaos through sculptural constructions and installations that juxtapose unexpected materials. Whether using industrial rubber, silk or surplus fabrics, she transforms everyday detritus into poetic metaphors for human contradictions.
Rooted in both humor and delicacy, her practice explores the absurdities and vulnerabilities within societal systems. May embraces both accident and intention, exposing beauty in the overlooked and the unpredictable. Her work asks viewers to pause and reflect on our flawed, inventive nature.
“Currents, Frailties and Shifting,” 2025
American artist Yvette Gellis, based in Los Angeles, explores themes of impermanence and transformation in her dynamic, participatory paintings. Born in the Chicago area, her early exposure to both vast open landscapes and dense urban environments informs a visual language that challenges the static nature of traditional painting. After studying at UCLA and Art Center College of Design, she earned her M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University in 2008 and continues to expand the boundaries of the medium while remaining engaged with its historical roots.
She has exhibited widely across the U.S. and internationally, including at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Landesgalerie in Austria, and venues in France, Taiwan, and California. Her recent solo show “Verdure” and two group exhibitions at LA Louver Gallery highlight her growing prominence. Gellis’s work has been reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and others, and she has participated in residencies in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections.
While not all artworks have been included in the Beach House exhibit, these artists also took part in the Camera Obscura residency program and some work in the mediums of performance, video, sound and digital work:
Anna Luisa Petrisko is a multimedia artist whose practice spans experimental opera, sound, video, textiles and performance. Her work investigates time, identity, and the sacred through collaborative, non-linear storytelling rooted in ancestral and futuristic visions.
Based in Brooklyn, Chinwe Okona is a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller. Blending music, visual art, and performance, her work reflects personal mythologies, cultural memory, and community-based narrative.
Christian Sampson creates light-based installations that merge painting, sculpture and projection. Drawing on the legacy of the Light and Space movement, his site-specific works use natural light and color to shift viewers’ spatial perception in immersive and ephemeral ways.
Diane Williams creates sculptural assemblages using found and salvaged materials, forming tactile, handmade works that are both visually striking and conceptually rich. Through her intentional material choices, she weaves together personal and postcolonial narratives, uncovering forgotten histories and giving voice to marginalized experiences across global diasporas.
Jenny Ziomek is an illustrator, cartoonist and educator whose visual storytelling has appeared in The New York Times and NPR. Her work is whimsical yet poignant, exploring everyday life with sincerity and humor.
Brazilian artist Joana P. Cardozo’s practice is rooted in ritual and spirituality, focusing on mortality, domesticity and identity through photography and installation. Her work transforms personal moments into shared meditations on life’s fragility and meaning.
Laura Davis
Lauren Davis sees abstraction all around us, woven into exquisite compositions with symmetrical and asymmetrical balance, fractal patterns, spirals and flower petals that follow the Fibonacci sequence. Sacred Geometry and the Golden Ratio also play a role in this intricate design.
Lua Kobayashi explores hidden histories and familial narratives through photography, video and installation. Her investigations into Japanese-American identity and suburban facades uncover the emotional truths embedded within places and lineages.
Matthew Lax is a filmmaker and writer whose hybrid works blend narrative and documentary. Collaborating with diverse communities, Lax examines language, power, labor and intimacy through performative, often surreal visual storytelling.
Melissa Ferrari is an experimental animator and documentarian who explores folklore, science and the supernatural through handmade animation and magic lantern performance. Her work brings overlooked histories into contemporary dialogue with wonder and care.
Ray Chang creates kinetic sculptures and experimental animations that explore the aesthetics of mechanics, labor and perception. His interdisciplinary practice reimagines analog technologies and examines the role of craft in the digital age.
Zach Dorn is a puppeteer, filmmaker and performance artist whose miniature, paper-based worlds delve into memory, nostalgia and emotional complexity. His multimedia performances blend animation, live action and autobiographical storytelling.
Authored By
Natalie Marrero
Cultural Affairs Supervisor