ABBY GREGG is an interdisciplinary artist based out of Denver, CO. Through painting, ceramics, and sound, she creates imagined worlds that explore the tension between aquatic, cavernous, or microscopic realms and toxic accumulation.
Through intuitive processes of painting, ceramics, and sound, Gregg invents narratives of diverse ecosystems coping within sublime complexity. The improvisational practice of transforming material into landscape creates spaces that appear prehistoric and futuristic simultaneously. These imagined worlds explore the tension between cumulative ecological mistreatment and unseen realms.
Her interdisciplinary work collects inspiration from local biodiversity and its intersections. Gregg is interested in the complexity of living beings who require defense mechanisms, membranes, and extensions of themselves for communication and safety. In all of her works, communities of diverse forms populate and interact within layers of toxic residue.
Gregg completed an MFA in Studio Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute, a BFA in Painting and Art-education from the University of Georgia, and currently facilitate clay programming at the Denver Children’s Museum.
KATE LASTER is an interdisciplinary artist and educator.
There is a cumulative intensity to the gesture of marks Laster carves as she explores tenderness, the temporary, and generational space between people. Through figurative woodcut, installation and generative intervention she uses the lens of her upbringing as a Jew in rural Alaska to consider place, displacement, diaspora and adaptation.
Working either monumentally or intimately small, Laster’s practice is connected to the weight of the past, human migration and the effervescent exhaustion of everyday love.
Her thesis, GENTRIFICATION OF THE DEAD: How The Displacement Of Cemeteries Paved The Way For Rethinking Monuments In San Francisco, was a site specific praxis of art-making and research.
Collaboration is an essential heartbeat to Laster’s practice. She has worked with Woosh Kinaadeiyí, the SF Poster Syndicate, Palace of Trash, Resolana, and with her collaborator, Steph Kudisch as Hevra Kadisha (חֶבְרָה קַדִישָא).
Laster currently teaches at the San Francisco Center for the Book, ARTIVATE: Public Art Now! through Collective Action Studio and ART SCHOOL public programming. She has taught collaborative printmaking at the Tenderloin Boys & Girls Club through City Studio and was a teaching artist in residence at White Oaks Elementary. She worked as Co-director of the Diego Rivera Gallery, a historic art space at 800 Chestnut Street where she facilitated weekly exhibitions. Laster has curated the Open Book sequence of exhibitions, including the most recent iterations at Root Division and Arion Press with an upcoming exhibit at Open Windows Cooperative.
STEPH KUDISCH is a genderfluid artist & educator whose artwork coaxes viewers to become participants, questioning assumptions and implicit bias about disability and queerness. They use mutability to reveal the worlds of indeterminacy that we dwell in, emphasizing the urgency of gathering spaces that foster discursive communities. In much of their work they reinterpret Jewish myth and ritual in the queer tradition of reimagining possibility.
Focusing in screenprint, sound, and ceramics, Kudisch recently received their MFA as well as the Isaac M. Walter Sculpture Prize from the San Francisco Art Institute. They are a member of the San Francisco Poster Syndicate, where they create and live-print screenprinted political posters. Kudisch and their collaborator Kate Laster form the collective Hevra Kadisha in which they create site-specific pieces that are grounded in intensive research, across the mediums of printmaking, sculpture, performance, and sound. They were awarded a residency at In Cahoots in Petaluma, CA in 2020.
Kudisch is Public Education faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute and they teach ceramics classes to youth at SOMArts. Kudisch teaches with the San Francisco Children’s Art Center’s Preschool For All initiative, where they teach printmaking, drawing, sculpture, and painting in schools throughout San Francisco, as well as drawing and sculpture classes for youth and adults with Earthfire Arts Studio.
BEN CORNISH is an interdisciplinary artist from Salem, Oregon living in San Francisco.
His images act as unsure timelines of mistakes and anomalies. His paintings, prints and drawings recall tensioned narratives that governed his childhood. Ideologies spoken with a certainty that could only be argued back in a kind of storytelling steeped in repentance. Cornish choses to speak in image. Bosch made paintings for the dungeons, Cornish makes images for houses filled with arguments and quiet anxiousness hidden, for oneself, from an environment built of allegory and alibi.
He received his Bachelor of Arts from The Evergreen State College. He is earning his MFA in Studio Art from The San Francisco Art Institute. Recently he was awarded the Edwin Anthony & Adalaine Boudreaux Cadogan scholarship in 2018 and was selected to show in MFA Now 2019 at Root Division.