Mark Baugh-Sasaki

Mark Baugh-Sasaki presents new photograms created using the light of his arc welder; sculptures in granite and steel; and a new video installation. Baugh-Sasaki is interested in the hybridity that results when the natural landscape is transformed through its relationship with the industrial. His artwork employs an ever-evolving combination of industrial and natural materials and processes to create fantastical objects that are inhabitants of or illustrate the evolving systems and interactions in this new landscape.

Baugh-Sasaki, a Bay-Area native, attended Carnegie Mellon University for his BFA. He was recently awarded the Honorary James Irvine Foundation Fellowship at the Djerassi Artist Residency in Woodside, and he will be installing majork works on the grounds of the California Shakespeare Theater as this season's featured artist. His most recent solo exhibition is on view now at the University of San Francisco. He has had two solo exhibitions at Krowswork, and his work is included in numerous public and private collections. For more information go to: krowswork.com/civilizedwild.html
krowswork.com/markbaughsasaki.html
markbaugh-sasaki.com

Monet Clark

Monet Clark presents large-scale videos from her Look Book series. Set in austere, yet jewel-like environments, Clark embodies and employs the slick visual language of the fashion world to perform acts from the sacred to the mundane, creating moving video portraits iconographic of 21st-century California culture. The resultant pieces are sumptuously spare, raw and honest, wickedly humorous, and embody the actual ritual potential of the medium.

Clark attended the San Francisco Art Institute for her MFA in the early 1990s, in what was arguably the moment when video art was transitioning from an alienated, almost always performance-based medium with little exposure in museums and galleries to its role as the cutting edge of artmaking, and its acceptance as a gallery and collectible medium. Her work has been exhibited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Kitchen in New York City, and galleries throughout the United States. For more go to: krowswork.com/monetclark.html

Jason Hanasik

Jason Hanasik debuts a new video from his four-year examination of the construction of masculine idenity surrounding the coming of age of Sharrod, a young man in Hanasik's hometown of Virginia Beach, VA, home of the largest Naval Base in the U.S.

Hanasik has an MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA and a BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase. Hanasik works in a variety of media including photography, film and installation. His work has been exhibited widely and published in various journals and publications. As a lecturer, Hanasik has delivered talks on his work and other artist's artistic practice at SFMoMA and various colleges and universities nationwide. In 2009, Hanasik was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize and in 2011, the Magenta Foundation selected him as one of the US winners for their Flash Forward Emerging Artist Exchange. In late 2012, the Smithsonian named Hanasik's piece Sharrod (Turn/Twirl) a finalist in the National Portrait Gallery's 2012 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. It is currently on view there until February 2014. He was part of a two-person exhibition at Krowswork in 2011 titled "This Means War Is Personal." For more go to: krowswork.com/war.html or visit jasonhanasik.com

Malak Helmy

Malak Helmy is based in Cairo, and her art focuses on video, text-based works, and collective initiatives. Much of Helmy’s video work visually references the new cultural and architectural constructs of her native Egypt, disputing their too-easy claim on reality and seeking a truer center for psychical meaning. The rhythm of her videos emulates that of desire, but the pathos of the work is of desire left waiting, as time—and its trappings of expectation, language, will—is suspended. With this deft poetry, Helmy’s video art succinctly and beautifully encapsulates the haunting liminality that defines this historical moment, in Egypt and everywhere. Helmy presents Helmy's work Records from the Excited State, Chapter 3: Lost Referents of Some Attraction (stills above and at right) will be presented Krowswork at the Moving Image Art Fair, New York, in March. It was recently shown at the Berlinale Festival 2013.

Helmy's work has been included in the Ninth Gwangju Biennial (2012), Documenta 13's Cairo Seminar (2012), Art Dubai (2011), Southern Exposure (San Francisco, 2011), Krowswork Gallery (Oakland, 2011), Projectos Monclovo (DF, 2011), Bergen KunstCenter (2011), Objectif Exhibitions (Antwerp, 2010), Mediamatic (Amsterdam, 2010), amongst others. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2010. For more go to: krowswork.com/liminal.html

Liz Walsh

Liz Walsh is a Bay Area native, who now lives in Los Angeles. She studied painting at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and received her MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 2003.

Liz Walsh's presents a tapestry/video installation at ArtPad that is part of her solo exhibition currently on view at Krowswork. (Please note this solo show is open by appointment on the weekend of the art fair and extended through May 25th.) This expansive show features photographs, paintings, video, tapestry, and installation. Walsh's dark Pop aesthetic blends documentation of natural entropy and decay with indicators of human's attempts to keep that entropy at bay through celebrations of moments of vitality. Walsh embraces the fact of this messy (read: not rationally resolvable) situation because she understands that this messiness contains an inherent truth that shouldn't be shied away from or glossed over. Instead, she confidently holds all the parts together using humor and careful looking, with a constant view to the larger cosmic forces at work.

The bottom line for Walsh as she cheerfully navigates the situation is that everyone dies, and so too everyone lives. This is community on a universal scale - an undeniable connection not only among humans but the smallest microscopic organism to the stars, which in the final supernova stage offer all their energy back into the universe. More shinto and shamanistic than morbid, it is a presentation of art without pretense. For more go to:krowswork.com/lizwalsh.html