Artists Archive
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Asher Hartman is an interdisciplinary artist, director, writer, and creator of live performances. His works operate in the charged space between performance art, experimental theater, and immersive installation. In this sphere of intensely amplified perception, Hartman generates works that grapple with the myriad of social and political issues that dominate this current era of chronic crisis. Often situating personal and emotional history in relation with the ideologies that structure Western culture, his works are dense, visual, poetic, embodied texts, where clown and cringe humor are layered upon moments of desperate rage and arousal. In every work, Hartman implants evidence of his own trance and psychic journeying, set in engulfing installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and elicit indelible feelings.
Hartman received his BA in Theater from University of California, Los Angeles and his MFA in Studio Arts from CalArts, where he has since become a faculty member in the CalArts School of Theater. He has also taught at Otis College of Art and Design, and University of California, Riverside. He is the founder and chief of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of artist-actors for whom he has written and directed since 2010. Hartman was also one half of the performative duo Krystal Krunch (with Haruko Tanaka), and over the course of their collaboration the two artists taught intuition-building work to artists, activists, and interested members of the public. From 1999-2005, Hartman co-directed Crazy Space, a performance art venue that featured artists such as Dark Bob, Mariel Caranza, Mario Gardener, Jamie McMurry, Johana Went, Kristina Wong, Liz Young, and Paul Zaloom.
Hartman's recent projects include The Mommy Leaks the Floor at New Hollywood Theater, Los Angeles, CA (2025); Blessed with Switch with Jasmine Orpilla at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2024) and University of California, Irvine, The Art of Performance (2024); It’s Better to Start Out Ugly at JOAN, Los Angeles, CA (2023) and The Lab, San Francisco, CA (2023). Past Gawdafful National Theater performances include The Dope Elf, Yale Union, Portland, OR (2019) revised as Organized Around the Erotics of Doing You In at The Lab, San Francisco, CA (2021); Sorry, Atlantis, Or Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA (2017); The Silver, the Black, the Wicked Dance, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA (2016); and Annie Okay!, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2010). Hartman's recent publications include Mad Clot on a Holy Bone (X Artists’ Books, 2020); Female Hallucinations, Folk Horses, and Gaunt Motherfuckers (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Learn moreK8 Hardy (b. 1977, Fort Worth, Texas, USA) lives and works in New York. She’s a punk rock artist who works across varied mediums, including video, photography, and sculpture.
Through her art practice, she unwittingly becomes a brand, intentionally exploiting persona and pop culture. Long before the ubiquity of the selfie, Hardy was experimenting in documenting her looks and various fictional selves. Her work takes us to the edge of “good taste.” Hardy’s materials are an assemblage of second-hand clothing, found objects, trash, and panache, evoking the world of consumption.
Learn morePato Hebert is an artist, teacher, and organizer. His work probes the challenges and possibilities of interconnectedness. His creative projects have appeared at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito; Beton7, Athens; the Ballarat International Foto Biennale; and the Songzhuang International Photo Biennale. Hebert is a COVID-19 long hauler, living with the ongoing impacts of the coronavirus since March of 2020, and publicly addressing the pandemic through creativity and community building. His solo exhibition about long COVID, Lingering, debuted at Pitzer College in 2022, curated by Ruti Talmor. His writing about COVID has appeared in Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic (eds. Romero, A.,Tucker, D.,Wang, D.), and The Long COVID Survival Guide: How to Take Care of Yourself and What Comes Next (ed: Fiona Lowenstein). Hebert serves as Chair and teaches in the Department of Art & Public Policy at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Learn moreSam Hamilton (Sam Tam Ham) is an independent, working class, interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand of Pākehā (English settler colonial) descent based in Portland, OR. After 20 years of working independently and professionally across experimental music and sound art, moving and still image, painting, writing, performance, stage, cinema, and curatorial projects, Hamilton's practice today operates more like an ecology than a discipline. A messy but verdant garden full of old and new growth, hidden places, edible arrangements, toxic weeds, garden parties, frolicking, and most importantly, the life-affirming ferment of deep existential entanglement. What physically emerges in any given season through the confluence of this garden depends most simply on what vessel(s) best serve the idea at hand.
The long song
a meandering garden path
Both an entrance and an exit
Hamilton's work has existed in a wide range of contexts, including Converge 45, Portland; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Portland Art Museum, OR; Transmediale, Berlin; Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival; Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland; as well as a research station in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, an active volcanic island crater, a billboard, a functioning Shinto shrine in Japan, an anarchist squat in Athens, Greece, the Australian outback desert, a dank underground parking lot, some dude’s apartment in Lima, Peru, and on the radio.
In addition to their solo work, they have collaborated extensively with artists across Aotearoa New Zealand, Sāmoa, Australia, Kiribati, the US, Finland, Japan, and Peru, including ten years spent working with the internationally acclaimed Lemi Ponifasio MAU Dance Company, touring major works to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAB; Ruhrtriennale, Ruhr; KVS; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Théâtre de la Ville, Paris; and more.
Their work has been recognized with a Creative Capital Award, Oregon Community Foundation's Creative Heights Award, and an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award, among others.
Learn moreTimothy Yanick Hunter (b. 1990 Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is an artist and curator based in Toronto. Hunter’s practice employs strategies of bricolage, archival exploration, reference, citation, and exploring remix and rearrangement as methods of practice. His approach alternates between exploratory and didactic, with a focus on the political, cultural, and social richness of the Black diaspora. Hunter’s work often delves into speculative narratives and the intersections of physical space, digital space, and the intangible.
Hunter received his BA from the University of Toronto, and has been an artist in residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada, and Black Rock Senegal. He was included in the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art and longlisted for the 2022 Sobey Art Award. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances in New York (2023), Cooper Cole, Toronto (2022), Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography, Bamako (2022), Gallery 44, Toronto (2021); A Space Gallery, Toronto (2020); among others. Hunter lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
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