Kathryn Barulich
I am an art historian working toward a PhD at the UC San Diego Art History Theory and Criticism program. My research is primarily focused on contemporary immersive installation and theories of haunting. This work takes up Gothic literature, phenomenology, site specificity, and the female uncanny. I am also interested in medieval animated sculpture such as the Cristo de Burgos, Victorian interior design, the French Revolution, and the intersections of the occult and technology. I earned a Masters degree in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at San Francisco Art Institute, with a focus on the linguistic and aesthetic strategies deployed by Dada artists working in interwar France. Previously, I studied Art History and French Language and Literature at Fordham University.
Christopher Squier
I am an independent writer, curator, artist, and archivist, focusing on conceptual and research-based projects in a global arts context. I aim to emphasize and elaborate in particular on the work of sculptors, sound artists, filmmakers, and new media/experimental practices.
Currently, I serve as the Director for the Carl Heidenreich Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the work of a postwar ‘exile artist’ who in 1941 found asylum from wartime Europe in New York, producing the key opus of his works on paper. Additionally, I am an archival assistant to a poet-artist and a sculptor based in NYC. In the past, I held positions at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter and McBean Galleries, Embark Gallery, and KunstWorks. I received the 2015 postgraduate SFAI + Kadist Exhibitions Fellowship and recently completed a certificate in Digital and New Media Archives and Preservation from the Danube University Krems. After seven years in the San Francisco Bay Area, I relocated to NYC where I now live and work.
Photography by Bojana Rankovic. Image use is courtesy of Rankovic and Squier.
Jackie Valle
I am a creative steward and cultural producer, working with artists, art thinkers, makers, and mission-driven organizations to realize previously unseen works and projects. My practice is based on creative inquiry and underscored by deep forms of looking. Here, vision is critical, playful, and ultimately holds court as a site where the body, psyche, and social meet.
My body of work includes writing(s) on art, visual culture, and the role of the avisual senses (olfactory, haptic, sonic, and otherwise) in visuality. I’m also co-founder of Dissolve, an art collective and project where art-making and looking are personal, performative, entangled, and unexpected.
I am based in the Bay Area (U.S.) by way of the East Coast and have worked in art, social justice, and education institutions for more than 15 years with particular focus on cultural equity in diaspora and First Generation communities.
Artwork included above by Marcel Pardo Ariza. Image provided by courtesy of the artist and Jackie Valle.