FEATURED ARTISTS

Anthony Ausgang
Born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1959, he lived in Houston, Texas in the early 1960s. His “lowbrow” style of art was formed in his childhood through his father’s love for custom car shows and demolition derbies, and mother’s love for operas, symphonies and art museums. After a short stint studying art at The University Of Texas in Austin, Ausgang began classes at The Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.  In 1993, Ausgang was included in the Laguna Beach Art Museum’s seminal exhibit “Kustom Kulture” which investigated art influenced by gearhead car culture.  In 2003 Ausgang’s paintings could be seen in Morning Wood, a primer of Post Graf art;  Pop Surrealism and Weirdo Deluxe.  In 2010 Ausgang painted the cover of the MGMT album Congratulations, and in 2016, he designed the “Bomb Cat” logo used by Green Day on its album Revolution Radio. Since then, Ausgang published his novella The Browser, the final volume of the Puss Titter trilogy, continues writing his Artillery Magazine blog Cat Call. He also plays intermittently with his band Cat Museum.

John Casey
Born on Friday the 13th in Salem, Massachusetts, I started inventing creatures as soon as I was able to hold a crayon. Drawings that my mother saved from when I was only three years old reveal my obsession with the figure. The figures in these drawings show not only the distorted perceptions of a child, but my fascination with skulls, teeth, spirographic eyes, and invented body parts. I graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1988 with a BFA in Painting. At the time I was making art that focused on surreal and psychological figurative painting and drawing. A bit later I added sculpture as part of my process, and my subjects continue to reveal a surreal bent in both structure and narrative. I have shown in galleries in Boston, Portland, Los Angeles and the Bay Area, as well as international venues in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Denmark. My work is included in collections at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the di Rosa Preserve in Napa, California, and the Artothèque de Caen in France.

David Dugoncevic  is an artist born and raised in Southern California, who currently lives and works in San Francisco Bay Area. He graduated in 2018 with a BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute on a Merit based scholarship. Upon graduating he received the Outstanding Painting Undergraduate Award, the Virgil Williams Prize, and the Ivan Majdrakoff Art Materials Award.  David has held four solo shows across the country, participated in 26 group shows in California, and has been featured in the deYoung Museum in San Francisco.

Joshua Ellingson
In my career as a commercial artist, I’ve worked with dozens of organizations to produce unique creative projects in different mediums. From murals about astronomy in deepest Austria to t-shirt designs for robot battles in Tokyo, each partnership has been a new chance to create something special.  As an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts, I teach my students how to make art with computers and explain what a future as a working artist might be like for them too. After graduating in 1999 from Kendall College of Art & Design with a BFA in Visual Communications, Joshua worked with No Starch Press, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Planet Labs, IDEO, Manifold, Upper Playground, SomaFM, Open Source Robotics Foundation, and X-Team. He has also been affiliated with California College of the Arts (CCA), Hi-Fructose Magazine, monochrom, Laughing Squid, and MuseumsQuartier.

David Fullarton
Mr Fullarton is a Scottish born, San Francisco based visual artist and illustrator. Because he is a man with very low expectations, he is seldom disappointed and, therefore, lives a life filled with boundless joy. He has spent most of his somewhat checkered artistic career attempting to create a piece of artwork that doesn’t have words written on it.
So far he has failed dismally.

Jason Gouliard
Jason graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002 with a BFA in Fine Arts.  As of 2018 he has been based in El Granada, California. “I like to think of a painting like a magic trick.  Knowing how the magician performed the trick robs the viewer of the magic. And to be honest, I’m an intuitive painter, so I always start a painting with an intention – but 9 times out of 10 I am surprised where I end up. In general, I refrain from trying to explain what is going on in them too much – each painting isn’t meant to be a story, if anything you can read them like a map, or a diagram in a science textbook, or as a doctor would inspect an x-ray. I like to make space so that the viewer can search in them for details, like a marker, a fracture, or a star on the wrapper of a tootsie roll tootsie pop.”  When not painting, you can find Jason exploring the coast of California or working as the head of design and research teams at various tech companies.

Mark Hamer is an animator, artist, Art Director and Instructor with jore than 25 yerars of experience working on games and interactive media, including roles as lead animator at Atari Games, as well as roles at Lucas Arts Entertainment, Egreetings, COVI Studios, Double Fine, Telltale Games and 2K Sports for the NBA 2K franchise. He has been featured as an artist in The Smithsonian Institute ans been an Annie Awards nominee for video game animation.  In 2018, he was the Art Director for an interactive, animated tv series for Netflix titled Minecraft: Story Mode. Mark is also a painter who has shown in galleries in San Francisco and Southern California. In 2013 a book of his comic portraits was published by Oni Press under the title Snapshots (Oni Press, 2013), based on his web comic of the same name. Mark’s concept art for Brutal Legend can also be seen in The Art of Brutal Legend (Udon, 2013). Mark is currently an Animation Instructor at De Anza College and Chabot College, and an Affiliate Instructor & Mentor for the Interactive Media Department at Bradley University in Illinois.

Martin Mazorra is a Brooklyn-based artist originally from West Virginia. He works chiefly in woodcut and letterpress, from small books, prints on paper, and large prints on fabric, to site-specific print-based installations. Since forming Cannonball Press in 1999, Martin has traveled and exhibited internationally. Martin has been the recipient of a 2007 NYFA Fellowship in Printmaking, a 2010 United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellow, and a Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Grant. His work is in the collections of the Beinecke Rare Book Library, The Metropolitan Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Taubman Museum, The Block Museum, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art.

Isabel Samaras
Known for lush and meticulously painted riffs on Old Masters that feature pop culture icons of the past, Isabel Samaras’ ribald images are woven with references to classic horror movies, ancient mythologies, cherished TV characters, tribal societies, and childhood fairy tales. Magical realism and the forbidden fantasies of fabled characters frolic in a world where elusive desires become reality, re-imagining ill-fated journeys that turn into enchanted honeymoons. A common thread that runs through much of Samaras’ work like a red string tied to her heart is that of love: maternal affection, romantic devotion, illicit enchantments, tender yearnings, unrequited passion, and the idea that everyone, even monsters or disembodied hands can find someone to love them. Her painted narratives, classical in technique and pop in content, often revolve around issues of making things end the way we wish they would. Exploring “What if?” and “Why not?” she brings human desires and foibles to fictional characters, studying the human condition through the eyes of popular culture by jamming old and new together in the visual equivalent of a mash-up song. Since 1991, Isabel has shown her work in galleries internationally.  She has also participated in lectures and on panels for Parsons School of Design, New York, New York, San Diego Comicon, San Diego, California; Graphic Artists Guild, San Francisco, California; Los Angeles Society of Illustrators, Los Angeles, California; St. Johns University, New York, New York; and California College of Art,  San Francisco, California.

Waye Whelan
Wayne Whelan graduated from a New York middle school and the US Air Force boot camp. He’s been seen behind the counter most of his life; whether managing the Troubadour, the front desk of the Tropicana, the smoke shops of Manhattan, or more recently, co-founding the Bay Area chain of stores known as Therapy. This is his inaugural exhibition in the art world.