Art Talks at Brand Return This Spring

The Brand Library & Art Center has announced the return of Art Talks at Brand this spring. This series invites contemporary artists to discuss their work and the issues surrounding it. Each talk will be followed by a moderated Q&A session led by Brand staff member, artist, and writer Jennifer Remenchik. The spring series will feature Los Angeles-based artists Roksana Pirouzmand, Shana Hoehn, Miguel Nelson, and Nick Aguayo. The series is sponsored by the Brand Associates, it is free and open to the public.

Thursday, February 13, 7:00 PM - Roksana Pirouzmand (b. 1990 in Yazd, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Los Angeles. While performance art is at the core of her practice, her ideas have materialized in mediums such as sculpture, installation, and two-dimensional imagery. In her pieces, personal experiences are incorporated into installation systems that suggest the possibility of transformation, deterioration, and movement through interactions between the artist and her work. Pirouzmand received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from UCLA. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries in Southern California, New York, Mexico, and China.

Thursday, March 6, 7:00 PM - Shana Hoehn is a Los Angeles-based artist working in sculpture and drawing. Through her art practice, Hoehn considers modes and conditions of agency, embodiment, and transformation. Hoehn's sculptural work combines traditional and digital fabrication techniques and employs various materials, including wood, sawdust, clay, and metal. Her work references a long and winding history of women contorting and the bodily destruction involved with transformation. Hoehn received her MFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University in Sculpture and Extended Media and earned a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries across the US and in Mexico, and Hoehn has participated in various international residencies.

Thursday, March 20, 7:00 PM - Miguel Nelson is a conceptual artist, designer, and developer who has created art and experimental social spaces for over twenty-five years. His interests have included projects as varied as multi-element, immersive art performances to developing urban oases as private event spaces to an ongoing venture dedicated to the re-vitalization of the Desert Island Country Club in Palm Springs. Now he is focused on a large-scale collaborative art project, “The Spirit of Rudy Caballero”, in which Nelson invites other (credited) contemporary artists to create work under the fictional artist’s name. “The Spirit of Rudy Caballero” recently presented an exhibition of sketches at LOOT Gallery in Mexico City during Zona Maco and is slated for upcoming presentations at Frieze New York and London.

Thursday, May 1, 7:00 PM - Nick Aguayo paints compellingly layered abstract works that reveal an inventive approach to the materiality and physicality of paint. Emphasizing the performative aspects of dragging, pressing, brushing, and rolling paint onto canvas, Aguayo layers hand-rendered geometric shapes, building his compositions around the tensions between erasure and transparency, accumulation, and excavation. Taking cues from collage, Aguayo densely coats his canvases with thick impasto surfaces, textural areas of paint, and materials including marble dust, to create a matte physicality to each composition. He received his BA from the UCLA and his MFA from the University of California, Irvine. His work has been included in group exhibitions and may be found in the collections of The Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY and the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA.