BIO: Linde Caughey is a former show designer for Walt Disney Imagineering and Department Head at Universal Studios Japan. She has shown her work in Los Angeles at bG and Gallery 825 and for six years was a curator for Art for Clare at the Bergamot Station Charity Auctions. Additionally, she has shown with Laffer and Maple Ridge galleries in New York and Vermont, and won an award of excellence at her exhibition at The National Art Center in Tokyo, Japan. Today she splits her time between LA and upstate New York with her artist husband where she works from a barn built in 1843.

"When I was ten-years-old, my father took me on his architectural visits. On the way he would pull over, take out watercolors and we would paint. This began my enduring love of painting."

STATEMENT: Over the past last three years, Linde Caughey has been exploring humankind's interface with the earth as an interrupter of the natural world. She states, "Our increasing urban imprint through industrial development and urbanization has cascaded the changes in our earth’s environment causing ozone depletion, catastrophic weather changes and a host of unforeseen consequences to man himself. As an artist who loves nature, these changes are horrifying while sometimes being beautiful visually." It is this final contradiction that keeps Linde painting the Earth Interrupted series.

BIO: Elena Manferdini, principal and owner of Atelier Manferdini, has twenty years of professional experience in architecture, art, design, and education. Elena currently teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and is the Graduate Programs Chair. In 2019 Manferdini was honored with the ICON Award as part of the LA Design Festival, which is a prize that recognizes iconic women who have made an indelible mark on Los Angeles, culture, and society in general through their work, character, and creative leadership. With a body of work that spans art, architecture, and industrial design, her eponymous atelier has created work on over three continents that uplift the human spirit. She refuses to be defined by mere métier and continues fearlessly to adventure further on her creative path while pushing the boundaries of multiple design disciplines. Elena Manferdini loves art, creativity and inventions, she deeply believes in the positive power of education and creative collaborations.

STATEMENT: The relationship between optical effects and audience has been a silent but constant protagonist of Atelier Manferdini artistic production. In particular, the inspiration for the Infonavit housing proposal is stemming from an interest in the immersive effects that vast abstract pattern fields can inspire into the viewers. Not surprisingly, among the many working scales an artist can adopt, Atelier Manferdini’ s canvas of choice is a building facade, because its broad size creates an immersive field of vision, through which basic human emotions could be communicated. Vibrant geometrical patterns bring a static image to life, giving the viewer the impression of movement and an exaggerated sense of depth.

BIO: Christopher Mercier is the Partner and Design Principal at (fer) studio in Inglewood. Previously to founding his own firm, for nine years he was Senior Associate and Project Architect at Gehry Partners in Los Angeles. A frequent lecturer and panelist at such events as the Museum of Architecture in San Juan Capistrano and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, Mr. Mercier has also held teaching positions at UCLA and Woodbury University. Chris holds a Master of Architecture (M. Arch) from Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and was recruited and assigned to Daniel Libeskind's Architecture Intermundium in Milano, Italy. In Los Angeles, his artwork has been shown at South Los Angeles Contemporary Gallery (SoLA), Haphazard Gallery, Lawrence Asher Gallery, and The American Institute of Architects LA Chapter Gallery.

STATEMENT: Mercier's work is intended as method of seeing and thinking to help reinvent the opportunities around the creation of Space (beyond two-dimensionality) for the Discipline of Painting. The intention is to look for a way to expand the viewer’s ability to participate and engage with Painting beyond just the visual and mental response to imagery. To support and encourage a more biological and physical relationship experience with Painting that is both in response to its mental and imaginary construct as well as its condition as an three dimensional object forming, defining and presenting three dimensional space.

The completed pieces seem to hover somewhere between the fields of painting, sculpture and architecture and require the viewer to fully engage the work from multiple locations, perspectives & distances and imply varying degrees of scale and position. With all this, based on the way they have been constructed using the fundamental conditions of painting (the picture plane and the picture frame) they still fully fit and participate within the rich history and construct of the tradition of Painting.

To expand the experience of Painting into three dimensions (physical space), while at the same time keeping it fully engaged in it’s highly unique, specific and rich history, of two dimensional space.

BIO: Brian Zamora is a 23-year veteran of Gehry Partners, who has bridged both designer and technical roles on a vast range of architecture projects. Mr. Zamora was Senior Project designer on the Lou Ruvo Cleveland Clinic Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas and the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. Brian is currently the Project Architect on a condominium development on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles at Gehry Partners. He has also been a part-time faculty member at SCI-Arc since 2014.      

STATEMENT: Mr. Zamora's works are light-based, predominately working with objects juxtaposing shadows as the driving medium creating evocative illusionary effects. His work is created in two directions, either through contrived shadows and deciphering forms, or by using simple forms and tricks to create elaborate ephemeral visual effects. In this series, a collage of shapes combined with a blend of incandescent bulbs and integrated LEDs form changing overlapping patterns, gradients, and blends -- a dynamic light painting of limitless arrangements, with the work itself serving as the canvas.