FELIX ART FAIR 2021

July 29th – August 1st, 2021 // RM132

Felix is a contemporary art fair co-founded in 2019 by Dean Valentine, Al Morán, and Mills Morán. The second edition of the fair will take place July 29–August 1, 2021 at The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The 2021 iteration of Felix will spotlight Los Angeles-based galleries and take place exclusively in the poolside cabanas, providing a comfortable and safe indoor/outdoor environment for participants and collectors. This year’s fair will feature twenty-nine leading Los Angeles-based galleries and will mark a turning point for in-person art events in Los Angeles. Come join us by the pool in Room 132 where we be exhibiting all new work from: Veronica Fernandez, Yvette Mayorga, Larry Li, Elmer Guevara, Devin Reynolds, The Perez Bros., Tidawhitney Lek, Jonah Elijah, Zeina Baltagi, Fabian Guerrero. See you poolside ✌🏾🌴.

Works Featured

Installation Images by Elon Schoenholz

About The Artists

Yvette Mayorga

Yvette Mayorga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work interrogates the broad effects of militarization within and beyond the US/Mexico border and intervenes in the colonial legacies of art history. She fuses confectionary labor with found images to explore the meaning of belonging. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Vincent Price Art Museum, DePaul Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the Center for Craft, the Museo Universitario del Chopo, LACMA's Pacific Standard Time:LA/LA, NXTHVN, Art Design Chicago, the Chicago Artists Coalition, the National Museum of Mexican Art, GEARY Contemporary, EXPO, and Untitled Art Fair. In 2020 Mayorga's project, "Meet me at the Green Clock," was commissioned by Johalla Projects as part of the exhibition “Andy Warhol--From A to B and Back Again” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work will be included in the forthcoming exhibition ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21, El Museo del Barrio’s inaugural large-scale survey of contemporary Latinx art. Mayorga’s practice has been featured in publications such as Artforum, Artnet, Art in America, Art News, Hyperallergic, NewCity, Teen Vogue, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Her works are part of the permanent collections of the DePaul Art Museum and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She has participated in the Fountainhead Residency and BOLT Residency, and is a recipient of the MAKER Grant. She holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Fabian Guerrero

I am Fabián Guerrero, a queer, first generation Mexican American based in Los Ángeles, born in Dallas, TX. I work with film and photography to document, creating images that reflect on pasts, presents and possible futures of our generation. My work both reflects and is inspired by my upbringing as first generation immigrant and a queer brown individual; taking from fashion, film, poems and music, the lifestyle and everyday survival, to shed light into my family’s history and the meanders of the brown and queer communities.

Jonah Elijah

Jonah Elijah is a Houston, Texas native now working in Los Angeles. He received his BA in studio art from

the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2017. MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2020. Jonah Elijah’s work encapsulates black life in America and addresses controversial issues that actively affect the African American community. Using materials to explore economic inequality, displacement, or human rights Elijah’s artist practice embraces discomforting realities. Being raised around lower income hard ships Elijah builds off his own personal upbringing and creates works that reflect the black experience. Whether in his paintings or installations, Jonah layers his work with coded language offering an abstracted or representational view of what it’s like to be black today.

Elmer Guevara

Elmer Guevara (b.1990) was born and raised in Los Angeles and is currently working bicoastal in New York City. In the 1980s, his parents fled a civil war-torn El Salvador finding refuge in the City of Angels. Along with the city exposure in South Central and the culture his parents brought to the US with them, he became inspired to depict images about his upbringing and exploration of identity. Furthermore, he depicts observations of encountered struggles from his own and neighboring immigrant families, who dealt with issues of marginalization and inequality. Through his teenage years he met with friends, commuting throughout the city on public transit becoming obsessed with exploring the city’s crevices and buildings while favoring the late nights to paint on walls and highways. Without much thought, this obsession later ventured into an appreciation for painting and an education in the arts. In 2017, he received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Cal State University Long Beach and is currently an MFA candidate at Hunter College in New York. He has recently exhibited with Residency Art Gallery at The Felix Art Fair this past year in Los Angeles and took part at Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia for A Very Anxious Feeling, group show.

Veronica Fernandez

Veronica Fernandez (1998) is a mixed media artist that discusses relationships between people and their environments. Frequently using personal memorabilia and experiences as a canon for her pieces, she explores the various ways we perceive our ever- fluctuating memories over time and the atmospheres around us. Using colorful, varying sized canvases full of an eclectic array of textures, paint is used as an expressive vehicle to highlight themes of disconnection, impermanence, and reconstruction, meanwhile putting a focus on the alternate realities we enter when reflecting on our past and present. In these pieces, she uses techniques of fragmentation, and abstraction of space to form narratives about individuals and how the factors of their environment influence them, meanwhile discussing the indefinite roles we can take on in the world at any moment. Incorporating figures at human scale allows spectators to engage with these unfamiliar environments and project themselves into these unpredictable headspaces, bringing a familiarity back into the moment. This sharing of experience allows her to speak to a community and discuss our foundations as people: where we come from, how we are shaped, and how we interact with one another.

The Perez Bros.

The Perez Bros are identical twin brothers Alejandro and Vicente Perez (born 1994) from South Gate, CA. After graduating from South East High School, they attended Otis College of Art and Design to pursue a degree in Fine Art focusing on painting. At Otis is where they began working as a collaboration duo.

They were exposed to the car culture in Los Angeles at a very young age. Their father has been a part of a lowrider car club for as long as they can remember. They are fascinated with the culture, from the cars to the models, from the people to the music. Through their paintings, they try and capture certain moments that they see when they attend car shows. Larger paintings seem to capture the mood and feeling of these car events, while smaller paintings tend to capture more intimate events. Through their paintings, they hope to make the viewer feel as if they were attending a car show.

Tidawhitney Lek

Tidawhitney Lek (b. 1992, lives and works in Long Beach) is a Cambodian-American painter. Her work plays with narrative and the Asian experiences of first-generation Americans. These bright and somber paintings present nuances of domesticity, figures and hands interacting in composition as culture and Southeast-Asian elements echo through mundane objects found from places like the home. She reinvents the traditional and conventional mediums like pastel, acrylic and oil paints on canvas, interchanging textures as pictorial spaces recede and soften. Lek graduated with her BFA from Cal State University of Long Beach with an emphasis on Drawing and Painting (2017).

Larry Li

Larry Li is a Chinese American artist born and raised in the bay area, California. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California, recently obtaining an MFA at the Otis School of Art and Design. He holds a BFA from USC Roski School of Fine art. Working primarily through figurative painting and collage, he aims to create works that visualize his inherited experiences and Chinese diasporic narratives. His work has been shown in the 2020 AXA art prize exhibition at the New York academy of art as a top 40 finalist, and will be featured in the New American Paintings MFA annual issue 153. As an undergraduate at USC he was one of two 2020 Macomber travel grant recipients, and was able to fund his research conducted in Zheng Zhou China for his first solo show at Lindhurst Gallery, titled Inherited Fruits.

Zeina Baltagi

Zeina Baltagi b. Stockton, CA 1988 is an artist and educator, raised between California and Lebanon. The work reveals intimate realizations; transforming how Baltagi navigates herself in relation to physical, emotional, economic, and cultural mobility. Zeina Baltagi holds a B.A. from California State University, Northridge, and an M.F.A. from University of California, Davis. Baltagi has exhibited her work with but not limited to: Basement Gallery, LADOT, Los Angeles Road Concerts, PØST, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, bG gallery, Klowden Mann, Art Music Lit Space. As well as University galleries including: University of Southern California, Claremont Graduate University, California Lutheran University and California State University, Northridge.

My work examines mobility in the collision of physical, emotional, racial, and economic identities. I collect and explore materials that carry collective memory and symbolism in relation to my personal experience with walking. I study objects that carry layers of memories that can-not be erased although unseen. The sidewalk is where most of my material is found, and performances are held. It is the space between the private and the public. It is where we talk to our neighbors, where children play, where protests are made, where the resistance is discussed, and many people are murdered, assaulted, arrested, and denied access. The ability to walk and move freely is a privilege often taken for granted. Our ability as to how far we can mobilize ourselves is dependent on ability, race, gender perception, and class. Whereas the perspective of one’s body moving through space in relation to landscape and other bodies was once undervalued became at the forefront of our thoughts via an airborne global pandemic. The individual moving through space and on the ground brings their self-perspective and interpreted interactions with the urban landscape and the people with in it. My body and working existence are a prime place for me to grow with my artwork. I imagine my endo-prosthetic titanium leg to be the most direct connection of material history to labor, access and mobility.