FELIX ART FAIR 2022
Feb 17 – Feb 20, 2022 // RM1205
Felix is a contemporary art fair co-founded by Dean Valentine, Al Morán, and Mills Morán. The fourth edition of the fair will take place February 18–20, 2022 at The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The 2022 iteration of Felix will once again feature an international roster of 60 galleries occupying both the poolside cabanas and two Tower floors, providing a comfortable and safe indoor/outdoor environment for participants and collectors. Come join us in the 12th Floor Prince Suite RM1205 and at the gallery where we be exhibiting all new work from Texas Isaiah, Devon Tsuno, Larry Li , Zeina Baltagi, Jonah Elijah, Mario Joyce, Saj Issa, Gbenga Komolafe, Bryan Fernandez, Esteban Perez, Lorenzo Baker and Aaron Estrada. We look forward to seeing you poolside!
Works Featured
Installation Images by Elon Schoenholz
About The Artists
Aaron Estrada
Aaron Douglas Estrada (b.1994) is an artist whose work examines the body in space, moments of play, and decolonization. He is an auto- ethnographer that documents materials and the energy in them through collective memories and stories. He incorporates songs, sayings, and cultural signifiers that contain a layered history. He is creating repositories for memory through which he honors/questions the material.
He is a first generation Los Angeles Salvadoreño native. He incorporates growing up in Los Angeles and his exposure to different cultures, languages, and lifestyles in his work. He is also a member of 3B, a collective of Los Angeles-based artists and designers who create site- specific installations, public artworks, and murals. 3B’s works reflect their commitment to providing an inclusive platform that encourages pride and recognition of the different facets of their communities. Their works make the arts accessible by addressing the social inequalities, creating public works through shared resources, providing peer support, teaching and mentorship.
Aaron was also included an Artists You Should Know List in the Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics by Arlene Davila. His work has been exhibited internationally in Spain, El Salvador, and Mexico. He has a BA in Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles and received his MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Devon Tsuno
Devon Tsuno is an artist and fourth generation Angeleno. His recent spray paint and acrylic paintings, artist’s books, community projects and print installations focus on Japanese American history. Tsuno’s recent solo exhibition Shikata Ga Nai is a yonsei story, a Los Angeles story, indissociable from the complexities of intergenerational and collective trauma, fences and cages, gentrification, displacement, water and labor politics, and how and where we choose to live. Tsuno’s interests have been central to his work with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Topaz Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Hammer Museum, Candlewood Arts Festival and Gallery Lara in Japan. He is a 2017 Santa Fe Art Institute Water Rights Artist-In-Residence, is the 2016 SPArt Community Grantee and was awarded a 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Art. Tsuno is a member of J-TOWN Action と Solidarity and currently is an Assistant Professor of Art at California State University Dominguez Hills.
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.
Bryan Fernandez
Fernandez (2000) is a first generation Dominican-American artist from Washington Heights, New York. Much of his work involves daily experiences of the Afro-Caribbean Dominican community in Upper Manhattan. Questions of representation are important to his practice, as he looks to give his community and people a depiction, one that is often underrepresented from popular culture. Many issues that are touched upon in his work are often those that affect the Dominican people such as gentrification, the effects of colonization, race and identity. Additionally his work captures moments of ordinary life as a way to document the culture and community, to keep a record, and to visualize an archive of a marginalized history.
Fernandez recently obtained his BFA at the School of Visual in May of 2022, a current Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation recipient and still resides in Washington Heights.
Saj Issa
Saj Issa is a multidisciplinary artist from St. Louis, Missouri. She received her BFA with an emphasis in ceramics from Webster University in 2017. Her work has been exhibited in Arcade Gallery, Kranzberg Arts Foundation, Art St. Louis, and featured work in NCECA 2019 at the Katheryn E Nash Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Issa participated in long-term residencies at Craft Alliance Center of Art+Design and Belger Crane Yard Studio. She is currently pursuing a Masters in Fine Art at University of California Los Angeles.
My paintings are a representation of displacement, identity, social issues, labor, and consumerism. The implementation of ceramic tiles alongside the paintings is my attempt to reference my personal experiences to religion, politics, and parallels of the East and West. I want my viewers to be provoked, informed, and entertained by my work. I position myself as a sardonic commentator through overlapping hypocrisies that each culture is guilty of, yet finger points the blame in the other direction; it is reflective upon my observation as an individual situated on both sides. As I put form to these social overlaps, it is an attempt to bring awareness to viewers of their own similarities to the side they position themselves against.
Gbenga Komolafe
Gbenga Komolafe (they/he) is a Nigerian artist currently based in Los Angeles and exploring the intersections of textile, video, sound and sculpture.
Komolafe draws inspiration from parallels between the traditional African art practices looted from their Yoruba ancestors and the innovative craftsmanship of mid-20th-century queer and black American communities. Komolafe’s practice builds on ancestral traditions of batik, quilting and cult imagery by implementing modern techniques like digital manipulation and assemblage. Utilizing everyday found materials, manipulated analog and digital printmaking techniques, and fabric-based installations, Komolafe stitches together personal memories with greater universal motifs to explore the possibilities of a collectively imagined future where queer, black, and marginalized bodies are not only seen but celebrated.
Komolafe’s work has previously been exhibited in group shows including Adolescent Summers, Outside Looking In and at Junior High, Ghost Gallery LA, and Roski Lindhurst Gallery, among others.
Esteban Ramon Perez
Esteban Ramón Pérez (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) received his BFA in Art from the California Institute
of the Arts in 2017, his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University School of Art in 2019, and was recently a Studio Fellow at NXTHVN. Pérez lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Pérez’ multi-disciplinary practice utilizes his experience as a professional upholsterer and intertwines cultural and artistic sensibilities of his Chicano heritage with the visual language of postmodernism as well as issues rooted in postcolonial history. His work embodies facets of art histories, subjectivity, spirituality, and social issues.
Mario Joyce
Mario Joyce Belyusar is a self-taught African American artist living in New York City. His artistic process began early and was heavily influenced by religious and racial prejudice experienced in rural Ohio. He began using both genealogical research and paint to further understand and share the social history of discrimination. After a moving to New York City, he is furthering his studies in the African diaspora and how American History is steeped in selective storytelling that neglects to share the experiences of marginalized communities. His work is characterized by vibrant colors, strong line and heavy texture. A collage of vintage materials is typically a part of his process. Mario has exhibited his work in many group exhibitions, including most recently at ArtCrawl Harlem's Fire 7 Soul: 100 Years of Harlem at Kente Royal Gallery, at PRIZM Art Fair in Miami, Florida and will be a part of Caribbean Art Fair in Barbados in Spring 2021. His work is privately owned by many collectors throughout the U.S. "I collage vintage materials as a background for landscapes and figures in oil paint that create an open dialogue with our Ancestors." Mario is specifically interested in the African American experience and social injustice within the Black community. His work is intended to create a bridge between our ancestor’s experiences and our familiar contemporary existence. He believes that without an understanding of our past, we have no real grip on the present, so his working process begins with genealogical research. One of his recent paintings “Strange Fruit” was made in response to black men dying by the hands of police and white supremacy. "It is my intention, in this piece, to take back that narrative and memorialize the countless black bodies that have risen and now navigate a higher plane".
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.
Lorenzo Baker
Lorenzo Baker is an interdisciplinary artist whose art practice is conceptually rooted in the democratization of art. Lorenzo Baker ‘s practice incorporates everyday materials and readymade objects that result in sculptures, installations, and videos. Lorenzo Bakers artworks offer viewers the opportunity to experience the everyday from an altered perspective.
Graduating from Otis College of Art in Design in 2018 with a Master’s in fine art, Lorenzo Baker was a featured artist in the Group Show New Contemporaries Vol. 1, at Residency Art Gallery in Inglewood, CA. In 2020 Lorenzo Baker’s artwork was published in Umber Magazine Vol. 4 SAM, and in 2021 he was a guest artist at the Museum of African Diaspora’s in the artist studio program. Currently Lorenzo Baker is committed to a yearlong project and collaboration with The Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
Texas Isaiah
Texas Isaiah [He/They] is an award-winning, first-generation visual narrator born in Brooklyn, NY, and currently residing in Los Angeles, CA. In 2020, Texas Isaiah became one of the first Trans photographers to photograph a Vogue edition cover (Janet Mock, Patrisse Cullors, Jesse Williams, and Janaya Future Khan) and a TIME cover (Dwayne Wade and Gabrielle Union-Wade). He is one of the 2018 grant recipients of Art Matters and the 2019 recipient of the Getty Images: Where We Stand Creative Bursary grant. He is currently a 2020-21 artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem.
In 2012, he created "BLACKNESS," a visual project that documented and celebrated the African diaspora's diversity across the spectrums of gender, sexuality, and ethnic heritage. At this time, he began to evaluate the broad visual needs of Black people, specifically Black trans, non-binary and gender-expansive individuals, within the larger photographic canon. As Texas Isaiah found himself photographing individuals who thought they didn't have a place as a sitter within photography, his approach began to prioritize a more thoughtful and compassionate visual world. He not only believes everyone has a right to be photographed if they consent, but he believes photography can be a healing mechanism despite the historical violence it has inflicted on communities. Although he has worked in a studio and various indoor settings, his interest in photographing individuals outdoors comes from personal curiosity and connection with nature.
