Emerging Artists Down
(But Not Out) in L.A.

Sharif Farrag is all over the map. Or at least his studios are. The ceramicist and painter has been working between his space in Long Beach, a bedroom apartment he occasionally sleeps in, Peter Sheldon’s studio in Downtown L.A., and his home on the Westside of L.A.—all while social distancing. The constant criss-crossing around the city is something that lends itself psychically to Sharif’s work. “I always think about the freeways of L.A. being the veins to a big body. My work has a lot to do with their complexity…I daydream about different people and what they do with their lives.”

As a kid growing up in Reseda—a neighborhood wedged in the depths of the San Fernando Valley—Sharif was left to his own devices, where he found a home in the skateboarding and graffiti communities. His adopted families in these worlds introduced him to a range of cultures and people in far-reaching pockets of the city, in stark contrast to the life he knew at home, where his Egyptian-Syrian parents maintained their religious Muslim customs and traditions. While the duality of the world outside and the one at home may seem at odds, these disparate influences all weave their way into Sharif’s work.

Sharif’s practice is a way for him to address questions of identity, mental health, and his role as an Arab artist—things he grapples with on a daily basis. He recognizes his presence in the art world as an anomaly, wanting to create more opportunities for representation. “For my culture, I need to be hyped about being Arab, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s not that easy to talk about. I’m figuring out what’s good and bad, for myself.” His colorful, psychedelic pieces help to create a space for Arab artists who want to make art that’s “cool,” merely for the sake of making art. “There’s no one who’s Arab who just makes whatever the fuck they want. It always has to be about something. I’m trying to be like, ‘No, you guys have to do something for no reason.’”

“Who’s going to want to look at a painting at a time like this?” wonders Alake Shilling, ironically as a creator of work that feels like the perfect antidote for a time like this.

Growing up in L.A., Alake’s proximity to Hollywood glamour and Sunset Boulevard influenced her work, which she describes as having a “groovy, wonky, cool jazz aesthetic.” It’s a feeling that places her in the tradition of the California Funk art movement, alongside artists like Peter Saul and Jim Nutt. But in Alake’s world, Betty Boop and Bugs Bunny are revered as demi-gods alongside contemporary icons such as Lisa Frank and Hello Kitty. Her obsession with old cartoons stems from the city’s connection to Disney, Pixar, and Looney Tunes.

Although she began making art at a young age, by taking animation classes in middle school and attending high school art programs at Oxbow and Idyllwild, it wasn’t until an internship at the now-defunct 356 Mission space that Alake’s career began its ascent. Not only did 356 Mission allow her to find a community in the art world, it introduced her to ceramics, a major element of her current practice. During the gallery’s open studio “Clay Days,” Alake began experimenting with the medium, which, she says, is now intrinsic to her work. “There’s a new generation doing funky things, sculpturally.” From there she worked as an intern at the Laura Owens-established gallery, where she was offered a solo show at the massive space.

While her mother is a professor who teaches race theory, Alake prefers to avoid socio-political commentary through her work. “I just want it to be pure and fun. A lot of artists of color are forced into [being political]. I feel that is only keeping artists of color in a box. You shouldn’t have to comment on your gender, religious background, race, or disability. You should be able to paint what you want and not feel pressured to make a social statement,” she says. “I think saying nothing at all is saying everything.”

Mario Ayala works out of a massive industrial studio space in Boyle Heights, which he shares with two dogs. The four-legged studiomates are more than just companions—they make regular cameos in Mario’s paintings, which also feature references from car culture, Catholic iconography, and other nuanced ephemera from his Latin American upbringing.

Raised in “the chaparral” of Fontana, a suburb in San Bernardino County filled with old vineyards, farm houses, “lots of stucco,” and new shopping centers, Mario’s early exposure to art came from his father, who regularly gave him intricate ballpoint pen drawings that he made while on the road as a truck driver. His love of cars—a theme that weaves throughout his work—comes from his father, “Even how I got into painting comes from my dad,” Mario says.

After high school, Mario attended art school at SFAI, but it wasn’t until after he graduated and returned to L.A. that he began working with airbrushing. Following in the footsteps of airbrush artists such as Abel Izaguirre and Art Alvarez, Mario’s aesthetic is an expression of the Latinx vernacular. Rooted in Chicano history, airbrushing stems from Barrio graffiti—which was used to signal both gang territory as well as tools of underground resistance. This September, he will participate in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, a monumental dossier of the city’s creative talent (and a huge honor, selected as one of just 30 L.A.-based artists).

When I ask about his subject matter, rife with symbols of Latinx culture, Mario says these things can “sometimes be easier to engage with. Access, to me, is really important.” Inserting these references into spaces they’re noticeably absent from is a way to bolster representation—and to bypass the gatekeepers of the predominately white, “blue chip” art world. While depicting car culture in art isn’t anything new—he points to artists such as Billy Al Bengston who did it in the 60s—Mario believes that the current conversation surrounding diversity has created opportunities for artists who have “a different perception of a similar thing. The obvious difference between [us is that] Billy is a white male and I’m not.”

The only thing that disrupts the stillness on this hot afternoon on Bamboo Lane is Bri Williams, as she comes tumbling out of her car in bright yellow sunglasses and a stretchy jumpsuit emblazoned with a white star. A jovial contrast to her work, which she says is inspired by “the idea of fear...the intensity and anxiety of horror films.”

The sculptor uses found and personal objects, encasing artifacts like taxidermy birds and a leather whip, in resin or soap. The latter is a material that is integral to her work, attractive to her for its esoteric qualities, “the spirituality of cleansing and purity,” as much as its physical properties—made from lye—which can be fatal.

Initially, she began thinking about the material in relation to the soap sculptures that prisoners create while incarcerated. Soap has been a cathartic medium, allowing Bri to experiment with her subject matter as a form of art therapy. Utilizing familial objects close to her such as her great-grandmother’s cabinet, she’s able to speak about themes that are difficult to talk about, such as trauma, pain, family history, and her experience in society as a Black woman. “I’ll probably never stop working with [soap], because the weight of it brings what I’m trying to talk about to the surface,” she says.

A class at SAIC called “The Philosophy of Pain” taught Bri that the roots of racism exist because people cannot experience the actual pain that others have gone through. “It made me realize why people do horrible things in the world. They can’t feel the pain, but watching someone else experience it is amusing, so they continue to unleash it onto others. It’s similar to watching a horror movie.”

Physically, she’s especially interested in the function of light in her soap pieces. In one sculpture, what looks like a dense block of soap actually contains a Mardi Gras mask—only visible when the lights are turned off and a flashlight is used to light the sculpture from behind.The mask is a symbol of her father’s upbringing in New Orleans, highlighting an element of her family history that’s been largely overlooked. She’ll be exploring this further for an upcoming exhibition at Progetto, in the form of a sound piece based on an oral history told through recorded interviews with her father. By tracing her roots, and recontextualizing common objects, Bri’s work makes the invisible visible, creating new artifacts to be studied and considered. Something as everyday as a Mardi Gras mask represents a larger conversation surrounding Black history (and her family’s place in it). “Growing up and in school, I realized how much of our history is untold. It’s my responsibility to get my history out there as much as I can. I do that through my work.”

Before he was painting full-time, born-and-raised L.A. native Adam Alessi almost became a chef. “I cooked for Jon & Vinny at a bunch of their restaurants while painting [on the side]. People would have their post-show gallery dinners there, artists and gallerists would come in and I would be so jealous. I wanted that, and I knew I wasn’t going to get there by cooking their linguine.”

Figurative oil painting is not an easy medium to break into, but for the entirely self-taught artist, “easy” has never been a motivating factor. “Not knowing how to do something really helps with advancing in it,” he says. “That, and a sense of bashfulness in the medium.” Working primarily with oil on canvas, Adam paints figures of witchy masks, decapitated smiling faces floating lifelessly in the ether, and poised glamour shots of characters that could be from a Cindy Sherman zombie yearbook. “None of these figures are making direct eye contact with you...you’re staring at this thing, but it’s not staring at you.”

Sitting with the anxiety and uncertainty of our future is the dissociative feeling that Adam works through in his paintings. For the past year, Adam ran Insect Gallery in Los Angeles, alongside artists Cooper Larsen and Jessica Williams. Before the space officially closed in February, the trio shared the curatorial and operational duties of running a fully-functioning gallery, located in the backyard shed of a house in Frogtown. Providing a much-needed opportunity for younger artists to show work, the gallery proved that the art world can be a welcoming place and foster a sense of community—even if it means carving out your own corner of it.

Now, working under the constraints of quarantine, isolation has been a difficult but welcomed challenge for Adam. Although it’s allowed him to focus solely on painting, the lack of social interaction with other artists has changed a large part of his daily life, where community had been its core. “Discussion is such a big part of art,” he says, which has become obsolete during this time—regular studio visits, gallery openings, and in-person conversations with friends in the art world simply can’t happen. Hard at work as he plugs away preparing for his upcoming solo show at Smart Objects gallery this September, Adam remains hopeful about the future. “As artists, we’ve always been resourceful.”

Dalya Benor is a writer from Los Angeles. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Vogue, Interview Magazine, Dazed, AnOther, Document Journal, Kaleidoscope and more. She covers art, culture and the in-between, and is a contributing editor to Office Magazine.