NEW EDITION: Work by Recent Verge Studio Artists
April 4 - May 11, 2025
reception: Friday, April 4, 5-8pm
Featuring: Amy Elkins, Serena Cole, Lyn Freeman, Jupiter Lockett, Nitheen Ramalingam, Orlando Tirado, Amy Vidra
Verge Center for the Arts is pleased to present New Edition: Work by Recent Verge Studio Artists.
New Edition showcases the work of Verge resident artists who have joined the program since our last studio survey exhibition in 2023. The work featured spans everything from gestural sculpture and narrative painting to reclaimed materials and sensual photography. Recent Verge studio artists include transplants to Sacramento, both national and international, recent MFA graduates, and existing regional artists. This exhibition is an exciting opportunity to get acquainted with new art and artists in our community.
Verge’s residency program is now in its 15th year serving close to 150 emerging and career artists. The program offers low and in some cases no cost studio space as well as access to an array of resources including a clay studio, printmaking facility, risographic printer, and figure drawing studio. Applications are accepted twice annually and are reviewed by a panel of community artists and arts professionals.
ARTIST BIOS:
AMY ELKINS – Amy Elkins is a visual artist and educator based in Berkeley and Sacramento, CA. She received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University. She works primarily in photography and installation and has spent the past fifteen years researching, creating and exhibiting work that explores the complexities of gender, race and identity, including how they are impacted by systems of power: prisons, the military, colonization, and hierarchies built upon social constructs. Most recently Elkins’ work pivots to include explorations of self as well as her family’s deeply rooted and complex history in Southern California as an 8th generation born on Tongva/Gabrielino land in the greater Los Angeles area with the ancestral blood of both colonized and colonizer. Her approach is series-based, steeped in research and oscillates between formal, conceptual and documentary.
SERENA COLE – Serena Cole received her Master of Fine Arts degree in 2011 from the California College of the Arts. She has exhibited her work in multiple solo exhibitions including Gallery 16 (San Francisco), Soo Visual Arts Center (Minneapolis), and Stephanie Chefas Projects (Portland). Her work has also been exhibited widely at venues such as Dodge Gallery (New York), Roberts and Tilton (Los Angeles), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and Phillips de Pury (New York). Her work has been published in The Huffington Post, Juxtapoz Magazine, KQED Arts, Comstock’s Magazine, and more. She lives and works in Sacramento, CA. She is an adjunct professor at Sierra College and American River College.
LYN FREEMAN – Lyn Freeman made a recent return to a dedicated studio practice a few years ago after originally earning her MFA from Ohio University in 1980. Freeman’s lyrical sculptures are both weightless and substantive, using playful gestural forms to occupy space.
JUPITER LOCKETT – Jupiter is a contemporary abstract artist, who currently resides in Sacramento, California. His work is created to make the viewer feel comfortable and uneasy at the same time. Focusing on beings who are daily ostracized, while giving light to the humanity of dark skinned people, who originate from Africa. Capturing the essence from the figures on canvas, through a child’s perspective; reminding the viewer of the innocence, that Black Americans are robbed of daily. The imagery in his paintings evokes a reminder, that no matter the form of suppression, beauty and power cannot be taken away. His goal as an artist is not to make the viewer like him, but to make them see the world through a pair of eyes that will convict the ignorance humanity has been taught. Fresh back from his artist residency in France, at Chateau d’Orquevaux, Jupiter is gearing up for his second and third residencies in September 2021, at the Imago Artist Residency in Tsarimir, Bulgaria; as well as the SkopArt Residency in Skopelos, Greece of October 2021.
NITHEEN RAMALINGAM – Nitheen is an Indian Artist currently living and working in Sacramento, California, having recently earned his MFA from UC Davis. “I was living at my home in Chennai, India during the pandemic after a gap of six years. I was observing and sketching my place in our family home. However, I was also sketching a lot in the streets, especially the traffic junctions, tea shops and fruit & flower markets in the evenings. On large sheets of paper, I have been making repeated marks and erasures using Charcoal and pastels to depict and think about the restful scenes from my home and the contrasting busy streets outside of it. I have been placing different large drawings next to each other, giving them an imposing presence. This body of work is born with a background of only spending vacations at my hometown while I was away in a different geography and linguistic region in India with a contrasting socio-political ethos (fascist politics). I am interested and curious to understand my own place with this new experience, knowledge, and time. I am trying to look at it from a new perspective, trying to understand its socio-political present and the possible future. As I am living in northern California the past six months, I find myself drawing places from back home along with the places from here, where I am finding both similarities and great differences. Depicting signages and using writing contextualizes the images talking about these two places.”
ORLANDO TIRADO – Orlando Tirado (b. 1982, El Organo, San Luis Potosí, Mexico) is a photographer and an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker. His feature films include Medeas (2013), Hannah (2017), and Monica (2022), co-written with Director Andrea Pallaoro. He received the Sergei Parajanov Award for Outstanding Poetic Vision for Medeas at the Tbilisi International Film Festival. Hannah was nominated for a César for Best Foreign Film in 2018 and star Charlotte Rampling won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 74th Venice International Film Festival. Monica features Trace Lysette, Patricia Clarkson, Adriana Barraza, and Emily Browning, and will premiere in the official competition of the 79th Venice International Film Festival.
AMY VIDRA – Amy Vidra is a Sacramento-based conceptual and abstract alternative media artist challenging the narratives we are told or that we tell ourselves. Her work combines and transforms narratives of past, present, and future, connecting and integrating old and new narratives. Her work often utilizes materials of textiles, photographs, and plaster, while thread is the connector, connecting time, connecting space; stitched, embedded, metaphorically and literally holding them together. Vidra holds her BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art and her Master’s in Art Therapy and Counseling from Southwestern College, Santa Fe. She is an art preparator and teaches art healing workshops throughout the Sacramento area.