Art Talks at Brand invites contemporary artists to discuss their work and the issues surrounding it, followed by a moderated Q&A with Brand staff member, artist, and writer Jennifer Remenchik. Artists are selected to reflect the diversity of the art scene of the greater Los Angeles area.
The series is sponsored by the Brand Associates and is free and open to the public.​
February 13, 7:00 PM | Roksana Pirouzmand
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Roksana Pirouzmand (b. 1990 in Yazd, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Los Angeles. While performance art is at the core of her practice, her ideas have materialized in mediums such as sculpture, installation, and two dimensional imagery. In her pieces, personal experiences are incorporated into installation systems that suggest the possibility of transformation, deterioration, and movement through interactions between the artist and her work. Pirouzmand received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2017 and an MFA from UCLA in 2022. She has exhibited at François Ghebaly, New York (2024); Spurs Gallery, Beijing (2024); Vernacular Institute, Mexico City (2024); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Murmurs, Los Angeles (2022); Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles (2022); Guest House, Inglewood, California (2022); Make Room, Los Angeles (2022); Simon Lee Gallery, London (2022); Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California (2021); REDCAT, Los Angeles (2020); and The Box, Los Angeles (2019).
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Images: Roksana Pirouzmand, A tap, a word, 2024. Photo by Brad Farwell; Artist portrait. Images courtesy of the artist.
March 6, 7:00 PM | Shana Hoehn
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Working in sculpture and drawing, Los Angeles-based artist Shana Hoehn considers modes and conditions of agency, embodiment, and transformation. Hoehn's sculptural work combines traditional and digital fabrication techniques and employs various materials, including wood, sawdust, clay, and metal. Hoehn's work references a long and winding history of women contorting and the bodily destruction involved with transformation. These sculptural contortionists appear to levitate, fold, collapse, hatch, split, and splinter like eternally petrified shapeshifters. Animated by unseen forces, Hoehn's figures twist and bend in acts of refusal and self-transformation. Hoehn received her MFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University in Sculpture and Extended Media and earned a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has been in numerous group exhibitions and has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at Jack Barrett Gallery, New York City, NY (2023); Deli Gallery, Mexico City, MX (2023), Prairie, Chicago, IL (2023); Make Room, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Art Pace, San Antonio, TX (2022); Euqinom Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2021), among others.
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Images: Shana Hoehn. Basket Toss, 2022-2023. Cedar, wood pulp, steel rod, bronze. 59x13x75 in; Artist portrait. Images courtesy of the artist.
March 20, 7:00 PM | Miguel Nelson
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Miguel Nelson is a conceptual artist, designer, and developer who has created art and experimental social spaces for over twenty-five years. His interests have included projects as varied as multi-element, immersive art performances to developing urban oases as private event spaces to an ongoing venture dedicated to the re-vitalization of the Desert Island Country Club in Palm Springs. Now he is focused on a large-scale collaborative art project, “The Spirit of Rudy Caballero”, in which Nelson invites other (credited) contemporary artists to create work under the fictional artist’s name. This project manifests not only as discrete art objects but also as pop-ups, exhibitions, and recorded conversations, incorporating many experiential facets in this gesamtkunstwerk. “The Spirit of Rudy Caballero” recently presented an exhibition of sketches at LOOT Gallery in Mexico City during Zona Maco, and is slated for upcoming presentations at Frieze New York and London. ​
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Images: Rudy Caballero Volume 1 - Preamble | Anacapa Chart (detail); Artist portrait. Images courtesy of the artist.
May 1, 7:00 PM | Nick Aguayo
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Nick Aguayo paints compellingly layered abstract works that reveal an inventive approach to the materiality and physicality of paint. Emphasizing the performative aspects of dragging, pressing, brushing, and rolling paint onto canvas, Aguayo layers hand-rendered geometric shapes, building his compositions around the tensions between erasure and transparency, accumulation and excavation. Taking cues from collage, Aguayo densely coats his canvases with thick impasto surfaces, textural areas of paint, and materials including marble dust, to create a matte physicality to each composition. He received his BA from UCLA in 2007 and his MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2012. Aguayo has been in numerous group exhibitions and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at La Loma Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; and the Undergraduate Art Gallery, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA. His work may be found in the collections of The Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY and the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA. 
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Images: Nick Aguayo, Gasoline, 2024, 96x86 in, acrylic and marble dust on canvas. Photograph by Jeff McClane; Studio portrait by Roger Edwards. Images courtesy of the artist.
Brand staff member and program moderator Jennifer Remenchik is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited in several institutions and galleries, including No Gallery, VIVO Media Arts Centre, HILDE, basement projects, Industry Lab, and The Contemporary Austin, among others. She is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic and has written for CurateLA, BOMB Magazine, and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles. Remenchik began art talks at Brand Library & Art Center to showcase artists who reflect the diversity of the art scene of the greater Los Angeles area.