Flatfiles in an Aluminum Briefcase

Future Fair NYC May 1 – 4, 2024 


Annabel Osberg

Drawing is the foundation of my artistic practice. Nearly all of my paintings originate in my sketchbooks. Pencil or pen on paper is my rawest way of processing the world around me, almost like a diary. I sketch nearly every day—sometimes from life; other times, from memory; often, I doodle whatever comes to mind, à la Surrealist automatism.
The 25 pieces here were selected from copious stacks of drawing pads I’ve filled over the past several years. A few of these, including my “Study for ‘Uprooted,’” were ideas for paintings that have already been executed; others might eventually end up in some form on future canvases. Many of them straightforwardly crystallize memories, dreams, or things I’ve seen, such as a total solar eclipse or a mountain near my house. All offer intimate glimpses into my mind and artistic process.

Annabel Osberg is an artist and critic based in Southern California. Her art addresses the surreality of life in the digital era, posing existential questions about what it means to be human in a world increasingly defined by advanced technology. With shallow, disjunctive spatiality and luminous hues, her paintings often evoke vacuous onscreen realms populated by sundered hybrids of flesh, blood, and nature. Her work has been included in recent exhibitions at the University of La Verne and Ladies’ Room in Los Angeles; and in July will be shown at Serious Topics.
In addition to her studio practice, Osberg regularly contributes to Artforum; and has penned hundreds of articles about art and culture for other publications including Art in America, the Financial Times; The Huffington Post; The Brooklyn Rail; AEQAI; and Artillery, where she served as an editor and weekly columnist. She has also authored numerous monographs and catalog essays.
Osberg graduated summa cum laude from California State University, San Bernardino with a BA in studio art, attended Yale, and received her MFA in painting from Boston University.

Anne Harris

I’ve made so many drawings over the years. Most live in my flat files, never seen except by me when I poke around in a drawer. They’re like thoughts I don’t say out loud, but mull over every now and then. Some have a purpose, some I make because I love to draw. Usually, I draw from life and I draw from art.
The ink drawings were made from Rubens (The Great Last Judgement and The Worship of Venus). The colored pencil and graphite drawings are from life, from me, looking in a mirror–part of a large group of drawings called How to Draw Yourself Out of a Hole.

Anne Harris has exhibited her paintings and drawings at venues ranging from Alexandre Gallery (NYC), DC Moore Gallery (NYC), and Goldfinch Gallery (Chicago), to the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute, The Portland Museum of Art, the California Center for Contemporary Art and the North Dakota Museum of Art. Her work is in such public collections as The Fogg Museum, The Yale University Art Gallery, The New York Public Library and The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Garden. Grants and awards received include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an NEA Individual Artists Fellowship. She is also the originator of The Mind’s I, a drawing project done with other artists which has traveled and exhibited nationally and internationally, including Dalton Warehouse in Los Angeles and Espacio Andrea Brunson in Santiago, Chile. 

Darius Airo

This suite of drawings was made this spring in Airo’s Chicago studio. The small graphite drawings are environmentally responsive, Described with a speedy cartoonish sensibility, the small graphite drawings respond to the artist’s physical surroundings. Ideas of romanic love for people and space are expressed through art historical themes like portraiture, reclining nudes and landscape.

Darius Airo (b.1995, Chicago) lives and works in Chicago. He received his BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. Airo has shown work internationally in exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Paris. Airo is preparing for his third west coast solo exhibition in Los Angeles this Spring 2024 at Abigail Ogilvy gallery.

Emma Gray

Emma Gray studies for larger works:

I made these studies right after one of the most challenging meditation retreats of my life – called The White Tantric. A day long kundalini retreat where we held poses staring into the eyes of our partners with our arms above our heads (to open the heart center) for 62 mins at a time, we practiced 4 poses like this, for over an hour, and 2 sits at 32 minutes each. I was completely astounded by own strength and endurance. I experienced so much agony/ecstasy it completely reset my nervous system, and cleared so much subconscious patterning as well as helping me challenge fear. I have had so much joy and fun since – these studies wanted to embody that. As well as delight in ‘play’ and the almost natural hallucinatory high that came from the sheer brutality of this kind of spiritual and physical endurance. No Mushrooms necessary.

Emma Gray, born in London UK 1970 has been painting solidly since graduating the portrait program in London. She has worked in contemporary art in many iterations. Her gallery: Five Car Garage, established in 2013, has been extensively covered in the global press including there FT, NYT and all major magazines. and a big international reach with collectors and curators. With an ongoing love for meditation, she has trained with four healers since the age of 21 running “The Energetic residency” – a meditation studio above the gallery. Also a former editor of ArtReview, artnet columnist and freelance writer she worked as a scout to a major advisor as well as build private collections. Emma studied at University College London before eventually getting back to art at Heatherley Art School, London, were she trained in portraiture. She has been painting solidly for the past decade, but her focus has seriously increased with her own painting career in the last 5 years, with her first solo show in LA recently at $Serious Topics and multiple group shows in LA, NYC and beyond with a 3 person show at a big University art Gallery in California. Her focus remains on the human figure and the works are usually in relationship to the natural environment and the four elements – see the iceberg, forest, fire and sun paintings.

Faris McReynolds

My current work still weaves around leisure and chaos, snapshots along the way. The leisure and chaos of making art, and in the activities I tend to depict. Pastoral scenes, scenes of internal and external conflict, come in and out of focus in my work. The people on the beach are at the end of a journey of discovery, a conquest, looking for the next horizon to uncover. Looking back at you. Lately I have been putting a lot into removing things from images I am working from until they reach a place of openness that a viewer can enter, separately from my motivations to work. In the age of social media I’ve become wary of literalism and directness in my own art, and want to present images that fall between any predefined ideas of meaning.  Painting for me is a timed performance of sorts, wet on wet, and as well I’m racing against my own interest in the image running out. Watercolor is how I practice for painting in oil.

Faris McReynolds (born 1977, Dallas, TX) is a Los Angeles based artist and musician. His paintings have been shown in solo exhibitions around the world and have been featured in Details, Art Papers, Flash Art Magazine, Tema Celeste, and ArtWeek.

Faris McReynolds grew up in a suburb of Dallas, the son of an Indian-American mother and Caucasian American father. He spent his childhood between Texas and Bombay, and appeared in the 1985 Bollywood movie Shahadat, when he was eight. From 1990-1998, he played bass guitar in Dallas based skate-punk band Family Values. During that time, they toured the American southwest. He started publicly showing his paintings in 1998, and in 2000, he received his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

Heather Brown

My drawings confront the impossibility of intimacy. Made with pen and ink, they are quick, mostly figurative, dedicated to gesture and line, unabashed in their narrative melodrama. They draw the viewer into luridly fantastical psychological spaces where displays of vulnerability are raw, disorienting, and ultimately unanswerable.

Heather Brown’s solo exhibitions include Psychic Forms; Five Car Garage, Santa Monica, Ruins; Carter & Citizen, Los Angeles, Thank You For Your Childhood; Parker Jones, Los Angeles, Drawings; Parker Jones, Los Angeles, and Heather Brown: New Paintings; Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles. Her work has been seen in group exhibitions at several other Los Angeles venues including Weekend, Five Thirty Three, Black Dragon Society, Honor Fraser Gallery, and Angles Gallery. She received an MFA from UCLA and a BA from UCSB. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Jason Meadows

Jason Meadows has explored formal notions of space, narrative, form and material through engaging sculptures that hover between abstraction and representation. Drawing from a wide range of sources including popular culture, art history and literature, the artist skillfully manipulates familiar forms and narratives in ways that challenge expectations in both overt and subtle ways. For the Future Fair, Meadows made a series of collages where time pieces are playfully displayed in a manner mimicking the language of design.

Born in 1972 in Indianapolis, Jason Meadows received a BFA from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago in 1994 and an MFA from the University of California in Los Angles in 1998. His sculptures have been exhibited at institutions worldwide, including the Tate Modern, UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam, and the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco, among others. His work was also featured in the group exhibition, Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy, which traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago to the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, followed by the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA and Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC from 2010-12.

Joshua Aster

What started as greeting cards morphed into unique fully developed singular works on paper. Linocut allows for image elements that can be used over and over again in different combinations. Phrases, patterns, grids, buildings and landscape are layered to create surprising and harmonious compositions. The inspiration for these images include vintage flickering newsreels, drawings from my photos and textile patterns. Elements are printed in intuitive arrangements, allowing for randomness between these singular blocks to develop meaningful associations.

Born in Brooklyn in 1976, Joshua Aster is a Los Angeles based artist and abstract painter who received his MFA from UCLA in 2007. Aster focused on printmaking at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, UK. Composed of memories of place, patterns, and current events, his egg oil tempera paintings feature triangular grids that obscure specificity. He has been featured in numerous exhibitions including solo painting exhibitions at Cuesta College, Southwestern College, Edward Cella Art, Karl Hutter Fine Art, Carl Berg Gallery, and LAXART. His work has been featured in the LA Weekly and The Los Angeles Times amongst other publications. He was awarded a MacDowell Residency in September 2014. He is also a founding member of the artist collective OJO, and has presented work at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles and LACE in Hollywood, CA. His 26 foot long painting can be seen at the W Hotel in Hollywood and see if you can catch his work on the 2022 Amazon Prime TV show, “Cosmic Love.”

Lindsey Nobel

the Neurons of the Metaverse

“My art is an expression of a deeply felt desire to create a future where our data is used to expand our consciousness, and in turn, usher in a new era of peaceful co-existence for the benefit of humanity and the planet we occupy.”

American artist, Lindsey Nobel explores ways of visualizing the interconnectedness between biological life forms—including people—and the informational networks through which all life is expressed, from the cellular level to the digital infosphere.Born in Baltimore in 1969, Nobel studied at the Royal College of Art in London, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. At various times, she has lived San Diego, Monterrey, San Francisco, New York, Rome, Malibu, and Los Angeles. Nobel has exhibited her art throughout the United States as well as abroad, in Paris, Rome, Venice, Dublin, and now Singapore.

Margie Schnibbe

My drawings are experimental narratives that tell stories from my life.

Three drawings are historical, from the early aughts. These are some of the first formal black and white artworks I made on watercolor paper after producing a series of autobiographical xerox ‘zines in the nineties.The words and images are from personal stream of consciousness rants: fragments of books I was reading at the time, news stories, technical manuals, childhood visions, voices in my head

The three recent and brightly colored drawings were inspired by my experience of spending nine days at my mother’s bedside as she was dying in a New York nursing home. This was during the Easter season, a holiday that my mother loved. Each night I returned alone to the suburban house I had grown up in and left many decades prior. I was surrounded by my mother’s tchotchkes. The house was filled with secrets.

Margie Schnibbe is a multidisciplinary artist who has been exhibiting, screening and performing in galleries, film festivals and alternative spaces nationally and internationally for over thirty years. Some of these venues include: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam), Arsenal Institute for Film/Video Art, (Berlin), Oberhausen International Film Festival (Oberhausen), Anthology Film Archives (New York), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), as well as numerous venues in Los Angeles including LACE, Outfest, The Finley Gallery, Ladies’ Room, Serious Topics, Human Resources, Charlie James Gallery, Night Gallery, Nicodim Gallery, MOCA, The Hammer Museum, The Getty Museum, Vincent Price Art Museum, LAXART, François Ghebaly Gallery, The Box, and David Kordansky Gallery. Schnibbe received a Cultural Trailblazer award from the Los
Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in 2019 and a Creative Capital grant in 2016. Schnibbe earned an MFA from Cal Arts in 1998. Schnibbe’s artworks are included in public collections and archives including The Getty Research Institute, The British Film Institute, The California African American Museum and Los Angeles Contemporary Archive.

Nina Bovasso

It was quite by accident my signature “gravity bound mound “ one day sprouted some ears. It’s a representation of shape shifting. A few years ago they sprouted legs. Thus a theme of mobility for the mounds began. Even as I write this and use theword “sprout”, I‘m getting an idea of how I’ll next problematize my mound series going forward.

Nina Bovasso was born and raised in New York City, NY, where she currently lives and works. She is known mainly for her works on paper, both large and small, and exuberant in color. A kind of semiabstraction and pattern gone amok with varying surfaces and visual time, see the most simple of marks, a dot and a line, proliferate across a field in
varying scale, sometimes morphing into a flower,and sometimes exploding out of a box. There is a nuance of interplay, and an engaged restlessness, moving about like a dance that obfuscates any questions of structure, of who conforms to who.

Ms.Bovasso’s work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including New Museum, NYC, St Louis Museum, Cleveland MOCA, Sala Uno, Rome & Kavi Gupta, Chicago.  Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications such as NYTimes,  LATimes, Artfoum, Artnews & Art in America, among others. Her work is in many museums and collections, including MoMA, NY, Whitney Museum, The Henry, Seattle, JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and more.  Bovasso ‘s work was recently included in publication One Hundred Painters of Tomorrow, by Kurt Beers. In 2012 she received a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, where she produced a large body of new works. In 2006-07 Bovasso held the one year Lamar Dodd Endowed Chair position at the University of Georgia in Athens. Part of the award included a large studio, where she produced A Giant Ball for a solo project at Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art.

Shiri Mordechay

In these small watercolors on paper, I create a series of vignettes and interpretations from the third eye- themes that include sexuality, death, hybrid lifeforms, romantic environments, and the gender spectrum are all examined through a dark sensibility. Most of these pieces were created during the height of the Covid pandemic and later in a room in an old squat in Philadelphia. They came at a time when I was forced to work in smaller spaces, and during a time of uncertainty scraping at the unknown. They are connected through internal themes rising from this mystery.

Shiri Mordechay was born in Israel and raised in Nigeria. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from School of Visual Arts in New York. Solo exhibitions have occurred in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Italy and Ireland. Some of the galleries/shows she has exhibited in are Honor Fraser, Diane Rosentien, Plane Space & Spring Break Art Fair. In 2020 her work was featured in New American paintings juried by Jerry Saltz . Mr. Saltz has written of her work stating, “Shiri Mordechay gives us a topsy-turvy world of mundane and mad images in sprawling paintings that curl onto the floor, snake around corners, and spill into space. We see nipple rings on giant breasts, bloody roadkill, spider webs, and Gothic mansions. It’s Charles Adams meets Edgar Allen Poe meets Animal Planet. Mordechay never allows us to look at any one thing; chaos and tumult reign. One thing leads to the next in this perpetual image-imagination flow. It makes stream of consciousness into a torrent of unconsciousness.”

Mordechay describes her paintings as if the ideas arrive from outside and yet anyone with an eye for the grotesque and sardonic can spot the humor that could only be her own. Imagery seems to arrive by chance and move about within a pre-moral realm and conjure what Julia Kristeva calls an “oceanic feeling.”