VELLUM LA Presents

Next-GEN LA: Digital Artists to Watch

Curated by Jesse Damiani and Sinziana Velicescu

Opening Reception:
Thursday, January 12, 2023 7-9 PM

On View at Vellum LA:
January 12, 2023 - January 22, 2023

Vellum LA
7673 Melrose Ave
Los Angeles CA 90046

Next-GEN LA: Digital Artists to Watch

Vellum LA is proud to announce Next-GEN LA: Digital Artists to Watch, an exhibition highlighting the work of 10 trailblazing emerging and early career artists based in the Los Angeles area, curated by Jesse Damiani and Sinziana Velicescu.

Los Angeles has emerged as a global hub for artists working with digital media. A city defined by its expanse, Los Angeles is home to a multitude of thriving and diverse artist communities. Next-GEN LA: Digital Artists to Watch is a yearly exhibition series designed to foreground standout early career digital artists, whose contributions are shaping the next generation of art in the city and beyond.

The exhibition invites local and global audiences alike to engage with their practices through a physical exhibition at Vellum LA on Melrose presented on state-of-the-art LED Luma Canvas displays, and sold as 1/1 of NFTs on SuperRare.

Featuring the work of:

Ainslee Alem Robson

Breanna Browning

Caleb Craig

Carrie Chen

Connie Bakshi

Creative Aya

David Guerrero

Enrique Agudo

Hirad Sab

Nate Mohler

About The Artists

LA-based Cleveland native Ainslee Alem Robson is an award-winning Ethiopian-American director, writer and media artist. Streamer Lab. Her work pushes beyond monolithic narratives of Africa and Blackness, and instead pursues expression for the complexities of liminal spaces between Africa and its diaspora. Through a transcultural, feminist, and first-generation American lens she crafts worlds focusing on decolonial narratives that deconstruct identity, perception, hierarchy and colonial legacies using film and emerging technologies in digital art.

Aya, also known as Faith Umoh, is an interdisciplinary creative whose range of expertise and practice includes data science, African history, media culture, storytelling, generative art, and speculative technology. Her multi-platform digital art collections unfold at the intersection of Afrofuturism and Artificial Intelligence, seeking a true collaboration between human imagination and computer algorithms moving towards a singularity with the power of evocative beauty and restorative social consciousness. Aya is currently working through a Stanford University BlackAIR Grant to develop “an AI co-creative system that enables her to imagine and render new worlds based on books and music lyrics,” as well as in a broader project to supplant negative media portrayals of women and Black with a vibrant revitalization of erased histories. Her work is currently part of the intercontinental and actually, interdimensional, exhibition Artists Who Code on view simultaneously in London, West Hollywood, and on Artsy’s corner of the metaverse.

Breanna Browning is a media artist and creative director with studios in Los Angeles, California and her native rural Tennessee. Breanna’s practice merges digital and physical matter through the misuse of technological tools and traditional methods of making. Her background in architecture and speculative fiction allows her to work simultaneously at multiple scales- from the bit to the body, from the landscape to the imaginary. Her varied practice includes image-based works, sculptures, immersive environments,

Caleb Craig (b. 1997) is a Los Angeles-based artist and performer who creates long-term audiovisual projects using immersive media, music production, and digital fabrication techniques. Their practice is characterized by an interest in queer representation and politics. Much of their work examines the body’s changing relationship to society and technology. They work with virtual reality, 3D modeling, 3D printing, couture, animation, and music production to create experimental and innovative modes of performance.

Carrie Chen is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles (Gabrielino-Tongva Land). Working with CGI animation, simulation and projection installation, she explores how digital figuration can be a poetic and multidimensional means to express ideas about identity, presence, and immateriality. Raised between the US and China, Chen’s practice involves examining non-western ontologies and narratives, while deconstructing and reconfiguring her relationship to Chinese American identity and ancestry. 

Connie Bakshi is an artist, classical musician, and engineer based out of Los Angeles. Working predominantly with artificial intelligence, she unfolds lore and rituals of the past that would collide with dreams of post-colonial futures. Her works mediate between digital memory embedded in AI and collective consciousness emerging on the blockchain to question the relationships between past and future, humanity and technology.

David Guerrero is an Los Angeles based artist, musician and coder. David mixes generative analog and digital music with code to create abstract and expressive pieces. With an interest in how math shapes structure in nature, his static and A/V artworks combine to create surreal minimalist environments.

Enrique Agudo’s (b. Madrid, Spain 1989) work explores the limits of digital media. Contemporary culture is infused with digital imagery, and Agudo’s work focuses on the pattern recognition of these digital indexes and shedding light on how they affect the way we behave. Enrique Agudo continues to use immersive and experimental digital media as the tools to question and challenge anthropological discourse around identity.

Hirad Sab is an Iranian-American artist whose work explores the margins of digital aesthetics, internet culture, and technology. His amalgams occupy a precarious intersection of culture and the democratic nature of image circulation; an aesthetic trend that expands and mutates rapidly. Sab heavily features depictions of the human form, gesture, and activity in distinctly digital environments. The result is an emblematic oeuvre that resists easy classification.

Nate Mohler (b. 1997, Los Angeles, CA) is an emerging media artist, who works with digital technology as a paint brush to build avant-garde experiences. Mohler is intrigued with the fusion of conceptual art and technology to support social activism with unconventional space and sound. His work raises questions about art + technology through digital mediums such as projection mapping, immersive installations, sculpture and video art.