BACK ROOM: February 25 – April 9, 2022
Pantea Karimi
Pantea Karimi is a multidisciplinary artist who employs VR, performative video, sound, traditional and digital printing, and drawing. Her art highlights personal narratives, political and societal issues through the lens of Iran’s rich and historic art and visual culture. Karimi’s process involves investigating documents, manuscripts, and historical objects at libraries and archives around the world. For this show of prints, the main visual elements–animals and plants–are sourced from the Herbal, a prominent medieval botanical manuscript. Karimi digitally drew the botanical and animal silhouettes and then prepared them for screen-printing printing process.
Karimi has exhibited internationally across a range of solo, group, and traveling exhibitions in Iran, Algeria, Germany, Croatia, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her work is included in public collections including Stanford University, UC Davis, and UC San Francisco, and has been featured in local and international publications. She is the recipient of the 2022 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant, the 2022 Mass MoCA the Studios Residency Award, the 2021 University of California San Francisco Library Artist in Residence Award, 2020 the City of San José’s Public Art Program Holding the Moment Art Award, the 2019 City of San Jose Arts and Cultural Exchange Grant, the 2019 Silicon Valley Artist Laureates Award, and the 2017 Kala Fellowship-Residency Award.
Christine Meuris
Christine Meuris presents a series of wall hangings that encompass playful expressions of post-pandemic, trans-apocalyptic musings that she calls Tiny Textiles. The pieces are created by the unweaving and reweaving techniques of drawn thread embroidery and they take up less space – concepts that Meuris has been thinking about a lot.
Christine Meuris is an artist living and working in Berkeley, Ca. She has shown her work in solo and group shows locally, notably at the Berkeley Art Center and Hello Stitch Sewing and Quilting Studio, and in group shows around the U.S. She was the inaugural Digital Artist in Residence at the Museum of Quilts and Textiles in San Jose, CA during the pandemic. She has work in the collections of the City of Berkeley, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, Kaiser Permanente and the Four Seasons Residences, as well as in several private collections.
Neo Serafimidis
Neo Serafimidis is showing a set of photographs from his series Coldtone City. Somewhere in his subconscious are faint memories from decades ago of promotional materials — corporate reports, brochures, and building proposals–containing blue-toned images of imagined buildings, landscapes and architectural drawings. In this series he explores applying this aesthetic to images of urban environments often in decline, offering a vision not of what could be, but of what has been.
Neo Serafimidis is a photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a member of the Bay Area Photographers Collective and has shown his work in various Bay Area galleries. Photos from his series The Sheltering Night were recently included in the de Young Open, a large group show at San Francisco’s de Young Museum.