"Structuring Matter" Jan. 20, 2018-Feb. 17, 2019

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Long Nguyen is an award winning visual artist and actor. Long has exhibited his work internationally. Long’s mid-career retrospective exhibition was completed in 2003 at the San Jose Museum of Art. Long’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Oakland Museum of California, the San Jose Museum of Art and the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, California. 

As an actor, Long has worked in movies including Seven Psychopaths and Heaven & Earth. He also worked on TV shows including NCIS Los Angeles and Lodge 49. 

Long is very passionate about his work as an artist and actor. He feels the two disciplines complement each other. Submerging into a character’s skin is very similar to getting lost in one’s painting.

In the Summer of 2017 I moved from South-Western Vermont to the Hi-Desert of Southern California, where I live with my partner Daniel. The year(+) here has been conflicting, solitary and unassuming, severe and agitating. The largest Marine base in the United States, 650,000 acres, is 20 miles away. Each day of quietude is punctuated, sometimes incessantly, by the distant sounding slams of bombs being tested against the sand of their imitation of the deserts of Afghanistan and the stone of their imitation of the villages of Iraq. With each punctuation, a schizophrenic schism feels widened between the stability of my living and the instability of the living implied by this destruction. More and more, this widening has become consuming, leading the reading and looking I’m doing while painting.

Since locating to Los Angeles in 1996, Tim has consistently worked in the film and TV industries as a creative person. He has held positions in camera, set building and art directing, and has been commissioned to create paintings forset decoration.  Additionally, he has designed and  fabricated a large body of work in the form of custom furniture and residential remodeling projects. As a fine artist, he has created hundreds of drawings and paintings, from portraits to landscapes and profound imagery. He is an active volunteer with The Art of Elysium, an LA based, artist-powered philanthropy, which provides creative art workshops for those dealing with social, emotional, and health issues. Tim believes that images are most impactful when they provoke the artist, and the viewer, to discover a deeper understanding about something profound. The current works consider technology’s effect on the human soul.

A native of New York City and graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Maud Simmons moved to Los Angeles to pursue a diverse painting career. Her commercial work is seen in movies and TV, in restaurants and hotels, and has been used for posters, cards, and advertising. Her personal work is ever-changing.  

“I am struck with the fundamental beauty of an object, say a pepper, and become obsessed with that particular form, with it’s rich color and changing shape, and I will paint peppers for years, until one day I notice an amazing cloud formation and that vision fills my consciousness, and I paint skies for the next five years.”  

In my most recent period I am indulging in non-figuritive work. It  feels like I woke up one morning and found that I could speak Italian/French/Chinese without having studied...the abstract work is a completely new language for me and it is thrilling.  

My visual obsession infuses my choices and I am something of a ‘binge-painter’, where the work itself decides how it will shape itself and for how long it will fill my dreams and waking hours.