The photographs and artist books of Cig Harvey, MFA, have been widely exhibited and remain in the permanent collections of major museums and collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; and the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. She was a recent finalist of the BMW Prize at Paris Photo and the Prix Virginia, an international photography prize for women. Cig had her first solo museum show at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway, in the spring of 2012 in conjunction with the release of her monograph, You Look At Me Like An Emergency (Schilt Publishing, 2012). Cig’s devotion to visual storytelling has lead to innovative international campaigns and features with New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar Japan, Kate Spade, and Bloomingdales. Cig teaches workshops and regularly speaks on her work and processes at institutions around the world. She is known for her high energy, sense of humor and creativity. She brings a profound sense of optimism to all that she does.

Cig lives in a farmhouse in the Midcoast of Maine with her husband Doug (who has the profile of an emperor on a Roman coin), their wayward daughter Scout, and Scarlet the dog (the original baby). She was an assistant professor at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University for ten years, but recently took a leap of faith to devote her life to purely making things. She tries to do this every day, and then pretends to clean up the mess she’s made with varying degrees of success.

** To know more about Cig’s work go here.

Oakland-based Atelier Dion has been in operation for less than 2 years, but has already built up an impressive list of clients and is on its way to becoming a successful ceramics production house. Owners Jay and Rie Dion are a husband and wife duo who met in 2008 while attending graduate school at California College of the Arts. After graduation, the couple realized they could use their skills as ceramic artists to create a business focused on custom fabrication. We visited the Dions in their West Oakland studio where we discussed the ins and outs of starting a business and the sacrifices and compromises they have made to get their vision off the ground.

This is the second episode of Working Title, a collaboration between KQED and Little Paper Planes, hosted by Kelly Lynn Jones of LPP and Andrew Martin Scott, co-owner of Needles and Pens. Through this program, which will include videos, interviews, articles, and essays, we will explore how local artist-entrepreneurs are re-inventing the American Dream, creating alternative economies and redefining success in the Bay Area.

Jennifer Mehigan is an artist and graphic designer based out of Singapore. Here are a variety of her works and scenes in her studio. To see more of her work visit her site.

Sara Maragotto is an Italian illustrator. To see more of her work visit her website.

Rain Studies is an ongoing series of unique 20 x 24 inch gelatin silver photograms of rain. They are made using rain in both Hawaii and Northern California.

To know more about Klea’s work go here.

Selected works from 1980 to 2012 of James Welling.

**All images are from www.davidzwirner.com

The work of Richard Rezac.

**All images are from www.richardrezac.com

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Emir Šehanović is a collage and digital media artist. He works with what he finds in his environment, real or digital. To see more of his work visit his site or flickr.

Francisca Pageo is a collage artist based out of Spain. To see more of her collages visit her website or flickr.

As an artist, Pageo not only fullfills her constant duty of constructing her
subjectivity, but does it in such a fragile and tricky field as collage, which
sometimes seems to be ruled by a systematic ad nauseam repetition of naïve
cliches. After many hard working years, her images bear witness to a self-
learning process which, little by little, has displayed a strong potential and gone
beyond several induced mandates.

This infinite roads leading toward self-construction, which takes place on
the artist’s relationship with the image, entails a shift from a period that was
characterized by a conscious will of naming, of clearly presenting her imaginary
content –in a designerly way, one might say-, to a period in which everything
starts being phisically incarnated, thanks to her own development of technical
skills. In this sense, Pageo’s work undergoes a metamorphosis from pure
figurativism –in which the formal elements depended on a certain narrativity- to
pure realism –a structurally true construction conceived to be watched.

I think it’s important to point out that this evolution doesn’t raise from a
substantial variation in her imaginary –she actually keeps working with similar
stuff- but from the way that material is used: the technical experience –
knowing how to make and how to look- gives entity, pictoricity –like a sort of cut
painting-, modeling, to her work. Plastic elements that in the beginning were
submitted to a fixed idea now rest upon the surface to construct the image and its visual
opacity. ¿Aren’t those black areas in the photographs just marks of light,
photographic matter acquiring presence while showing off the impossibility of
a representational equivalence?. ¿What are those shadows that quietly outline
and define something as eminently flat as a collage?, pure nonsenses that
stop the gaze in the surface of the picture. They come to break the illusion of
achieving an alleged meaning and then they become mere spots, mere blots.
¿Could there be a being more given to be seen than those carnal tondos?
Pageo gets rid of the discursive inertia that used to engage her to an imaginary
role –a feminine but paradoxically masculinizing one it was, because of that
stereotypical ideation of femininity and the conviction of stating things in a total,
objective way- and when she flops down on the structure and lets herself be
swept along, in that precise point, her traced subjectivity is put to actuality.

by Héctor Rey – visual & sound artist