Trav'ler's Inn- April 29–June 3, 2016  Jamison Carter  Alika Cooper  Oona Gardner  Kiel Johnson  William Ransom         

Alika Cooper attended the California College of the Arts for her BFA and MFA. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Actual Size, Los Angeles and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, MULHERIN, Toronto, ON, and Tracy Williams, Ltd., New York. Her work has been in exhibitions at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, Robert Blumenthal Gallery, New York, LAXART, Los Angeles, and Western Exhibitions, Chicago. Her work has been covered in Artforum, Frieze, and Flashe Art. She recently was a panelist on Cheryl Donegan: Screening and Panel: Marjorie Keller’s Daughters of Chaos at the New Museum. She is the recipient of grants from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation. She was Artist in Residence at the Luminary Center for the Arts, Saint Louis, MO in spring 2014.

Jamison Carter (b. 1973, Winston-Salem, North Carolina) received his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2001, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions in Los Angeles include Klowden Mann, California State University Northridge, and MorYork Gallery, and he has exhibited in group exhibitions at galleries and public institutions throughout California, and in Italy at the Museo Archeologico in Amelia. His work was recently on view in the exhibition We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles with Bardo LA as part of the 56th Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy. He has exhibited at art fairs in Brussels, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, and Miami. His recent two person exhibition at LAX Airport with Bardo LA was the subject of a feature on KCET’s Artbound, and his work has been reviewed in New American Paintings, LA Weekly, Artsy, Artillery and elsewhere. Along with numerous private collections, his work is held in the permanent collection of Weatherspoon Gallery, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He teaches sculpture, drawing, and three-dimensional design at Los Angeles Valley College.

Kiel Johnson is a Los Angeles based artist, currently running around the west coast, getting involved in any creative project that will have him.  With an emphasis on drawings and sculpture his works always say, handmade, hard work and having fun.  Kiel brings the inanimate to life, giving us a world not unlike ours but entirely his.

Collaboration has become a big part of his practice as well.  Through epic workshops, artist talks & collaborative video projects, Kiel uses simple materials and hand made ingenuity to bring the infectious disease of creativity to anyone willing to engage.

His work has been exhibited widely throughout galleries and museums around the country, with recent solo shows at Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Davidson Contemporary, New York, NY; The Taubman Museum, Ronaoke, VA.  Johnson is also the recipient of numerous awards including The Pollock-Krazner Grant in 2008; Durfee Foundation ARC Grant, 2007; and the Outstanding Creative Achievement Award, 2003. Kiel has also been found speaking about his work at TED events around the world with recent talks at TEDxAlAin, United Arab Emirates and TEDxChristchurch, New Zealand

From an early age Oona Gardner experimented in expression through writing, drawing and performance, but it wasn’t until she discovered sculpture in college that she found her visceral sensibility with clay. After receiving her BA from Bennington in 2003, she went on to earn an MFA at The Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2006 where she was awarded the Frankel Merit Scholarship.

Gardner has shown her work nationally and internationally and has been awarded several international residencies including the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands and the NES Artist Residency in Skagastrond, Iceland. Since Moving to Los Angeles, Gardner has shown locally at the Torrance Art Museum, Chime and Co. Gallery and Rio Hondo College among other venues. In 2009 she showed the work Accumulation and Entropy: the Potted Plant Project in the project space at NCECA in Phoenix. Most recently was included in the 72ndScripps Annual at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery. Gardner has also taken on curatorial projects including F•Utility: Absurd Acts of Radical Intelligence at Arena One Gallery in Santa Monica and the Manana Show at Chime and Co. Gallery.

William Ransom was born in 1975 and grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont where the daily physical experiences on the verge between the man made and the natural set the stage for a life of material engagement. He studied Sculpture and Architecture at Bennington College graduating with a BA in 2004 and went on to receive an MFA in Sculpture from Claremont Graduate University in 2008. 

He received a Windgate Fellowship at The Vermont Studio Center, an Open Studio Fellowship at Franconia Sculpture Park and a Claremont Graduate University Art Department Fellowship and in 2009 was the first recipient of the Pitzer College Emerging Artist Residence. Ransom’s most recent solo show was in 2015 at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY. He has shown extensively across the country in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, where he currently lives and works.