Pippa Garner is an artist of many in-betweens. Since studying automotive design at ArtCenter in the 1960s and serving in the U.S. Army as a combat illustrator during the Vietnam War, Garner has built a decades-long career that bridges the chasms dividing art from design, publishing, media, and lived experience. Always with an edge of sardonic wit, her absurdist yet accessible drawings, sculptures, and characters cast a satirist’s trenchant eye toward the systems of authority and myth that shaped the Boomer Generation’s American experience. Embarking, in the late ‘80s, on her self-described project of “gender hacking” caused an estrangement from L.A.’s art world at the time, as well as a recent resurgence of interest in her status as a pioneering trans artist.

Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, video, ceramics, and installation. She is co-founder of Monte Vista Projects, an artist-run collective space in Los Angeles, and an assistant professor in the Department of Art at the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture. In her work she offers a number of windows through which to encounter the colonial histories embedded deeply within her organic, and often living, materials.

Susan Silton is a Los Angeles-based artist whose multidisciplinary projects respond to the complexities of subjectivity in a given moment — often through poetic combinations of humor, discomfort, subterfuge, and unabashed beauty. She speaks here about Type Specimens, a limited-edition serigraph print produced in the pre-pandemic days of early 2020 for East of Borneo.

Shevaun Wright is an artist and a lawyer. She earned her Masters of Law at the University of Melbourne and recently graduated from University of California, Los Angeles with a Master of Fine Arts. Her interdisciplinary fluency, Australian aboriginal heritage, and feminist perspective combine to yield a singular, thought-provoking body of work that delves into language and power, patriarchal and white supremacist tyranny, and concepts around the social contract. Kimberli Meyer spoke with Wright, now based in Los Angeles, over Zoom in the summer of 2020 to discuss her artistic practice.

Since 2013, Tarrah Krajnak has been producing photographic works that spiral around the particular circumstances of her birth. Born in Lima, Peru, in 1979, she was left at an orphanage and adopted as an infant by parents who come from the coal mining town of Lansford, Pennsylvania. The late 1970s in Peru were marked by social and political turmoil, as the country transitioned from a repressive military dictatorship to widespread bloodshed with the beginning of the Communist Party of Peru’s (also known as Sendero Luminoso, or the “Shining Path”) guerrilla war in 1980. In June 2019, Kavior Moon spoke with Krajnak about her recent works, which employ found photographs, the artist’s body, and analog photography to speak about a range of issues, from the use of archives to invent histories to the problematics of representing violence and trauma. The conversation took place in Krajnak’s studio in Claremont, where she is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Pitzer College.