In Seeping Through Domestic Dissonance, on view January 24 through May 18, 2025, Mitra Fabian creates a surreal and somber mixed-media installation that intersects the natural world, built environments, climate change, and human interference. This project will include Fabian’s recognizable organic sculptural forms as well as the use of resistors, capacitors, and diodes. But it will also reveal animal elements and a wooden shelter ravaged by fire. This installation is an immersive contemplative conglomeration of her six years living in the Santa Cruz Mountains where she and her wife encountered first-hand experiences of the CZU fires, catastrophic rain, wind, and downed trees. Concepts around wildland urban interface and diminishing animal habitat also play important roles in this exhibition.

Visitors will be transported into a mysterious yet familiar environment. The ceramic and mixed media sculptures may look somewhat identifiable, but leave them with a sense of eeriness, and a question of what exactly these organisms are and why and how they are growing. Setting these sculptures in and around the wooden structure ties the forms to familiar architecture, and therefore to humans, thus probing questions of human relationships to nature, and how things can go awry, especially in the face of climate change. This is the aftermath of human-caused disasters, focusing on destruction, but also nature’s resiliency, grotesquery, beauty, and wonder.

This exhibition can be found in the Spotlight Gallery.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Mitra Fabian was born in Iran and raised in Boston. She received a BA in Art with an Anthropology minor from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. She located to Los Angeles in 1996 and returned to school in 2002 to receive an MFA from California State University, Northridge. As of May 2005, she lives and works in the Bay Area. Fabian has been showing her work nationally since 1997, had a solo show at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art in 2007, and was commissioned by Google for several pieces in 2021. She has also shown with galleries and museums in California and Oregon, and is represented by the Billis Williams Gallery in Los Angeles. She has been an artist-in-residence at Bemis in Omaha, NE, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and Centre d’Art Marnay, in France. Her work has been reviewed by several media organizations including Spark, KQED Television, Ruby Mag (an online Argentinean art magazine), Create Magazine, Angeleno Magazine, and Artweek. She is a professor at West Valley College teaching sculpture and ceramics.

My artwork reflects upon the intersection of local industry, humanity, and nature. I work almost exclusively with manufactured materials- the remnants and by-products of human activity. As I build with these materials I alter them in such a way that they are not immediately recognizable. The reconstruction is determined by what the material is capable of doing but not meant to do and is always more organic. My current work consists of ceramic sculptures textured with resistors, capacitors, and diodes, the candy-colored components one finds on circuit boards. I am captivated by these materials that were ubiquitous in Silicon Valley but have limitations in an industry that seeks to get smaller and faster. In using these components I comment upon the slowness of my process in opposition to the immediacy and “progress” the resistors are thought to provide. And because these elements end up as e-waste, I also seek to illustrate a certain level of waste and intentional obsolescence that they can signify.