You come home late, a long day of work, and get right to work again. The lights turn low and evening approaches. Next thing you know, it’s midnight, and now almost dawn. Walking down the street, you see a car crash. An accident. You see a sign to call for help if you can’t handle dealing with it on your own. You go back home, you wake up later than ever but you have to go to work again. You made great progress on your work. Totally blue with many moves underneath. You go to work, you come back to your studio, you unload, you load. To live here is to handle things on your own, but if you get a hand from your homie that always helps.

When I look at Lisa and Victor’s work, I see the additional hands that have shaped the artist’s ways of making: a daughter’s, a mother’s, lover’s. I see the unwarranted hands that try and break and bend the spirit of the makers, hands controlled by people who don’t believe, or don’t know, the strength of the artist's build, or don’t know what they’ve sacrificed to sustain their lives. The solidity of the work, its reflective construction, is clear to me.

The greatest overlap between these artists is their consideration of time. Balancing art-working with the grind of city living, sustaining their lives through making scratch from service to others. I respect them dearly for their conviction in keeping art close to home.

- Gabriel Garza

Lisa Samudio is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Oakland, CA. Lisa’s work is inspired by the daily rituals in her life through language and text, spiritual identity, transformation, and resistance. Lisa was born in Fresno, CA, but grew up in Albuquerque, NM. Lisa studied art at the University of New Mexico, where she received her BFA and was trained as a sign painter with her father. She now lives in the East Bay with her daughter and is a garden teacher in East Oakland. Recent exhibitions include the group show Signs at Pacific Saw Works (Oakland, 2023), and her debut solo show Choke Cherry at Cushion Works (San Francisco, 2023).

Victor Saucedo is a second-generation Latinx artist based in San Francisco, CA. They explore their relationship with White American history and society through their multidisciplinary experimentation with bodies, ceramics, and digital collage. Saucedo draws inspiration from their own visceral family encounters and from reclaiming imprinted historical documents and internet culture. Saucedo’s confrontational style aims for audiences to reflect on their shared experiences of unrecognized prejudice and lack of empathy. Saucedo received a bachelor's degree in Studio Art from San Francisco State University in 2022. They’ve exhibited and led curatorial projects throughout the Bay Area in various art spaces including, Et al., Root Division, Right Window Gallery, and ICASF as part of their Inaugural Meantime Residency.

Gabriel Garza is a drawer and sculptor, originally from Los Angeles. His curatorial projects include In Concert (2023), San Francisco, in collaboration with Theadora Walsh and Cushion Works, Thats A More (2022), Oakland, also with Theadora Walsh, and Punto Lairs inc (2020-21) in Los Angeles. Recent guest curation has included a solo show of Jasminne Morataya at Bass & Reiner, a group show at Personal Space entitled Helping Heads, and a solo show of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon at Staircase in San Francisco. Recent solo exhibitions of his work include Malprop Pablum at /(Slash) /Room/ (San Francisco) and Epiphany at Escolar (Santa Rosa). He is beginning an MFA program in Sculpture at the University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design this August.