Darryl Jones is a landscape designer, artist and amateur filmmaker based in Oakland, CA. His lifelong quest is to unite his love of film with his love of landscape. This journey has taken him down many roads rich with watercolor sketches, haiku poetry, theatre performances, binge-watching, filmmaking and unguided walking tours.
His insatiable curiosity has led him to produce a web series on how to draw outside in the landscape (Drawing in the Landscape with Darryl Jones), direct a documentary about San Francisco’s Market Street (This Is Market Street), direct a narrative short (Surprise Me) and contribute to the ongoing collection of The California Chronicles featured in the Space Open Exhibition.
Darryl met Bobby Glass in Missoula, Montana in the summer of 2010 before attending UC Berkeley together. Since 2011, they’ve been hosting Space Open gatherings together in the Bay Area.
David Aipperspach graduated from UC Berkeley in 2010 with a B.A. in Landscape Architecture. Inspired by Chip Sullivan’s drawing courses and extensive work in CED's Visual Studies Department with Anthony Dubovsky and Joe Slusky, he transitioned from environmental design to studio art. He went on to receive an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. He now lives and works in Philadelphia and teaches painting, drawing and printmaking in the Department of Art and Art History at Ursinus College.
David came by his aesthetic honestly and subconsciously. Growing up in agrarian Iowa sticks with you. Whether the land around him was silent, barren and frozen in the grey light of January, or teaming with life that is summer in the Midwest, he was surrounded by a resounding expression of nature. This context instilled a deep appreciation for the immutable qualities of the landscape and most definitely shaped his idea of what was beautiful.
Before co-founding Meyer + Silberberg Land Architects with Ramsey Silberberg, David was a partner at Peter Walker and Partners and co-founded the partnership of Schwartz Smith Meyer with Martha Schwartz and Ken Smith. He has been an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley for 15 years and currently teaches the graduate-level Capstone studio. Winner of the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture, David has distinguished himself through a rigorous approach to both design and execution.
Amber is an architect, landscape architect, and author by trade, and an urban researcher, teacher, and adventurer by experience. She arrived in Rio de Janeiro and fell in love with the city after a thirteenth-month trek by truck, boat, and bicycle from San Francisco, CA, to Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, traveling alongside a seventy-year-old biking capoeira master. Her professional focus is on small-scale sustainable urban development for and by the public who will benefit from it. Now over a year in Rio, Amber loves to share her knowledge of this 'Marvelous City' by giving architectural and historic tours. She recently became the South America Destination Manager for Context Travel, a sustainable, “deep travel” company that connects local experts with intellectually curious travelers and provides a platform for a unique walking tour experience.
Bobby Glass was drawn to the West Coast in 2008, following script of the Bay Area Beats and completed his MLA from UC-Berkeley in 2011. Soon after, he began to host Space Open gatherings with Darryl Jones around the Bay Area, monthly meet-ups intended to fulfill the need for a space where multi-media art making and group critique occur. His artwork is sparked both by these gatherings where abstract figure drawings express a reinterpretation of form, and further excursions into the California landscape evoke plein air watercolor painting and poetry from the Haiku masters of Japan.
Born and bred in the heart of California's Central Valley, raised in a soup of post-apocolyptic science-fiction fantasies and tempered in cooperative arts communities, Kathleen creates performance and installation. A background in landscape architecture informs her dance practice which explores site while creating cinematic visual landscapes.
Investigating ways of living in contemporary American ritual and connection to land. Buoyed up & floating in technological future-scape while distilling down the essence of what is real.
Eliot Rose is an artist, musician, and planner. At UC Berkeley, where he earned his Master of City Planning in 2010, he was fortunate to find himself in a landscape thick with panoramas and in the company of peers schooled in methods of wonder. Projects from his Bay Area years include the collaborative gentleman’s adventure compendium The California Chronicles (with Bobby Glass and Darryl Jones) and the album Natural Panic. Eliot now lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and son, and continues to chronicle his travels in sketch and song while working to save the planet through better planning.
Justine Holzman is an adjunct assistant professor in the Graduate Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Tennessee. Holzman received an MLA from LSU and a Bachelor of Arts in Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley. She recently co-authored a book with Bradley Cantrell, Responsive Landscapes, framing a comprehensive view of interactive and responsive projects and their relationship to environmental space. Holzman pursues ceramic art alongside landscape architecture and is exploring digital and analog methods of making with ceramic material in relation to the built environment.
Ian Mackay lives in San Francisco but hails from the Midwest. He is preoccupied with reading and drawing—with special interest in human anatomy, the philosophy of technology, comics, and corn.
Following her studies of architecture at UCBerkeley, Gita Khandagle found herself tangentially drawn to the practice of landscape architecture because of its ability to create distinctive spaces that act as a framework for activity and memory.
Gita is interested in experimenting with how still and moving images, prints, recordings and objects can be layered to recall dreams, reveries, and experiences that inspire her work. Born in Los Angeles and currently residing in Oakland, California's distinctive cities and terrain have served as the launching point of her explorations.
Kyra Baldwin (BA 2014) grew up in Berkeley in a house stocked with paper, pencils and tape. Her grandfathers made beautiful objects out of trash; her grandmother restored urban creeks.
Outside of her current work at a landscape design-build firm, she draws and writes about her local landscape, from coastal bluffs to mazes of city and freeway.
In all of her work, she observes and reacts to environmental qualities – light, space, moisture, – and the state of the people around her. The practice of landscape architecture seeks to make rational sense of these reactions and observations, but artwork is free to have loose ends.
Rae Ishee works as a landscape designer in New York City after graduating from LAEP in 2014. Current projects include a sweet 3-acre park in Manhattan and a wild simulated-below grade installation that tests the bounds of plants and public space. Working at the merger of art and science has been a long standing interest met with varied integration—sometimes the two converge seamlessly and other times they run in parallel. Work from her first master’s in Soil Science from the University of Vermont was recently published in the Journal of Environmental Quality and her current work is visible in the April 2015 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine (Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects features).
Jim Bensman is a Bay Area contemporary oil painter of urban and rural landscapes. Growing up in rural Ohio he spent much of his childhood exploring the neighboring fields and farms. Jim’s interest in art began in his early 20’s as a soldier deployed to Panama. He was fascinated by the Panamanian culture and explored the urban decay that formed out of the recent conflict. Jim began sketching as a way to record his surroundings and remember a moment in time.
After the military Jim attended The Ohio State University in the Landscape Architecture program and continued to explore his art through night and weekend classes.
Now living in Albany with his wife and 2 kids, Jim continues to explore the urban and rural landscapes around him, captivated by transitional and commonplace areas. His strong compositional paintings, much like his early sketches of Panama, are a way of capturing a moment in time. He often explores a subject by developing many sketches and paintings of the same subject.
Dara Lorenzo was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1983. She attended West Virginia University for Painting, 2001-2004 and received her B.S in Printmaking from Towson University in 2008. She has an MFA in Printmaking from San Francisco Art Institute. Dara’s work explores the claiming of spaces, through treading and marking also the layering of memories through photographic printmaking processes, also the importance of narrative in our lives. With a focus on the expressive forms found in carving, writing, construction and deconstruction, her work discovers the way we inhabit places and change them to suit our personalities and daily lives. Some of her photography projects involve collaborating with strangers who interact with places in a unique way. She develops her photo- etching compositions through a photo-intaglio print process, combining painting and printmaking processes on the plates. Dara’s work is being exhibited nationally and abroad. Her last solo exhibition was in New York City, NY at The Sensei Gallery in Manhattan. Her prints are one of a kind monotypes with multiple printmaking/painting process.
Dara currently lives in Oakland, California and is the Art Instructor at Cox Academy in Oakland as well as holds an Artist In Residence at The Compound Gallery and respectively taught printmaking at Towson University, Baltimore, Maryland. She has also taught printmaking at Maryland Institute College of Art for their Extension Program in the Summer 2013. She taught Photo-etching Workshops in Austin, TX at Flatbed Press, as well as in Washington D.C at Pyramid Atlantic Press and currently teaches workshops in Photo-etching, Collagraph and Monotype Process at Myrtle Press in Sacramento, California, and Collagraph /Photo-etching Process at Richmond Art Center, Richmond, California.
For the past decade, artist and educator Chip Sullivan has been exploring the medium of the graphic novel as a teaching tool, finding the integration of word and image a powerful tool to communicate the transformative powers of landscape observation. His research evolved into a series of comics for Landscape Architecture magazine titled “Creative Learning.” His current work in this area continues to develop the language of the comic as a means to elevate one’s environmental awareness. His latest book “Cartooning the Landscape” is to be published by University of Virginia Press and will be launched the coming May.
Diverse training in civil engineering, urbanism, and landscape architecture gives Yu-Chung broad perspective of complex urban, natural, and social systems. He is interested in exploring conflict and contrast between humans and nature, science and art, and logic and insanity, and conversation and communication through staging conflict and contrast. He believes as the most intuitive way of representation, design and art are the most powerful media to facilitate the dialogue. Through representing our worlds by fusing and transposing different cultural forms in order to trigger interchange of disciplines, cultures, and classes in various scales, he aspires to be both a messenger and a processor through materializing the imagination.
Driven by existential concerns, Richard brings fresh approaches to the daily challenges of working in public realms. A geographic imagination fuels his interest in multi-dimensional projects around the world. Connectivity to many cultures, arts, disciplines, and understandings allows him to tailor interventions thoughtfully. In all of his work his strives to create something that is evocative, emotional, and ecological.
