Night Tea Contributors
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Jesse Genepi
Jesse Genepi (b. 1995) is a Los Angeles-based artist. He holds a BFA from the University of Minnesota and an MFA from the University of California, Davis.
Metaphysical in thought, the paintings arrive from the distillation of Genepi's worldview influenced by science, visionary art, and cosmology. Within the layers of paint and collage, are the ascemic histories of self - each layer containing the deliberate 'hand' of the artist asserting itself against the anonymity of mechanized production.
A rebellion against image making - the paintings yearn for the embodied experience of their viewing. Utilizing color-shifting materials and drawing on histories of light & space, and optical art, Genepi’s works remain in a state of continual flux. The convergence of colors, textures, and brushstrokes analogically depict the intricate interplay of human relationships and emotions, presenting micro & macroscopic constants as visual metaphors, namely the collapsing and colliding nature of human relationships.
Within this visual language lies a syncretism, a collaging of beliefs, blending practices from various schools of thought. Visual forms linked to metaphysics, digital technologies and form constants can be recognized among them. The resulting visual language becomes a vehicle for sharing this worldview, beckoning the viewer to delve into the layers of reconstructed forms and motifs woven into the artwork.
Recent exhibitions include A Line to You at Noon Projects, LA, Black Lodge at Island Gallery, NYC; The Marble Mouth Oracle at Below Grand, NYC. Genepi was a 2023 artist-in-residence at Art House San Clemente.
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Lily Forbes
Lily Forbes Shafroth founded LILY FORBES with a commitment to sustainable fashion, blending timeless design with ethical production. With a background in Geography, Sustainability, and Development Theory from UC Berkeley, Lily’s journey into Fairtrade production began with co-founding a naturally-dyed, unisex outerwear brand in India.
In 2018, she officially launched LILY FORBES, working with small dye houses and weavers in rural India. Today, her pieces are crafted across Los Angeles, India, and Peru, emphasizing transparent and fair trade practices. In Echo Park, garments are produced in-house by Señor Rafael, a master craftsman with 40+ years of experience. In India, she collaborates with a female-run fair trade house supporting women facing caste discrimination. In Peru, Lily partners with a female-led knitting group helping rural communities through fair trade.
Lily prioritizes deadstock, organic, recycled, and naturally-dyed fibers, balancing aesthetics with sustainability. She sells her collection online, by appointment at her studio, through pop-up events, and in select stores across the U.S.
For inquiries: HELLO@LILYFORBES.CO.
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Joshua Moreno
Joshua Moreno’s work explores the intersection between the natural and human-made environments, focusing on the patterns and systems of efficiency within them. Through installation, drawing, and film, he reinterprets everyday spaces and objects, paying close attention to elemental phenomena and revealing new perspectives on familiar surroundings.
Born and raised in Watsonville, California, Joshua earned his BFA in Art Practice from the University of California, San Diego, in 2011, and his MFA in Studio Art from Stanford University in 2022. Since 2012, he has worked extensively in art education, teaching courses in art history, filmmaking, and studio art. He currently teaches drawing courses at Stanford University.
In 2020, Joshua co-founded the art collective All of Us alongside Brett Amory, Karla Centeno, Gabriella Grill, and Miguel Monroy, fostering collaboration and community-based projects.
Learn more at: www.allofusprojects.com.
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Alberto Hamonet
Alberto Hamonet is a multidisciplinary artist based in California, whose vibrant work merges the cosmic with the personal. Offering a contemporary reinterpretation of the Sunshine State through a lens of esoteric psychedelia, Alberto paints in a style he calls “psychedelic high-fantasy.” His work interlaces bold narratives of adventure, sensuality, and tennis, creating a vivid tapestry of imagination and storytelling.
A former record producer and club DJ in New York City, Alberto transitioned to a full-time art career in 2019. Since then, he has exhibited his dynamic work in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Berlin, and Athens, Greece. His most recent series of tennis-inspired paintings was featured at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
Alberto holds a BFA from NYU and an MFA from UC Davis, bringing a rich interdisciplinary approach to his practice that continues to captivate audiences worldwide.
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Andy
Andy is an experimental musician and one half of Fugitive Gods, an Oakland-based experimental band. In addition to Fugitive Gods, Andy is also involved with other projects, including Perfect Geisha and Nihiti.
Fugitive Gods describes its members as “animated meat sacks”—vessels channeling the chaotic wailings of obscure gods. The band’s sound blurs the lines between the human and the divine, creating raw, immersive sonic experiences that challenge conventional genres.
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Valerie Scott
Valerie Scott is an Oakland-based artist specializing in wheel-thrown ceramics, coil building, and textured forms. Her work delves into themes of ancestry, impermanence, and the human longing for ritual, exploring the forces that bind us across time and space. Through her intricate ceramic practice, Valerie seeks to create tactile, meaningful works that invite reflection on connection, memory, and transformation.
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Havilah Aos
Havilah Aos is a visual artist living and working in the Bay Area, whose work spans sculpture, installation, and conceptual painting. Using gathered materials and everyday hardware store items, she creates objects and environments that recreate transformative or destructive events in both natural and human-made worlds. Her practice explores how we perceive and remember places, transforming familiar materials into immersive experiences.
Havilah’s background in documentary photography began in her birth state of Minnesota, followed by time spent living in Germany and working aboard a cruise ship in the Pacific Ocean. These experiences shape the conceptual framework of her work, reflecting on memory, perception, and place.
She began her studies at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul (2008-2010) and later earned her BFA from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 2018. In 2021, she completed her MFA at the University of California,Davis.
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Miguel Novelo
Miguel Novelo is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, focused on emerging media and community organizing. Currently working on algorithmic movies on geological disruption , game engine storytelling on dogs-human-technology afterlife , technoshammanisims , thermodynamic communication and computer viruses
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Nicole Shaffer
Nicole Shaffer is a Bay Area interdisciplinary visual artist with a focus on research based installations. Their work offers space for poetic and phenomenal understanding while centering the nuance and beauty of non-normative and divergent temporalities and embodiments. By reconfiguring visual language from local archives and passed down craft techniques, Shaffer reclaims access to a sense of lineage and belonging historically denied to queer, gender variant, and mad lives.
Nicole lives and works in Oakland and so did their grandma. They create work that is built and activated in sites significant to their personal history and subsequently has shown installations in a variety of non-traditional private and public spaces throughout the Bay Area including an abandoned cult commune, their father's home in the days leading to his eviction, and a fabricated private beach for their mom beside the port of Oakland. Their work has been exhibited at local galleries including Southern Exposure, SOMArts, 500 Capp Street, 41 Ross, and Root Division. Nicole is a current Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts, distinguished graduate of their 2022 class at San Francisco State University, and recipient of the 2019 Murphy Cadogan award.
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Arianna Khmelniuk
Arianna Khmelniuk (Ukraine, 1987) is a Bay Area experimental artist. She is the creator of the artistic ventures Zapah Lab and Olfactory Playground, both of which focus on artistic research and aim to further the creative and theoretical use of smells in an art context. Her artistic investigations span topics such as art and reality perception, space and time, grief, and notions of knowledge, interpreted through the sense of smell, performance, and installation.
She has shown her work in a duo exhibition “Phantoms and Soft Time” at Swan Coach House Gallery with Wihro Kim, curated by Qualia Projects / Iman Person, Atlanta, GA, 2019; group show "Controlled Burn" at MOCA GA, Atlanta, GA, 2019; group show "Somethin missin'...somethin promised", MINT Gallery, Atlanta, GA, 2020; group show Boka with artists Benjamin Rouse and Danielle Brutto, Bakery Gallery, Atlanta, GA, 2020. To learn more please visit her website.
Art work "HAYA" (Life), in collaboration with Eddie Farr; Photographer: Wyatt Kane
Khmelniuk has been granted residencies at institutions such as the Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria, and the Hambidge Creative Residency Program (Raburn, Georgia). Khmelniuk was awarded funding by USAID in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a distinguished fellowship stipend by Fulton County Arts & Culture (Atlanta, Georgia), as well as the Academy of Fine Arts (Salzburg, Austria).
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Reginald Smith
Reginald Smith is a Kansas-born African American artist, musician, and videographer currently based in New York City. He co-runs, designs, and creates content for the vinyl record label Hyph Stems alongside Naang Tani and pH. Reginald has coordinated events with prominent acts such as Yaeji, Juliana Huxtable, Nídia (Portugal), and key figures in New York’s underground electronic music scene. His work has been featured on The Lot Radio, 8ball Community Radio, and Boiler Room.
Reggie’s visual talents extend to commissioned work for UNO Records and Nowadays, where he has consistently provided motion content. His multimedia practice spans directing, filming, and editing music videos and fashion campaigns for labels like Bond Hardware and Telfar, alongside creating short-form journalistic documentaries focused on music and art culture.
At the core of Reggie’s creative practice is a focus on intimacy, connection, and community, drawing inspiration from the communal gatherings of his maternal Black American family. The Cookout—a cherished cultural tradition—instilled in him a deep understanding of belonging and collective experience, which he seeks to replicate through his sonic and visual work.
As a DJ and musician, Reggie’s sets aim to connect deeply with the dance floor, awakening a shared awareness of participants' lived experiences within broader cultural narratives. His musical explorations honor the rich history of Black music in America, paying tribute to the Black origins of House and Techno and celebrating the vast influence of Black musical traditions in contemporary sound.
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Justin Kiene
Justin Kiene is a self-taught ceramic artist and instructor based in Oakland, California. His practice with three-dimensional forms has evolved over years, drawing influence from his upbringing in Pennsylvania and further shaped by residencies in Puerto Rico and Denmark.
Justin’s recent work delves into the interplay of color, texture, and tactility, creating functional art that doubles as a sensorial experience. His fascination with microbiology, viruses, and unicellular organisms inspired a series of vessels and sculptures produced during the pandemic, reflecting themes of life, adaptation, and presence.
Through his work, Justin aims to curate tactile encounters, encouraging people to touch and reconnect with their physical presence. His ceramics have been featured in American Craft Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and several Bay Area exhibitions, cementing his reputation as an artist who seamlessly blends functionality with artistic exploration.
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Isis Hockenos
I (Isis Hockenos) b. Marshall, California, 1986, studied painting and printmaking at Sarah Lawrence College in New York (BA, 2009) and at Il Bisonte in Florence, Italy. Primarily using oil paint, India ink and gouache, I explore ideas of loss, mortality, shape-shifting, transformation, masks and identity. Through vibrant visual narrative that disconcerts and unnerves the viewer, I takes my experiences and surroundings and weave them into a personal mythology. I am interested in human relationships (intimate, erotic, platonic, professional, with oneself etc.) and in the push and pull, the tension of these relationships. I live and work between Los Angeles and West Marin, California.
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Shao-Feng Hsu
Shao-Feng Hsu is a photographer whose practice revolves around the intricate interactions between humans and aquatic environments. He earned his MFA from the California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2022, receiving the Dennis Leon and Christin Nelson Scholarship. He holds a One-Year Certificate in Creative Practices from the International Center of Photography (2019) and received the Rita K. Hillman Excellence Award.
In 2020, Shao-Feng co-founded 'Cademy and Fotodemic. Hsu is the recipient of Jury’s Choice Award of Forecast 2023 at San Francisco Camerawork, Photolucida Top 50 of Critical Mass 2023, and participation in the International Juried Exhibition 2023 at the Center for Photographic Art, Carmel. He was a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts 2022-2023. Shao-Feng has also received support to participate in a Yaddo residency in 2024.
Hsu work has been exhibited globally, with showcases at Kyotagraphie in Kyoto, Root Division, The Lab, Right Window, and Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, as well as Galeria Beta in Bogota. Publications and features include +KGP Books, Lenscratch, Photograph Magazine, Harper's Magazine, SF Chronicle, 48 Hills, and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.
He has taught and lectured at institutions such as CCA, Calarts, Stanford, and ICP.
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Jordan Benton
Jordan Benton is an artist from Kentucky who lives and works in New York City.
Jordan Benton’s work is about, specifically, “place as no place”. Benton received his Master of Fine Arts from University of California, Davis in 2023. He is the recipient of the Keister-Allen Purchase Prize at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art for his work at University of California, Davis – his work will remain in the museum’s permanent collection. Notably, he was the recipient of the Russel J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellowship from the Bodega Marine Laboratory in which he collaborated with a PhD candidate in Hydrological Sciences that culminated in an on-site installation at the Marine Lab.
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Nathan Jorgenson
L.A.-based photographer Nathan Jorgenson, known online as fotoapparatic, blends humor, and a deep love for nature, to create striking, abstract film photography. With a signature aesthetic that celebrates the raw beauty of 35mm and medium format film, Nathan’s work explores the psychedelic and surreal aspects of natural landscapes and textures.
Nathan approaches his craft with steadfast dedication, a keen eye for detail, and a playful spirit. Nathan champions the analog photography movement, inspiring others to embrace the imperfections and timeless artistry of film. Follow his journey through the tangible and textural world of analog on Instagram at @fotoapparatic.
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Emily Gordon
Emily Gordon is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice bridges the realms of painting, ceramics, and performance art. She earned her MFA in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis, a program renowned for its interdisciplinary approach and emphasis on artistic development. During her time at UC Davis, Emily engaged with diverse artistic practices, benefited from the mentorship of visiting artists, and exhibited her work in the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art as part of her thesis presentation.
Emily also holds a BFA in Studio Art with a concentration in Ceramics from the University of Wisconsin-Stout, which she completed in December 2019. Her work thrives in a space of in-betweenness, exploring the intersections of material, form, and movement. By weaving together elements from multiple disciplines, she creates evocative, multi-sensory experiences that challenge traditional boundaries and invite audiences to engage with the transformative potential of art.
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Matt Reynolds
Matt Reynolds is a multidisciplinary artist known for his distinctive blend of humor, surrealism, and intricate detail. Working across mediums such as animation, sculpture, and mixed media, Reynolds crafts whimsical yet thought-provoking narratives that explore the absurdities of life. His work often delves into the fantastical, creating worlds where the strange feels familiar and the mundane becomes extraordinary.
A graduate of CalArts, Reynolds has exhibited internationally and gained recognition for his animated films, which have been featured at major festivals and platforms. Whether through a meticulously sculpted figure or a vividly animated sequence, Reynolds invites audiences to step into his unique, imaginative universe.
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Clara Liang (vinegary_personality)
Clara Liang, known as vinegary_personality on social media, is a San Francisco-based baker and artist who transforms cakes into stunning, edible works of art. Balancing her career as a non-profit worker, Clara channels her creativity into baking, producing cakes that look like wild, prickly 3D paintings adorned with unexpected flowers. Her creations are deeply personal, often inspired by her imagination, heritage, and the unique whimsies of her customers.
What began as a pandemic hobby has blossomed into a distinctive artistic practice. Clara’s cakes incorporate unexpected ingredients, like pomegranate molasses and dried lily flowers, and are infused with stories that weave together family memories and cultural traditions. One such cake, themed after the name “Lili,” featured cardamom buttercream and edible lilies—a design that sparked a nostalgic connection to her father’s childhood in Taiwan, where he used to pick and eat lilies.
For Clara, the combination of food and flowers is more than aesthetic—it's a philosophy. “Cakes are ephemeral like live flowers are ephemeral,” she says. “Together, they remind us that everything is impermanent, so we may as well get as much pleasure out of life as we can.” Clara’s work is an invitation to savor the beauty and impermanence of life through edible art that nourishes both body and soul.
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Micah - TreeBed Design
Micah is a Vallejo, CA-based artist, musician, and creative visionary behind TreeBed Design. A lifelong maker and storyteller, Micah’s work spans handmade creations, thoughtfully sourced products, and collaborations with talented individuals from their community. With a deep love for design and a passion for fostering connection, Micah crafts treasures intended to inspire and endure—pieces that carry stories meant to be passed down through generations.
A full-time artist and coffee industry veteran, Micah balances their creative pursuits with a commitment to holding space for healing, growth, and collaboration. From tending the garden of creative projects to exploring life as an aspiring shepherd since age 11, Micah’s journey is one of connection, communion, and creativity.
TreeBed Design embodies Micah’s vision of creating everyday items that inspire, connect, and reflect a shared humanity—crafted with care, from their hands to yours.
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Ryan Seiter
Ryan Seiter is a musician and composer whose work explores the boundaries of sound and emotion. His compositions, such as "opened his jacket slightly" and "starburst," weave ambient soundscapes with experimental structures, creating immersive auditory experiences that invite listeners to inhabit a space of introspection and wonder.
Ryan’s practice is deeply rooted in an exploration of subtle textures, layered harmonies, and moments of sonic stillness, often evoking a dreamlike quality. His work reflects a keen sensitivity to the interplay between sound, memory, and the ephemeral nature of experience. Whether composing for personal projects or collaborative ventures, Ryan’s music resonates with a quiet intensity that lingers.
Follow @bleakspring to dive into his evolving body of work and experience the unique atmospheres he conjures or visit his soundcloud.