Karen Atkinson, Is an installation artist, independent curator and founder of Side Street Projects, she has exhibited and curated throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Cuba, Japan and South Africa and was included in the Fifth Havana Biennial in Cuba. She has curated numerous gallery and traveling exhibitions and public projects, including the For the Time Being parking meter project, and Projections: intermission images — slides projected in commercial theaters between films. She has produced a number of projects designed for the web and digital media.

Amitis Motevalli, Installation, Her vision has shown a duality of culture, both natural and learned. She introduces a dialogue that critiques the western view of Middle Eastern women and culture in general. Her work recreates the concepts of Islamic art, yet with a resolve that adapts and exploits her environment and experiences. In one of her pieces she reconstructs religious/holy Iranian flags with painted images of rebellious minds into a new now.

Jeremy Hight,  Text installation, He is a writer, new media and locative media writer/artist, and theorist. He created locative spatial narrative in the first locative narrative project "34 north 118 west" (34n118w.net/34n) His essay "narrative archaeology" has been named one of the 4 primary texts in locative media. His artwork has shown in galleries and museums internationally as has his writing.  He currently has a narrative project, shortlisted by the European space agency to circle the earth on the international space station and trigger narratives above cities.

Marjan K. Vayghan, Installation, Her art is informed by this context of movement and flexible citizenship across both geographical and cultural spaces, and the multiple realities these spaces engender. Photographs of Watch Towers from her latest voyage to Iran, integrated with interviews by her with the watch guards humanize what is by the media dehumanized.

Linda Marshalla Kunik, Paintings, She opens a dialogue for human rights, feminism and the political problems in Iran and other countries around the world.   Exploring causality related issues.   Is beauty accidental?  Is the broken calculated?  There is no absolute answer. With her work she brings us directly to questions that surrounds politics of self.

Ulysses Jenkins, is a video/performance artist who earned an M.F.A. in Intermedia Video/Performance Art at Otis College of Art, Los Angeles in 1979, and a B.A. in Painting/Drawing at Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1969.  Mr. Jenkins has taught video production (lecturer) at the University of California San Diego (1979-81) and Otis College of Art (1982-84), and performance art at California State University Dominguez Hills (1981).  He is currently an Associate Professor of video art production and performance art at the University of California Irvine (1993-2007).  He is also an Affiliate Professor with the African American Studies program at the University of California Irvine.

Colleen Murakami, Embroidered lace pieces, Tradition shall be passed on from one generation to the next.  Naturally, a metamorphosis takes place when one’s environment changes suddenly or gradually.  In making art, Colleen hopes to reflect on some of these traditions that have influenced her life, creating a new sensibility of them.  It is her hope that through this work in progress she may develop her own traditions, to honor the cycle of life in creating the notion of endless possibilities.

Sholeh Wolpé, Performance art, movement of body and spirit through physical spaces and spiritual identities, past real and fictional boundaries, reflects in both her poetic and artistic work.  Sholeh is the author of two collections of poetry and a book of literary translations.

Nikhil Murthy, is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. He works in video and installation and deals with subject matter pertaining to a critical view of the individuals place within a globalized society and how the subjectivity of the individual becomes part of this globalized system. He received his MFA in art from CalArts in 2006 and has exhibited in a variety of places including the Armory North West, Barnsdall Art Park and CSULB.

Mahyar Nilli,  Video projection, Mahyar’s work changes in form and media, often bearing a hybrid art form, while the subject matter revolves around issues of placement and position.  The work at times weaves between abstracted veiling, and directly observing and rearranging constructed viewpoints.  Her art is informed by feminist intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and religion.

Luis Ernesto Zavala, Identity and its displacement, he believes, can be clearly defined through our interaction with physical spaces. His relationship as he navigate through these spaces presents him with daily obstacles as this interaction proposes a constant reminder of his displacement as an immigrant in a foreign place.  He strive to maintain a subjectivity, which would allow him to question by what means we may enrich our lives without gentrification or commodification, but rather an internal relocation if that is possible.

Gita Khashabi Meh, “Skin Study”, Installation, Paintings, Drawings.  Her migration began in 1983 from Tehran to Italy to Germany to Los Angeles. Intersection designed to find attractions between both worlds. Feminism of the contemporary East and the West. In her new body of work chador is used as canvas.  Chador this veil is  fashioned in style specifically for Sheat Muslims Women of Iran. Covering their entire female form from head to toe. Women erotic corsets in Western fashion are painted on dried California palm leaves posing on the opened flowered chadors.  The veils are nailed spread open like a pattern on the gallery wall as the ornamented corsets are installed inside on each individual veil.

Evelyn Serrano, Her resent installation relies on the phenomena known as “persistence of vision”.  The experience of displacement, and yet present in the life of the exile, is effectively portrayed in this work, however fleetingly, by each of these thaumatropes. For her Home is acted upon, re-inhabited and re-owned.

Alexis Demetriades,

Shadi Harouni, Installation  

Lisa Tao, Animation projection,

Sara Esmaili and Gary Miraz, Musical performance, they combine music as if paint, you hear their surreal dream states and memories of their experiences, with the rise of each new sound you will hear an acoustic, electronic, world and ambient set that will give a new vision about multiculturalism as they play their journey.

Maryam Tavaf, Drawings, Maryam says she is exiled within her studio with her text based female drawings, one is confronted with an anatomy that words and sentences are moving in and out of the surface of the female forms.

Farzad Kohan, Sculpture, His sculptures of mass miniaturized humans struggle for ground, his particular human forms are made in small intricate scales migrate from the sky above to earth.  Consequently the bodies hang eternally in the hope of the promised land.  As you see him confront the idea of Home through his eyes.

CURATOR STATEMENT:
Gita Meh

Migration means Mohajerat in Persian language.  Migration began as a vision drawn from my migrant world.  My personal history and my personal relationship to exile, loss, crossing and freedom. with the rise of the age of Technology migration has become a global state.   Art of migration is expressed complaints in the now through visual/musical/alphabetical/preformed languages.  Self-consciousness which includes feeling of being a stranger, therefore exiled.  What emerges consequently is a decision to return.  But where?   

Migration Study is a conversation of returning.  Migrant is being prepared for the unexpected.  It means not being accepted.  Migration denotes move meant by humans from one place to another while forming history from pre existing and the present isolation.  Art that aims to remove distances.  Migration is known as inevitable, that which will come to pass.  Migration has always began by mutation.  Distribution of cultures.  Natural and human disasters and mutilations.  As seeker.  As settler of differences.  I seek art with inspiration, which gives warning to what is created out of creation.  That which gives the experiencing of apprehension over separation.  
Migrant population moves since is isolated.  Moving becomes a prayer place.   A home place. Belonging.  Art of Migration is a evolutionary revolution.  Creators who study then help the distribution of changes that are in need of taking place.  Ethnic cleansing begins in migration.   By curating Migration Study I desired to settle the migrant in me.   

The involuntary migrant reaches the migrantpower.  To reconstruct the meaning of what it is to be a superpower, through art.  Migration Study is a Cross-cultural experience of moving bodies.   
Moving faces.  Moving minds.  Moving languages.  Moving art.  Moving installations, performances.  
This opening is dedicated to loss of history.  Loss of lands.  Loss of homes.  Loss of human lives.   
Migration is the moment when nostalgia and sorrow of exile, becomes the moment in which ground layers beneath your feet.  Where a diverse audience can gain a greater understanding, of the nature of our global culture today.

CURATOR BIO:
Iranian-American artist Gita Meh an independent curator/Visual artist/writer was born in Tehran in 1963.  She lives and works in Los Angeles and Tehran.  Her work has been shown in the United States, Europe and Iran. Gita Meh has had forty exhibitions around the world.  Currently she is painting new body of works for her upcoming exhibitions at Hour Gallery, Tehran, Iran;  Seyhoun Gallery, Tehran; Capricorn Towers, Dubai;  Titanium Gallery,  Athens and Bandar-e Anzali, Rasht, Iran, 2007-2008.  Her upcoming curatorial work Translated Translations is a group exhibition and will be opening in October 13 2007.  She has studied for her MFA in Creative & Critical Writing/Integrated Media program, California Institute of The Arts, Valencia, CA, pending, Received her BFA, CALARTS, Valencia, Painting P’ART , Stuttgart, Germany, Freie Kunst Schule, Zuffenhousen, Germany.  Academia Delle Belle Art’i, Drawing, Florence, Italy, New Andish Azadegan, high school of Visual Arts, Tehran, Iran