JINGLETOWN ARTS

Karen makes quilts out of a variety of fabrics and recycled materials. Her imagery is abstract, based on her experience of the earth,  landscape and environment. Her quilting has a painterly quality to it. 

Karol Hilker’s mixed media paintings are created as she weaves wires, threads and objects into the surface and frames. Her paint is built up in layers of color to create an environment for the figures. She likes to show the despair, hope, tension, love, and passion that we all experience through her images. Her paintings show the chaos and balance we can create in our lives.  

I have always been an observer and collector of natural objects. Wherever I walk -- beaches, parks, sidewalks, woods I  look to see what's on the ground and in the trees. Then I use, and alter, my weathered findings to reveal nature's bounty and beauty in new ways.  

Since 2018 I have been creating photo-based digital art. I extensively manipulate digital photographs that I have taken of trees, other plants, and leaves; to create artworks that are abstracted to varying degrees.  I create art that is reflective of mental processes. Each artwork is assigned to one of three concurrent series: UNFORMED THOUGHTS, SUBLIMINAL PROCESSING, and OUTER TERRITORIES

I am a painter and percussionist living in Oakland, California. I hold an MFA in Painting from San Francisco State University and a BFA in Drawing and Painting from UC Berkeley.  I teach Drawing and Painting at The College of San Mateo. My work has been exhibited throughout the greater Bay Area, in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Alaska, Cuba, Ghana, and Senega  

Jill McLennan explores and observes the city of Oakland, a city she has chosen to call home. She delves into the industrial history, researching historical photographs and learning the stories of this vibrant city, built on wetlands of the bay.  She documents the rapidly changing present while assessing her own place in this chaos. 

Dorie Meister offers unique, hand-crafted sterling silver and copper jewelry, incorporating found objects along with antique beads and precious stones.  The pieces are wearable objects of beauty.

Dorie learned to work with metal using basic hand tools over 25 years ago. Since then, she remains committed to the simplicity of transforming precious metal, (each element hand-formed and forged) into unique, wearable works of art with movement and organic form. 

Sarah focuses on ugly or distressed beauty, an aesthetic that can be harder to look at but more honest and challenging to pursue.  Most recently, she has been making sculptures in an attempt to explore and understand vulnerability and susceptibility through the metaphor of children. The pieces are often damaged or weathered to show how we spoil innocence and leave people scarred and changed.  They often have zippers. Life pours in and we absorb it. It runs through our bodies and changes us from the inside out.

Vida Pavesich teaches philosophy and makes digital collages. She has been profoundly affected by teaching philosophy–and more recently by teaching environmental ethics for a few years at California State University East Bay and now at the University of San Francisco. She has gone back and forth between being absorbed by ideas, making art, and taking photographs—always knowing that these two preoccupations could somehow inform each other. 

Fernando Reyes’s extensive resume of national and regional exhibitions was built from his Jingletown studio in Oakland, California, where he has worked since 1999.  Like many artists, he was a creator from an early age. After almost two decades working in San Francisco as a banker, Reyes left the Bay Area to study at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating with a BFA degree in 1997.

Malcolm is an Oakland based photographer whose cityscapes focus on the unusual, ephemeral, or disappearing in the local urban landscape. His emphasis is on seeing the creative self-expression of the city's inhabitants as the agent of change that generates an environment which is both a statement of Oaklanders' self-definition and a reflection of it. The work frequently aims to contradict both stereotyping and indifference in how Oakland and surrounding East Bay is seen. His work frequently fuses abstraction and documentary, but also freely exploits and reassigns numerous types of photographic conventions, such as postcards, cinema, and journalism, that attempt to pre-set expectations about how to interpret imagery.  He also shoots commercially.

Jan Watten is an analog fine art photographer with a BFA in Photography and Certificate in Gallery Management from the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCA). Her work revolves around the idea of identity and she focuses on capturing an aspect or an isolated moment of her subjects.  Using low and high tech film cameras, Watten photographs in black and white, although she does enjoy working in color occasionally.
She has lived and worked in Jingletown since 1984.