Liminality Artist Biographies

Seyed Alavi

Seyed Alavi has created site-specific installations for The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Franklin Furnace in New York City; The University Art Museum-Cal State Long Beach; The Museum of Santa Cruz County; The deSaisset Museum; The University Art Museum, Sonoma State; The University Art Museum, Cal State San Bernadino and San Francisco's Capp Street Project.

Alavi's work is often engaged with the poetics of language and space and their power to shape reality.
His public art projects include; Tale of Time in Kochi, Japan; Seed of Knowledge in Saint Paul, MN; Nature of Life and A Sense of Unity in San Jose, CA; Signs of the Time in Emeryville, CA; Where Is Fairfield in Fairfield, CA; Words by Roads in Oakland, Selected Words in San Rafael, CA; Neptune's Gate in Manhattan Beach, CA; Forgotten Language for the City of Palo Alto; Speaking Stones, and What Do You Think? in San Francisco.

Alex Clausen

Alex Clausen, a Bay Area native, lives and works in San Francisco. He received his MFA in Drawing and Painting in 2006 from California College of the Arts. He graduated from UC Davis in 2000 with a BA in Physics and Art. Alex is currently working at the Marin Headlands Art Center as an MFA Studio Awardee. He has shown work at Spanganga Gallery, Works San Jose, Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery (Oregon), the Rena Bransten Gallery and is part of the de Young Museum collection.

Paul Hayes

Paul Andrew Hayes received a BFA in Illustration from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he would often create large, site-specific installation pieces as a solution to ordinary illustration assignments. This type of experimentation lent itself to set work with Perishable Theater in Providence, RI, and set design with Knife Beats Finger, a small theater group in San Francisco. Paul has also worked on several sculpture projects with Headless Point Studios in Hunters Point.

The past several years have seen the development of numerous site-specific works around San Francisco, most notably the "Paperwork" series for Red Ink studios and the Canvas Gallery's "Thing That Makes Everyone Beautiful."

Erica Gangsei

Erica Gangsei is a sculptor, performer, activist and fundraiser from Brooklyn, New York. Her large-scale, site-specific installations, performances and public interventions chart the hidden undercurrents of origin and meaning in the physical world. From political lectures mandating the tracking of the origins of objects, to assemblages of packing material, to site-specific crochet work around the architectural features of exhibition spaces, her artwork deals with identity of objects. Her work attempts to bridge what she sees as our society's material disconnect with where things come from and how they work.

Gangsei has exhibited and performed at venues around the San Francisco Bay Area including: Live Worms Gallery, New Langton Arts, Red Ink Studios, the Garage, Crissy Field Center at Presidio National Park, and the Diego Rivera and Swell Galleries at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2005 she was an artist-in-residence at the De Young Art Center and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Her curatorial experience includes the 2006 shows Science Fair Meets World's Fair at the Garage and Craft and Maritime Exploration in Theory & Practice at the San Francisco Art Institute. -- www.exploratorium.edu