"Coastal States" is a 5 person photography and video exhibition.  The works are varied--some are landscape, some are portraits, some are arachnid. But all 5 projects are about existing on the periphery-- of family, in your social outlets, and in your neighborhoods--and the changes that occur when you come up for air after realizing you've been coasting on auto-pilot, without taking immediate surroundings into account.

The artists are Gilda Davidian, Ignacio Genzon, Rena Kosnett, Jeff McLane, and Katie Shapiro, who are graduates of CalArts currently working in Los Angeles and contributing to the From Here To There art collective.

Gilda Davidian's photographs, "Blue Tarp" and "Shopping Cart," are part of an on-going project titled "Highland Park," which she began

upon moving to the area in the summer of 2007.  In these photographs, Davidian is singling out objects that are, at norm, part of the larger visual landscape of her neighborhood.  When isolated, these objects act as landmarks which highlight not just the physical, but also the psychological environment of Highland Park, and reassess how people acclimate to new neighborhoods through the familiar and the mundane.

Ignacio Genzon is an artist who moved with his family from Argentina to the United States when he was 7 years old. Through the years his nuclear family have been a constant in his life. Through the years they have all gone on their separate ways.  The video and photograph installation "All On Your Own" is a reaction to the fact that this separation happened while no one was looking.

Rena Kosnett's photographic triptych, "Unfixed," is comprised of two portraits surrounding an abandoned pier.  The portrait on the left is of a small woman being swept by harsh wind, in a background that is comprised of a large field and mountain landscape.  This woman, a renegade psychic living and working in Sedona, Arizona, who broke from the larger conglomerate of working psychics, has been pushed from her community to the point where she literally has her back against the edge of the city's homestead limits.  The portrait on the right is of a woman in the midst of transitioning to life as a man.  Melissa/Luke is standing on a wall, lifting the figure to a podium position, which highlights this person's displacement from the everyday realm.  The surgical scars and fake prosthesis in the underwear signifies that this is a portrait of a person literally on the edge of a physical limit, and her/his uncertain looks captures the psychological transitioning as well.  The image between the two portraits, a broken pier, is the community infrastructure that mimics the living situations of both the people in the portraits.  The pier was once used for recreation at the edge of a city, but has been left to physically sink on its way to being replaced by another structure.

"Exteriors" is an ongoing photographic project by Jeff McLane.  His pair of diptychs focuses on the physical change and appearance of exterior walls in Los Angeles.  Here, the colorful walls display the effects of social graffiti, and the city beautification that is trying to repair it.  As the city tries to cover up the unwanted graffiti, the consistency of color is lost in the action, forcing the new paint to become its own exterior object.  McLane closely crops these defining marks in his photographs, utilizing the exterior walls as an urban canvas.  This in turn allows the subject to become a painting on its own.

Katie Shapiro is presenting new work from her project entitled "Spiders".  She started photographing found spiders in her apartment and then began to place them into her own constructed environments.  By using shadows and manipulations with light, she creates new homes for them.  This is a work examining the home and the placement/displacement of living spaces.  By creating this "new web," she is looking at how changes in the home and environment modify the subject.