PROGRAM DETAILS:
Date Saturday, March 22, 2025
Time 3-5 PM
Location NUMU | 106 E. Main Street, Los Gatos, CA, 95030
Cost Free with standard admission
Join us for an in-person artist talk between Mitra Fabian and Melisa Cambron Perez from Sempervirens Fund. The conversation will reflect on the CZU fires and how Mitra’s experiences during that time informed the creation of her current installation, Seeping Through Domestic Dissonance. Mitra Fabian and Melisa Cambron Perez will discuss the fires from both a personal and environmental lens, sharing a unique perspective on the urban/wildland interface, how people respond to catastrophic events, and what rebuilding in the aftermath looks like.
Schedule
3 PM - Doors open
3:30 PM - Talk begins
5 PM - Doors close
Mitra Fabian
Instagram | Website
Mitra Fabian was born in Iran and raised in Boston. She received a BA in Art with an Anthropology minor from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. She located to Los Angeles in 1996 and returned to school in 2002 to receive an MFA from California State University, Northridge. As of May 2005, she lives and works in the Bay Area. Fabian has been showing her work nationally since 1997, had a solo show at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art in 2007, and was commissioned by Google for several pieces in 2021. She has also shown with galleries and museums in California and Oregon, and is represented by the Billis Williams Gallery in Los Angeles. She has been an artist-in-residence at Bemis in Omaha, NE, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and Centre d’Art Marnay, in France. Her work has been reviewed by several media organizations including Spark, KQED Television, Ruby Mag (an online Argentinean art magazine), Create Magazine, Angeleno Magazine, and Artweek. She is a professor at West Valley College teaching sculpture and ceramics.
My artwork reflects upon the intersection of local industry, humanity, and nature. I work almost exclusively with manufactured materials- the remnants and by-products of human activity. As I build with these materials I alter them in such a way that they are not immediately recognizable. The reconstruction is determined by what the material is capable of doing but not meant to do and is always more organic. My current work consists of ceramic sculptures textured with resistors, capacitors, and diodes, the candy-colored components one finds on circuit boards. I am captivated by these materials that were ubiquitous in Silicon Valley but have limitations in an industry that seeks to get smaller and faster. In using these components I comment upon the slowness of my process in opposition to the immediacy and “progress” the resistors are thought to provide. And because these elements end up as e-waste, I also seek to illustrate a certain level of waste and intentional obsolescence that they can signify.
Melisa Cambron Perez
Melisa joined Sempervirens Fund in 2021 as the Field Operations Manager. She holds a B.A. in Biology from Lake Forest College in Illinois and a M.S. in Environmental Management from University of San Francisco. Passionate about working outdoors, Melisa has close to ten years of experience with habitat restoration, community engagement, and vegetation management across the Bay Area. At Sempervirens Fund, she is apart of the Stewardship team, which oversees the restoration and management across Sempervirens’ properties and conservation easements.
