Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, video, ceramics, and installation. She is co-founder of Monte Vista Projects, an artist-run collective space in Los Angeles, and an assistant professor in the Department of Art at the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture. In her work she offers a number of windows through which to encounter the colonial histories embedded deeply within her organic, and often living, materials.

Trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith describes what he makes as creative music, an expansive description of the process, rather than jazz, a limiting and genre-specific term; the at-times chamber feel of his music alongside the broad range of tonal coloration in his compositions, and the instrumental complexity of his ensembles, clearly evidence why. Ankhrasmation is Smith’s solution for merging improvisation and composing. The word is a combination of “Ankh,” the Egyptian symbol for life, “Ras,” the Ethiopian word for leader, and “Ma,” a term for mother.

Kenneth Tam works in video, sculpture, and photography, using the male body as a starting point for discussions about performance, physical intimacy, vulnerability, and private ritual.

Samara Golden, an “interdimensional artist,” creates boundary-breaking installations—vivid concatenations assembled from psychological states, misremembered architectural interiors, and transitional objects. Utilizing everything from 3D anaglyphic photographs to pantyhose, she dives deeply into the other side of the looking glass and alters reality through simple means.

Since 2003, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly (as Gerard & Kelly) have worked at the juncture of dance, text, and visual art. Their conceptually-based  “choreographic scores" nimbly engage topics such as collective and individual memory, time, gender and sexuality, queer subjectivity, and dyadic relationships.

Born in Massachusetts in 1982, Wu Tsang graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was involved with the local underground scenes in that city before moving to Los Angeles in 2005. Two years later, he moved to the MacArthur Park neighborhood just west of downtown and lived near the Silver Platter, a historic Latino bar for the LGBT community. Inspired by the thriving scene there, Tsang and his friends (Ashland Mines [aka Total Freedom] and NGUZUNGUZU [Daniel Pineda and Asma Maroof]) organized a weekly party at the bar featuring dancing and performances and called it Wildness. The intersection of subcultures that ensued became the subject of a fanciful documentary film of the same name, released in 2012, which is now his best-known work.

On the occasion of the first California-Pacific Triennial at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), we asked curator Dan Cameron a few questions about his curatorial process and some of the ideas that influenced the framework of the new exhibition.