Lilliputian refers to the “little people” who lived on the island of Lilliput in Jonathan Swift’s 1726 work of fiction, Gulliver’s Travels. For the purpose of this exhibition, the artists have been asked to work in a miniature scale while maintaining the integrity of their life-size (and larger- than- life) narratives.

Ana Bagayan is a formally trained illustrator and fine artist from Los Angeles, CA. Born in Yerevan, Armenia in 1983, she immigrated to the USA at the age of six with her family and earned a BFA in Illustration from ArtCenter College of Design. Her artwork is inspired by the ethereal – E.T.s, aliens, spirits, ghosts, intergalactic space creatures, anything that hints at the idea that we are just a small part of the unimaginably vast Universe. Bagayan’s miniature works are a part of a miniature gallery and webcomic series titled, #AnasDollhouse which has been featured on Macaulay Culkin’s website, Bunny Ears. Her miniatures are 1/12th life-size and displayed in the framework of a dollhouse.

Guy Colwell was born in Oakland, California, and lives and works in Berkeley California. He studied briefly at California College of the Arts where after two years decided to pursue a position at Mattel as a toymaker, and later as an illustrator for the underground newspaper, GoodTimes. From 1972-78 Colwell’s poignant comic Innercity Romance depicting racial and sociopolitical injustices debuted and developed a cult following. During that time, he also worked for Ripoff Press but left to join the Great Peace March for Global Disarmament in 1986 where he made route maps and painted daily life of the peaceful protestors. Colwell has exhibited his socio-political and controversial paintings extensively in the Bay Area. His work has been collected by the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and Pritikin Museum in San Francisco.

Raul D’Mauries is an Oakland-based self-taught artist and musician, born and raised in Mexico City.

D’Mauries works predominantly in acrylics and is influenced by surrealism, Ancient Greek, Aztec, Mayan and Egyptian mythologies, wildlife, and the shadow. These influences appear throughout his work in different shapes and forms. His anthropomorphic creatures lean toward the dark, tender and weird.

Riffblast starts with religious chromo-lithographies with which then he alters by using water-based acrylics. He interpolates present-day icons meant to elicit the familiar and the sarcastic, but the message dives much deeper into the psyche of consumerism and corruption that he experiences in the predominantly Catholic country of Italy.

Michelle Konczyk finds solace in knowing that there cannot be light without darkness, and there cannot be beauty without ugliness. She paints subject matter that transcends into the realm of surrealism by composing figures with extra body parts and eyes with the intent of emphasizing the pressing irony within our ugly realities.

Aaron Marshall’s Aaron Marshall’s early influences came from his mother, Alice, painting in her spare time and his older brother, Andy, sign painting and pinstriping custom cars. Saturday morning cartoons, album cover art, skateboard graphics, older film poster art and surrealism all made an impression on his early work. His paintings are rife with imagery of the collective conscious of these subcultures. Universal symbols, the modernism of the sixties and Art Deco have made their way into recent work. The eye ( all-seeing eye, Georgian eye) as a universal symbol is the inspiration for this group show.