Gallery 16 is pleased to present a group exhibition of seven Bay Area-based artists. Homebody brings together paintings, drawings, sculptures, and quilts that, together, explore what it might mean to be home. Home means so many things: safety, family, connection with others and with yourself. Being and feeling at home is as individual an experience as existing in a body; every person has their own ideas and practices of order and stability, comfort and belonging, sharing spaces, and exploring desires. While our inner lives and the spaces we inhabit are separate things, the two inform each other. In the hands of these artists, domestic objects and spaces become stages for performances of identity, labor, and fantasy. The rituals and routines of daily life become containers for boundless imagination.

Mary Campbell is a multimedia artist interested in the theatrics of everyday life. She finds inspiration in do-it-yourself homeowner manuals, magazine advertisements, and life hack tutorials in the midst of the loneliness of late capitalism. Casting, sheet forming, photographing, and camouflaging, Campbell approaches the objects she crafts like props in a performance. “Silently steering the attention from photograph to object and back again, I invite you to engage and follow their direction. With any luck, you’ll reach a dead end”. Campbell has exhibited regionally at SF Camerawork, Incline Gallery, and Borderline Art Collective, Stelo and Littman Gallery in Portland, and in NAHP’s traveling Papermaking Triennial exhibition.

Greg Climer combines the slow, meticulous crafts of quilting and knitting with pixelated digital composites of images from the news, pornography, and his personal archive, heavily edited or re-generated with AI. Climer’s work mediates on the joys of community, intimacy, and resilience against the backdrop of political realities like prejudice and climate change. His work has been shown in many museums and galleries, including the Museum of Art and Design (NYC), Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (NYC), Museum of Craft and Design (SF), DeYoung Museum (SF), San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte, NC), Muskegon Museum of Art (MI). Climer has also worked on the design teams for Victoria’s Secret Runway Show, Karl Lagerfeld, Imitation of Christ, John Bartlett, as well as many broadway shows and movies. He is currently the chair of the fashion program at California College of the Arts.

Rachel Kaye lives with her two children and her husband, fellow artist Jay Nelson, with whom she often collaborates, in San Francisco. Kaye’s work uses intense patterns, swirling lines, and graphic layering in conveying a sense of freedom and joy. Kaye’s abstract oil paintings and pencil drawings bring small moments of the everyday into the realm of unpredictability and mystery. She has exhibited in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Palm Beach, Paris, and Tokyo. Kaye has completed large-scale murals at Google (Mountain View), Meta (Menlo Park), and the Hook Fish Restaurant (SF).

Erik Parra was born and raised in El Paso, Texas in a midcentury modern house. Rather than working with reference materials, he creates his work through a process of remembering, drawing, collaging, and improvising forms. Parra’s work considers how personal and political realities color our experiences of safety within built environments. “The history of white flight and its effect on contemporary urban real estate practices directly impacts my work. The implications of these stories do not simply affect my ability to maintain a studio but they literally pervade just about every other aspect of life”. Parra has exhibited in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Reno, Portland, New York, Brazil, Berlin, and London. In the Bay Area, Parra has exhibited at Maybaum Gallery, Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Blankspace Gallery, Johansson Projects, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Root Division, Southern Exposure, Kala Art Institute, and the Berkeley Art Center. He teaches at the California College of the Arts and Berkeley City College.

Rachel Stallings Thomander is a Colombian American multidisciplinary artist. She lives and works in Santa Cruz with her husband and two sons. Thomander’s work activates an exchange between childhood and adulthood in objects that staddle decorative and utilitarian, opening the door to a fantastical realm of creative exploration. “One of the purposes of these [works] is to call attention to the utilitarian objects in the home. Where do my spoons come from? Who made my clock? What country was my jacket made in? Which traditions or histories are these objects tied to? I make functional and nonfunctional works that are in conversation with each other. They are partly in charge of their own creation, forming a world of their own”. Thomander has exhibited work at Tropical Contemporary, CTRL+SHFT, Nous Tous Gallery, Guerrero Gallery, Richmond Art Center, and Berkeley Art Museum.

Cate White grew up in the backwoods of northern California, and her intimacy with cultural margins is reflected in her art. Her paintings and drawings explore the existential and cultural realities of struggle and resilience through a lens of mysticism, storytelling, comedy, and raw emotion. Her symbolically charged, narrative paintings illuminate many of our personal and collective shadows in relation to class, race, gender, trauma, morality, and power. White splits her time between Oakland and a shack on the Mendocino Coast, where she hosts How do you paint, an “unhinged, Bob Ross-inspired” painting show on YouTube. White has exhibited widely, including at George Adams Gallery, Guerrero Gallery, and the Oakland Museum of Contemporary Art.

Karla Wozniak is a painter whose work moves between representation and abstraction, characterized by idiosyncratic explorations of mark-making, color, and texture. Wozniak’s work mediates on the hyper-local space of her home as well as sweeping, imagined landscapes. In the paintings seen in this exhibition, she brings together the mundanity of parenthood and the uninhibited imagination of childhood. She has shown internationally, with solo shows at such venues as the Schneider Museum (Ashland, OR) and in San Francisco at Gregory Lind Gallery, Paul Thiebaud Gallery, and Et al. Wozniak has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and was a Seca Finalist at the SFMOMA. She has participated in the Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace program, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, and two MacDowell Colony fellowships. Her work is included in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Knoxville Museum of Art permanent collections. Wozniak is an Associate Professor at California College of the Arts.