San Francisco new media artist Deborah Oropallo continues to surprise the art world by reinventing her work with consistent quality. Oropallo allows her images to evolve with the change in technology, and her mediums range from oil on canvas, to digital photos and permanent pigment prints. Most of her work focuses on mundane objects, but Oropallo transforms them into elegant images through formal concerns like scale and color. In recent years, Oropallo has focused on digital imagery to create large-scale, vibrant images, but the artist always allows her style and approach to change dramatically from one body of work to another. In 2007, Oropallo will show with San Jose Art Museum, Scott White Contemporary Art in San Diego and De Young Museum in San Francisco. She has won many awards, including the Eureka Fellowship Award from the Fleishhacker Foundation, and received her M.F.A. from University of California, Berkeley. Her work is currently carried by the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco and the Gail Severn Gallery in Ketchum, Idaho.

Los Angeles artist Tim Hawkinson has been called one of America’s most singular and inventive sculptors today. He is renowned for creating both monumental and microscopic works made of complex kinetic and sound producing elements, which are operated through low-tech programmed systems. Hawkinson’s work is seemingly scientific, and the necessities of his inventions often lead to new tools, widely imaginative approaches and diverse mediums. Hawkinson has created major works in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation and sound. In February 2005, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented 20 years of the artist’s work in his first major museum survey. The PBS series Art:21 interviewed Hawkinson about his practice and concepts, and he was also featured on NPR‘s “All Things Considered” (2005). Hawkinson is a graduate of UCLA and is currently represented by the Ace Gallery in Los Angeles.

Raqib Shaw is a London-based Kashmiri artist whose work is influenced by decorative objects of the East. The artist uses Japanese screens, Asian textiles and antique carpets, along with paint, to create a rich and layered surface where an erotic world of hybrid creatures inhabits an underwater enviornment. Shaw incorporates a catalogue of flora and fauna into each piece, mixing aquatic with animal and human qualities into creatures that engage in sexual acts. The artist is a graduate from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London (2002) and began to exhibit with LCF and The London Institute Gallery that same year. In 2005, he had a solo exhibition with Deitch Projects in New York City, which was followed by an exhibition with Tate Britain the next year. The Tate exhibition was featured in the Evening Standard (London).

Ellen Altfest is a hyper-realist painter whose work contains an illusionistic material quality. Each painting is created from still-life observation, focusing on the individual object’s inherent complexities. Altfest’s painted objects blend into their surroundings. Engulfed by the environment, these paintings focus on the physicality and the patterns found in images of nature. The artist received an MFA from Yale University School of Art and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2002. Later that year, Altfest exhibited with Bellwether Gallery in New York. She exhibited again with the gallery in 2005 and had a review in the The New York Times. This year, Altfest will be featured in The Triumph of Painting at the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Artist Terence Koh works in a variety of media, including performance, sculpture, books, zines, Web sites and photography. Throughout the artist’s career, references to punk culture, homosexuality and adolescence have been offered through a very personal vocabulary. The artist often focuses on ephemeral materials, employing tactile and sensuous qualities to many appropriated images and objects. For the sculpture called “These Decades that We never Sleep, black drums,” Koh covers a drum kit with paint, ropes, insect parts and his own bodily fluid. Similar materials were used to create a full boudoir chandelier. Terence Koh graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art in Vancouver. Since 2003, he has exhibited with Peres Projects in Los Angeles and Berlin four times, and, in 2006, he exhibited at the Kunsthalle Zurich in Zurich, Switzerland. Koh is currently exhibiting with the Whitney Museum in New York City through May, which is his first major U.S. solo museum exhibition.

Todd Hido recently released a new body of work named “Between the Two” with the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. Hido’s photographs range in subject matter but consistently rely on formal elements to create reduced narratives without solution. The images bring beauty and emotion into stark environments by integrating the figure into empty spaces. In 2004, Hido was featured in an article in Seesaw Magazine and, in 1998, received the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation. In 2005, Hido had solo shows with the Karyn Lovegrove Gallery in Los Angeles and the Inman Gallery in Houston. Hido received his B.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1991 and his M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 1996. Currently, he has work in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the SF MOMA and many others.

Photo, performance and video artist Mary Coble creates work that addresses the social issues associated with gay, lesbian and trans-gendered individuals. The images evoke physical pain that references the emotional strain many ambi-sexual individuals constantly endure. Her 2005 performance with Conner Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C., received strong opinions after the artist endured a 12-hour marathon of inkless tattooing, covering the back side of her entire body with the first names of more than 300 gender-based hate crime victims. Mary Coble graduated in 2004 from George Washington University and since then has had exhibitions and performances with Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, d.u.m.b.o. art center in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Artist’s Space in New York City through Performa’05. In 2007, Coble is scheduled to have a performance with the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. View video of Mary Coble’s inkless tattoo performance “Note to Self” (2005) here.