[ Salad of Contents ]
- Jaylene Li - The Glugs
- Max Sugarman - Foster Machinery
- Cora Colin - Vision
- Jacob Mai Nguyen Glantz - The Princess of An Châu
- August Petersen - Mystery Meat
- Sophie Lewis - Childhood Waves
- Vivian Nguyen - Out of the Blue
- Ben Couoh Menendez - The Forsaken Pumpkin Man
- Priya Chichester - Toast Flower
- Renai Gutierrez - No Harpsicord
- Zoe Venier - The Aisle
- Lena Toner - Smiling With Too Many Teeth
- Mina Halloran - Omar
- Seraphine Hoyles - The Strangest Salad
- Nana Alatorre-Gonzalez - Chikhai Bardo
- F. Schlessinger - Return of Lucky Fish
- Kai Sun - Unique is the New Normal
- Sherina Wu - Running Solo
- Emi Harris - From, Emi
Welcome to Strange Salad, a collection of 19 original projects created by our fall cohort of artists working in genres ranging from music and film to painting, collage, animation, and more. Step up to the salad bar, hit that salad of contents, and serve yourself some premium strangeness!
Jaylene Li - The Glugs
It’s hard to hide your guilt when it shines right on you, and sometimes right through you. In this film, two high school boys confront both the pretty and ugly sides of their small glitter-selling business. One of them needs the money, while the other can’t shake the guilt that comes with how they’re getting it. It’s a scheme so dazzling you could say it sparkles and shines, even when the truth underneath doesn’t.
Please come play with the interactive clay sculpture. I created this small collection of mystery objects and only later realized that it functions just like a puzzle. Whatever! Come play with me! They are smooth and nice to touch… mostly. Just be careful because it’s a little sharp in a few spots where the rusty screws and bolts I found on the street poke out from the clay.
Some questions for your consideration before you come over and play:
What if an art piece was also a little guy? (200 words maximum)
What if it could also be many little guys?
What if you could take it apart and pick it up and move it around for fun?
Don’t you want to scoop metal strays off the sidewalk and wrap them up in clay blankets and give them a nice warm home?
Don’t you want to tuck it into bed with a big cup of tea? (350 words maximum)
I’ll be expecting a response in my dreams tonight.
Cora Colin - Midhorse
Julia doesn’t mind that her husband is a horse. Roger can be awkward at dinner parties, and his hooves sometimes get in the way, but it’s never been an issue. Really. In fact, Julia would rather not talk about it at all. It’s nothing, and everything is fine… until Roger begins having strange dreams.
Jacob Mai Nguyen Glantz - The Princess of An Châu
The princess of An Châu is just like any other princess. She reads a million books, talks to her animal friends, overhears two palace guards plotting to murder the royal family and take over the kingdom… What?!? In this new children’s book, heavily inspired by classic Vietnamese literature, the fate of a tiny kingdom rests in the hands of a teenage princess, her courageous horse, and a crazy parrot. What the friends lack in brawn, they make up for in brains, and they must pull theirs together to stop a power-hungry warlord from destroying their kingdom before it’s too late!
The Princess of An Châu is a bilingual Tieng Viet/English folktale rooted in classic Vietnamese stories. The goal is to help second generation Vietnamese youth like me learn the language in a cultural context. For that reason, my illustrations are deeply inspired by Vietnamese lacquer paintings, which I incorporated into the colors, borders, and line art. This project is a collaboration with my mentor Bac Tran: a Vietnamese Stanford professor and linguist, and the author of this book. This is my very first book illustration project, and I am so grateful to have been able to bring this story to life.
August Petersen - Mystery Meat
The pandemic never ended, at least in the minds of those who experienced it. We somehow have convinced ourselves that we healed and moved on, refusing to acknowledge our scars and masking the pain we experience as a result. Covid was a fever dream for most of us living in cities. Isolated in the presence of each other, we were confused, scared, and devoid of any sort of meaningful social connection, eventually to the point where many of us experienced some sort of mania during that time, some of which still lingers inside us today. Including myself in that category, Mystery Meat explores this idea from the perspective of Jerry, a lonely weirdo who finds himself in a bitter feud with his nosy neighbor, all while struggling to survive during lockdown.
Sophie Lewis - Childhood Waves
I found an image of my child self staring ominously across the beach. I cannot remember what I was looking at, and whatever it was never made into the image’s frame so I decided to impose a likely subject. The base of this piece is a watercolor painting, and the majority of detail was built through layers of colored pencil. Five mystical pegasi gracefully celebrate the end of my childhood. I was 17 years old when I started this piece, and I finished it at 18.
Vivian Nguyen - Out of the Blue
I first came up with the concept of this film when one of my friends dyed her hair blue. The color popped out against the rest of the world, and I knew immediately that I wanted to capture that vibrancy in my next film project. Buzz cuts, MUNI buses, hot air balloon engagements. The project meandered through many phases before landing in its final form.
Out of the Blue is a short, mixed-media work about the idealization of crushes and how easily we build fantasies around strangers. I use blue and orange tones, paper textures, and experimented with choppy, handmade animation to create a whimsical atmosphere that mirrors the dreamy–and sometimes sobering–state the film explores.
Kind of a long-winded way to say that my favorite color is blue and I love blueberries.
Ben Couoh Menendez - The Forsaken Pumpkin Man
The Forsaken Pumpkin Man is a short concept film about a cursed man who is transformed into a walking pumpkin on the night of the dreaded blood moon. I was inspired by Halloween and my love for all things spooky, which is why I had so much fun making and bringing this walking anorexic gourd to life. This is a work in progress; in the future, I will build more on the concept and keep developing this character. For now, enjoy the origin story, the spooky panels I pieced together. and the dreadful world that The Forsaken Pumpkin Man is cursed to inhabit.
Priya Chichester - Toast Flower
My title comes from what is underneath the paint, which is the result of a flower that spent a little too long in the oven. The clay became super burnt in the cooking process, but it didn’t push me too far off track. Clay is not a medium that I have had much practice working with in the past; it took a couple of tries to end up with a form that resembled a flower to my liking, and then I had to figure out what to do with the background. The idea of using tiles appealed to me, as it added the contrast of something natural against something abstract. Although I hope Toast Flower brings comfort to the viewer, I hope it challenges them a bit too, just as it pushed me out of my comfort zone and into a brand new meadow of tiles and clay.
Renai Gutierrez - Quintaracore
My two songs were written over the past year about the same subject, but at drastically different times in my life, which has come to represent the dichotomy between desperation and rejection. My music is influenced by rock acts of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, notably American Football and Saosin, and Vocaloid artists like Wowaka, Powapowa/Siinamota and 36g. Sonically, I wanted to encapsulate a certain suburban melancholy, based on my move away from San Francisco and into the burbs. “Anything Now” is a song about the desperation of needing someone so badly I was willing to take anything from them, considering any act a sign of supposed ‘love.’ Forty Eight is a song about rejecting the desperation of Anything Now, focusing on a new awareness of how desperation shaped me. (It’s also a nod to the infamous San Francisco bus, the 48 Quintara, which was where I processed a lot of my emotional fallout). In the future, I will keep experimenting with genre, and produce a vocaloid-style song in the future! Last but not least, the saxophone on both songs was played by Alex Trillo!
The Aisle is an animated short film exploring the short moments in time that shape the experience of getting through the day, starting over, and waking up in the same aisle again and again. This particular episode features my main character discovering something out of place while grocery shopping. I animated his story because I wanted the audience to get a direct experience of his spiraling life.
Her skin is a lot smoother than mine. Making it smooth was hard, and bits of the plaster bandages still peek out. I held her and sanded her down over and over again, but sandpaper would just scratch my skin. I laughed too much when I made her, so now she can’t stop smiling. She doesn’t look like me, because she’s not me… not really. She’s different underneath her skin. Both from herself, and from me. The inside of her face smells like E6000. She gives me a little bit of a headache when I wear her out even if her eyes are a lot like mine… Maybe a little asymmetrical, but then again, so am I.
Mina Halloran - Ormr
Did you know that King Cobras are considered vulnerable to extinction? The consequences of deforestation and our growing population are affecting all aspects of the environment, and this piece highlights a species that has special symbolism to me. I decided to go to medieval and old story book art for inspiration, as they also tend to incorporate the environment and morality into their work.
Seraphine Hoyles - The Strangest Salad
As a jack of all trades, I’ve probably tried every project under the sun. I have mastered a way to learn something new each cycle and this fall was no exception. Between learning new instruments, experimenting with plug-ins, tracking vocals, drums, bass and keys, I was determined to crash the software as much as possible. Once again, I left my comfort zone and created a brand new song called, The Strangest Salad featuring F. Schlessinger and Cora Collin. It was made on Logic Pro with a lot of blood, sweat, goop and tears.
Nana Alatorre-Gonzalez - Chikhai Bardo
Chikhai Bardo is a Tibetan Buddhist concept I first discovered in the TV show Severance. It represents a transitional stage of dying before death: a liminal stage, occupying space in two places when the consciousness separates itself from the body right before death. This moment of suspension comes with clarity, suffering, and everything in between. Chikhai Bardo leads to the defeat of ego, resulting in ego death. Exploring this in-between state and confronting my own ego is the ultimate goal of my project.
F. Schlessinger - Return of Lucky Fish
After a year’s worth of travel, Lucky Fish is finally here to meet you, but he’s a bit shy. Maybe once you get to know him, he’ll open up! This charming fish with legs was constructed in Blender, a 3D modeling and animation program. He is in his second iteration, but the first Lucky Fish who can actually move!
This enchanting sea-dwelling fellow likes to travel and has a bit of a shopping addiction when it comes to limited-edition sneakers. He spends countless hours scrubbing eBay listings and hunting through forums for the perfect new pair for his collection. Lucky Fish has been planning a trip through Eurasia to track down a specific pair, which was swiped out from under him over a year ago. Hopefully he can collect them before they are lost to the sands of time.
Kai Sun - Unique is the New Normal
It doesn’t feel good to lie to others, but it feels even worse when you lie to yourself. That’s part of what makes someone truly unique, not just looking different, but expressing yourself in ways that set you apart. Being different makes you more interesting to be around since you have more to offer the people around you. When you’re not honest with yourself, connecting with others emotionally becomes difficult. Connecting with your own inner self becomes harder. To be unique is to be truthful about who you really are.
Sherina Wu - Running Solo
He gets a once in a lifetime opportunity to intern at the most well-funded and prestigious tech company in Silicon Valley, but instead of placing him in the lab to invent god-knows-what, they make him run errands all around the city. It’s all so boring and not what he signed up for. Still, Matthew Jones tries to do the job perfectly, while his friend Sam Parker doesn’t take anything seriously, especially when he’s with Matthew. Together, they navigate Helios Co’s strict rules and regulations, complete their odd errands and slowly uncover more about a tech company that seems to value results above everything else. Tat’s a good thing, right!? Just think of all the new innovations they will produce for the system!!
Emi Harris - From, Emi
In this short zine, I capture experiences from my growth as an artist and how I’ve been creatively inspired by different aspects of my life. From my favorite TV shows to a homage to my neighborhood in the Richmond, I reflect on my internal thoughts to curate an accurate depiction of my artistic development through captivating images. I chose the zine format simply because a single spread is worth a thousand words, i.e. the perfect way to share a time capsule of my creative life.
