About The Exhibition
Imagine an evening without light and energy. Now, imagine a lifetime.
Unite to Light the Night is an annual light art exhibition celebrating the power of light. The event supports Unite to Light’s mission to bring light and power to nearly a billion people who live without light at night. For this year’s exhibition, artists are asked to challenge and question our comfortable reliability on the access of light and share the stories of those who rely on solar energy.
Artists Uniting to Light the Night
Meet the Artists of this year’s Unite to Light the Night exhibition and fundraiser. With over 50 submissions, the Jury of the 2023 Unite to Light the Night has selected 26 artists whose work explores Unite to Light’s mission and celebrates the power of light. This year’s Jury included 5 Santa Barbara-based arts professionals, including artists, local arts instructors, curators, and staff of local museums and galleries.
We look forward to seeing you at the event to meet the artists and experience their work.
We look forward to seeing you at the event to meet the artists and experience their work.
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Alex Noble
Alex Noble is a Santa Barbara based fine art photographer with ten years of experience behind a camera. He has found it challenging to articulate his thoughts and feelings through words alone so photography has became his chosen medium for self-expression. He is passionate about creating images that leave a lasting impression and tell a story that words simply can't.
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Ali Williams
Ali Williams is a storyteller, researcher, and creative practitioner. She engages across textual and visual mediums to explore her endless curiosity in human beings. As a full-time lecturer in the Writing Program at UCSB, Ali’s courses focus on composition and communications in media, culture, and the arts. Ali is a PhD candidate in Creative Research at the Transart Institute, and her work has been published and exhibited in mainstream and academic spaces.
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Amun Levy
Amun Levy (aka. Altarbeast) lives and works in Southern California. A graduate from the graphic design program at California Institute of the Arts, his love for music and art have evolved into a progressive multi-faceted creative force. Altarbeast creates projection visuals that synthesize environments in harmony with audio, blurring the lines between visual and audio. Altarbeast performs all live, original content, creating a distinction between out of the box VJ’s and projection as an art form.
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Ben Grace
Ben Grace is an interdisciplinary designer and creative technologist living in Ojai, CA. With a foundation in architecture, Ben’s interdisciplinary approach allows his passion for experience to reach a contemporary audience. Specializing in spatial design where digital processes meet the real world, Ben works from concept to implementation in order to bring ideas to life. The goal of these works are to illuminate realities beyond our perception through experience. His aim is to make the settled, strange.
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Birgit Leleu
Birgit Leleu was born in Ypres, Belgium in 1979. She graduated in 2002 from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, as a Master in Visual Arts, 3-Dimensional Art, Jewelry and Silversmithing. She has exhibited her work across the globe in prestigious galleries.
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Brett Schoonderwoerd
Brett Schoonderwoerd is an artist fueled by a deep connection to creation. From a young age, he found joy in tinkering and unraveling the mysteries of old electronics, discovering the magic within their workings. College brought him the opportunity to study photography and art. Brett pours his heart into crafting meaningful works for individuals, events, and the community. Each creation is an invitation to explore the extraordinary, to evoke emotions, and to connect with the world in profound ways.
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Cevins McCullah
Cevins' work exploring the junctures of memory and form become portals to the past, encouraging introspection about our own experiences and the ever-shifting nature of time. Through every creation, Cevins unveils fragments of the human soul, seamlessly intertwining the tangible and intangible in a harmonious dance of nostalgia and artistic expression. Having earned an AA in Studio Art from Santa Barbara City College, Cevins is currentluy pursuing a BA in Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Jami Joelle Nielsen
Jami Joelle Nielsen is a Santa Barbara based self-taught artist with a degree in Environmental Science from the University of Kansas.Jami Joelle's body of work combines a reverence for science, nature and the human experience. She strives to develop powerful art that speaks to social and environmental concerns while encouraging dialogue, education and collaboration in an inclusive community, connecting us to each other and the broader universe. The result pays homage to symbiosis, transformation and hope.
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Justin Gunn
Justin Gunn is an award winning filmmaker whose journey to sculptural artist was first inspired by his many visits to the Burning Man festival. Inspired by the giant art cars known as Mutant Vehicles which shuttle participants across the vast desert expanse, he started building artistic personal vehicles based on electrical tricycles. Along with his frequent collaborator, Torin Curren, he continues to build these fantastical Tiny Art Cars.
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Kellen Meyer
Kellen Meyer is a Contemporary Artist focused on Large Scale Fiber Art Installations, Sculptures, and Collaborations with Galleries and Boutique Hotels. Kellen’s Art is Rooted in Nature and influenced by the colors, shapes and textures in the wild outdoors. This influence weaves a common thread throughout her work. She entwines a variety of natural fibers to create hand-woven works of fine art that integrate knitting, crochet, and various weaving techniques.
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Lucia has lived in Argentina, Italy, Switzerland and since 2013 calls sunny Santa Barbara her home. She is always creating and draws inspiration from her years living abroad, her travels and her favorite place, the beach. She has always been passionate about art and loves playing and exploring with different mediums. Her studio work focuses on acrylic paintings and collage on paper.
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Marco Pinter creates artwork and performances which fuse physical kinetic form with live visualizations. He has a PhD in Media Arts and Technology from UC Santa Barbara, and an undergraduate degree from Cornell University. He has exhibited artwork and performances at cities around the world, including Dubai, New York, Montreal, Tehran, Hong Kong, Anaheim, San Diego and Santa Barbara. He is also founder and co-curator of the Museum of Sensory & Movement Experiences.
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Meiya Sidney
Meiya is an interdisciplinary artist based in Santa Barbara. Through her lived experience of hybridity being Taiwanese-American, she cultivates a practice that invites deep looking, wisdom, and community well-being. Meiya’s work combines calming colors, Traditional Chinese characters, and allusions to nature to create a peaceful, grounding energy that brings us back to the present moment. Meiya studies at College of Creative Studies, UCSB as a Book Arts major and Chinese minor. She is the 2023-24 Artist Visionary of UCSB Mindfulness Club and Gallery Assistant at Maune Contemporary.
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Mia Franco
Mia Franco was born and raised in Santa Barbara, where she continues to live and work today. The local landscape and different forms of biodiversity inspire her work, ranging from oil and acrylic paintings to print and sculpture media. In 2021, she received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She has been awarded a scholarship to attend Anderson Ranch Arts Center, selected for several community mural projects, and continues to build upon her artistic and botanical knowledge. She is currently a studio technician at Clay Studio SB and a scenic painter at Santa Barbara City College.
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Rebecca Zendejas has had a lifelong fascination with the creation of sacred space within daily routines and community spaces. With a background in art installation, theater production and woodworking, Rebecca began designing and constructing one of a kind personal altars for the home and office in 2018. October of 2020 she created a Community Memorial Altar at Paradise Found, where the public was invited to add the names of departed loved ones to an altar. In the years that have followed, it has become a beloved autumn ritual.
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Richard McLaughlin
Richard McLaughlin was educated in both arts and sciences. He studied in the physics department at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and shifted his attention to painting and sculpture at UCSB upon arriving in Santa Barbara. Richard also spent a year abroad at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, Italy, where he studied painting, performance, and puppetry. For several years, he worked in downtown Santa Barbara and collaborated with local artists on what was to become the Summer Solstice Parade and Celebration.
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Award-winning artist and a 5th generation Santa Barbaran, Rod Lathim creates neon sculptures exploring matter and light. Often incorporating vintage objects and marrying various artistic styles and epochs, his work references pop, minimalism, retrofuturism and deconstruction. He is fascinated by light created by combusting gas with electricity. This ethereal, radiant light is the closest thing he has found in our physical world to our soul’s light. @rodlathim
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Shaune Lundstrom is a multimedia artist studying Art and Communications at UCSB. She grew up in Orinda, CA, and has been pursuing art her whole life. Nature is a large inspiration for Shaune’s works. She also loves the flow state of longboarding, and finds it similar to her creative process. As a large believer in experimentation, she often changes her medium.
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Tai Rodrig
Tai Rodrig is a multimedia artist based in Santa Barbara. Since studying computer science and art at UCSB, he has been creating artwork using the power of computers, usually reserved for boring and sterile applications, to turn artistic visions into reality. Tai’s projects blur the line between digital and physical art, letting the computation work its magic behind the scenes without getting in the way of experience. Tai uses the computer as a tool, not unlike a paint brush, to create unique artwork that escapes the screen.
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Torin Curren
Torin Curren is a multi-talented craftsman and artist living in the Central Coast. His skills as a master carpenter, welder and metal fabricator all are brought to bear in the kinetic sculptural vehicles called Tiny Art Cars. Whether pedal powered or electrically propelled, Torin’s creations have taken the shapes of bunny rabbits, Guinea pigs and even a glowing snail.
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Timothy Wood is a media artist and somatic movement artist committed to creating practices of balance. His work in creating immersive and dynamic spaces for improvisational performance and playful interaction explores new ways of learning from the rich stories of living natural systems to empower our own embodied storytelling practices. Timothy aims to create works that promote imagination, creativity, and play as a healing force for both the physical body and the community.
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Tori Louise
Tori Louise is an artist and poet residing in Santa Barbara. Tori weaves her connection with the natural world into her artistic expression. Enveloped in an aura of mysticism and reverence, her art reflects an exploration of human emotions. Tori's artistic practice spans an array of mediums, including poetry, fiction, painting, and installation art. Tori's art aims to inspire empathy, foster connections, and encourage viewers to perceive the world from fresh and meaningful perspectives.
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Udo Gyene
Udo Gyene is a mathematician, visual artist, programmer and educator based in Santa Barbara. Driven by the power of the universal language of mathematics, he strives to share that inspiration with the world through artistic expression and education. Udo explores the fields of Geometric Abstraction, Surrealism and Op-Art, drawing guidance from the likes of Kandinsky, Miro and Vasarely. He has harnessed the power of vector calculus, differential geometry and implicit modeling to develop a vast body of mathematical artwork in a variety of media.
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