Real Time and Space is ecstatic to host REAL TALKS with resident artist Nicole Shaffer and our special guest, tamara suarez porras. Thursday, June 26th at 7pm at RTS located at 125 10th St. Oakland – get here early for PIZZA!
Nicole Shaffer is a Bay Area interdisciplinary visual artist with a focus on research based installations. Their work offers space for poetic and phenomenal understanding while centering the nuance and beauty of non-normative and divergent embodiments. By reconfiguring visual language from local archives and passed down craft techniques, Shaffer reclaims access to a sense of lineage and belonging historically denied to gender variant, queer, and mad lives.
Nicole is a current Fellow at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. They were exhibiting artist in Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and a 2023 Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts. Their work has been exhibited at galleries and museums in the Bay Area including YBCA, Southern Exposure, SOMArts, 500 Capp Street, 41 Ross, and Root Division. They were a distinguished graduate of their 2022 class at San Francisco State University, and recipient of the 2019 Murphy Cadogan award.
tamara suarez porras (they/she) is an artist, writer, and educator from (south) Brooklyn, NY and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who works across photography, filmmaking, and writing. tamara examines dynamics of seeing, remembering, forgetting, and how photography attempts to know the unknowable. Often beginning with collected and family archives, their work explores how memory and self-knowledge can be unraveled through layers of a photograph. tamara has exhibited nationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, School at the International Center of Photography, Filter Space, Houston Center for Photography, San Francisco Center for the Book, Root Division, and Kala Art Institute Gallery. They have published artist books with Sming Sming Books, Deep Time Press, and National Monument Press, held in library collections including Harvard University, National Gallery of Art, and SFMOMA. tamara has written criticism for The Brooklyn Rail, 48Hills, and Art Practical, and published essays with Saint Lucy Books, SFMOMA’s Open Space, and CCA Wattis Institute / Sternberg Press. They are a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Photography + Imaging and California College of the Arts with an MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual & Critical Studies. tamara is a Lecturer at Stanford University in Photography, adjunct faculty in photography and art history at colleges across the Bay Area, and on the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure.