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BIO

Tia Factor received a B.F.A. with High Distinction from the California College of the Arts in 1997 and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. At U.C. Berkeley, she was the recipient of the Eisner Fine Art Award in 2000 and J. Ruth Kelsey Traveling Merit Award in 2001. She received the JurorÕs Choice Award at the Sonoma Vallery Museum of Art Biennial in 2005.

She has been awarded artist residencies at Kala Bhavana in Kerala, India; the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont; and Arts Tasmania, a Port Arthur Historic Site in Tasmania, Australia. Her work has been exhibited largely throughout the Bay Area, as well as in New York, Germany, Denmark and Australia. She has taught at the University of California, Berkeley as well as the Oxbow School in Napa, California. Tia lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

STATEMENT

Painting with gouache on paper, Tia Factor generates personalized maps of what is unseen and intuited in the places she visits. Maps may appear in her art, but the works themselves become larger maps of her subconscious. For Factor, a mental map is the composite of elements of exterior realities combined with instantaneous interior impressions of a place gathered in an intuitive manner. Multiple and contradictory views of one place will appear, a rural landscape, a run-down mini-golf course, and an industrial-era bridge are combined with uncodified or ineffable information, such as diminishing coils of color bands or tie-dye patterns shooting from an exploding star. The paintings help to reveal how our internal landscape is shaped by the external landscape we are surrounded by.

PRESS

TIA FACTOR, Arts Interviews 4/27/2010
Interview with Tia Factor