Greetings from VC Projects on this chilly Sunday.
We are excited to announce Shane Guffogg: Xingu exhibition, and Anthony Cardella, piano performance has been included in PARASOL Creator Salon on March 2nd located at RITA HOUSE! This one time only event promises to be an inspiring evening of creative community building paired with an immersive art and music experience. The theme this month is Brand & Audience Development. The panel speakers include Azy Saii (Universal Music, Amazon Studios), Alan Sartirana (Anthemic Agency, FLOOD Mag)
Hope to see you there!
The Creator Salon is a monthly series developed to creative a supportive space to fuel personal, professional, and collective growth while sparking new ideas and connections.
Thursday, March 2nd
From 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM, piano performance begins at 7 PM
Located at: RITA HOUSE, 5971 W. 3rd Street, Los Angeles, 90036
ARTIST & PIANIST COLLABORATION
SHANE GUFFOGG: XINGU
Large to medium-scale works on paper
An expressive piano performance by ANTHONY CARDELLA
featuring works by Janacek, Ravel, Scriabin, and Prokofiev
Curated by Victoria Chapman of EL NIDO by VC Projects
BRAND & AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT PANEL
featuring Alan Sartirana (Anthemic Agency, FLOOD Mag) & Azy Saii (Universal Music, Amazon Studios)
Music performance by Anthony Cardella, Pianist at 7 pm
Leos Janacek: In The Mists , Maurice Ravel: Miroirs, Maurice Ravel: Gaspard de la Nuit Alexander Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 2 in G-Sharp Minor (Sonata-Fantasy) and Prokofiev: Toccata
March 2nd at RITA HOUSE, 5971 W. 3rd Street, Los Angeles, 90036
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS & ARTISTS
| LAN SARTIRANA CEO & Founder, Anthemic Agency, Flood Magazine and Flood FM, President & Co-Founder, Louder than Bombs Productions |
| As CEO and Founder of the award-winning ANTHEMIC Agency and Publisher and Founder of FLOOD Magazine, Alan Sartirana is an industry stalwart who is regarded as one of the leading voices in culture, music, lifestyle, and branding. ANTHEMIC is a collective of creative and engaged industry leaders who cultivate extraordinary experiences that inspire and influence culture. Sartirana leads the full-service brand and culture agency in its unique approach to experiential marketing, brand partnerships, media campaigns, public relations, and content strategy, with clients and projects that include Toyota, Bowers & Wilkins, Saatchi & Saatchi, Guitar Center, Burton, the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, and more. Sartirana is also the founder of FLOOD, an online and print media publisher spanning the landscape of film, music, art, travel, and everything in between, featuring everyone from Run the Jewels, Neil Young, Big Grams, and Iggy Pop to fashion spreads featuring John C. Reilly’s Dr. Steve Brule and the cast of HBO’s Veep. |
| AZY SAII Growth & Marketing Leader | Deep CX, E-Commerce, Performance Marketing, Data & Tech Expertise | Accelerated Growth For Industry Leaders: Universal Music Group, FOX, Experian & NewsCorp |
| Azy Saii is a global marketing leader with a history of achievement unlocking growth for Fortune 500 brands and start-ups in the media, entertainment and consumer tech space. She is currently an independent advisor mainly helping media and entertainment brands of all sizes optimize their marketing, operations and infrastructure to scale performance. This includes her recent role as the marketing integration lead for Amazon Studios, following their $8.5B acquisition of MGM, where she helped develop a future-state vision across the two studios. Prior to consulting, Azy held several marketing executive posts where she spearheaded performance turnarounds and digital transformation. As the senior vice president of global audience development at Universal Music Group (UMG) she steered a data-powered growth strategy, creating a competitive advantage for the label in its ability to support artist’s accelerate their commercial success. She led the marketing technology and data vision, as well as created a performance marketing center-of -excellence to support the label businesses in acquiring new fans, creating engaged digital experiences and driving targets campaigns to yield an average of 10M incremental fans and 130% increase in response rates per artist campaign. Some of the most successful album release campaigns she contributed to were Taylor Swift’s Red (Taylor’s Version), Lorde’s Solar Power, Stromae’s Multitude launch in North America and The Weeknd’s release of After Hours. Prior to UMG, Azy served as the head of marketing for Fox’s direct-to-consumer business unit, which launched their first digital product across a portfolio of four networks – FOX,FX, National Geographic and FOX Sports. Her launch of the digital-first business helped capture an incremental $71M in revenue and grow FOX’s owned consumer base from 0 to 10M within one year. She also managed two performance turnarounds for Experian, the world’s largest data company, in both UK and North America where she served as the marketing and customer experience leader on the executive leadership team of their consumer services business. Her early career was built in the UK and Canada, during the onset and rise of digital consumption and commerce. In hands-on digital and performance marketing roles, she facilitated GTM success and led early innovation in digital marketing for brands like BSkyB, Vonage, Telus and AOL. She’s recognized for her deep data and technology fluency and a passion for creating authentic connections between brands and fans that simultaneously translate into value exchange. Raised in Canada, Azy graduated from the University of Victoria with a bachelor of commerce and major in international business. She now calls Los Angeles home, where she lives with her two boys and husband. She is currently completing a certificate in Blockchain Technologies: Business Innovation and Application at MIT. |
| SHANE GUFFOGG, Visual Artist |
| Shane Guffogg was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised on an exotic bird farm in the San Joaquin Valley. His interest in painting began while a teenager when he traveled to Europe and the former Soviet Union and was exposed to the Masters. He received his B.F.A. from Cal Arts, and during his studies, he interned in New York City. Guffogg works in oil on canvas, paper, watercolor, gouache, pastel, and traditional etchings on zinc plates. Guffogg’s language of light and color in the oil paintings manifested into glass, with the shapes originating from the negative spaces within his paintings, creating a visual duality of male and female, organic and architectural forms. Guffogg is an artist who looks at past and present civilizations through the lens of humanity and views time as a thread that connects all people. His work is a visual language informed by the spiritualism of abstraction and the realism of the old masters. These two ideas are usually seen as separate but Guffogg fuses them seamlessly into works that transcend and become testaments to thoughts that inform us who we are in the 21st century. Guffogg’s artwork can be found in numerous private and public collections and museums in Europe and the USA. Some notably the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, New York, Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City, The Imperial Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Russia, The Gallery at the Museum Center, Baku, Azerbaijan, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania, Frederick R. Wiseman Art Foundation, Los Angeles. |
| ANTHONY CARDELLA, Pianist |
| Anthony Cardella is a dynamic and compelling, active performer who has performed in esteemed concert halls across the United States and Europe and has won regional and national performance competitions in the United States. A Wisconsin native, Anthony moved to Los Angeles three years ago after completing his undergraduate studies at the Lawrence Conservatory of Music and has been performing, teaching, and collaborating in the Los Angeles area while pursuing further studies at the Thornton School of Music. Anthony is an award-winning performer praised for his virtuosity, exceptionally delicate touch, and colorful playing that connects with his audiences emotionally. Anthony is known for assembling programs that showcase the full extent of his technical abilities and vulnerability at the piano in tandem while actively seeking out music written by living composers to program and showcase in addition to standard Classical repertoire. |
| VICTORIA CHAPMAN, Curator |
| VC Projects was founded in 2014 by British-born Victoria Chapman, who is a Los Angeles based curator and former graduate of The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston at Tufts University. VC Projects was created out of a desire to assist artists with their studio and exhibition development as well as representation at art fairs. Chapman has spent over twenty-five years working domestically and internationally in a variety of means with art directors, curators, art consultants, artists, galleries, museums, and art institutions, assisting with administrative, curatorial, and exhibition planning. Chapman’s work experience has taken her to museums such as The Isabella Gardener Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, and Laguna Art Museum. For just over six-teen years, she also worked for Daniel Fine Art Services as an Art Director working alongside senior curators to create art collections for boutique hotels. For the past seven years and as of present, Chapman has been the Studio Director for Shane Guffogg, whom is a Los Angeles-based international artist with a long and honorable career in visual arts, augmented reality and sound experiments. Chapman is also a published writer, speaker and mentor regarding art history, and the creative process. During 2022, she was selected as Featured Curator for “Small Talks” (England). Previously, she was featured on Calls with CURA, The Garden HIERONYVISION arts community, Art Confidential Magazine and LACP’s Conversations with a Curator (Los Angeles). Another aspect to her curatorial program is VC Projects Podcast: Conversations About Art featured on Spotify where she has produced over 24 episodes, and El Nido’s Sound Cloud, where she captures 5 to 10 min sound bites on the creative process by selected artists. In addition to producing art programs Chapman has been a selected Portfolio Reviewer for Los Angeles Center of Photography from 2020 to forth-coming 2023. Lastly, Chapman is a Contributing Curator and Liaison to Casa Regis: Center for Culture and Contemporary Art, Italy and a club member of Cromwell Place, art exhibitions space, in London, England. |
ABOUT THE HOSTS
| PARASOL: GRACE HONG AND MARTIN WAVE |
| PARASOL is a creative community with the vision of raising consciousness, nurturing the creative spirit, and providing a sense of home and belonging in the physical and virtual worlds. We curate transformational events that foster human connection and bridge the business, creative, and mindfulness communities. At the heart of the organization is a conscious community of artists, entrepreneurs, and next-level thinkers dedicated to supporting other creators and creating a positive vision of the future. Grace has a multi-faceted career across business, the arts, and the non-profit spheres. She is a Senior Advisor at the private equity firm TPG Global, an artist/music producer known as Nolo Grace, and serves on the Board of Directors of two non-profits (OpenSecrets and Save the Music). Martin is an award-winning, platinum-selling music producer, composer, and artist with an expansive career spanning pop, film, TV, gaming, and major placements with brands on commercial campaigns. His music has hundreds of millions of streams, include a global #1 selling album, and collaborations with artists like Steve Aoki, ALOK, NCT DREAM, Post Malone, Kasey Musgraves, Vince Staples, Masego, Bas, and more. www.parasol.la |
| RITA HOUSE: DEENA ODELLE HYATT |
| Rita House is 9,000 square feet of vintage Hollywood charm. The space is used for co-working, events, dinner parties, writer’s tables, conferences, and as a location for film and photography. Some of clients and collaborators have included: Netflix, United Nations Women, ESPN, Notion.io, Simon Sinek, SpaceX, Warner Brothers Music, The Jim Henson Company, BBC, VICE, MedMen, Disney+, Hypebeast, I Heart Radio and more. Originally built in 1926 as a Prop Design Studio for film and television, this space also spent twenty years as a violin factory before Emmy Award Winning Costume Designer Rita Riggs purchased the building In 1967 and made it her studio where she worked closely with legends such as Alfred Hitchcock to Norman Lear. Rita predated the current interest in shared community office space by offering space for coworking and creative offices starting in the 70s. When Rita passed five years ago she passed the building onto Architects and Rita House Founding partners Scott Strumwasser and Tash Rahbar. They, along with Event & Community Director Deena Odelle Hyatt keep her creative spirit alive in this unique, multiuse space. |
SHANE GUFFOGG 