Nat Decker & Cielo Saucedo

An Artist Talk Organised by Zeina Baltagi

Monday, April 7, 2025

Cypress College Art Gallery

3:00 – 4:30 pm

In the context of an exhibition about 20th-century artist Tom Van Sant, who believed technology and humanism could save Earth's "narrow hospitality zone for life," Cypress College Art Gallery is delighted to welcome two 21st-century artists who "disrupt notions of humanism and make space for disabled mind-bodies and ecologies."

NAT DECKER (they/them) is a Chicago-born Los Angeles-based artist interpreting the intimacies of queer and disabled experience as provocation toward collective care and liberation. Working critically with technology, they identify the computer as an assistive tool affording a more accessible and capacious practice and the virtual as a space of potential which often mirrors patterns of exploitation and exclusion. Their practice fundamentally integrates accessibility as a generative medium. 

Working with computational and sculptural processes, they trace serpentine connections between the body and modes of technology, reimagining fantastical mobility devices as cultural expansion and agitation of conventional desirability politics. These non-functional devices operate as aesthetic scrutiny and frictional commentary on designations of usefulness and capitalistic innovation.

Nat was a 2024 Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow with their collective Cripping_CG, which includes Cielo Saucedo and Olivia Driesinger, a Y10 member of NEW INC, and a 2023 Processing Foundation Fellow. They are also an access worker, consulting on accessibility for various arts organizations. In June 2022, they graduated from UCLA with a degree in Design|Media Arts and Disability Studies. IG: @crip_fantasy

CIELO SAUCEDO (1993, Whittier, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She is an access worker and artist from a family of migrant farm workers. Their work encompasses writing, computer-generated imagery, sculpture, machine vision and virtual reality. They received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago in 2020, and their MFA at UCLA in 2024. They were an Eyebeam Democracy Fellow (2024). Recent exhibitions of their work include presentations at The Armory, Pasadena for Getty PST (2024), Francios Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2024), Murmurs, Los Angeles (2024), BlankSpace, Pittsburgh (2023), New Image Gallery, Los Angeles (2023), Honor Fraser, Los Angeles (2024), MexiCali Biennale, The Cheech at the Riverside Museum (2023), Human Resources, Los Angeles (2022) Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago (2021) and Rudimiento, Quito (2021). They have given panels and lectures at NYU, UPenn, the Whitney Independent Study Program, Emily Carr University, Indiana State University, and the Sandburg Instituut among other institutions.

ZEINA BALTAGI is an artist and educator, raised between California and Lebanon whose work reveals intimate transformations in relation to lived experiences with physical, emotional, economic and cultural mobility. They have exhibited their work with Eyebeam NY, Townsend Gallery, Basement Gallery, LADOT, Union Station, Los Angeles Road Concerts, PØST, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, bG gallery and Klowden Mann, among others. Zeina holds a B.A. from California State University, Northridge, and an M.F.A. degree from University California,  Davis, and teaches at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and Cypress College.