Artists
Victoria + A.P.
Victoria Mara Heilweil received her Master of Fine Arts in Photography from California College of the Arts in 1995. She has been exhibited throughout the Bay Area, New York City, Los Angeles and Seattle, including recent exhibitions at the Studio Gallery and The Lab in San Francisco. In addition to her exhibition history, Victoria has also been a photographic educator for the past 10 years. She is an Adjunct Photography Instructor at City College of San Francisco and Solano Community College, and has lectured at UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts and Art Center College of Design. Originally from New York City, Victoria has been a curator and co-owner of Points of Departure, a cooperative art gallery in New York’s East Village. Her work can currently be seen at the BC Gallery in Laguna Beach, CA and locally at the RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco, CA.
A. P. Saito recently immersed himself in theater, masks, and mysticism in Perú, where he served as a writer-in-residence for world-celebrated theater company El Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, as well as the theater group Kusiwasi, in the Sacred Valley of the Inca. He has studied writing with June Jordan, Cherríe Moraga, Octavio Solís, Alfred Arteaga, Jeannie Barroga, Joan Holden, Arthur Kopit, and Dijana Milosevic of Serbia’s DAH Theatre. He has served as playwright-in-residence with the Asian American Theater Company’s New Works Incubator, and a playwriting intern with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. His work has been featured at the Magic Theater, SOMArts, Kearney Street Workshop, Bindlestiff Studio, Galería de la Raza, La Peña Cultural Center, and the Million Fishes Collective. In 2003, he taught theater and poetry to Mayan youth in Ixcán, Guatemala through the ArtCorps program, and previously studied Zapotec poetry in Oaxaca, Mexico. He teaches creative writing with WritersCorps and Performing Arts Workshop.
On their pairing:
Victoria and A.P. are the kind of people you’d want to invite to a cosmopolitan, witty dinner party. Victoria’s photography is subtly, yet powerfully intimate: a hand holding an actual bleeding heart, the cost of love illustrated by a heart on a scale, a series of the impressions on a bed once a lover leaves. A.P.’s poetry is tinged with feelings that it has somehow managed to scorch you without your knowledge. He writes of making love to a girl he had not spoken to in a year, on the day his mother passes away, of a mother’s day card adorned with a kitten in a yellow bow mailed too late. These two artists create the type of artwork that feels like the repeated caress of fingernails on your skin, a pleasurable sensation that leaves you marked.