La Matadora Gallery

Casey Niccoli is an award-winning, self-taught multimedia artist, filmmaker, and creative visionary known for shaping the alternative music and art scenes of the late 1980s and early 1990s. She grew up in 1960s Bakersfield, just a few doors down from country legend Buck Owens. A shy child, she spent hours in her purple bedroom listening to Light My Fire by The Doors on repeat, crafting Mod Podge Holly Hobbie plaques and papier-mâché animals, all while nervously watching the sun, convinced it might crash into the earth at any minute. Even then, her work blended the divine with the handmade, a theme that would carry into her later artistic vision.

Niccoli made her mark as a music video director and key collaborator with Jane’s Addiction, including the iconic Been Caught Stealing video, which won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Alternative Video in 1991. Her distinctive aesthetic helped define both the band's visual identity and the broader alternative culture of the era.

Niccoli is best known for directing the cult classic Gift (1993), a semi-autobiographical feature-length film exploring love, addiction, and art. Fusing raw emotional honesty with experimental storytelling, her work blends music and film into an immersive artistic experience.

Beyond filmmaking, she has built an extensive career as a visual artist, working in collage, photography, mixed media, and installations. Her work explores themes of femininity, redemption, counterculture, individuality, and the human condition, leaving a lasting impact on the creative community. She currently resides in Joshua Tree, California.

Carlos Ramirez was born in 1967 in the Coachella Valley (California) where he is currently based. He was formerly part of the artist collaboration The Date Farmers with Armando Lerma for over a decade. The duo’s work was exhibited in museums such as Oakland Museum of California, Laguna Art Museum and Palm Springs Art Museum. The Date Farmers began working independently in 2017 and ever since Ramirez has been blazing a trail with his detail drenched, mixed media works that echo his Mexican-American heritage rooted in California pop culture. Ramirez’s paintings, collages and three-dimensional sculptures contain elements influenced by graffiti, Mexican street murals, traditional revolutionary posters, sign painting, prison art and tattoos.

With traces of ancient indigenous art, mushrooms, and mescal, Ramirez combines familiar pop iconography and corporate logos with figures from comics, folklore and Catholicism. Desert creatures such as coyotes, snakes, and scorpions appear frequently in his works as well as found materials like stamps, bottle caps, hand painted or collaged lettering. Through his unique perspective as an American-born Chicano, Ramirez explores topical subjects with a profound simplicity.