Gabe Strader-Brown

NATALIE BAXTER

Natalie Baxter (b. 1985, Kentucky) explores concepts of place-identity, nostalgic americana, and gender stereotypes through sculpture and video. Baxter’s work playfully pushes controversial issues, creating an accessible entry point for unpacking matters of tension in today’s political and social landscape. Baxter received a MFA from the University of Kentucky in 2012 and a BA in Fine Art from the University of the South in Sewanee, TN in 2007. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Press for Baxter’s work includes, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, Vogue Italia and Bomb Magazine. She currently lives and works in New York, NY.

AMANDA BROWDER

Born in Missoula, MT in 1976, Amanda Browder received an MFA/MA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York producing large-scale fabric installations for building exteriors and other public sites. She has shown nationally, and internationally including at the New Museum, Ideas City Festival and FAB Fest, New York City; The Dumbo Arts Festival, Brooklyn; University of Alabama at Birmingham AAHD, Birmingham, AL; Nuit Blanche Public Art Festival/LEITMOTIF in Toronto; Mobinale, Prague; Allegra LaViola Gallery, NYC; Nakaochiai Gallery, Tokyo; White Columns, NYC; No Longer Empty, Brooklyn. She has been published in books such as Unexpected Art: Chronicle Books and Strange Material (Arsenal Pulp Press). This year she received her first National Endowment for the Arts grant to work with the Albright Knox museum to cover 950 Broadway (the old Eckhardt Building), the Church on Richmond and West Ferry, and Clifton Hall at Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Photos and reviews have appeared in New York Times to Fibers Magazine and she is a founder of the art podcast, www.badatsports.com. The artist’s website is www.amandabrowder.com.

BEN GARTHUS

Ben Garthus (b. 1976 Stevens Point WI) Raised in rural Wisconsin, Ben Garthus recieved his BFA from the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire and his MFA from the University of Minnesota and is now a Brooklyn-based sculptor, printmaker and designer. His work has been featured at Honey Ramka, Regina Rex, The Parlour Bushwick, The Walker Art Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, Grounds for Sculpture and Queens Museum and published in Sculpture Magazine and Public Art Review.

INDUSTRY OF THE ORDINARY

Since 2003, Industry of the Ordinary collaborators Mathew Wilson and Adam Brooks have been orchestrating performance works that allow their audience access to the creative process as it unfolds. However, the ideas and intentions behind a performance do not end when it does, and the photographs that document these acts give the viewer additional opportunity to respond to and interpret the work. Typical of Industry of the Ordinary’s documentation, each piece in this portfolio consists of an image captioned by a single line of descriptive text, providing context or counterpoint while leaving room for reaction and speculation.

Adam Brooks was born in New York, and received a BA from Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1982) and an MFAfrom The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1988). Mathew Wilson was born in Reading, England, and has lived and worked in Chicago since 1991. He holds a BA from Humberside University, Hull, England (1990) and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1993). His performance piece Surrender was included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s 2004 exhibition Camera/Action. Additional Industry of the Ordinary performances and exhibitions have been held at Chicago’s Daley Plaza, the PAC /edge Performance Festival in Chicago, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and in public spaces in England and Croatia. They have received an Illinois Humanities Council grant.

CHRIS LARSON

For the past two decades, Minnesota–based artist Chris Larson has developed a multimedia practice that is rooted in sculpture and incorporates film, video, photography, drawing and sound. His work focuses on building and reproducing spaces, objects and specific architectural sites that look familiar but have been severely affected, disfigured, or transformed through relocation, replication and distortion. His most recent works examines specific architectural sites that are deeply connected to history and location.

Since receiving his MFA from Yale University in 1991, Larson has received numerous awards including the Bush Foundation Fellowship, The McKnight Foundation Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and most recently was awarded a New Work Project Grant from The Harpo Foundation. Larson's work can be found in private and museum collections including Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Walker Art Center and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

Larson has most recently had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY and his work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In 2018, Larson’s work was included in the 11th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil and a solo 10-year survey exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, OH. He is an Associate Professor of Art and the Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Minnesota. Larson is also the publisher of Inreview, a quarterly print publication presenting critical responses to art in the Twin Cities.

LIEVEN MEYER

Lieven Meyer lives, travels, and works between Quebec and Germany, where he participated in several shows. The experience of growing up in the 1980s in former East Berlin had a decisive impact on his practice and the nature of its content, initiating a critical and analytical approach that extends from traditional sculpture to video animations and processual sculpture-based performances. As part of an ongoing artistic investigation, Meyer develops visual solutions capable of exposing, subverting and ultimately neutralizing the contemporary expressions of new and subtle structures of control and power in their diverse public forms and manifestations. With training in academic drawing and painting (2000 - 2002, J. Schultz-Liebisch, Berlin), followed by a period of autodidactic practice in the North of Germany, he then enrolled in the sculpture department of the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel (2009 - 2013, Bildhauereiklasse Wagner, Kiel). After obtaining the BFA, he completed an MFA in visual arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2013 - 2016, with David Tomas).

KRISTOF WICKMAN

Kristof Wickman was born in Madison, Wisconsin and currently lives and works in Queens and upstate NY. He holds a BFA from UW Madison and an MFA from Hunter College. He has shown work at Cave, Detroit, Novella Gallery, NYC, Coustof Waxman, NYC, Klemens Gasser & Tanya Grunert, inc, NYC, Rare gallery and the Brooklyn Museum. Recent curatorial ventures include, Condensed Matter Community in Stoughton, WI and CISCO SYSCO SISQÓ in Rockaway beach, Queens. He has been the recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, the Macdowell Colony and the Shandaken Project.

JOSH ALMOND

Joshua Almond works primarily in wood to create abstract sculptural landscapes. Drawing from a variety of sources for inspiration, his work is intentionally ambiguous with forms that are, at once, familiar and exotic. By referencing geological and biological structures, he is able to create a new visual topography that entices the viewer both visually and tactually.

These surreal landscapes range from austere to intricate and create even more tension for the viewer because of the medium chosen. The warm organic feeling from the wood seems to be lost in the otherworldly topography that rises from it.

Almond, who currently on staff at Rollins College in the Art and Art History Department, began his art career studying Furniture Design at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He continued his studies at Arizona State University receiving his master of Fine Arts degree in Wood.

KIMBERLY BENSON

Kimberly Benson describes her style of Dutch still life painting as a form of “chaos management.” Her works come alive with noticeable texture, vibrant color, and meaningful abstraction. In her own words, Benson states that she desires to create paintings that are visually overwhelming; that play with viewer’s understanding of space, form, and illusion. The exhibit “Rite of Spring” showcases paintings that are not only physically immense, but also tackle immense subjects such as mortality and trauma- some of the major concepts behind the genre of Dutch still life painting. Kimberly Benson (Minneapolis, MN) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, MN. Benson went on to University of Wisconsin-Madison to fulfill her Masters of Fine Arts. She graduated in 2015 and has since been participated in a myriad of solo and group shows, exhibiting her knowledge, talent, and love for this specific genre of painting.

MAYA BRODSKY

Originally from Minsk, Belarus, Maya Brodsky studied here in the U.S. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the New York Academy of Art. Her paintings focus on interiors and figures. At times they seem direct portrayals of everyday scenes, at other times they can be somewhat haunting, as if something is slightly amiss, but you can’t quite identify what.

Her compositions are rich with detail, but I never feel as though detail for its own sake — or an approach to hyperrealism — is the point; rather I come away with the thought that Brodsky is speaking to us with the visual texture of her subjects, using it to slow down our scan of the painting and draw us into the subtle emotional responses her work can evoke.

HANNA DOREEN BROWN

Colorado artist working with the smaller things.

SUZANNE TORRES

Suzanne Torres (b.1982, New Jersey) received her MA, MFA with a concentration in sculpture and ceramics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015 and was a Post-Baccalaureate student in sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute. She participated in additional studies at the Studio Arts Center International in Florence, Italy and the Metáfora International Workshop in Barcelona, Spain as a yearlong resident. Torres attended the Vermont Studio Center on a full fellowship and participated in the Open Studio Residency at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Most recently she was a Center Program participant at the Hyde Park Art Center. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally.

RACHEL BEACH

Rachel Beach was born in London, Canada and lives in Brooklyn, NY.  She received an MFA from Yale University in 2001 and BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1998. 

Her work has been recognized with several honors including an American Academy Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, a Pollock-Krasner grant, a Canada Council grant and residencies at Yaddo, Sharpe-Walentas, LMCC Process Space, the Lower East Side Printshop and Socrates Sculpture Park.

Her work has been widely presented at venues including the Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans, LA; The Philbrook Museum, Tulsa, OK; Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ; The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax NS; New Hampshire Institute of Art, NH; PlugIn Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg MA; Lennon Weinberg, NYC; Thierry Goldberg Gallery NYC; Jane Lombard, NYC, LMAK gallery, NYC and Postmasters, NYC.

Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, ArtCritical,  NYArts, Sculpture Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail among other publications.

ARIEL BRICE

I make objects to explore the gaps between what I see and what I perceive.  I am obsessed with the difference between the way that we look at things and the way that we handle, touch, and access things.  As my artwork is produced and consumed by my consistently faulty human eye, the contentious relationship between optical and physical experience remains central to my studio inquiry.  These frictions echo the slippage that occurs between the ideal and the actual states of being in which we live. 

Each of my pieces is designed to locate its audience in a specific manner that questions the historical functions of artworks and the preconceptions of everyday objects and spaces. 

I enjoy the challenge of balancing material tendencies and in-depth investigations with widely varying my roles in the production of artworks–from maker and designer to manager, director and sculptor.  To diversify my approaches to form making, I question my inclinations towards the hand and explore computational means of producing objects or translating images into objects. 

Although the assertion that art objects stop being art objects as soon as they become functional has loosened, an age-old stipulation persists: Art poses specific questions about cultural phenomena and, by contrast, utility and performance remains the mantle of design.  Function and process are the preoccupations of craft.  However, every art object functions in a very specific way and every crafted design object has a distinct visual appeal. My studio work evolves in the territory between strategy, incidence, execution and afterthought .

Lee Delegard’s sculptures and installations playfully combine domestic materials culled from her everyday life, (Coconut Water boxes, Keds, mugs, found metal pipes, hair extensions), with abstracted papier-mâché and ceramic forms. Her works utilize elements inherent to the medium of sculpture, i.e. mass, volume, scale and balance, to create a sense of instability and unease. In this way, Delegard explores precarious relationships between juxtaposed materials, viewing them as analogous to the unsustainable connections between identity, consumer goods, and the limitations of art as a language itself.

Lee Delegard received her MFA from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 2012 and her B.A from Beloit College. She has been awarded residencies at Ox-Bow, The Summer Academy through the American Austrian Foundation, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and AS220.

ERIC FORD

Eric Ford attends the University of Akron’s Myers School of Art as an undergraduate student studying sculpture. Before this, he attended Boardman High School, from which he graduated in 2011. He found interest in not only the act of art making, but the teaching of it as well; this led to the declaration of an art education degree. This changed however, when he took the foundation three-dimensional design course that is required for all art majors; thus triggering a shift to majoring in sculpture. Currently with one semester left in his degree, he focuses mainly on installation art and sculpture that deals of installations intended to form a spatial relationship between an engaged viewer and the habitable space around them. His work does not only exist for the eyes, but also the body. He currently works as the sculpture shop assistant where he maintains machines and tools, and aids those who use the equipment. Last year he received the first prize scholarship at the underclassman level in the Myers School of Art Studio Scholarship Competition. To date, he has been involved in a few shows including “Divergent Dimensions” in 2013, the 78th and 79th Annual Juried Student Exhibition at the Myers School of Art in 2014 and 2015, The Myers School of Art Studio Art Competition in 2014 and 2015, and the “Black and White” show in December 2014 at Summit Art Space in Akron, Ohio. He has also been recognized for multiple scholarships such as the Gillette Scholarship which honors a student at the top of the senior class, and the Folk Charitable Foundation Venice Biennale International Travel and Study of Art Scholarship.

BRIANNA GLUZSAK

Brianna Gluszak is a sculptor working primarily in the medium of glass. Her work utilizes the act of observation, relationships, and formal investigations. Gluszak focuses on the creation of objects, to escape from the mundanity of everyday life.

Miss Gluszak received a Bachelors in Fine Art with distinction in glass from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2016. She has studied and worked at Pilchuck Glass School in the state of Washington, The Corning Museum of Glass, in Corning, NY and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma Washington. She has travelled internationally to participate in residencies at the Royal Danish Academy of Architecture, Design and Conservation in Nexø, Denmark, as well as at Northland’s Creative Glass in Lybster, Scotland. Gluszak is currently enrolled in the Masters in Fine Art’s program at The Ohio State University in Columbus OH.

BRIAN KLUGE

Brian Kluge is a sculptor in the Madison, Wisconsin area. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in art education from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Kluge also served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in sub-Saharan Africa. This influential experience contributed a great deal to the unique aesthetic sensibility in his work. Kluge has taught ceramics as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln and Doane College. He was featured as a 2012 emerging talent in Ceramics Monthly and recently completed residencies at the LUX Center for the Arts and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. He is currently acting in the capacity of regional liaison for NCECA planning and related projects in the Madison area in preparation for the 2014 Conference. Kluge continues to show work nationally, most recently in a two-person exhibition at Santa Fe Clay, a solo exhibition at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, as well as numerous juried and invitational exhibitions including the Las Cruces Museum of Art, Pottery Northwest, Texas A&M International University, and the University of Tulsa.

ALICE RONCHI

Alice Ronchi’s sculptural works are minimal yet whimsical, reflecting the artist’s curiosity and fascination with the built environment. In addition to making physical forms, Ronchi also takes photographs, most notably, images of objects and architecture in urban settings that resemble flowers and plants. Much of her work, though inanimate and rigid, becomes anthropomorphic, or at least life-like. Employing materials that are often used in the construction industry, Ronchi explores the relationship between nature and the built environment. 

Born in Italy, Ranchi received her MA from Amsterdam’s Sandberg Instituut in 2015. She’s held solo or two-person exhibitions at Galerie Fons Welter in Amsterdam, and DRY Space, Francesca Minini, and Gasconade Space in Milan. Her work has also been exhibited in Venice, Rome, Zurich, and Marseille.

BEN SKIBA

The intention of my current work is to create objects that support another object’s instabilities. Through paint, tape, cardboard, wood, and other materials I build supporting relationships for ceramic vessels. Bound quite often by tape, these sculptures shift delicately between one object holding the other, and a mutual embrace.

I was born and raised in a small Northern Wisconsin town bordering Minnesota. Intending to leave college with a degree in the sciences, I ended up spending countless nights sleeping on studio floors and receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Upon graduation I moved to Portland, OR to pursue the yearlong Emerging Artist Mentorship Program at Ash Street Project. Since completing the program I spend my time assisting around the studio at Ash Street Project, working with other artists, creating work and showing regularly.

JOHN SHEA

John graduated with a BFA from the School for American Crafts at RIT in Rochester, NY in 2011. From there he traveled Montevallo, AL to be a resident artist at the University of Montevallo. Afterward he moved to Portland, OR working for Bullseye Glass and Mudshark Studios.  He moved to Madison, WI to attend graduate school at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and recently graduated with an MFA. He is currently living and working in Baltimore, MD.

VIVIAN BEER

Growing up in rural Maine, the development of hand skills and the making of objects was a part of Vivian Beer’s everyday life. This understanding of design as a hands-on process has influenced the format of both process and product throughout her career. Vivian tiptoes through contemporary design, craft and sculptural aesthetics, sampling from each one. She deftly counterbalances a strong knowledge of contemporary furniture design with the history of industry and architecture to create furniture that intends to transform our expectations of and relationships to the domestic landscape. She holds a BFA from the Maine College of Art (2000) and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2004) and just completed a three-year residency at the Penland School of Craft. She lives and works in Manchester NH, teaches and exhibits nationally and internationally.

PATRICK CUFFE

Cuffe combines his attraction to light with superior construction skills. In a departure from former work with neon, he constructed an 8′ l x 12′ w x 7′ h room in the Sculpture Space studio, in which he hung a giant water sprinkler meticulously crafted from maple, oak and steel. The room becomes the upper corner of a ceiling where, through the irony of extreme proportion, an ordinary eyesore, a sprinkler head, has been transformed into a decorative statement.

Cuffe has a MFA program from Albany University and a BFA in Sculpture from The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY and has participated in the traveling Light Exhibitions organized by Pratt at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. He has worked with Habitat for Humanity in Utica, NY.

LARS FISK

Though born in Lebanon, NH, in 1970, Fisk attributes much of his success to his experience of living and working in Burlington, VT. He received a BA from the University of Vermont (UVM) in 1993 and a MFA from Columbia University in 2005. After graduating from UVM, Fisk became the first art director of Seven Days, an independent weekly publication from Vermont that covers everything from politics to art to food. Around the same time, he became involved with Phish, an American rock band founded at the University of Vermont in 1983. Through this, he experimented with performance art and set design, which fostered his interest in installation art. In 2002, Fisk was awarded the third annual Rappaport Prize, an award administered by deCordova to an artist in recognition of his or her significant achievement and creative potential. His work has been featured at museums and sculpture parks across New England and New York, including Socrates Sculpture Park, and MoMA PS1. Most recently, he held a solo exhibition at the Marlborough Chelsea gallery in New York City titled “Mr. Softee” (2016), which featured twelve balls intended to represent an entire street as a contained sculptural object. Today, Fisk lives in Brooklyn where he calls four storage containers, stacked two by two, home.

ERICA HESS

Erica Hess lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin. She received her M.F.A at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where she focused on printmaking, textiles, and sculpture. She is a co-founder of the collective printmaking space, Polka Press.

Hess uses metal, wood, cloth, concrete and paper to build objects that abstractly address impermanence and the body. Her work develops from a process-based relationship to materials and a sense of scale in proportion to the viewer’s body. She is interested in the stories objects can tell and how these things can orient us in time and space. How do we reconcile our bodies as objects with the life of objects and forms that surround us? She is frequently grappling with the ongoing deterioration of our bodies while continuing to create art objects. 

CHRISTINE LEE

Christine Lee has an interdisciplinary practice straddling art, design, science and sustainability. She has traveled to numerous residencies and is involved in collaborations with artists and scientists. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as SOFA Chicago, the Traver Gallery in Seattle, San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC, the Bellevue Arts Museum, the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston, the Society of Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, the Aspen Art Museum, the Racine Art Museum, and the ASU Art Museum. Lee received her M.F.A. from San Diego State University and her B.S.A from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Currently she is a Senior Sustainability Scholar of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and Assistant Professor in Wood/Sustainability in the School of Art, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, at Arizona State University.

LUCAS MARTINEZ GRAULLERA

My work results from the impulse to translate my perception of my environment into something tangible. The perceptive analysis allows me to structure the information and develop my process. This creative exercise gives rise to two fundamental consequences: a reflexive dialogue with the work, and the act of observing myself creating.

As a result, the physical appearance of the piece is reshaped through this process.

These two underlying experiences of making – the reflexive and the responsive experiences – serve , as the philosopher François Jullien wrote, “to return to what our thinking regards as something evident and which, rediscovered from that outside, is perceived again as something surprising.

ELIZABETH THORP

Deception is the only essential skill of the artist: a manipulation achieved by selectively revealing and concealing. Drywall hides pipes, ducting, and wiring which do essential work for us. Wood, paint, and a well placed vent conceal consumer electronics that perform for us daily but are seldom considered for their sound and breath. My work questions our relationship to the unseen side of built environments by exposing the invisible, whether simply out of view or too common to notice.  Wood poses as plastic, plastic as paper, cardboard as clay. 

Our engagement with objects puts us in touch with materials; materials provide both accurate and misleading evidence as to the story of things. My work is full of impersonators, objects performing as others. Hand painted wood mimics a manufactured device. Plastic bearings play at being furniture. These pieces are amalgamations: old, new, found, fabricated, discovered, lost, abandoned, rescued, irrelevant, essential. The work asks how we use, recognize, connect, and become attached to things. 

I hold an MFA from the University of Wisconsin Madison and a BFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design. I have worked as both an educator and studio manager at several universities and arts organizations. 

CELESTE WILSON

Celeste Wilson received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2010 and is currently pursuing her MFA at Brooklyn College. Wilson’s work uses a range of materials but is always centered on themes of materiality and deconstruction and an interest in making and manufacturing. Much of Wilson’s work is process-based and involves using traditional techniques with modern materials. She has received many awards including fellowships at the Creative Glass Center of America at Wheaton Arts (2013) and the Vermont Studio Center (2017), and Urban Glass (2017). Wilson currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

JORDAN ADAMS

Jordan Adams constructs paintings that explore themes related to existentialism and the psychology of personality. Recent imagery has focused on imagined ruin-architecture within a fragmented landscape. Jordan received a BFA in painting and drawing from the Milwaukee Institute of Art of Design before receiving an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the New York Studio Residency Program. Jordan currently teaches Introduction to Painting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

CHRISTINE MILLS

Christine Mills was born and brought up in Wales UK, she lives on a hill farm  in Rural Wales. The land where she lives has inspired her creative work as a multi media artist. She works with a wide range of  natural materials that both celebrate, demonstrate and communicate our concerns. They range from cows gut, sheep’s fleece floor drawings, casts in wool, to film, sound and found objects. For Mills, media is dictated by the ideas, chosen scale, considered locations, and relationship between work and viewer. More often than not, her practice is shaped by a narrative and driven by an investigation into where she is mentally and physically at this moment of time in life, with the chosen subject matter being the vehicle for her questions. Currently she is investigating musical string instruments a project called ‘tinkering with strings’ experimenting with new materials and techniques.

EAMON O’KANE

Irish born artist Eamon O’Kane currently lives and works in Bristol. Memories, travel and the large-scale panoramas of the 19th century are recurrent themes in O’Kanes work. In 2002 O’Kane began working on a project called Ani-Mates, the project is based around a group of fictional art assistants and has resulted in animations and large-scale installations. O’Kane’s current work has developed into an exploration of the ‘ideal studio space.’ His recent paintings consist of views of architectural interventions where the man-made meets with nature. These works further draw out O’Kane’s conceptual concerns about art and architecture and reflect a growing maturity in his work.

GABRIELLE ROTH

Gabrielle Roth is an interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, California working in Austin,TX.  She received a MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2015 and a BFA in Sculpture from California State University at Long Beach in 2011. She has been an artist in residence and education fellow at the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY  and Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Co, and  has exhibited her work in Los Angeles, Oakland and Long Beach, Ca; Iowa City, Ia; Florence, Italy;  New Brunswick, NJ; Dallas, TX; and Brooklyn and Wassaic, NY.

ROBERT AIOSA

Neighborhood identities are evolving as buildings become renovated and repurposed for new activities and cater to an influx of different class demographics. My work is inspired by this transitional state of limbo filled with uncertainty, excitement, and trepidation. By abstracting the built environment and mixing vernacular, high style and urban planning, with historical and iconic forms, I aspire to showcase the importance of diversity in our environments. I create these structures with off the shelf building materials such as Oriented Strand Board, Plywood, Pine 2x4s in techniques that are common to the construction industry, as a stand in for the common man, DIY aesthetic and pride in labor, all attributes found in our changing environments.

CINDY CHENG

Cindy Cheng is an artist living in Baltimore, Md. Cindy lived a somewhat nomadic childhood, spending time in Hong Kong, Canada, Hawaii and Paris. Because of this, she spent much of her playtime tinkering with found objects and materials "re-appropriated" from her twin brother. This sort of puzzle building still in influences much of her studio work. Rooted in the practice of drawing, she explores the relationship between drawings and objects through installation and complex constructions. Cheng likes thinking about how both natural and built structures may act as an incubator for narrative, memory and reflections on the physical and abstract self. She completed her undergraduate studies at Mount Holyoke College in 2003. In 2008 she received a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from MICA, and in 2011, she graduated with an M.F.A. from the College's Mount Royal School of Art.

JEZABETH ROCA GONZALEZ

Jezabeth is a multidisciplinary maker who uses Video, Performance, Photography, Land, and Live Plants through Installation. Highly influenced by their hometown of Añasco Puerto Rico known as "La cuna de la Puertorriqueñidad" (the birth of puertoricaness) and the town "Donde murieron los Dioses" (where the gods died) Jezabeth focuses on re-examinations of Puerto Rico's ongoing colonial status with the United States through family, personal migration and attachment to Añasco.
The works pair the multiplicity of lands and the dualities of daily living through a migratory perspective.

DAVID HARPER

Harpers work employs both traditional and non traditional materials such as embroidery, ceramic, and casting materials such as salt and charcoal in a cross disciplinary manner to create objects installations that grapple with notions of loss, love, feelings of belonging and how we use objects to inform our notions of self.

JOSH JOHNSON

As I go about my daily routines, I have encounters that give me pause. Particular objects, their placement, the spaces they occupy, and my body's relationship to these signifiers create an intersection of a remembered place and my current context. A connection is made between two environments, one at hand and the other remembered. I tap into this brief merger of my present location and a memory, identifying objects as personal landmarks and a catalyst for construction.

I respond to materiality and draw upon my history of making to relate ideas. A snow shovel sliding around in the back of my car and stacks of polystyrene from past projects, the butting-together of commonplace subjects and familiar studio materials produce unexpected tensions. I carve, construct, and join low, often rummaged materials and portions of past works into lonely vistas alluding to the slippages associated with memory’s shaky hold on place. The resulting sculptures are a build-up of references aimed at softening the margins that separate perceptions and moments, inhabiting a landscape between ‘here’ and ‘there.’

MARIAH TATE KLEMONS

A question that I focus on in my work is how to capture the space between the life of mundane, utilitarian things, that mostly go unnoticed, and the waves of emotion that they can trigger when we occasionally see them for what they are: emblems of time and place and memory and love.   

My works often represent domestic items that are mostly kept hidden away, but are essential for the home to function. By hand crafting and re-making these mundane items; toilet paper, a litter box, sinks, toilets, mops, I invest them with a sort of sympathetic magic, that transforms them from their bluntly practical function into devotional objects that serve as repositories of poignant recall and emotional moments in my personal history.   

The hand-carved toilet, fabricated from a 200 pound block of cast soap, becomes a romantic monument to the shared intimacy that a couple can have within the privacy of daily bathroom rituals.  The toilet represents a sort of tool for eliminating what is unwanted, but its use requires a moment of physical vulnerability that has real potential for connection and honesty. When we are at our most vulnerable, we rely on the trust we have built with those we love to support us and watch over us.  I find a sort of romance and innate intimacy in the forms associated with those moments. My obvious touch in the construction of a soap toilet shifts the character of the toilet from sterile to emotional. Toilets serve as a sort of echo of the moments in which someone is simultaneously the most physically indisposed as well as the most emotionally vulnerable. By laboring over the containers of this abject experience, I labor over the moments in which we are all most exposed, and potentially the moment in which we are most able to be found and loved completely.

My works almost always demonstrates a quality of human touch, or a subtle descriptive failure that suggests bodily mediation and psychological nuance.  The objects have a slightly animated quality that hints at an inner life, or a sort of emotional possession moving them beyond the banal or purely functional.  In turn, my objects ask viewers to look around with a sharply critical eye, but also with an open heart.

ANNA MLASOWSKY

My creative interest is tied to the place I was born in, the changing culture I grew up in and the foreign society I live in now.

I was born in a country that no longer exists. Growing up in East Germany I experienced the collapse of a value system and the struggle of its citizens to adapt. I grew up in a country that, although reunited, still has an invisible border. I grew up in a country where I was taught to be ashamed of my heritage. I grew up in an uncertain world full of the resentment of a generation of parents that were told that their society was wrong. I grew up in houses that were falling apart, with no bathrooms, no heating and bomb craters. As soon as I finished High School, I left the country and have lived abroad ever since. 

I have been a foreigner all my adult life, not only geographically and culturally, but also emotionally and bodily as a pan-sexual woman with Borderline Personality Disorder. This is the basis for my interest in the temporary, the in-between, and materials that occupy a pluralistic space. Glass is an embodiment of pluralistic identity and holds a central place in my practice. It does not crystallize when it solidifies, forever occupying a state of uncertainty. It can be solid, fluid, transparent, unyieldingly hard, and precariously fragile. With its physical extremes, it functions as an extension of my own conflicted self, stuck between cultures, languages and the emotional extremes of my mental condition.

ANNE CLARE ROGERS

I create paintings, often using traditional rug-making and embroidery techniques, to explore both a formal and content-driven relationship with contemporary abstraction; I am predominantly drawn to color, shape, line, and (more recently) texture. These are valuable subjects to examine individually, but they constitute the vernacular I use to investigate the content of my work as a whole. 


Ideas of both seen and unseen logic inherent within systems are my primary focus. I am interested in systems of process, perception, documentation, and interaction. Grappling with these systems (whether literal or metaphorical) provides an opportunity to contemplate the absurd complexities that govern the outcome of personal experiences. 

More specifically I am currently focused on developing abstraction that is derived from, and related to, mechanical components and piping constructs. The tubes, connectors, conduits, fluids, and mechanisms referenced in the work appear to be part of an almost infinite system or series of systems waiting to be revealed through diligent exploration.

CHRISTOPHER ROWLEY

I create paintings, often using traditional rug-making and embroidery techniques, to explore both a formal and content-driven relationship with contemporary abstraction; I am predominantly drawn to color, shape, line, and (more recently) texture. These are valuable subjects to examine individually, but they constitute the vernacular I use to investigate the content of my work as a whole. 


Ideas of both seen and unseen logic inherent within systems are my primary focus. I am interested in systems of process, perception, documentation, and interaction. Grappling with these systems (whether literal or metaphorical) provides an opportunity to contemplate the absurd complexities that govern the outcome of personal experiences. 

More specifically I am currently focused on developing abstraction that is derived from, and related to, mechanical components and piping constructs. The tubes, connectors, conduits, fluids, and mechanisms referenced in the work appear to be part of an almost infinite system or series of systems waiting to be revealed through diligent exploration.

PATRICE RENEE WASHINGTON

Patrice Renee Washington’s work exists somewhere within the space of thwarted potential and clumsy optimism.  Often using humor and the sometimes uncomfortable convergence of materials, she pieces together new mythologies reinterpreting the domestic and historic.  Her objects often find themselves in peculiar relationships with one another, pushing the boundaries of usefulness, functionality and irreverence.