I am interested in making art that facilitates conversations around freedom, autonomy, futility, and suffering. Growing up in Las Vegas and attending Catholic school, my influences surrounding womanhood were polarizing. Whether it was in Church or on a billboard, representations of women were an overwhelming object of my environment. By appropriating Christian iconography and combining it with the hyper-sexual aesthetics of Las Vegas, I paint images that reflect and further complicate ideologies related to the body, social conditioning, and self-realization. Under the established patriarchy, navigating the boundaries between objectification and subjectivity can be muddy and confusing. I want to expand this conflict between who we are and who we are conditioned to be, and shamelessly transcend these binaries. My position on this has been informed by the writings of feminist philosophers and research about the way art history has dictated representations gender, sexuality, and the intersections between them. It feels empowering to recontextualize iconic representations of women by articulating the performativity of womanhood. I choose to stylize my portraits and figures to play with objectification and the elusiveness of idealized beauty. I combine non-natural color palettes that demand attention, with traditional Baroque techniques, such as diagonal compositions and chiaroscuro, to push and pull sensations of familiarity, history and modernity, and to examine how the objectification of women has pervaded art history and continues today. I want my art to question how we exist in spaces that aren’t designed for us, and to consider the dynamics between agency and environment.

kaitlynwallaceart.com /// @kaitlynxwallace

 

My current work considers the use of flowers as a symbol of femininity in popular culture. My approach to making art has varied from color digital photography, black and white analog image making, and more recently, I have introduced the process of book making into my practice as well. My thesis project, Subsumption, is a cumulation of my study of this theme. In the gallery presentation, this project will include 11×14″ framed prints along with an 8×10″ handbound book. For the online exhibition the project will include images of my book, Subsumé.

Subsumption, meaning to include or absorb (something) in something else, looks at the traditional comparison of women with flowers. Flowers are traditionally seen as decorative, beautiful, and fragile aligned with traditional notions of the female. However, when looked beyond the cultural symbol, flowers are strong and resilient. It is a generalization to assume that this is what femininity means to all women, therefore, a crucial part of my work is translating these ideas through my own personal experience and identity. To me, the comparison of women to flowers fits closely with how I identify to be feminine. For this work, I photographed myself in my domestic space with flowers serving as a trope to further emphasize it is my personal experience and not that of all female-identifying persons.

A key factor in my practice is to depict these performative gestures through the female gaze, as opposed to the more familiar male gaze. While the male gaze seeks to devour, control, and objectify women, the female gaze is thought to represent their own gender with openness, respect, and no strict boundaries. This is not about me performing my feminine identity for the male gaze but for my own pleasure.

bailythompson.com /// @bailythompson

 

 

 

 

 

My jewelry-making practice is heavily influenced by my own identity and experiences as a queer transgender person. Queer bodies exist as political and social battlegrounds and sites of public contention. My own queer body is a site of great personal discomfort. I must always be conscious of my body and its presentation in heteronormative spaces. Through my work I want to explore the discourses surrounding the physical presentation of queer identity, and the passage of time in relation to the queer body.

Nature is always in a constant cycle of change, growth and decay. I use natural materials such as wax, wood, and honeycomb to reflect delicateness and impermanence of form. The imagery of flowers, bees, and the human body signify aspects of queerness and queer community. I use the language and techniques of craft to portray the crafting of queer identity, and the eclectic methods of queer community building. Craft is often thought to be in a category separate from art. Craft is full of contradictions of itself, and works as an agent of disruption- disrupting the current norm of consumerism, disrupting the polished aesthetics of fine art, disrupting the monotony of conformity. To me, this disruption and alternate focus makes craft an inherently queer medium- both queerness and craft contain a perception of “otherness”. In my work I use semi transparent fabrics and embroidery to obscure and abstract, as well as to define and accentuate.

Through these natural materials, delicate forms, and the transformative processes of craft, I look to embody the softness of daydreams and the beauty of the individual and collective queer body.

@noelstrohm ///  p.n.strohm@gmail.com 

 

 

 

 

I’m compelled by the internalization of American mythology, how perpetuated stories and images become a part of our personal mythologies. I tend to concentrate on the post WWII period because this is when the facade-like nature of American culture began to proliferate with extravagance (television, mass consumerism/marketing, Disneyland etc). Soon this layered simulacra was imperceptible, the boundaries blurred between the real and the imagined. This illusion of the everyday allowed for the gap between idealization and reality to flourish.

The counterculture of the 1960s clearly illustrates this gap between idealistic optimism and actuality; An abrupt upheaval questioned traditional social values and on a deeper level, capitalism and the grander facade that it upheld. This questioning involved a lot of postmodernist thinking (within academia as well as popular culture) and created an opening for magical thinking. This general acceptance of magical thinking had an impactful effect on religion, it also allowed room to believe in things like satanic panic, aliens, spontaneous healing, and the paranormal. Perhaps most notably, it permitted pseudoscience to enter into the mainstream. We may not be able to define universal Truths, but we can recognize universal human traits; I am trying to understand which universal traits are more prominent within American culture and why we have a deep desire to elevate ourselves out of the everyday.

I’m using realism to create a surrealistic effect, mimicking the indiscernible line between the real and the unreal. Additionally, the illusory quality of realism lends itself to our yearning to believe in the mystical. I use various aesthetic elements from mid century American culture that may portray an initial sense of nostalgia, but my intention is to manifest something haunting (rather than saccharin) — a visual echoing of the reverberating social shifts that occurred during the 20th century.

madisonskriverart.com  /// @beautifuluniverse 

 

 

 

 

Through large scale forms and installation practices, my work conflates and compares systems of building and systems of the body. Both rely on order to achieve and maintain a high level of function but become vulnerable when this order is interrupted. I examine where this event might occur, looking at the mechanisms both within the body and building. I consider the unseen and overlooked elements, the assumed operations. Pipes hidden behind walls, bringing water to a faucet; the “pipes” through which blood flows, carrying oxygen to our tissue. Operations that occur with little conscious control but contribute to the systems viability. I’m interested in the instability of these interconnected systems, the potential for cascading failure, forcing a conscious response. Often this becomes a point of departure in the work. I look for a push and pull between order and disarray, an attempt to control as form becomes less contained, ultimately becoming more precarious and unstable.

My materials are mainly those used in construction, both the mechanisms that allow for a structure to be built, the tools at hand, and components that hold it together—wood, spackle, sheetrock, glue. The materials can offer line and rigidity but also flexion and fluidity, similar to the body with bone, tendons, and secretions. My forms are driven by merging these qualities, offering elements of order and unpredictability.

Clumps of spackle, overflowing foam, and haphazard supports are remnants of superficial solutions to an issue that run deeper within a system. For example, a broken pipe leaking water cannot be remedied by simply painting over the discoloration where water has begun to penetrate the wall. By covering and concealing I avoid the root of the problem, I place a bandage on the surface, disregarding the potential damage as the issue grows and festers.

@megan_shull

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you turn the corner in my memory palace, you’ll find the Portrait Room, just a few steps beyond the Closet. Here are icons of a metamorphosis that I’ve quietly undertaken, living out their afterlives. Inside and outside my life in photographs, I’m in the process of becoming someone formerly-known-as. In the studio, I cloaked my obstinate, shifting body in histories of saran wrap and shiny brocade to keep it from distracting me from longer-term concerns. I can’t say these pictures solve my problem with gender dysphoria, or my yearning to be Out, so much as they enact and memorialize it in archival prints and gilded frames. The walls and tapestries might whisper secrets to you: “hot-glue tears aren’t really a metaphor,” they say. So too, might the accessory-laden pictured noble dead: “my false lashes are terribly uncomfortable,” “these boxers are plucked from a forgotten poem in some public bathroom,” “this packing tape is not just for show…” I pray you [[don’t]] take their grievances to heart!

allisonschukis.com /// hyacinthschukis.com /// @discoursamoreux 

 

 

 

 

In my work I seek to capture the interconnected nature of the world that we all exist in. The human society we live in hinges on connection – between individuals, social structures, government regulations, academic disciplines, and beyond – through which many things are inherently linked to other things. I seek to tease out the sometimes invisible, other times conspicuous, web of ties that hold up the world where we live.

My recent work has taken particular interest in the intersections of the body with materiality, production, concept and installation. I am concerned with exploring the ways in which work is embedded within the body and simultaneously becomes external to it. Likewise, I am interested in the way that viewers experience work that is both of and about the body.

I’ve worked recently with porcelain slip and twine – both fired and unfired – to fully engage my own body in concept and production. To create The Body is a Conduit, I dipped twine in porcelain slip in a process which engaged my body directly with material. Immersing the twine in slip became a physical experience in which the thick, liquid clay became an extension of my own physicality, encasing my hands as well as the twine. Long nearly five-foot strands of twine emerged from the process heavy with slip to become an external conduit of my body, from and through which the concept of the piece flows.

Once fired and installed, these external conduits construct a body within the installation space into which viewers can step. The ceramic conduits move throughout, in and out of the space and engage its corners, lines and features. In the materiality, production, concept and installation of the piece, the conduit of the body is both internal and external. Ideas and work flow in and out, sometimes existing simultaneously internally and externally of the body – connecting it to the world of things, ideas and people around it.

jordanpickrel.com

 

 

 

 

 

“It’s 5am and I’m sitting on the porch, wind pushing grains of sand against my body. I hear birds singing (as they always do this early in the morning). Perhaps they’re just talking, or maybe they’re simply making noise. Maybe they so desperately need to be heard. I wonder if that’s why the owl near my bedroom window hoo’s all night. Does she need to be validated as badly as I do that she exists? The air feels so good against my skin. I don’t know why I don’t sit on this porch more often.”

When was this desire to be understood, born? Is this desperation for proof that we exist predisposed in our biological framework? There is an inherent loneliness to consciousness, one that I became aware of quite early on, a loneliness that sits with me. The overarching theme of my work is self-reflection and documentation. Through photographic prints I endeavor to acknowledge the mutual exchange of validation between artist and viewer, to understand humanity’s obsession with art that expresses personal identity and private experience, and to address the inherent absurdity in our desire to visually capture the intangible. On the surface the photos serve as intimate vessels of my lived experience, however each photograph carries moments of deflection that allow for an omission of true vulnerability.

@madelinepace_ /// madelinepeveto@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

My work considers feminine aesthetics that are formed under pressures from target marketing and media advertising. I explore how social and digital media reinforces the gender binary and influences the construction of our individual identities. I articulate these conflicts through merging materials and color to forms that are reminiscent of the body while giving a window into psychological states of hopelessness, frustration, and apathy. In my work, femininity is embraced through decorative gestures with color and surface qualities. In tandem, these decorative tendencies are coupled with quick gestures, manifesting into grotesque oozing surfaces. The amalgamation of gesture addresses the criticism of decoration being superfluous and shallow. This relates directly to expressions of femininity and how these expressions receive a similar criticism despite being shaped by social constructs reinforced by gendered marketing. My work embodies the internal struggle of embracing the embellishments of the self. Decoration masks conflicting feelings of the desire to conform to gender roles while recognizing the inherent inequities at play. In turn, the emotional toll affects mental health and is materially shown by using found objects such as prescription bottles. This body of work uses a critical lens to analyze the ways media, targeted marketing, and gendered advertising manipulate and set ideals for femininity.

@maddyoart

 

This work is about the relationship between civilization and nature, reclamation by nature, and the way life leaves imprints that can be reconstructed and interpreted in our imagination. Much of the subject matter lives in an imaginary, sightly magical realm that exists in the small patches of wild growth that precariously exist between developments, cities, and roads. Scenes from these hidden glens and backyards are depicted in print. Concrete fossils of material and figures from those real natural spaces act as evidence of the secret lives imagined in the prints. The prints are extrapolations of the evidence frozen in the fossils.

clancyoconnor.com

 

 

The world was already an uncertain and unknowable place before the pandemic, but the threat to and failure of structure resulting from global shutdown has pushed uncertainty to the forefront of everyday life, exposing the obvious fragility in, and tenuousness of, any idea of normalcy.

I have responded to this situation by making drawings that are more visually suitable for an online platform. The quickness of drawing allows me to formulate thoughts with immediacy. Image manipulation and collaging using my iPad widens the potential of complexity, fragmentation, and loss of control. My drawings serve as visual reflections of non-linear, discontinuous thought processes. I use drawing as a way of working which is directly responsive to an accumulation of images, objects, and ideas inspired by my everyday life and routine.

My process is a place for me where uncertainty is embraced and confusion is legitimized. I use humor and play to navigate this uncertainty by embracing the absurdity and ridiculousness of everyday life. The studio, whether it be a space provided by an institution at school, or a makeshift set-up on my apartment kitchen table, is a space where I can surprise myself. I feel best in the studio when I don’t know what’s going to happen; when I can break rules and think critically and expansively.

These drawings are informed by my experience of navigating this weird world: particular things I notice, dumb things I imagine, collaborations with my cat, an argument I had with a professor, a philosophical text, an insecurity, a dad joke, or the arrangement of rotten food in my garbage can.

These things illustrate this particular time, and these drawings articulate my response to living in this moment, making art that can only be seen through the conceptual and literal filters of the pandemic. At least for now…

madymaszk.com /// @madymaszk