Lyn Liu was born and grew up in Beijing, China. She studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she achieved her two Bachelor degrees in Fine Arts. She is currently an MFA candidate for the Columbia Visual Arts program. Liu works in painting, printmaking, and publication. Her work focuses on the interdependent relationship between an individual and a community. The psychological perspective from which she views the social strategy is closely linked to her biography.

I’m not interested in people; I am interested in the opportunity to mock reality.

Capturing the moments when my life views and personal experiences click together is what I want. I believe a lot of things that we overlook in our daily life have a spiritual quality that reveals our strength and potential to move forward. My work intends to highlight the spiritual dimension that lies behind the events and obstacles we encounter in life and to bring that to the viewer’s attention.

My work is about things that are close to me, which I translate through observation and documentation. Painting acts like a portal for me to tell the story of feeling trapped in the gap between two countries, where I am a citizen of one, and a resident of another. Finding the resolution among vague memories and vivid life is a journey of reconciling the struggle of disorientation I constantly encounter.

If the body is a container of space in painting, what object could suggest that repository? How could a painted thing make the figure’s form present without the actual body being there? I choose to paint belts as stand-ins for the body’s absence to defy and stay within a conversation about figurative painting.

Salim Green hides.

Through shape, colour, and scale, the objects I make suggest specific gendered traits and circumstances, playing off the viewers implicit biases and perception of gender. The long stretched out forms of glass reference dominance, power, and erection, while painting and textiles evoke softness, warmth, comfort, and figurative curves. They evoke a seductive relationship that cross contaminates the gendered fields of textiles and glass blowing with a play between hard material and soft curves.

I paint with a gun—a tufting gun—along with needles, hooks, and knots. Repurposing such a phallic signifier of violence, I conjure vibrant objects of comfort that inhabit a mystical pictorial space between abstraction and representation. Stabbing fabric with yarn, my psyche cracks open into fibers. It’s intuitive and it’s cathartic; it’s a pain in the ass but it’s satisfying. The resulting images are hysterical—in the truest sense of the word. Liberated from its slanderous connotations, hysteria is understood as a manifestation of the unconscious when it’s ferociously unbound.

Mahsa R. Fard was born and grew up in Tehran, Iran. She studied painting at the School of Art and Architecture in Tehran and moved to the United States to pursue her graduate studies at Maryland Institute College of Art, where she received an MFA in Painting in 2019. Since then, she has been working in her Baltimore studio and has participated in group and solo shows nationally and internationally.

My paintings explore introspection, anxiety, and connection through a playful bending of space, time, and bodies. I create ambiguous narratives set in claustrophobic residential architecture that feature figures who oscillate between stagnation and acting out. The characters I depict are desperate to break cycles and self-actualize, often sabotaging themselves in the process. Moments of wonder twist with apprehension in scenes that attempt to capture life’s intensity and tenderness.