I explore strategies used by women to navigate social systems. Building on my career as a hat designer, I’ve repurposed my craft to invite public dialogues on the theatricality of gender. Using patterns and color associated with feminine ideals, my work plays on uncanny extremes that occur when women mirror fetishized personae. By highlighting the semiotic mechanism of cultural expression, my work creates a platform to reconsider the purpose of the conventional system of signification.

 Shadows emote, checkered grids undulate, and space collapses. The table sits awkwardly, unaware of its significance. An ambiguous memory shapes their meaning. Images of grid, shadow, table, and space are made to replicate moments in memory and of consciousness. There is familiarity with ambiguity. These objects are created by thought and memory of my family and my home. Memory that took place in a gridded space: spilling orange juice on my grandmother’s formica tile floor, baths in the pink-tile bathroom, ghosts in the kitchen, becoming friends with my shadow.

 Michael Ward-Rosenbaum’s sculptural wall pieces deal with the absence of image, the deconstruction of the painting surface, and the psychology of art-viewing spaces. His art-making process is intuitive and influenced by repetition, chance, and a longing for resolution. The works are often shown in multiples and attempt to create immersive experiences.

 My work focuses on psychedelic dreamscapes generated from the disorientation between physiological space and physical space, specifically through children’s eyes and bodies. I inject my paintings with autobiographical narratives through the use of anthropomorphic animals, fractured bodies, and other signifiers in undefined spaces. These juxtapositions represent the discordance caused by isolation and disconnection.

 Through the use of romantic, introspective metaphors, such as shadows, reflections, and windows, I dive into my personal memories. The three places I call home—Suriname, the Netherlands, and New York—come together in a fictional psychological landscape, where colonial relations have collapsed yet identity and race still must be performed. By playing with cultural markers and stereotypes that are often read and (mis)understood in different ways, multiple self portraits can appear. Indonesian ghost stories from rural Suriname about shape shifting creatures serve as metaphors for my own

 Drawing on historical, political, and personal narratives, my paintings are figurative compositions that conjure the complexity of the Afro-Latinx experience. The figures in my work inhabit a state of vulnerability that often encourages the viewer to question their positions on class, race, and geography. I immigrated to the United States in 2002 from the Dominican Republic.

 My practice challenges the linearity of time. Taking care of a family member with Alzheimer’s, I would often wonder about the impermanence of life. At the same time, she taught me that time is not linear but fluid. Memories bring back time, and different states of mind can make things skip and stop. In my paintings, there is never a single thing happening at the moment but rather many things at the same time. Fleeting moments are portrayed by adding and subtracting paint and lines made by graphite.

 Paintings are records of touch across a surface. To touch is to be touched. To make is to allow yourself to be unmade. This is how I have come to understand the tethered relationship between painting and intimacy in my practice. Through their interaction my body and material make each other visible. Are you looking? A toe dipped into a still pool of water causes a ripple of concentric circles across its surface. Are you looking? A Las Vegas hotel drained their pool when the Black singer Dorothy Dandridge stuck her toe in its water. Does that mean what I touch is made Black?

 Consumer culture and visual culture are two parts of the same runaway train that’s moving faster than ever before. Branding, advertising, and fashion are constantly changing course in an effort to keep up with what’s new, innovative, and hot. Because of my background in graphic design, I’ve witnessed firsthand the inner workings of this corporate-driven gold rush for what’s trending, and my artwork is, in large part, a byproduct of it.

 Through the female lens, my works revolve around the theater of the dinner table, synthesizing mythology and contemporary life. Exploring and expanding identity in response to Jane Bennett’s ideology of “vibrant matter,” and tapping into Donna Harraway’s concept of “open-circuit identity,” these works focus on the relationship between body, object, gender, narrative, and affect. We all must eat. How do the objects we consume and surround ourselves with become a part of our cultural and psychological understanding of self? For me, nothing is more intimate than sharing a meal.