Evan Mazellan’s paintings grapple with privacy, injury, and ownership, lifting objects and materials directly from digital media, personal photos, and belongings in and around their studio. Familiar objects take on new meaning as they are fragmented and reassembled into a pictorial space that highlights the permanence found in media and mass production. Mazellan explores the sought-after transformation found in art restoration and medical surgery, a process prone to unexpected outcomes and mishaps, where the pursuit of enhancement can swing between helping and harming.

 My work explores the duality and ambivalences of the mixed-race experience. It pulls from past experiences, both personal and historical, to bring to light my connections with memory, environment, and belonging. Dynamics of intimacy emerge in my work as the painted figures simultaneously interrupt, obstruct, bridge, appear, and erase traditional lines of demarcation between race and color, time and dimension, and subject and viewer.

 My paintings draw inspiration from biological systems, post-humanist thought, and the intricate web of ecological relationships. These elements converge within a style of painting I call “transfigurative,” which embraces the constant coevolution of the body with other forms of life, environment, and technology. I create orchestrations of color, line, and space that evoke a sense of exchange, activation, and transformation.

 Nour Malas explores transient emotions and the in-between. Her gestural, bold, and expressive brushstrokes give the paintings an almost sculptural sense. Her spontaneous and intuitive marks—signatures of Malas’s distinctive pictorial language—are a direct response to her environment. Expressions of curiosity, rage, and desperation, the mark making invites viewers to immerse themselves in poignant landscape, both internal and uncharted. Movement is muse as Malas follows forms (figures, animals, an occasional vehicle) along the image.

 My work examines nuances of counterculture archetypes within narratives of personal experience and geography, pop culture, and the social mystifications around individuals often categorized as social deviants—members of various subcultures that include punks, metal heads, skateboarders, and bicycle motocross (BMX) riders. As an artist I am engaged in the poetic pursuit of failure, parallels of which I find in both painting and subcultural sports, with a focus on BMX and skateboarding.

 Lou challenges the propensities of classical oil painting with decisions as subtle as a color palette shift and as radical as her choice of subject. With a rare deftness and sensitivity, her studied eye translates the legibility of everyday life into something muddier and more opaque. The artist sees herself not as a person animated by collective, social perceptions so much as an avatar for approximate meaning, or an object hovering in the periphery of awareness—a mass of abstract constructions conjectured always by someone else.

 My paintings are informed by the momentary sublime that is rooted in the vastness of the natural world. The work is centered around landscape as a concept—unity, balance, focal points, and transitions—and explores the tension between conscious and subconscious interpretations of place and spaces. Through continually reworking intervals of space, rhythmic movement, and perspective, my work critiques the human consumption of natural locales, while honoring the poetic, everyday subject matter that is often overlooked.

 I create paintings using oil on clear primed linen, translating sensorial memories into images. My various sources of inspiration range from cherished objects to culturally significant artifacts, such as old Korean landscapes, architecture, and porcelain. These tangible influences intertwine with intangible elements encompassing temperature, time, sound, and scent. Through abstraction of space and shapes, I fuse these contrasting substances and capture fleeting moments that are otherwise elusive to grasp.

 I make work that addresses the meaning of home or, sometimes, the lack thereof for individuals like myself: those who grew up as children of multiple cultures and places. My paintings are a personal investigation into the complex question of how we as individuals define home and, more specifically, where home is located for people with variegated cultural identities. My own experience as a Generation 1.5 immigrant has put me on a journey of floating back and forth in perpetuum between time zones seventeen hours apart, trying to navigate myself to a place that feels like home.

 The figures in my oil paintings have their facial expressions hidden, as if keep-ing a secret or like they are asleep. Their huge bodies look heavy enough to make a lot of noise when moving around, but, paradoxically, they also seem to float as in dreams or recollections, implying the suspension of time in memory.