In search of a departure from prevailing ideas around figuration, I imagine the body as impermanent, morphing and changing as a representation of complex emotion and cognition. Rooted in my own longtime battle with depression—and the significant reprieve found through psychedelic therapy—I pursue world-building that draws from my studies in consciousness and melancholia, as well as theories around “deep adaptation” in the face of climate crisis.

 My family is from a people group called the Hakka (“guest”), fanning out from central China after 800 AD. Some settled in Southeast Asia and later became Singaporean. But the ancestral homeland is lost, swallowed up by the passage of time. Much of my Hakka identity has also been lost in an unrelayed oral history and denatured by the construction of “Singaporean.” Painting and performance have become vehicles to explore what is irretrievable in me.

 I work with oil paint and digital tools to express and examine the tension between ideas of intimacy, movement, perception, and the technological lens. I explore connections between people and how intimacy is experienced, grasped onto the more quiet, nuanced moments and shifting away from overtly narrative aspects. Layers, materials, and forms are merged and unified; synthetic materials and applications meet with lavish opulence to create a cheapened yet indulgent atmosphere.

 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.