The Universe is half creation and half destruction. Understanding that brings me peace. I hope my work conveys a sense of balance.

 Everyone is wounded. Everyone carries on. This is a hypothetical reality that draws from nature, art history, magic . . . the news. These are vestiges of a world that is familiar but appears here half-remembered or misremembered and reincarnated in a fanciful way. Incongruous plants and sometimes animals exist side by side. People merge with the land and emerge from thin air. Climates are theoretical. Everything is fluid. The rocks might melt, the sea stand still. The trees may change at any moment . . . a new pattern may be imported, a character swapped . . . a sky stolen.

 I am an illustrator by profession and an artist by heart. My mixed media paintings explore both Blackness and womanhood. Acknowledging the number of stigmas attached to each classification, I hope that my paintings will serve as a contrast to existing stereotypes by promoting their true essence, beauty, happiness, and inclusion.

 Dave Swensen is a self-taught painter and sculptor with a background in design. He works from his home studio with a focus on minimalist concepts and forms. With a unique approach to painting, Swensen’s handling of shadow, light, and spatial concepts are front and center. Embedded surfaces, figurative notions, and the use of repetition are all recurring themes. Swensen is constantly refining his use of line and how a blank space is used and declined. In most cases, his work walks the line between painting and sculpture.

 My paintings are light and strange and sometimes sweet. I love ordinary objects, drawings within paintings, and when goofiness undercuts beauty.

 When I get to making something, the drive is to get at and exploit the seemingly mundane quality of our collective surroundings. You either get lost in, or completely ignore your daily setting most of the time, but the visual background noise hums along. I’ve found that with time and scrutiny, our habitats can expose themselves to the bizarre mixture of influences that form them, especially in a city environment. Observational in its foundation, my work tends to shift and merge into the abstract through sampled components and hints of collage, like abstraction lite.

 Color is a huge part of the way I see the world and what I am most interested in when constructing my paintings. The interaction of color, how space can be flat and have depth all at once. How two colors can fight with each other while remaining friends. That perfectly off-color combination that feels so satisfying. Materiality. Reflectivity. Symbols that can mean something and nothing all at once. Narrative that can be abstract. Color that takes over your body. Brings joy, but also makes you uncomfortable. I am interested in that discomfort. In the unknown.

 Relational dualities, such as between viewer and wearer, inner and outer, latent and manifest energy, and grief and joy, drive Katrin Schnabl’s work. Through Portal, a recent series of dimensional metal frames stretched with boldly tinted, transparent, and intersecting fabric layers, Schnabl has been addressing and expressing dynamic internal emotions around loss.

 My work stems from a career in architecture, interior, and graphic design. With my dimensional wall art, I’m interested in exploring the interplay of pattern and disruption, order and disorder, calm and tension. I pair precise and refined fabrication with an irregular or unpredictable arrangement. My constructions are made from multiple repeated parts, all of which are slightly varied. The use of ultra-bright monochromatic color is a distinct counter-reaction to years of clients’ dismal color requirements.