My paintings explore formal relationships through recurring geometric forms bound to a system of constraints. The reappearance of the same geometric forms across the body of work allows them to become familiar to the viewer, but their endless material manifestations and relationships mean constant reconsideration.

 The process of painting allows me to feel the discomfort of corporeal (dis)-embodiment. Indexing conversations that I have with my body into the painting is a way for me to understand my body and create an experience of what I feel when language fails. My approach to painting becomes a mediation with the canvas as I discover and give shape to the physical experiences of my skin: how it feels when my skin folds into itself, bodily urges, and the soft texture of my fatty tissue. I embody the duality of beauty and the grotesque.

 Through an intricate painting process with a maximalist tendency, my work transfers energy into images, which awakens the potential of perception hidden in the mind’s depths. It reflects my relationship to common human experiences related to spirit, unconsciousness, and fear.

 As a non-binary, first-generation Mexican American artist, I am heavily influenced by my lived experiences, cultural upbringing, and the Chicago queer community. Growing up in a traditionally Catholic household, I repressed parts of my identity for the sake of appeasing my family and assuring my survival. As an adult, I have found sisterhood within the queer community. My work is now a place where I can be boldly colorful and loud.

 In my work I employ pictorial space as a threshold to explore the emotional resonance of liminality, memory, grief, and the interior within constructed space. As a silent character, I dissolve into the transformative armature of painting and drawing, navigating the vulnerable questions of loss without the requirement of a clear answer.

 My artistic focus is on the theme of relationships, both in form and concept. In terms of form, my paintings embody a balance between reality and abstractness, achieved through exaggerated color, flattened space, and defined edges that allude to the artwork as an entity. From a conceptual standpoint, I find inspiration in my environment, using it as a reflection of the inner self.

 Painting is my language and most authentic mode of communication. I have an ever-growing body of smaller work on an assortment of wood species. My mixed-media paintings are floral-vegetal-biological-mineral-synthetic efflorescence: the play of nature and artifice.

 Raised Korean in China, and currently living in the American Midwest, my practice has been deeply influenced by diasporic memories. I explore ambiguities inherent in what is often taken for granted as an externally focused sense of possibilities, lack of common sense, and confrontation with the heavy, naked face of another, primarily in the realm of painting.

 Drawing from C. E. Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Communication and translated narratives, Haan explores the foundation of languages. By developing her own analog system, the symbols in Haan’s paintings are arranged by probability. Through this process, she finds gaps between meaning and interpretation. Her symbols are semasiographic, signs that don’t directly reflect speech, though their sequence relates to the order of construction in written language.

 Atticus Gordon is a Canadian painter based in Chicago. Gordon’s practice engages with painting in the present, asking how the medium shifts and exists under the current conditions of capital, technology, and culture. In Gordon’s practice, painting is a site of discourse where conceptual thinking meets the bodily process of mark-making, spontaneity, and feeling. The works are constellations, combining imagery from diverse sources, including sketches, internet imagery, iPhone photographs, and art history.