I make images that engage with the literal meaning of “representation as a repeat presentation.” Through this iterative representation, I aim, and playfully fail, to create entities that embody the contradictions of identity formation. They are between and beyond Chinese and American; boyish and nonbinary; self and other; animal and human. These spaces and faces allow for their paradox to feel truer than direct depiction.

 My work uses portraiture and self-portraiture to visualize retellings of playful conversations that I’ve had with friends and family. These stories often include inside jokes that can only be fully deciphered by those within the narrative. With that in mind, I am interested in allowing others to create personas—to form their own inside jokes—and use them to create a world of characters to compose fun action scenes.

 I am interested in how memory intersects with place, and how it shapes the Black experience.

 Married artist/designers Nathan Gorgen and Molly Jo Burke, based in Cincinnati, comprise Byproduct Studios, a collaborative practice focused on the balance of artistic, family, and professional life. Their work explores domestic life and space through the use of artifacts and materials generated by their children, home renovations, individual practices, and collections. Of particular interest to the artists are materials that are, or appear to be, soft and malleable, and that do, or seem to, slump, stretch, flow, drip, and squish.

 In my most recent body of paintings, I work by alternating the canvas between horizontal and vertical orientations in order to control the flow of water, paint, and ink seeping into the work’s surface. For me, this method is linked to the depicted landscape: a porous bedrock, subject to the flow of both aquifers and surrounding water bodies. Using tape and a blade as drawing tools early in the process, partitions of canvas are corralled in order to guide an outcome, which nevertheless, often has unexpected results.

 My work is fundamentally at odds with the pervasive “cult of busyness.” Time consuming to make and packed with detail, my paintings demand a certain level of time and attention before revealing all they have to offer. Traditional themes and compositions provide familiar entry points, luring viewers deep into dreamlike scenes from everyday life. Intense attention to detail captivates modern eyes that are more accustomed to scrolling imagery consumed at warp speed.

 Rachel Collier is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the release of internal visual language held in the emotional body, resulting in radically uplifting imagery that rides the line between the mysterious and the familiar. Her materials are activated by a meditative and repetitive process rooted in nonrepresentational painterly tradition.

 

 My practice focuses mainly on relationships and self-reflection. These interactions and this contemplation are portrayed with a sense of ambiguity and anonymity as an expression of my search for identity and purpose. Once finished, I leave it to the viewer to determine what or who they may relate to.

 LaShae Boyd is a contemporary mixed media artist known primarily for making figurative work using acrylic, oil, and collage. Boyd’s staged subjects depict her own unique visual language of dissecting the human psyche, leading to a spiritual, transcendent experience. She takes influence from Carl Jung’s theory of the “shadow self” (repressed feelings of pain and fear left unacknowledged) and utilizes it as a source for creating balance between the conscious and unconscious aspects of self.