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.

 My paintings tell a loose narrative about ritual and possible transcendence. Through illusion and tension, the works explore scenes with a heightened awareness packed with psychological energy. Beneath the surface of humor, the works subversively address philosophical subjects, such as human existence and one’s own mortality.

 My paintings walk the line between expressing sensation and capturing the reality of the everyday. Each piece begins with an excitement about a specific formal quality—a shape of light, a hint of color, a repetition of form, or a composition of layered spaces. They are quiet, crisp, orderly, and controlled representations of places around my home, executed on an intimate scale in acrylic on panel.

 Years of self-practice and expression through various mediums—which have ranged from charcoal pencils, graphite, ballpoint pens, photography, sign design, and most recently, mixed media—have accompanied my steady progression towards finding a unique style. I have worked on a number of projects, with themes including personal narratives, societal challenges, and migration. After years of experimenting, I began creating collage works using Dutch wax textiles, acrylics, oil paints, and photographs.

Through an interdisciplinary art practice, I make work informed by experiences of migration, assimilation, and indigeneity. My recent works reflect my effort to learn about my parents’ Mixtec culture, most recently through their gardening practices. During calls with my parents where they walk me through their garden explaining their process and progress, I utilize FaceTime as a medium to take pictures which I then print using gum bichromate. These prints are exposed to sunlight, and I imagine them harnessing the power of the sun as plants do during photosynthesis.

My work explores the themes of home, travel, desire, and memory. My current body of work, Moving Entities, explores the idea of relocation and dislocation through abstraction. The relocation from one continent to another, and from one country to another country, the dramatic cultural shift, the absence of one’s basic and essential foods, are felt deeply as one finds himself in the presence of starkly different substitutes. The earliest works of the project are acrylic paintings characterized by paper collage and images of foods from Nigeria and the United States.

 After becoming a mother, my relationship to time changed. I am awake more hours than I used to be and am busier than before. Yet, there is also a lot of downtime when I am alone with my thoughts. Those brief, flickering thoughts that come and go between so many other things have become the subject of my new work. Sam Anderson wrote, “A vast majority of our waking hours are filled not with witty jokes or brilliant thoughts or epic feelings but with tiny, private mind-motions—thoughts that are hardly even thoughts at all, that don’t rise to the level of sharing with another human being.

 Working predominantly as a painter, I tell short stories of justice and social improvement. Using portraiture and protest paintings that represent the African American experience, I examine the ways in which past issues affect the present. I experiment with various formalist approaches; family relationships are the framework that connects disparate bodies of work and show how joy and trauma are intrinsically connected. Through my work, I invite viewers to see the world through my eyes, fostering an intimate experience between audience member and subject.

 Jillian Van Volkenburgh is a multidisciplinary artist. Moving from painting to photography to sculpture, the subject matter dictates the medium. Her work is rooted in her experiences in the industrial corridor southeast of Chicago. She is currently focused on work based on personal transition, with themes of home, work, legacy, and death. These themes are translated into variations of both symbolic and literal imagery, ultimately creating a broad self-portrait.