“What was scattered gathers. What was gathered blows apart.” - Heraclitus, On Nature

 A Miami-based multidisciplinary artist and arts educator from Haiti, Morel Doucet’s ceramics, illustrations, and prints explore the impact of climate gentrification, migration, and displacement on Black communities. Through a contemporary lens, Doucet’s Emmy-nominated work documents environmental decay as it intersects economic inequality, pollution, and policy-making.

 My most fond memories of growing up are the quiet ones. As I recall these memories, I not only think of the moment but of the environment in which they occurred: how the evening sun settles in patterns, the way light filters through sheets, and curtains being blown by a breeze. Each moment is characterized by its ambience, and I have always been fascinated by light and how it interacts with different objects and colors.

 My paintings and works on paper depict figures in colorful, geometric architectural spaces undergoing the conflicts and desires of the human experience. I explore material and mark making to generate nonlinear dreamscape narratives that provoke perception while challenging the grand narrative tradition. My work oscillates between themes of presence and absence, fact and fantasy, and reason and madness.

 From a young age, Denna Ameen, born to Iranian immigrants and raised in Maryland, was familiar with working with her hands, as her father was a carpenter. Her passion for art led her to study Open Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. Through her work, Ameen explores themes of sustainability, the complexities of identity, and the beauty that can be found in overlooked and forgotten materials.

 My work exists within a particular mindset: the possibility of remembering our origins. It begins in the day, using the automatic drawing technique to channel memories and visions with quick sketches and annotations on Post-It notes. I later use these notes as data to be transferred to my large canvases. Once in the studio, the painting process begins, and the collaboration of drawing and painting becomes one of activation of the mediums’ expressive potential. This is a project built on the premise that impulses when contained can bring

 My paintings explore specific memories that conflate the past, present, and future, resulting in alternative narratives. Hypermnesia is an “increasing mnestic capacity in the event of crisis or trauma,” as defined by Paolo Virno in Déjà Vu and the End of History. I correlate this heightened experience with memory through meticulously rendered details that come forward through a haze of distorted recollection and active imagination. My paintings are tight––rendered concretely and opaquely. Their crispness and shallow depth

 Is ‘You’ ‘I’? Do my feelings oscillate between love and hate for ‘You’? While my body is here, my mind wanders there—so, where am I? Encountering this overwhelming sensation, I search for a language to articulate the liminal experiences that straddle the dichotomies of self/other, love/hate, desire/repulsion, ecstasy/pain, and here/there. My painting practice explores these ambiguous territories where clarity dissolves and what remains is the unsettling, yet compelling realm of that which is abject.