Dustin Emory’s work largely explores the human response to confinement through a black-and-white lens. Using unconventional angles and surrealist devices while also sticking to a strict palette, Emory explores how limitations can create a boundless arena. Emory’s fascination with limitation and confinement was accelerated in the midst of the pandemic when he found himself negotiating with his perception of his father’s incarceration. The issue has always been prevalent in his process but in conceiving the works of the past two years he has confronted it head-on.

 My work examines decolonization as a cultural and historical confrontation with a hegemonic system of thought. Working primarily in portraiture, I critically interrogate old narratives, suggesting an introspective appraisal of the politicization of Blackness. My work features an intensity of expression as a way of forcing a necessary interrogation of perceptions associated with the ideology of imagery, particularly the Black countenance. I layer and mix my pigments directly on the surface using oil stick on canvas.

 Through paint I explore my friends and family in quiet, introspective moments. These compositions reveal a vulnerable side of the human experience that is only unveiled when people are not performing or fulfilling societal roles. I am interested in the inner person as well as what they project. Using richly painted surfaces with mesmerizing patterns and lush vegetation, I captivate the viewer to encourage self-reflection and curiosity.

 It is exhausting to exist as a multiracial man in America. In 1978, my West Indian mother entered the United States by way of New York. In order to safely assimilate, my mother relinquished her Caribbean heritage. She later met my African American father at a funeral, fell in love, relocated to the South and learned to cooked soul food. I had an older brother. In 2018 he was shot and killed by a cop. My work investigates the faceted constructs of self-identity and its relational dependence upon both the living and dead. Through humor, humble

  Jerstin Crosby is a Southern artist who currently makes paintings assembled from shaped wood, realized in saturated tones. There is a degree of real and illusionistic depth offset by Crosby’s use of hard-edge, vibrant color. The elements and their surroundings define each other through cutouts in the wood panel supports. Sometimes shapes are removed to reveal the wall behind, while other times you see still more layers and textures building upon each other. Crosby has used digital tools from early in his practice, starting with the

 I am a figurative painter with a particular focus on self-portraiture and the intersection of self-conception and the physical environment. I think of my work as being primarily about spaces. In my portraits, the figure often takes a secondary role to the interior or exterior atmosphere in which I position myself. These settings are crucially informed by my own experiences, memories, and travels. Growing up in the South to a blended Black and Swiss family, much of my identity was constructed through a process of self-invention to which

 I use the visual language of architecture and the literal physicality of building materials to create collaged drawings and site-specific installations. I am interested in transitional spaces and the homogenization of place in addition to pushing and playing with the boundaries of drawing, sculpture, and installation. I use formal gestures of erasing, overlapping, layering, stacking, leaning, and cutting, and saddle them with the task of depicting our compromised narratives within our built environments.

 I use the visual language of architecture and the literal physicality of building materials to create collaged drawings and site-specific installations. I am interested in transitional spaces and the homogenization of place in addition to pushing and playing with the boundaries of drawing, sculpture, and installation. I use formal gestures of erasing, overlapping, layering, stacking, leaning, and cutting, and saddle them with the task of depicting our compromised narratives within our built environments.

 I am driven by the idea of the forced and voluntary migration of people from the Caribbean region and the struggle to navigate spaces that are both familiar and unfamiliar. My work is invested in strategies for survival, the relationships humans form with other creatures and with the natural environment, and the influences these elements have on the formation of identity within the spaces we inhabit. I am particularly intrigued by mimicry in nature and the ways in which plants, insects, and animals utilize it to survive.

 My work gestates in the space between the dream world and our experience of history, memory, and propaganda narratives. Here spirits play at the edges of the psyche, born out of anxiety, whimsy, spiritual yearning, and sexual fantasy. I seek to project vibrations that echo our disorganized and unfocused consciousness, and murmur with the promise of stranger forms yet to be conceived.