This body of work stems from the exploration of the term “food apartheid.” The urban landscape paintings are grounded in issues around climate change, resilience, access to food, self-sustainability, and racial, social, and economic barriers. I draw from personal experiences as well as historical references that thread together painting, light, film, architecture, and sculpture.

 My paintings communicate a state of controlled chaos as I combine two diver-gent forces and approaches: realism and abstract expression. With a proficient handling of light, a mastery of images, and a skillful mark making method, the paintings confer an illusion of reality to something that’s not real. I am playing with the light and its effect on color. The end result is a spatial between magic and illusion, rooted in the American Realist tradition.

 My childhood in Cuba, spent living in a wooden house and seeing the process of deconstruction and reconstruction, has had a great influence on my artistic evolution. From country to country, house to house, I have relocated multiple times throughout my life, which has influenced every step of my development; due to the unforeseen changes in my environment, I’ve always had the ability to adapt and create my own space within my work.

 Painting serves as a daily physical ritual and is a spiritual necessity for me. Through my work I try to draw out the colors and scenes hidden within the labyrinth of memory and extend the perceptible atmosphere of the canvas into a realm beyond.

 Folktales communicate scenes about human nature and demonstrate the idea of consequence. I create autobiographical bodies of work that depict scenes of everyday life shrouded in a layer of fantasy. Utilizing themes of community, family, wealth, consequence, and mortality, I merge each scene with multiple folk references pulled from the American South, as well as other worldly tales, and overlapping symbolism to illustrate life experiences. By creating vignettes armed with bright, alluring colors, the pieces feel familiar, even when being viewed for the first time.

 Matthew Forehand’s artwork explores personal heritage and the influence of the environment on cultural identity. He uses a collage-based approach to combine images from Colombia and his current home in South Florida, revealing the nuances and complexities of his relationship to these places. In Forehand’s collages, each image serves as a component to a larger composition, which becomes a starting point for his paintings.

 “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.