Born and raised in Baghdad, Iraq, during multiple wars, my paintings are infused with emotional tension and based on confronting destruction and decay, challenging boundaries through intentional color contrast within gestural landscapes. My interest is to express untold emotional landscapes to suggest the turmoil that can disturb the thin surface of social order and its effect on the human soul. My paintings suggest figures and places, including gardens and war zones, landscapes of lush fertility and terrible decay, cycles of life and death, that are generating order in chaos.

 Being an image maker affords me the opportunity to highlight the humanity of the viewer by illustrating the humanity of the subject. My creative process focuses on the interaction between the work and its audience. My goal is for the receiver to experience the mystery of creation while interacting with the portrait. The work’s evolution to becoming art has everything to do with the dance between the painting and the receiver. My primary subjects reflect the multiple aspects of the Black/Africanist experience in the context of a society that confines Blackness to being the

 I work from memory and intuition to invent spaces that are built from harmonious color relationships, fluid lines, and expressive mark making. I want to shift our society’s traditional notions of gender expression and use subject matter such as flowers to speak to a sense of self-affirmation and discovery. I find that human beings are full of contrasts, and our identities are so complex; often operating in dualities that are never static, we find ourselves constantly shifting. I explore this in the formal aspects of my work,

 Mike Ousley paints a direct commentary on Appalachian life and folk traditions, though their simplicity belies their depth. Ousley has painted since childhood, and though trained, he foils Western European traditions with the folk style of his youth. Born the son of a coal miner in Eastern Kentucky and having traveled all around Appalachia and the Blue Ridge Mountains, Ousley envisions his paintings as ballads to the people, places, and culture of the region. Subverting stereotypical perceptions with dark humor and a played-up naïveté, his paintings

 These works represent acts of improvisation through a formal language. If they contain narrative, it is fleeting, individual to the viewer. I want the viewer to have a moment of surprise and delight from these works: like finding something unusual in nature, not expected and moving. I want them to have familiarity and newness at the same time. Laying lines down across the canvas is for me a physical act, a bodily relationship to the canvas’s materiality and space, experimenting with different brushes and hand pressure without planning or overt intentionality. The space created

 What interests me as an artist is being able to explore what crafts emanate from an Indigenous society: the particular color palettes, the different techniques and terms used to classify each craft. Like all the different languages of the world, there are so many regionally specific crafts that play important roles in history, and it is fascinating to study and incorporate bits and pieces of the techniques into my own practice. What I find is they often have a religious or spiritual significance, if not a monetary value from their use once for trade.

 My work explores the use of narrative to evoke emotional connections that reference aspects of existence. Through symbolism and allegory, I refer to what lies beneath the surface. Using varying imagery of my choosing allows me to explore imaginative realms that defy logic but are directly influenced by my experiences. I also investigate different themes that affect people from all walks of life, concerning trials and tribulations, which include hostility, victimization, exclusion, oppression, exploitation, and withdrawal, which all ties to spiritual rebirth.

 Kathryn Kampovsky creates layered paintings in oil and acrylic, using intentional and varied color palettes. With a focus on figurative painting, she explores her interest in the unconscious desire to prepare for an unpredictable world. In her work she aims to understand the ways that daily life, technology, and life events permeate the brain and body in ways that make the flesh inseparable from the outside world.

 For four decades I’ve had a rigorous studio practice, creating brilliantly colored motifs that shift and circle back on themselves over time. Working with oil paint on canvas and paper, I reference geometric shapes and pop graphics. I paint circles, dots, ice-cream cones, combs, cigarette butts, lips, words, and eyeballs, to name a few. These forms star in my paintings and are constantly being recombined in new ways. Erratic patterning and bright colors are layered to surprise a viewer’s sensibilities, representing familiar

 Through glitch-inspired self-portraiture I study the desire, failure, and dissonance associated with portraying an idealized self for a physical and digital audience. I consider how those of us coming of age with the Internet and social media have constructed alternative identities online—fantasies, really—that bear little resemblance to our IRL selves. Using paint, projected video, and augmented reality, I transform my image beyond believable authenticity: it is fragmented, replicated, and distorted to the point of becoming disconnected from my real body.