Sam Hensley

BIO: I was raised superstitious. Growing up in rural Kentucky, the knowledge that strange beings inhabited the woods and fields gave them a sacred life that fascinated me. I’ve carried this sentiment everywhere since; in every home and city where I’ve lived, there is a constant presence of the unseen.

ARTIST STATEMENT: I strive to give face and form to beings from other realities. These entities are benign and they want to be near us; by giving them bodies I can assist and entertain them. My illustrations are concepts for their new physical bodies, which I carry out in fabric sculpture. Animating the sculptural bodies I build with electrical and battery components is the final consecration of their temporary inhabitance in our world. They have full internal lives and histories that I love to document in writing and video, to help other humans get to know them.

Paul Lorenz

BIO: PAUL LORENZ (b. Chicago, Illinois) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the links and relationships between architecture, visual art, sound/performance and music composition. His solo exhibitions typically include visual art (drawings, paintings, digital photograph collages or video) that combine with sound performances to define or question the scale and volume of gallery or museum spaces. Sound performances may be solo, acoustic investigations; the investigations may include musicians, or be computer enhanced manipulations of actions within the gallery.

Paul’s recent work in digital collage and video is a direct response to life during the Covid-19 pandemic. The daily need to create has made digital exploration a necessity during isolation. By pouring through a cache of photographs, decades in the making, new compositions and personal definitions are realized. The combination of imagery and geometry evoke architectural spaces or interior/exterior landscapes, something that has always been the essence of Paul’s work.

Paul currently lives near Phoenix, in Buckeye, Arizona.

ARTIST STATEMENT: With an education in architecture, fine art and music composition, Paul Lorenz has carved a unique niche in the contemporary art world: bridging the immediacy of drawing, performance and sound making with the detail and logic of architecture. All works are a balance of physical structure (paper, panel, canvas, mylar), visual expression (lines, scrapes, color fields, photographs, video) and color, whether overt or atmospheric, that combine to allow the creative process to be the final subject.

Paul exhibits nationally and globally. He seeks out residency programs world-wide to add dimension and cultural relevance to his visual and sound library. With his sound/music ensemble, Perception Project, he combines performance, architecture and improvisation to create audible, indoor/outdoor foregrounds and backgrounds.

The majority of his work involves a line or a group of lines...exploring density and volume through drawings, the making of a line through durational performances. and the discovery of what a line sounds like through music composition and recording.

Sean Mac

BIO: Sean Mac is a cartoonist living in Chicago. He draws comics inspired by the television, video games, and stories of his childhood as well as the grimy, uneasy, weirdness of being an adult. His work is focused on creating fun and immersive narratives in a format that feels good in a reader’s hands.

ARTIST STATEMENT: My most recent obsession has been creating mini comics with my risograph. Risograph printmaking lends itself very well to comics, and I’ve found the whole process of printing my own work to be very exciting. Over the summer I bought an old broken risograph on Facebook marketplace. After finally getting it fixed, I’ve been using it to print my own comics and zines, as well as experiment with comic construction. Ziggy Sunshine and the cover of Buppy the Caveman were printed by Perfectly Acceptable Press, while the guts of Buppy the Caveman and the other various zines were printed by me.

Luis Martin

BIO: Born in Los Angeles, and based in New York city, Luis Martin began his journey in the art museums of LA where he worked as a teen. Moving to NYC at the age of 19, he continued to work at cultural institutions before attending art school. His artistic career flourished through self-initiated projects that aimed to create visibility and access to his art practice and that of other artists. He has exhibited nationally and internally around the world. Most recently in Merida, Mexico where he had a solo show of collages created during his stay.

ARTIST STATEMENT: I make collages. My small works on paper are amplified by my robust studio practice that takes on a multi-disciplinary approach. I combine the them es at the center of m y visual work with other projects that include a podcast, and a live studio session series on social media. My work stems from a deep creative and spiritual inquiry, which plays out with my restless passionate nature, akin to the NYC hustle. I created the term “The Art Engineer” for my thesis project in art school, which granted me creative license to unapologetically explore my role as an artist from a place of agency and leadership that extends from the studio outward.

Vincent Puren

BIO: Vincent Puren is a visual artist working and living in Paris area - France. He was trained in a graphic art school. His art is a proposition of a dialogue, even though, there’s no exchange of words…To initiate this dialogue, he creates art works as a representation of a memory, an emotion, a feeling. The object is not explicit. Yet the work raises a doubt, an interrogation… As a journey, an immersion in a moving universe. He brings a form of a poetic militantisme as he consider his art as a LGBTQ infra-politic action! 

He also worked for Radio France, coproducing "La parenthèse enchantée" an audio immersion in the pre-HIV San Francisco in the 70’s.

ARTIST STATEMENT: A proposition of a dialogue, even though, there’s no exchange of words...

To initiate this dialogue, I create art works that suggest a beginning of a story; as a representation of a memory, an emotion, a feeling. The object is not explicit. Yet the work raises a doubt, an interrogation...

The figuratives elements belong to dreamtime, fantasy, composed with multiple layers, that appear to float.

These elements are the link between the dream and the reality. They are disturbing and destabilizing.

Immersion in a moving universe; becoming?

Now, the observer is free to tell is own story.

In my recent project, I continue to propose a dialogue in which I blend fantasy my own story.

I bring a form of a poetic militantisme as I consider my art as a infra politic action!

Kristin Romberg

BIO: ​I am a Norwegian visual artist who practice ranges from individual two-dimensional works as painting and drawing, to siteworks and performances. Painting is my main area. I have my degree from Art Academy in Sydney, Australia, Einar Granum College of Art and Westerdals School of Communication in Oslo, Norway. I have exhibited all over Norway and also in Sydney, Riga, San Francisco, New York, Barcelona and Denmark. For the coming year I am exhibiting in Norway and at Makarere Art Gallery in Kampala, Uganda. I have been awarded several grants and my work are purchased by many public institutions. I have a nice studio in my hometown Fredrikstad in South-East of Norway, sharing the studiohouse with 12 other professional artists.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Through my paintings I can express the wonder and the curiosity I feel about nature and the world I live in. My work is an intuitive improvisation on nature and on the impressions of my walks in the forest, my hikes in the mountains and my hours on the windsurfing board. Through a process of psychological realism, visual elements are restructured into an abstraction of landscape. Through the relationship of colors, forms, and marks, through rhythm and balance, and the physical and psychological work of painting, each picture develops into a unique expression. Using visual suggestions, I draw the viewer into an imagined landscape, into a colorful, dynamic world that hovers between the abstract and the representational.​

Peter Ronan

BIO:  Peter Ronan is a nomadic artist who grew up between Idaho and Washington. Currently he is one of the artist in residence at Lillstreet art center. He received the 2018-2019 anonymous studio residency at the Northern Clay Center. He is a fabulous butch queen who makes work that is focused on the queer experience. He attended Boise State University where he received his BFA with a concentration in ceramics. He received the Robert Kantor Sculptor Award, the Murray Art Scholarship, and the Boise State Art Department scholarship. Following his undergraduate studies, he moved to Philadelphia and started to work for The Clay Studio as an intern and quickly ascended to the work exchange program and then as an education assistant. While living and working in Minnesota his work became more openly homoerotic and it continues to evolve. 

ARTIST STATEMENT:  I use ornate hand-built vessels, designer slip cast pieces and video to create a representation of my existence as a gay male through the objectification of my experiences and emotions into objects. I craft objects that are both functional and decorative – they are not functional in the traditional craft sense of the word. Instead they operate specifically within the queer fringe community. My plugs, paddles, pipes, and knives portray aspects of the gay male that is rarely represented by popular culture. I’m interested in the thin line that exists between seemingly opposite emotions and physical sensations. Pain and pleasure, fear and confidence, comedy and tragedy, fantasy and reality are all a false dichotomy that queer people are forced to regularly navigate. My work aims to express these emotions - these in between spaces - and the need for queer self-identification in physical form. My work has been a catalyst to start owning my emotions and desires. It has allowed me to begin to master the fear of talking about my specific queer experience in hopes that it can relate to a larger hetero and queer audience.

Jan Simonds

BIO: B. 1997. Lives and works in Chicago IL. American/Slovak.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Simonds’ drawings are an expulsion of love and fears. In adapting vignettes from nostalgic experience in Slovakia, coming to terms with sexuality, peaking stress and contemplation. His current perspective commits their ambiguity.

Marina Timm

BIO: I’m a Russian-born LA-based collage artist. I create original works on paper as well as designs for commercial projects.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Observing and contemplating our collective human melodrama is what drives me to create. The exaltation and despair of our interconnected daily lives and the absurd banality of it all are my focus. An assemblage of arbitrary shapes, shades and textures becomes a new complete whole. I chose collage as my preferred medium because it feels like an open-ended puzzle or a balancing of objects. The practice of bringing unrelated elements together to produce a cohesive piece helps me explore and understand complex human interactions.

My main influences are the artists of the Russian avant-garde like K. Malevich and A. Rodchenko, as well as the Dadaist movement of the post WWI Europe. Their aesthetic and polar opposite views on what art is and should be have long been a source of fascination for me.

Anna Valgreen

BIO: Anna Valgreen lives in Copenhagen, Denmark where she works with teaching combined with her artistic practice. She was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, but quit the study after two years and continued to work with art and music. Her artistic work and expression is often based on the subject of imaginative and emotional images. 

ARTIST STATEMENT: I work with drawing and painting and the mediums are mostly acrylic paint, oil pastel and fineliner on canvas, paper or found materials as stone and cardboard.

My work displays both detailed drawings of small lines and 2-dimensional layers of colored shapes that create various abstract metamorphoses of different objects or feelings. 

I work in a non-structured process where the organic and lumpy shapes continuously develop in layers and lines and build up as I work; Sometimes the work stops when all space is used up, sometimes it ends in the middle of the process, and the image can seem to develop on its own. 

I don’t plan or sketch my work, as it is often an intuitive and imaginative process shaped and built up in clear, colorful inner images or an expression of an emotion shown in a slight gloominess with organic shapes. When I work with abstract images, even one single shape, it often seems to have a symbolic representation, and can portray something in between pure abstraction and realism. 

Rich Ward

BIO: I studied Fine Art (painting) a long time ago, so much has occurred in the intervening years, helping to bring up children, various jobs, life with all its ups and downs. The biggest challenge of recent years has been managing pain from a back injury, and subsequent life changes. I’m lucky I can be active, but there have been big changes to what I do and think.

When I came back to painting after a long gap, it quickly became obvious that I no longer wanted to work from observation or even figuratively in the same way as I had previously. Mixed- media drawings (they are generally improvised compositions) that began almost as therapeutic work have now become more and more of a resource for larger paintings.

ARTIST STATEMENT: There is so much that interests me it is hard to edit down, but it seems clear most of my work at the moment although mostly abstract, has references of how humans interact with nature in one way or another.

Archaeology, History, Industry, engineering, extreme environments, climate etc, are always at the back of my mind but I still try to make paintings that are first and foremost about paint and painting itself.

Inspiration for me comes from painting, it really seems to come down to turning up everyday no matter what you can give and staying involved, over time bit by bit things happen. You can’t think yourself solutions only paint/ draw them. I try not to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge these days, do what I can and enjoy it. There is so much potential and possibility it’s very exciting.

Francisco Zarate

BIO: My name is Francisco Zarate. I was born in Buenaventura, a small island in the pacific of Colombia. Currently I live in Argentina where I was able to finish my university studies as a visual communication designer, and where i worked freelance and continue my learning.

Recently I finished a postgraduate course in conceptual design at UNTREF which has allowed me to have an alternative vision about the intersections between art and design.

As a self-taught visual artist I have been working on the intersection between art and design from the perspective of creating a visual poem, also in the search for an image in which I recognize myself as an Afro-indigenous descendant artist, where images are born that converge in an imaginary endowed in some part by the geographical space from which I come.

ARTIST STATEMENT: My idea of a work of art is based on the possibility of creating an image that allows me to travel and create an imaginary to that primiti- ve childhood, to be in a ritual with the materials and the dreams.

It explored an interconnection between a virtual world in relation to new technologies and forms of communication, in a swing towards a past, towards the construction of a myth, of a ritual to decipher my identity as a visual artist. To create new representations influenced from the past looking towards a future.

My works are built on various supports such as paper, cloth, acrylic, self-adhesive vinyl for cloth, magazine clippings, newspapers, as well as found objects attached to the work. In some cases for the digital assemblies the use of own images and of the web, the scanning of organic and inorganic objects found in the public thoroughfare that make part of the work.

These digital/manual collages, stencils, illustrations, prints, looms and sculptures do not attempt to explore unknown worlds, but rather the connection with the imaginary that founded my childhood in Colom- bia, the memory of blackness and surveys of myths that crossed my identity. These works also seek to build the story of a mythical lands- cape, with the use of color, building characters, based on the recrea- tion of ancient myths according to my perspective of the world.

The invisible material of my works are the dreams, stories and objects of childhood, fears, and images that challenge me in the Pacific Ocean, the density of the jungle when crossing the mountains, these expe- riences await like a second skin in the senses, the images that I create are a fickle body that speaks for itself, they suggest their own universe where my hands are the sieve of their body.