Jesse M. Bell

BIO: Jesse M Bell is a contemporary abstract painter based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In his practice, Bell works to explore both the foundational aspects and the more remote possibilities of painting—realizing the opportunities afforded by the historical while also contributing to the ever-evolving, hyper-current conversation of the medium. Focusing primarily on the abstraction and interaction of organic shapes in various painting mediums, he employs symbols and detached iconography to create what he refers to as “visual poems” or “speech-act objects”.

ARTIST STATEMENT: My paintings are abstract compositions that incorporate strong narrative elements. I juxtapose visual references of the mundane with the absurd to create open-ended conceptual opportunities for viewers to explore. I also strive to infuse my work with musicality and a continually-developing visual language. Through this, I'm working to create paintings that suggest stories, events, or convey to the audience a memory, situation, or scenario; at the same time, exploring and contributing to what a painting can be.

Fiorella Hilda Gomez Bermudez

BIO: Fiorella Hilda Gomez Bermudez is a Peruvian multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Wheaton, Illinois. She is a teaching artist for CAPE, an organization that partners with the West Chicago School system that fosters collaboration between teachers and students experimenting with art. Her work has been shown in several national and international galleries and institutions, including Biblioteca Nacional del Peru, Blanden Memorial Museum, Triton Art Gallery and The School of the Art Institute. Gomez is the recipient of a Dean’s Grant and the Anna McMaster Memorial Scholarship while she completes her Bachelors of Fine Arts with emphasis on Art Education (BFAAE) at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Through performance and the re-activation of recycled materials, Bermudez’s work explores the complexities of migration, belonging and colorism within the Latinx community. Gomez manipulates alternative materials such as plastic, dry flowers and trash, to build sculptures, installations and fiber objects that imagine the immigrant’s journey within the United States. Through “occupational realism,” she chronicles her experience as a server by collecting ephemera, trash and imagery with the aim of exposing systems that view immigrants as invisible, disposable workers. 

Bryana Bibbs

BIO: Bryana Bibbs is a Chicago-based textile artist, painter, and art educator who earned her BFA with an emphasis in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work comes from her personal life, struggles with daily occurrences, the ultimate strive for comfort, and trying to figure out life one step at a time. She is the founder of “The We Were Never Alone Project – Weaving Workshops for Victims and Survivors of Domestic Violence”, a 2021/22 Chicago Artist Coalition HATCH Residency Artist, and serves on the Surface Design Association’s Education Committee.

ARTIST STATEMENT: The “Journal Series” is a body of work that documents my day-to-day life. Whether it be struggles with mental health, anxiety, or everyday events, The Journal Series allows me to create a visual narrative through the intuitive use of color, textures, and materials. Handwritten journaling has been a huge part of my life ever since I was 5 years old, so I look at these weavings as an extension of my handwritten journals. Each weaving was completed on a 15” wooden frame loom with materials that are all hand-carded and hand-spun by me.

Judith Brotman

BIO: Judith Brotman is a multidisciplinary artist from Chicago.   Her work includes mixed media installations and immersive environments which occupy a space between sculpture and drawing. Recent work incorporates language/text based conceptual projects which are meditations on uncertainty and the possibility of transformation.   Exhibitions include: Smart Museum, SOFA Chicago, Hampshire College, The Society of Arts & Crafts/Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Asphodel Gallery, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Threewalls, Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400, and The Illinois State Museum. Brotman’s work is in the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Illinois State Museum, and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection.

www.judithbrotman.com

@judithbrotman

ARTIST STATEMENT: My two individual works are component pieces from a much larger installation entitled “1001 Nights (More or Less).”  Each piece contains text from one or more book pages, including ones whose content have inspired, disturbed, or left me feeling ambivalent. All of the texts are re-configured and only close attention will allow you to access a title or author.  What does it mean when a text is taken out of context? How are we defined by the stories we carry, by the many words we have digested over time? I pose these questions without answers, believing any singular response to be partial or incomplete.

J. Carino

BIO: J. Carino is the pseudonym of a California-based figurative artist working in a variety of mixed-media. He is a graduate of Parsons School of Design and an award-winning illustrator and animator. His work explores the intersection of nature, sexuality, and being seen, especially as it relates to queer relationships and a sense of self.

www.jcarinoart.com

@j.carino.art

ARTIST STATEMENT: These works both explore the relationship between a queer sense of sexuality and self and the natural world. In “Lovers”, the two figures are abstracted into the leaves of an agave,which I use as an atypical fertility symbol, because it does not reproduce in a “traditional” male/female way. In “Pink”, a self-portrait, the figure emerges from the leaves, relaxed, gentle, but still provocative and direct, in a bold “feminine” pink. For queer people, there is often a dichotomy of wanting to be seen as a whole person, sexuality included, but also the fear of people seeing too much.

Selim Çinar

BIO: Turkey – 1988 / Ceramic Artist and Research Assistant

2010 Undergraduate - Abant İzzet Baysal University, Department of Painting Teacher.

2016 Master - Uşak University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Ceramic. Master thesis “The Use of Paraffin on Ceramic Surfaces”.

2021 Phd - Anadolu University, Institute of Fine Arts, Department of Ceramic. Phd thesis "Neolithic Figurine in Anatolian Ceramic and Its Eclectic Interpretation”.

He has had three solo ceramic exhibitions and participated in national and international exhibitions with ceramic artworks. He won eight awards and participates in various workshops on ceramic firing techniques.

@selimceramics

https://opensea.io/selimer

selimceramic@gmail.com

Facebook: Selim Cinar

ARTIST STATEMENT: Selim Çınar focuses on the hidden layers of all earthlings and the universe. The artist emphasizes that all aspects hidden under the persona are actually the truth of one and that the power of the universe is hidden under the shell. These are hidden layers. According to him, when we can see - when we can show these layers, we can more perceive existence and universe. The motto of him is "without fear - bravely - show - your inside". Selim benefited from philosophy, analytical psychology and geography, uses figurative and amorphous forms in his works in which he refers to the layers of consciousness and he shaping reliefs, holes and colored layers on ceramic surface with paraffin decoration technique (wateretching) and carving.

Autumn Elizabeth Clark

BIO:  Autumn Elizabeth Clark was born in 1989 and raised in Rhode Island. Clark started making photographs in high school and took classes at the Rhode Island School of Design before moving to Milwaukee, WI. Clark received their BFA in photography from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2011 before moving to Chicago, IL to receive their MFA from the University of Chicago in 2015. Clark works in an array of forms including digital and analog photography, collage, and video with a focus on sexual and gendered social constructs within the ideas of truth and manipulation.

ARTIST STATEMENT:  Fantasy plays a large role in my work with photography being a magical process with capturing light, lenses bringing things into focus that may have gone unnoticed and transforming the mundane and ordinary into otherworldly. Erotica is in its nature a fantasy, and is important in not only escapism but a way of processing one’s own desires and confronting “forbidden” ideas. Many of my processes have a violent nature, the use of cutting, tearing and erasing parts of the imagery which reinforces in my work how often various social structures abuse, manipulate and destroy those who live outside certain ideologies.

Matt Davis / Perfectly Acceptable Press

Perfectly Acceptable Press publishes short-run narrative artist books with an emphasis on synergy between content, craft, and form. Our aim is to create an object that pushes the boundaries of a zine without sacrificing accessibility or content. Perfectly Acceptable is run by Matt Davis out of Chicago, USA.

Poppy Dodge

BIO: Poppy Dodge is an abstract painter living and working in Petaluma, California. Poppy is a self proclaimed Color Maximalist who delights in creating harmony and balance using all the colors. She graduated with her BFA from Cal State University Hayward in 2004. In 2013, Poppy and her family grabbed an opportunity to move to Wellington, New Zealand. Heavily influenced by living on the sea, Poppy’s work shifted from playful narratives to brightly colored abstracts. After five years abroad, Poppy and her family relocated back to Northern California. Poppy can be found making art in her tiny home studio or out and about with her family. 

www.poppydodge.com

@poppydodgeart

ARTIST STATEMENT: My work is a tribute to improvisational quilting, a tradition I deeply admire. Like a memory quilt, with its unpredictable stacking of shapes and colors, my pieces reflect on places I explored as a child, and the people and adventures that populate my past. Warm and cool colors live harmoniously in my work, inspired by years of travel and living in places from the Sonoran Desert to New Zealand. These color memories are integral to my work and the optimistic energy it conveys. I like to think of my work as color celebrations; a stacking of playful color conversations joyfully stitching my life experiences together.

Dani Gonzalez

BIO: Dani Gonzalez is a queer art educator. They are currently 23 and reside in Richmond Virginia. Like many queer folk in their 20’s Gonzalez is searching for the meaning of home and love. Weaving through the balancing act of desiring both commitment and spontaneity is documented in their art and, or course, messy social media posts (Janedoesaint.)

ARTIST STATEMENT: Gonzalez’s Space Takers are made from fiber scraps woven around a spiral metal skeleton. The Space Takers frame and soft fibers allow them to collapse to near flatness or expand to a full fluffy body. Influenced by experiencing housing instability as a marginalized person Dani Gonzalez’s art is made to be portable and hideable. Misconceptions or disapproval of queerness robs the community of its space, time, and sense of security. These works were created not only from a survival necessity but also to bring comfort with their celebratory colors and soft bodies.

Sam Hensley

BIO: Sam Hensley is a storyteller and sculptor from Kentucky. She mends together little storybooks for tales of endearing yet unsettling creatures of varying sentience.  The telling of these stories is further aided by animatronic puppets that she constructs as vessels for her tragically friendly beings.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Little Like Yourself is a comic about a little creature. They're little and they're like yourself. The comic is accompanied here by Little Like Yourself, in the flesh, who came to our world to share their story. If you look closely you can see them breathing. 

Adrian Kahlo

BIO: Adrian Kahlo is a latinx artist and illustrator based in Houston, Texas. His drawings invoke the queer gaze through figurative work and homoeroticism. The work is largely influenced by a rich tradition of queer illustrators such as Tom of Finland, as well as participating in contemporary visual dialogues with artists like Andrew Salgado and Oliver Coipel. Working a clinical job with HIV+ patients and volunteering at a late-stage HIV hospice, Adrian works towards a degree in the art field and hopes to represent and inspire queer artists everywhere.

ARTIST STATEMENT: These two pieces, titled “Green” and “Blue” were inspired by a Tom of Finland aesthetic. Often working in warm tones, I decided to give green and blue a chance. The vibrancy of the colors added an element of surrealism. An erotic mushroom trip to a Tom of Finland fantasy world. 

Charlie Kater

BIO: Charlie Kater (1970, The Netherlands) received his Bachelors of Arts with a focus on sculpture and design at AKI Academy in Enschede NL, studied abroad in a fine arts exchange program at University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, GB, and received an Honours Bachelors of Education in Visual Arts & Design at University of Arts, Utrecht NL. He is a member of the Laren & Blaricum NL artist society, associated with the internationally acclaimed artist group “The Style/ De Stijl.” His work is currently in numerous private collections. Kater currently lives and works in Hilversum NL. 

www.charliekater.nl

ARTIST STATEMENT: Charlie Kater creates abstract, minimalist objects that are constructed in their own, artisanal way. They are mostly geometrical shapes which sometimes seem architectural. Material, size, colour and structure and a playful approach to those elements form the core of Charlie Kater's work with the aim of communicating intimately with the viewer. The intimacy is an important aspect of the form of the work itself. In the playful approach, size, color and material show both themselves and also hint at something else. This makes the works enigmatic, you don't really know what you're looking at. Charlie creates from a strong inner drive. His works are aimed to be a reflection on culture and (our) nature. He wishes to inspire, just as he is inspired by others.

Millicent Kennedy

BIO: Millicent Kennedy’s art practice collaborates with storied materials and time through performance, fiber, and book arts. The themes explored in her work often revolve around labor, desire and loss.

Kennedy co-curates at Parlour and Ramp Gallery in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago and has served as the Gallery Director at Rockford University, She currently teaches at Evanston Art Center and Lillstreet Art Center.

www.millicentkennedy.com

@millicentkennedystudios

ARTIST STATEMENT: The printed imagery of Delineate is pulled from a dream in which myself and multiple generations of women are sewing the cord of time with our actions. This notion of desired control was in fact chaos, creating a cumulative mound of tangled cord. Labor marking time is repeated in my work frequently, a reminder of the unknown hands of the past, as is the tangled cord to contrast linear time. The thread also references the Three Moirai Fates spinning, measuring and cutting the thread of human’s lives.  

Philippe Laferrière

BIO: Philippe Laferriere is a Visual Artist and Art Teacher based in Thessaloniki, Greece. Born in 1974 in Toulouse, France. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts (1992-1995), has a degree in History of Art and a Master in Classical Archaeology at the University of Aix-En-Provence (1995-1999). He is also graduated from the School of Visual and Applied Arts (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki).

The development of a survey about the painting of Macedonian Tombs brought him to Greece in 2000, where for a decade he worked as a conservator of works of art.

Since 2010, he took part in many group exhibitions and regularly shows his work through solo exhibitions and performances (action painting) in Thessaloniki, Athens and across Europe.

His work was exhibited in November 2017 for the 6th Biennale of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki. He is currently working as an Art Teacher in Public Primary School.

ARTIST STATEMENT: My work is a process of everyday drawing and painting on Indian handmade cotton paper which aims to picture through vivid colors and introspection the rawness and the essence of meditation. My subjects evolve along with references to Art History and observation of everyday life where I find my inspiration. Most of my works relate to Ancient Archeology, Symbolism, Suprematism, Fauvism, Cubism, Orphic Cubism, Surrealism and Dada. My purpose is to take the viewer in a colorful and optimistic journey where the soul could find peace and healing.

Pablo Martín

BIO: Self-taught painter and graphic designer. Exhibited in public venues in Argentina such as CC Borges, CC Paco Urondo, Palais de glace, etc. In 2009 he created Periódica along with his partner Florencia Fernandez Frank, producing shows, fairs and publications for underrecognized artists. He’s been an active member of Proyecto La Estrella (a socially inclusive project). He was invited to participate in art residencies in DF and Oaxaca (México), Tilcara and Salta (Argentina). In 2015 he obtained recognition under Drawing category at Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales. He exhibited internationally in Mexico, Austria, Germany, France and United States. Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

www.soypablomartin.com.ar

@pablomartin74

ARTIST STATEMENT: What moves me to work is the search for the human factor. For that I am nurtured by the art of native peoples, popular, outsider and African art. Although I feel that my roots are there, they are also in the present, which allows me to bring those resonances to a contemporary practice that includes objects, installations, graphics, as well as ceramics, murals, painting and drawing.
I choose to use tools and supports that bring me closer to the primal and visceral, to what is marked by time. For years I have been investigating the complexity within the archetypal form of the head, which are mask, face and object.

JJ McLuckie

BIO: Ecological illustrator, muralist, and handpoke tattoo artist living in Chicago, JJ McLuckie grew up at the confluence of two rivers, next to a woodland floodplain, and near a dolomite prairie. While there, they ran a landscaping business and thus most of their practice now involves studying ecologically stable landscaping practices compared to those standard in most home settings in order to restore soil and improve water retention. JJ volunteers with the forest preserves of Cook County and then applies those practices to residential spaces. They currently manage a wildlife habitat and living drawing reference focused on creating habitat for native plants and associated insect population in hopes of creating a seed bank within an urban ecosystem.

ARTIST STATEMENT: I primarily self-publish queer body-horror comics and zines based on observing biological patterns, destigmatizing gender/sexuality, and visually communicating emotion. Vibrant paintings are often portraits of the enjoyment of melancholy and vulnerability; these form the nucleus of which the varying mediums used revolve around. Color theory, design, and stylistic collage are always at the forefront of concepts and therefore are constantly shifting depending on what their most recent research happens to be. Each comic tends to be a vessel of a specific emotion or period in time and once it’s drawn I rarely think of it again unless as an outsider on the rare occasion i reread my own comics.

Chris Moody

BIO: Chris Moody is a queer artist from the Texas Hill Country currently living in Oregon. Moody has been making zines for the last decade and eventually started horse gurl press while living in West Virginia in 2015. These zines are a diy creation with the intention to spread beautiful visions, memories/archives, queer life documented, all the different artforms Moody creates, and just an overall love for life and the creation of tangible things in this crazy digital era we live in. <3

ARTIST STATEMENT: These 3 zines: 108, CELLULAR PICTURES, & wet woods of spring, represent three different approaches to art, life, and it's endless possibilities. 108 explores the theories and experiences around mystical numbers appearing in one's life, while CELLULAR PICTURES is a photographic diary of images remaining on my old ass cell phone, which its date doesn't continue past 2020 (the new y2k). Wet woods of spring, documents the more queer flow through life as it follows Candy Whoreholla (Moody's drag persona) through the woods as she hikes through the wilderness with friends. LOVE <3

Melissa Rodriguez-Mursch

BIO: Melissa Mursch-Rodriguez is a Milwaukee-based creative whose practice exists between the realms of fiber arts, zinemaking, poetry, and programming. She finds herself at the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender in her identities as a mixed chicana queer woman, which she examines through her practice. Regardless of the vehicle used, she hopes to share her identities and vulnerabilities and platform those of others in hopes of creating community and connection. One way she does this is through founding Moody, a monthly zine featuring work by queer and BIPOC creatives.

www.melissamurschrodriguez.com

@mmurrod

www.moodythezine.com

@moodythezine

ARTIST STATEMENT: Moody is a monthly handmade zine publication made up of artist contributions with an emphasis on queer and BIPOC creatives. Each month Moody features six new creatives from across the country and world. Featured artists share not only images of work, but stories, poems, notes on their creative process, QR codes to online content, and whatever else has been on their minds. Importantly, all of Moody’s contributors are paid for their work.

The personal is political, and Moody hopes to create radical community through sharing the personal vulnerabilities of queer and BIPOC creatives with each other and others.

Andrea Myers

BIO: Andrea Myers received her BFA in Printmedia in 2002 and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies in 2006 both from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Hyde Park Art Center, Toledo Museum of Art, Steven Zevitas Gallery, and the Columbus Museum of Art, and coGalleries. Recent exhibitions include her first solo museum exhibition, Neon Speed, at the Textil und Rennsport Museum, Hohenstein-Ernstthal, Germany.  Andrea was one of five 2011 Efroymson Fellowship recipients and has also been awarded artist’s grants from the City of Chicago, the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council.  

ARTIST STATEMENT: Fabric surrounds us. It is on our bodies, in our space, and moves with us. In my work, I translate found, donated and repurposed fabrics into densely patterned fabric installations and picture planes.  Using the language of color field painting combined with a gestural and a bit rebellious approach to quilt making, disparate color combinations, organic formations and shifting shapes merge. Zigzags of fabric brush strokes pulse on and off the wall, building a soft geometry, transcending the original form and function of the fabric.

Juan Narowé

BIO: Juan Narowé (Brazil, 1993) is a Barcelona-based visual artist working within the field of drawing and graphic art.

His recent exhibitions include ‘One Long Party’ at Taca Studio, Palma de Mallorca; ‘Meca presents Juan Narowé’, at Meca Gallery, São Paulo; ‘Morreu’, at Orbit Space, Tokyo.

His works were also included in collective institutional exhibitions such as Muestra De Arte Joven En La Rioja, Logroño; FIF International Photography Festival, Belo Horizonte; Tokyo Art Book Fair, Tokyo; New York Art Book Fair, New York. Has art books published by Santa Rosa in Argentina and by Meli-Melo Press, Plana and Cosac Naify in São Paulo.

ARTIST STATEMENT: For the exhibition in Fluffy Crimes, I selected two drawings on paper made within a series that I have carried out over the last four years, in which I analyze culture through the image of the table as a human phenomenon, this place that generates social interaction but also reflection.

Vanessa Navarrete

BIO: Vanessa Navarrete was born in 1976 in St. Augustine, Florida. She graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998 and has exhibited in Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, and New York. Her work was recently published in New American Paintings, curated by Henriette Huldisch, chief curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

ARTIST STATEMENT: My paintings could be described as psychological landscapes inspired by the paradoxical nature of being a human today. 

Tykeith Nelson

BIO: I’m TyKeith L Nelson, I’ve been a professional creator of images for 14 years. I'm forever learning and passionate about bringing people together. Portraits are my favorite. I consider myself an emotional photographer. That comes from different family experiences I had in life.

www.tykeithlnelson.com

ARTIST STATEMENT: Photography has long been the way that I find beauty in his world, beauty that transforms pain into possibility I consider myself an artist with a lens in hand, I try to find the light in dark places, illuminating healing and hope.I'm also an avid marathoner. I run marathons in countries in which I want to photograph.

Marco Antonio Núñez

BIO: Marco Antonio Núñez is a visual artist from Concepción, Chile. His work ranges between analog collage, film, and art research. He is the founder of the CECOLL Collage Study Center. He also teaches collage's workshops: history, portraits and landscapes. His work has participated in various exhibitions, including Galería Clandestina, Universidade do Papel and the Anthology of Collage Chileno 2020. He has published research articles for Kolaj Magazine. During 2021 he premiered his first film: AL MAR, which has participated in various film festivals in Spain, Chile and South Africa.

ARTIST STATEMENT: What happens if you make collage in the same week that you see films by Paul Verhoeven and Pier Paolo Pasolini? This series of men in fantasy landscapes are a response to the author's sexual expression. Romanticizing the desire that, at times, finds its fullness in nature and at other times is censured by the heritage of spanish culture.

Boris Ostrerov

BIO: Boris Ostrerov earned a BFA in Painting from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and an MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Ostrerov has exhibited widely and has earned several opportunities including showing at AREA Gallery, Slow Gallery, Paris London Hong Kong (PLHK), and Lubov Gallery.  He has been featured in publications including New American Paintings #119 and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  Ostrerov’s painting was included in the New American Paintings show at the Elmhurst Art Museum in 2016.  Ostrerov currently lives in Chicago.

@boris.ostrerov

ARTIST STATEMENT: I am inspired by the suppression and release of energy and emotion.  I use layers of thick raw paint (often squeezed from a cake decorating bag) that run into, over and under each other in a dynamic battle confined to the rectangular support. I think about the many drives, emotions, and forces that are constantly battling each other within our minds and bodies. The paint emerges and protrudes off the surface seeking to go beyond or break free from the confines of the substrate.  This physicality encourages exploration and discovery and hints at the layers of the psyche.

Marcie Paper

BIO: Originally from New England, Marcie Paper is an artist currently living and working in the Hudson Valley. Marcie makes, paintings, patterns, murals, and stop-animated films that investigate the track and significance of short-term memory.   She received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2006. Since then she has been awarded a number of residencies, and has shown her work nationally.

Solo shows include, 1708 Gallery in Richmond Virginia, Seton Gallery at the University of New Haven, in New Haven Connecticut, Tin Lark Gallery in Los Angeles, and the Crisp-Ellert Museum in St. Augustine, Florida.

ARTIST STATEMENT: I believe that sense-memories and nostalgic responses can generate and offer a different view of our personal histories. While less reliable, less responsible, more fleeting and more subjective, they are also more precious.

I collect, abstract, and layer the details of my daily.  Attempting to preserve and learn from, my short-term memories, I operate with the assertion that memories find their importance in the whole rather than in the sum of their parts. By embedding paintings with specific details that may have been lost otherwise, I am working to supplant more of these moments; in hopes of concocting future sense memory experiences.

Austin Reilly

BIO: Austin Reilly lives in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago and makes oil paintings and drawings. He began his work as a means of self-care, and hopes it might contain something others see in themselves. This is the first time his art has been shown, and he is incredibly excited about it. 

@apoignantpear

ARTIST STATEMENT: “Go on.”

“In the dream I’m playing tik tak toe with him and the vein under his right eye is beating in 3/4 time. He’s whispering things to me and I’m getting scared.”

“What’s he saying?” 

“He’s saying… the cost of prime will go up. And his presidency is pre-ordained. That they’ve just cracked the WEATHER.”

“Why does that scare you?”

 “It makes me feel helpless. Like the sky is getting dark, and somehow all I want is to catch a raindrop on my tounge and ride the lightning.”

“Okay, let’s step back.”

“Yes. My joints are starting to ache.”

Charles E. Roberts III

BIO: Charles E. Roberts III is an artist living in Chicago, Illinois. For twenty years they worked primarily in video, photography, assemblage and installation. Recently they've returned to their first love, drawing.

www.charlesroberts3.com

@charlesroberts3

ARTIST STATEMENT: "Percival's Wet Dream" is from a series of Arthurian apparitions that were encountered in adolescence and are now being committed to paper in middle age. 

Breanna Robinson

BIO: Breanna (she/her) was born and raised on Chicago’s South Side where she currently lives and works. She earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2017. Breanna has shown work at The Silver Room, Free Range Gallery, WeSpace Gallery, and SAIC Sullivan Galleries in Chicago, among others.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Breanna is a multidisciplinary artist who’s work engages various themes including nostalgia, femininity, media and technology in the context of Black American culture, history, and traditions. Her work manifests mainly through printmaking, although she often utilizes collage, painting, html, and sewing. Luella is a screenprint that depicts a nostalgic and ethereal scene where two black girls are jumping rope on a sunny summer day.  It is hand embellished with a mohair trim. The homes shown are on the 8400 block of south Luella avenue on Chicago’s south east side, where the artist spent her childhood. 

Zakia Rowlett

BIO: Zakia is an Experimental Artist practicing Graphic design, Printmaking, and Craftsmanship. Her work focuses on bringing her emotion and relationship with herself/ how she exists within the world out by using expression through color, texture, and Typography.  Zakia's creations take on the form of screen prints, digital art, and hand lettering, where she spends intimate time giving personality to letters. Or carefully mixing a color that captures a vibrant emotion. 

All in all she aims to explore the dynamism of her being, and coexisting with others through these practices. 

ARTIST STATEMENT: The two pieces represented were two cases that relate to how she had been feeling at moments of time in her past. "The Blues was bleeding the same blood as me", came to mind during a time she was pondering on the relationship between music as an outlet for black people during hardship. "Double Edge Sword" speaks to her mentality about there being a consequence to all things, not negative or positive but more so how every choice comes with a response. It also plays on her thoughts about self reflection. 

David Rustile

BIO: Self described Pomo Homo Boho Schlomo, David is a 51 year old veteran of life as well as sometimes photographer, zine maker, and enthusiast of queer history and vintage smut. He currently makes his living as a male nurse/Santa impersonator. David lives with his husband Steven and tiny dogs; Mr.Crouton and Buddy Pickles in scenic West Rogers Park.

ARTIST STATEMENT: These zines are reprints of the last two copies I have of a visual chronicle of my young queer punk life. Stories and photos of old lovers, homocore bands and young art f*g pretentiousness live side by side of these xeroxed pages.

Salix

BIO: Salix is a graphic artist living and working in the city of Chicago.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Salix works in both the digital and printed mediums to explore shape, color, and archetypal symbols combined into compositions based on anything from archaic color theory to 2am infomercial nostalgia.

Martin Severinson

BIO: I made my Art studies in the 90´s plus two and a half year studies of philosophy at the university. I´m a multidisciplinary artist and My practice in art is closely connected to the stated question. I choose the technique I find most fitted for the purpose to explore and express the area I´m processing. That has resulted in works of photography, painting, graphics, textile, comics and installations. Since the mid 90´s I’ve been producing artworks and exhibitions. 

ARTIST STATEMENT: The "Eyespeaker"-artbook is a collection of work made from the question "How much expression can be accomplished in a face if I use the broadest brush and wettest ink?". While the faces were made they seemed to speak a little text. I listened to the faces and let their texts be part of the expression. The texts are both reflections of our present times but foremost reflections of being human. 

Melon Sprout

BIO: Melon Sprout lives and works in Chicago, IL. Melon currently focuses on making and performing with their large-scale ceramic sculptures, and enjoys collaborating within and apart from their ceramic instrument work. Melon is an active member of the ceramics and performance community in Chicago, and actively shares their studio in Humboldt Park with collaborators and fellow ceramic artists. Melon has shown work with spaces including The Justice Hotel (6018 North), Fulton Street Collective, My Dreams These Days, Side Street Studio Arts, and Agitator Gallery.

ARTIST STATEMENT: I use ceramic instruments to adapt the body I was given to extend and abstract the form I was assigned. By relating performatively and bodily to the vessels I create, I work the clay to express its trans*ness through call and response. Viewer activation through vocalization promotes individuality in viewership and sound, interaction changing depending upon each viewer. My work uses viewership and the viewer's surrounding forms of communication to extend and abstract what is assigned, in an effort to engage others in nonverbal musical communication.

Sanna Stabell

BIO: A self-taught artist, Sanna Stabell was born and raised in the United States, Sanna spent her early years in Minnesota and later moved to Arizona. Nature and animals are an essential key to her happiness and influence her work, which often takes on a childlike feel. Her work has been featured in several publications including Friend of the Artist, Al-Tiba 9 and Southwest Contemporary Art Magazine. She will be in the upcoming exhibition “Hyphenated” at the University of Wisconsin Crossman Gallery.Sanna is the founder of the Collective of Women Artists (COWA) and the Cathartic Art Movement (CAM).

ARTIST STATEMENT: These pieces were developed with the intent of creating an interplay between visual elements that enhances the non-visual (emotive) elements of the artwork. Components comprised of a full color spectrum intertwine with relatively monochromatic backdrops in order to force a push-pull aspect within the artwork and allow depth for the emotions of the central characters.  The character expressions work within this dynamic and ideally develop an ambiguity that asks the viewer to question the initial impressions of the scene as well as create their own narrative regarding what they are seeing.  

Brad Stumpf

BIO: Brad Stumpf is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist from St. Louis, Missouri. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2015. 

www.bradstumpf.com

@bradstumpf

ARTIST STATEMENT: My paintings function like miniature stage sets; they are small in scale and consist of arrangements of handmade objects organized to depict lust, love, and expectation with visual poetry. The handmade objects within these paintings consist of paper birds, butterflies, drawings, and notes that add an additional layer of encapsulated thought. It is the poetry of the everyday, and love for my wife, that has proven to be a rich source of inspiration for my work. I want my paintings to function like an open door to a quiet room for which you can peek into, or the stage-set of a play halfway through.

Valeria Terrazas

BIO: Valeria Terrazas (1995) is a Chicago based Mexican artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking. She obtained her BFA at Fort Hays State University. She is the gallery assistant at Oliva gallery. Prior to moving to Chicago, she was involved with the Downtown Vision Banner Walk for six years, an organization in Garden City, Kansas, dedicated to bringing art and funding to the community. Her work will be in a two-person show at Oliva Gallery in the spring of 2022. She also plays saxophone in Barry & the Fountains, a band which performs in the Midwestern USA. 

ARTIST STATEMENT: Terrazas is interested in making paintings and drawings about self-identity, past memories, depression, and “because I wanted to.” She creates colorful stories, utilizing a blend of realism and illustrative techniques to make her images striking and eye-catching. She applies numerous layers of paint, often in the form of thin transparent shapes, representing the nuances of the ideas and emotions stemming in her mind from the subjects she paints.

Martha Thorn

BIO: Martha Thorn is a full-time painter residing in Raleigh, NC. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in Graphic Design from Western Carolina University. Golden Belt Arts in Durham awarded Thorn a fully-funded artist residency. Over the past 15 years, she has exhibited work in group and solo exhibitions at Cameron Art Museum, GreenHill, The Carrack Modern, and other venues throughout the Southeast.

ARTIST STATEMENT: The pieces I am exhibiting at Mana Contemporary continue examining the tension between chaos and control by using visual metaphors and juxtaposing poured, painterly forms with graphic lines and planes. In addition, I will always remain committed to an intuitive painting process, and this work reflects the dynamic nature of that approach.

Jamie Tubbs

BIO: After an early and far too long pseudo-career in Christian ministry, where I stood out as an artist of the most subversive and starving kind, I left and decided to start making large wooden frame looms, weaving and playing with recycled fabrics, tension, draping, color, fabric dyes, and learning about the world of making, selling and exhibiting art. I discovered art was both a medicine and a microphone for me. I've continued my education, just shy of receiving an Associates in Fine Art from City Colleges, and about to embark on a Masters in Social Work, with the hopes of integrating my love for creative solutions to social problems and the healing work of a personal art practice. 

ARTIST STATEMENT: How To Be Selfish is my offering to anyone leaving high demand groups or relationships. I hope it can be like some spiritual Neosporin. It was for me. It includes writing, watercolor, photos of textile work and sketches. 

Your Kids Don't Need That #1 School is an argument for investing in an average school. Chicago's parents have a culture of battling to get your kid into "the best school" which I think is kind of garbage for everyone involved and affected. I have 3 kids, who attend their neighborhood school. 

Georgie Vargemezi

BIO: Georgie Vargemezi is a visual artist, art historian & founder/editor of ALKALI, the independent arts magazine showcasing women artists. Her work encompasses fresh perspectives, be it regarding material and/or color, and utilizes balance and schemata that share visual references with casualism. Georgie employs this new mode of abstraction to share feelings and thoughts concerning not only personal happenings, but also sociopolitical matters of the 21st Century.

ARTIST STATEMENT: In these two pieces, 'Perhaps what dreams could be made of' and 'Fields' , I am adopting an energetic, colorist method with a casualistic lack of formal cohesion in order to convey emotions concerning a childhood where 'play' was lacking. Instead of morbid or sorrowful, these two pieces are full of joy and hope - two feelings that have positive perseverance and permancence. Utilizing a mixed media approach in both artworks creates an almost hodgepodge, relaxed visual statement.

Brooke Wandall

BIO: Abstract artist from scranton, Pa, I attended Marywood Univeristy graduated in 2007 with a BFA  in painting. Won the st Luke medal for excellence in art. I have been selling and teaching art since 2010. My work has been in a movie, several art books and lives all over the world! 

ARTIST STATEMENT: I am submitting two abstract floral pieces reminiscent of my terrarium series where the vessel has as much interest and transparency as the flowers. 

Hope Wang

BIO: Hope Wang is a Chicago-based artist, arts facilitator, and poet. Contending with sloppy traces of human activity around sites of industrial labour, her work considers the ways architectural spaces become artifacts of memory. She hosts and operates LMRM, a floor loom rental resource for Chicago fiber artists. She received her BFA (2018) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a 2021 recipient of the gener8tor Art Accelerator Program Grant. She has attended the Digital Weaving Lab Residency at Praxis Fiber Workshop; The Weaving Mill WARP Residency; and Spudnik Press Cooperative Fellowship.

ARTIST STATEMENT: These paintings are made entirely of pigmented paper fibers that were applied onto another sheet of hand-pulled paper during the papermaking process. Their form also references the sloppy gestural qualities of human detritus in space. 

Ellen Weider

BIO: Ellen Weider is a native New Yorker living in Manhattan. MFA, Pratt Institute, BA, Hunter College. Weider’s work is included in many collections including the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC; Rutgers Print Study Archive, Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ; and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Art Collection, NYC. Her catalog “E.W. Squared: Ellen Weider Drypoint Prints” is in the collection of the Widener Library, Harvard University. Recent shows: “Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love,” The Painting Center, NYC; “Rock, Wood, Paper Scissors,” Lockwood Gallery, Kingston, NY; “Ellen Weider: Art About Art,” Equity Gallery, NYC.

www.ellenweider.com

@ellenmweider

ARTIST STATEMENT: The images in my paintings float in a mysterious, ambiguous space. They explore issues of isolation and connection; whether they are interpreted as pure abstractions or as self-contained narratives, an ironic humor with a meditative, existential, transcendental bent informs them.

Ayshe-Mira Yashin

BIO: Ayshe-Mira Yashin (she/her) is an 18-year-old Jewish & Muslim lesbian artist from Istanbul and Nicosia, studying illustration art at UAL Camberwell in London. Her art explores themes such as witchcraft, spirituality, the occult, and sapphic love and intimacy. Her most recent project is the Sapphic Enchantress Tarot Deck, a tarot deck representing queer and femme bodies, exploring divine femininity. She runs a small business selling her tarot deck, as well as handmade notebooks, art prints, stickers and more.

www.ayshemira.com

@illustrationwitch

ARTIST STATEMENT: In my art, I aim to depict women existing in their bodies in a "feminist utopia", with the total absense of a male gaze, and free from the constraints and norms imposed upon them in a misogynistic and homophobic society. Through the depiction of women in natural environments, depicting the women melting into their surrounding plants and natural bodies, I wanted to challenge the notion that queer love is "unnatural", as well as representing my eco-feminist vision in my art. 

Alice Zakharenko

BIO: Alice Zakharenko is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist from Memphis, Tennessee. She is currently working towards her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Welcome to My Emotional Portfolio explores the repetition of collected words and phrases from months of recording passing thoughts throughout the day. The repetition embodies the techniques used in mantras and affirmations, thus forcing the reader to spend more time within the space and the complex messages that lie within.