Allison Turcios
Houston Christian University

Mixed Media on Birch Wood Panel
24x30
$770

Recently, my time in the studio has been dedicated to creating dreamlike visions and abstractions of the natural world that interact with the dichotomy of life and death. These works are made using printmaking methods combined with mixedmedia elements, and themes from scripture are the foundation. Using personal photographs and intimate experiences, I choose my subject and build my work around it by applying gel transfers to birch panel. Expressive and intentional marks in dry media allow the subject to emerge from the distorted transfer. This sets the framework for the surface to become adorned with texture mediums and handmade paper, then elevated through washes of acrylic and ink.

The layered and textured process hints at the depth and complexity of my life, while the references to nature help to draw a parallel to the spiritual transformation of blooming and becoming. Through the symbolism associated with a certain flower, the energy within a brush stroke, or the emotion of contrasting colors, these are the facets that aid in the composition of a visual story. This story illustrates the experience of rebirth after seasons of sorrow and death. It is often expressed through my work in flourishing gardens or lush blooms and sometimes juxtaposed with scenes of a muted, dying landscape. As the narrative within the painting unfolds a spark of revelation is revealed; I was growing all along. The intent behind each creation is that it displays the spiritual being unveiled through the natural, conveying how the relationship between the two reflects my experiences with faith.

Archit Karkare
University of North Texas

3D printed Photopolymer Resin, Paint
8 x 10.5 x 11.5 in.
$500

My work mainly focuses on two avenues; first, character and scene design and second, organic forms that mimic the motion of fluids, both with an underlying concept of depicting motion in a particular instance. My topic of interest includes the behavioral motion of substances that range from the behaviors of fluid substances to the behavior of organic materials and social behaviors and interactions between humans and animals. Some of my recent interest of research include: the exploitation of magnetic putty to create kinetic sculptures, use of light and shadow to expand the sculpture beyond the physical limitations and merging the virtual and real world through augmented reality and holographic projections.

My artistic practice involves the creation of digital mockups using 3D modelling and sculpting software such as Blender and Maya, and then deriving construction files from it to create the final sculpture in any decided material using 3D printers or CNC machines. I also tend to incorporate multiple materials such as wood and acrylic or steel, foam and epoxy, utilizing them to either achieve interesting visual dynamic or as a structural component to include variety in my sculptures.

Some of my biggest heroes and inspirations are Lynda Benglis, H.R. Giger, Cajsa Von Zeipel, Anila Quayyum Agha, Dan Lam, Louise Bourgeois and David Knopp. I am inspired by the history of capturing motion beginning in the mid 19th century with photography and later with motion pictures and stop-motion animations. My goal is to provide a new experience by enabling the viewers to interact with the “Frozen Objects” in three-dimensional space.

Ashleigh Buchanan
Houston Christian University

acrylic on canvas
30”x24”x3/4”
NFS

In my work, I seek to communicate to the viewer my own psychological, emotional, and spiritual experiences as well as the sacred connection between the feminine and nature. My work explores ideas of the divine feminine, mental illness, generational trauma through created archetypes, using found photographs and objects as inspiration. Animals feature frequently as symbols for different parts of myself. I create intimate portraits of the people in my own life as well as ceramic altars built to honor the divinity of woman. I also use surrealistic collage as a way to bring together these ideas. When someone views my work, I hope to give that viewer a moment to be still and experience the sacredness of life.

Atinuke Adeleke
University of North Texas

Maple Plywood, Recycled cotton yarn, Pewter, Wood Dye, tufting cloth
20” x 18” x 1”
$635

My work pays homage to my tribe of origin, Yoruba, whilst redefining and exploring the hybridity that exists as a result of cross-cultural influences that are prominent in our world today.

My artistic practice centers around personal history, connection and identity. I reflect on my experience as a Nigerian who has lived on three continents thus far and how those experiences have led to the deconstruction, reassembly and hybridization of my identity.

I incorporate varying objects and materials such as jewelry, sculpture, wood, metal and fiber. This integration speaks to the multicultural existence of the world I live in, the interrelationship between Nigeria and the West.

I use symbolic motifs from my culture of origin and from my daily experience as a cosmopolite, to speak on personal struggles and achievements that arise from these moments of intersections.

Aubrey Barnett
University of Texas - Arlington

Blown and hand finished glass
each is 6” x 6” x 6”
$1,000 SOLD

My work explores the human condition. It studies personal identity and provokes the viewer to consider their past and shared human experience.

This work looks at time's effect on memory, and degradation of childhood and innocence. Like a never-ending game of telephone, each time a memory is recalled it is distorted. This phenomenon is known as the Decay Theory. The exaggeration and enlargement of pieces from childhood act as a metaphor for aggrandizement, inaccuracies in memory, and the slow distortion and erosion of memories over time. By presenting these hyperbolized objects I am provoking a sense of distorted nostalgia which draws attention to the fallibility of memory.

I also wish to spread joy. Everyone deserves to smile, and everyone deserves to play. I wanted to make giant candy, so I did!

Avery Silliman
Abilene Christian University

Iron Casting, Welded Steel, Acrylic, Semi Gloss Spray
10" X 13.75" X 6.75" (15 lbs)
$1,670

My work alludes to the ora of a greater presence through the characteristics of veils and natural forms. I am curious about how we as humans interact with our surroundings and how these momentary engagements can change the trajectory of our lives. These momentary engagements are stitched together throughout time, orchestrating a personal and universal veil. This veil is where we engage with a higher place, where wonder and mystery coexist. In my work, I derive materials and compositions from historic and symbolic influences that describe a higher place interacting with its viewers.

I noticed this cultural obsession with moving in a direction, usually up or forward. I wonder if this obsession comes from a place of spiritual dehydration where we crave to be in a higher place. If we are not careful we will forget to notice the surrounding water that holds us and reminds us that movement is, not that movement does, it’s the dance in the water, the clumsy splashes, and the mystery of the deep that captivate us in inexplicable ways. My work proposes abstract instances of these higher places from multiple perspectives and origins which invite viewers to engage with the intangible through a tangible but conceptual work of art. As I investigate the personal and universal microcosms that exist between the natural and spiritual realms, I invite viewers to notice the beauty and power in the unknown.

Brendan Flores
Houston Christian University

Pine, acrylic rods and sheet, stain
9” x 9” x 25”
NFS

I appreciate straight lines, symmetry, and precision. However, I find my inspiration in the things I see and the situations I experience, where such qualities are generally sparse. Life, nature, and experiences are all messy concepts. My work is the way I assuage my inner desire to smooth the messy into the precise. Each cube is a box that stores my thoughts, emotions, ideas, and once that cube is placed into a work, that is where those feelings live. These emotions are not locked away in some part of me, rather, they are placed in the open to be considered by myself and my audience. Through this open dialogue, I am creating my own abstract language to represent subjective organic themes through rigid and exacting forms.

Carter Cordes
University of North Texas

Oil paint on canvas board
11”x14”
$600 SOLD

Over the last few years, I’ve been interested in native Texans’ relationships with their State. With that in mind, I’ve been painting a series of portraits of people in my life from Texas and talking to them about their identity as Texans.

My work examines what the future generation of Southerners, particularly Texans, look like. Being a native Texan, I’ve heard the opinion that all Texans think the same way and come from the same background. As a young progressive Texan, I want to celebrate the diverse and open-minded population of Texas that is often overshadowed by the State’s history and continuation of hatred. To achieve this in my art, I take subjects from my life that display the diversity of backgrounds that can be found, especially at a University. I then dress them in western clothing, cowboy hats, and boots and paint them like that.

So far, the work has consisted of representative portrait-centered work, referencing each person’s life story. However, in the future, I am interested in adding more still life or not representative elements to my pieces.

Charlie King
Sam Houston State University

Digital Illustration
13 x 19
$250

My photography and artistic practice takes a close look at the human form and how each body and person is entirely unique but interconnected simultaneously. This work is a reflection of myself, my mental health, and my queer identity. As a transgender and queer individual, my work reflects my identity, struggles, and joy that comes from my identity. I work closely with the human form to show unique work about the body. My artwork explores connectiveness and individuality of people and the human condition. Entry

Chenxi Gao
University of North Texas

Screen print on BFK paper, colored pencil on tracing paper, transparency overlay
9” by 6”
$100 SOLD

My recent works meditate on my relationship with my family and hometown through the lenses of memories. What do I remember, why do I keep thinking about them, and how are they affecting my behavior today? I look at my experiences critically and pay special attention to the changes that happened and are happening over time.

I use origamis as metaphors, both the final products and the process of making them. Naturally, it connects to childhood and playing: I learned to make them from my mother as a child. I like to fold paper to keep my fingers busy while thinking. I am interested in their structure of them. Parts of the paper are hidden in the folds, like how I hid my past experiences. When I moved from my hometown Laiwu, a small town in the north of China, to the mega-city Nanjing in the south at seven, I tried my best to appear like my classmates. No more hand-made clothing, homemade furniture, and my northern accent. The memories are both preserved and hidden from everyone outside of my family.

Moreover, the origamis fold and unfold, and so do memories when they get stored or recalled. Similarly, my attitudes toward my hometown, family, and memories fold, unfold, and sometimes flip over as I ponder upon them. I long to reunite with my hometown, but it has changed dramatically. I held on to the child-like dependence on my mother, but I have grown up. The relationship is changing.

My pieces visualize my thinking process and help me to untangle my thoughts. When I make the prints, I spend time with the images from my memory and make new connections. I have some rough plans for the pieces in the beginning. However, more often they “unfold” naturally into what they are. For example, In What to Keep, the plastic sheet and the piece of paper with dates were unplanned. The idea came to me when I realized that the portrait of my mother got very abstracted after states of translating: from the photo to the drawing on the paper crane, and to the screen-printed image. Even if I laminate the photograph to protect it, the memory fades. Do I keep the photograph, the memory, or the relationship recorded in this photo?

After all, my current works are personal, but may or may not be relatable to the general audience. I translate my experience into visual representations through the material, imageries, and processes. They function as the starting point of conversation: with myself or others. Eventually, I want to be healed from being forced to hide by revealing the hidden parts.

Arthur Mangum
Sam Houston State University

Xerox transfer and woven paper
12” x 16”
$100

My work deals with themes of loneliness, abandonment, betrayal and isolation stemming from early childhood and my early relationships in life. Although I‘m not a photographer, my work is mainly photobased. I begin by either choosing or creating photos I connect with on a visceral level and that connect to my core. Sometimes they are of strangers, or sometimes it is images from pop culture. In any way, the activities or emotions depicted in the photos always resonate with me deeply, and usually connect to my childhood and adolescent years as a young adult in some way or another.

Through my selection and handling of each piece, I try to explore and uncover the true emotion. What is “my truth” in what is depicted on that photo at that moment in time? I use mark making techniques and xerox techniques to shift the visual focus, evoke certain moods, reveal hidden meaning and help me connect on a deeper level with the subject matter.

Cheyanne Reyes
San Antonio College

Silver Gelatin Photograph
8x10
$180

I’m a black and white street photographer in San Antonio, Texas. With my work, I try to focus on capturing the people of San Antonio as well as the hidden art that blends into everyday life. I started working with film photography in my first semester of photography, I am now in Photo 2, growing and challenging what I know and like. I hope to create something that hopefully gives the audience a chance to sit and take apart my work to find your own meaning or create your own story that means something to you.

Constance Yowell
Houston Christian University

Acrylic and collage on canvas
30 in x 24 in x 2 in
$750 SOLD

I was once content to live in a idealistic bubble of comfortable inaction. Choosing to go back to school to study art, and then experiencing the upheaval of the last few years has made it clear than there is no going back to that delusion. I realized along the way that my silence on matters that are important to me have robbed me of my voice. Art has become a form of communication to deal with ideas that I struggle to convey with words. My art focuses on the absurdities in our culture, that I cannot unsee. My creative process is rooted in the use of myth and metaphor to highlight the inconsistencies in our modern society; I use the beauty of the natural world to contrast the decay of culture and urbanization. By creating work that combines both figurative images and abstraction, I play with the absurdity in the world around us while searching for the hope out of the way things are.

I am inspired by using recycled materials to illustrate contradictions in our way of thinking about important issues. This transformation of waste materials into beauty speaks to the redemption of what is lost. Through my work I am searching for the deeper ties that connect us to each other, beyond the fault lines and borders in our culture. In my pursuit to find my own voice, I look to create visual stories that convey the beauty and dignity of marginalized individuals and help tell their story.

We are all seeking for a safe place to get lost in.

Dreana Booker
Houston Christian University

Chalk Pastel on Stonehenge
36 x 24 x 36
$850

As an artist, I believe it’s a necessity to make art consecrated to the people you love. With my works of art, I want to capture the experience of making the best of what you have; of being grateful for family and friends who relate to you and support you, and for the moments that you share with the people that you love. “Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.” Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

I want to capture the intensity of these moments that we as a family cherish so dearly. I frequently recall these experiences and the intense emotions I felt during those times. I remember the chemistry of community bonding that began with my mother, Ms. Garrilyn Booker who helped to create and keep around me a safe creative space in which I could make my art. I want to capture the intensity of these moments that we as a family cherish so dearly.

Ellis Barber
Baylor University

Steel, Wood
10” x 14” x 42”
$800 SOLD

As a sculptor I primarily work with wood and metal. I feel drawn to these materials given their easy ability to gather and create art. They teach me to create work with limited tools and space. I particularly enjoy combining the two elements in my sculptures, feeling their surfaces contrast and interact with each other. Wood is very given to more fluid forms and organic shapes, with the grain, cracks, and blemishes adding to their unrefined and natural appearance. Metal represents rigid, geometric structures. It can either be sanded, polished, and refined to a high sheen or beaten and formed into shapes with character. The malleability and range of function of wood and metal, however, allows me to switch these roles and work the materials to my need and vision.

Gabriella Vian
Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi

Cast Aluminum Sculpture
9 1/2 x 12 1/2 x 7 1/2
Not for Sale

My pathway towards the arts started as far as I could pick up crayons and decorate anything I could find! It never mattered to me that it was walls or a wooden toy chest. Even as a toddler I wanted to express my creativity and I was stubborn about my own opinions. Originally from Brainerd Minnesota and currently being a part of the Coastal Bend for over fourteen years, it still has not stopped my creativity. In fact, my family and friends encouraged me to follow what I have always done, creating art.

With each project, my skill set is increasing, my knowledge is expanding, and my value for the arts deepens over time. With my work and process, it becomes meditative as I wonder, feel, and understand the materials. This becomes more than an object but rather a piece of myself that I show to you. Within myself and my work, I reflect not on just my childhood or those who support me, but what reminds me of comfort, process, and the idea of bearing my soul to those who set eyes upon my artwork.

In Nature’s Fingerprint, there was growth, fear, and challenges; from craving the sand mold, pouring the metal, and to wood burning the surface. It became this reflection on myself, my relationship between the design, materials, and even the the process. In nature, especially in the inspiration of an emerald, there is never a duplicate and with the concept of individuality, not one person is the same as the other. No relationship, artwork, and people, there is no one who is exactly the same as the other. In the nature of an emerald, it leaves fingerprint marks, reminding us to embrace each other, our differences, our similarities, and to cherish what is being given.

Ginger Gore Russell
Stephen F Austin State University

Photography
19 x 27, framed
$1,800 SOLD

13 x 19, unframed
$600

My Mother‘s Daughter (God is Alive, Magic is Afoot) is a series of figurative color photographs set in a natural environment. Using myself as a model, each image is a portion of a larger story being told about a woman within this natural landscape.

This series began gestating in 2019 as I was approaching midlife. At that time, I started to write and reflect on what it meant to be a woman at this age. I had a deep desire to express certain struggles and unmet expectations in my life and relationships. This work celebrates womanhood, feminine energy, beauty and the ability to survive life’s challenges against great odds. My mother passed away in 2008 at the age of 55. As I approach the same age as my mother at the time of her of death, I realize that reaching midlife is a crown of victory. I am still vital, like other women my age, and have much life yet to live and wisdom to offer others.

I choose to have this female character be represented primarily as a nude figure to illustrate her vulnerability and expose my mid-life body for what it is today, imperfections and all. In this nakedness there exists an openness and willingness to be unguarded with no need to hide behind outward projections that come from costume or clothing.

All of the work in this series is photographed on land that I inherited from my mother, so the land is as important as the figure. The land and the woman are intertwined. This work pays homage to the strong female heritage on the maternal side of my family; honoring my mother, who was a hunter, her mother, who was an ordained minister, and my great-grandmother who was an Italian immigrant to the U.S. in the early 20th century. These women were fierce, independent and unconventional for their time. On a grander scale, this work honors Mother Earth and the sacredness of the land and the natural environment.

My inspiration comes in part from a poem by Leonard Cohen, “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot.” This poem was powerfully set to music and sung by Buffy St. Marie on her 1969 album Illuminations and I was fortunate to discover it for the first time just prior to the pandemic. It became a mantra for me. It is my belief that there is a spiritual connection between humankind and the natural world, if we will calm ourselves and pay attention to it. In the solitude of nature I can sense and experience a divine presence that beckons to be known. It speaks to me. As a woman, my response is to be still and surrender myself to its majesty, acknowledging its presence and recognizing its rightful place in this world. By giving birth to this series of photographs, I am offering thanks to this divine power for the magic it has given me in my life.

Hannah Rodriguez
Texas State University

Oil on canvas
40 x 30
$3,000

I am a painter who creates work through the use of collage with a surrealist twist. I focus primarily on collaging pop culture and nostalgic references into my work as a way of re-imagining my childhood. My work is not always narrative based, but I do like to comment on society and the effect of consumerism through the use of notable childhood media. Growing up, I have always been fascinated with media and wanted to find a way of merging that with my love for art. I wanted to portray the way that media has affected my sense of individuality and has challenged the way that I view the world around me. When beginning to create my pieces, I build collages primarily out of pictures I find on the internet. Some photos may be found photos from vintage ads and some are newer works that I find and implement into my piece. Once satisfied with the collage, I begin to recreate it through oil on canvas. My work focuses a lot on pop culture and the way that media has infiltrated our lives. Advertisement and media have been injected into our subconscious since we were children and because of that, I try to find a way to connect popular media to my art but now with a darker twist. I wanted to create a world where the beloved characters we grew up with merged with our world, similar to movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Space Jam. The pop culture and food brands found in my paintings is inspired by the works of Tom Wesselman and Andy Warhol, while the surrealist aspects of my paintings are heavily inspired by Rene Magritte and Max Ernst. I try to find a way to appropriate popular food brands and media into my work as a way of commenting on the psychological effects of consumerism from a very young age.

Jae-Eun Suh
University of North Texas

Video and audio
2:15 minutes
NFS

My work reflects my experiences as a Korean American straddled in multiple locations and cultures (South Korea, France, and the United States) at different times of my life. The research for my work begins with looking at photo and video archives of my local or transcontinental travel, and the resulting patterns and images that connote both place and passage. Through the material mediation, the visual elements of that data are fragmented and reconstructed into a new form by portraying a sense of longing; physical and emotional disconnection from others is depicted as physical distance over space and time.

Digital technology serves as a bridge for the sculptural, physical, virtual, and sensorial experience. Technology also conveys the concept of telepresence that helps maintain our relationships and communication with others. Videos projected onto objects and architecture with abstracted and fragmented images interplay between transition and temporality or permanence. With the control of playback speed in moving images, my work encourages both active and intimate contemplative meditation.

My research also investigates the relationship between the body and space evoking the longing through visual, auditory, and haptic responses. The viewers are invited to this constructed space to find meaning from disparate fragments, and projecting their own experiences and imagination as they undergo and navigate through space. The visual layer adds and removes specificity and visualizes dualities --- tangible and intangible; clear and hazy; large and small; intimate and distant.

Karla Cruz
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

Graphite on paper
18x12
$1,000

Katelyn Girouard
Texas A&M University- Corpus Christi

Lithograph
14”x11”
$200 SOLD

This work demonstrates how the structured hierarchy in a household can mold one’s future thoughts and actions. Gathering visual information from personal objects and childhood photos, compositions are collaged and constructed into a world that references a dysfunctional home life’s affect on complacency. These narratives expose experiences that provide a window into events otherwise intentionally unnoticed, that forces the viewer to question the facade of comfort in the world. By framing animal and human relations, the work is able to portray direct interactions between parental figures and their relatives and how traits are passed through tradition. Showing these animal and human relationships in ways that are either familiar or unfamiliar, these pieces speak on the back and forth of power dynamics found in the home and in politics, and the struggle to take back said power in the relationship.

Liz Hayes
Sam Houston State University

watercolor, risograph, and gouache on paper
30”x22”
$1,049

So much of our lives are spent trying to become the person that we envision ourselves to be as children. Sometimes that means that our journeys are not linear or bound to what would be considered typical by society. While those same journeys are nothing like what you could have ever dreamed for yourself, they are crucial for us to learn what we can and what we must on them. My work addresses my personal journey into the multi-disciplinary artist that I have become over the past decade. Because of the unique challenges of being a double BFA major and taking on a minor, I have had to grow into places, mediums, and ideas that I never saw for myself as a possibility. And like all growth, there is often pain associated with it as you are becoming the person you were always meant to be. Some things in our lives will remain. Some things are forced to evolve with us, and some will need to be left behind. We as humans are meant to be constantly evolving and learning. So as I continue on, I will also have to continue to expand and never seek to bind myself to any one idea of who I am.

Mariana Ruvalcaba Cruz
Texas A&M University- Corpus Christi

Plaster
6 inch x 16inch x 13inch
$375 SOLD

Through sculptural mediums I blur the line between real and fictional by overlapping, distorting, and manipulating the human figure. I am interested in communicating my individual experiences, emotions, psychological struggles, and relationships with the self and others.

Keeping It Together represents the clenching repression of emotions, where trying to hold something tightly together can lead to self-destruction

Rebecca Talbot
Stephen F Austin State University

Quilted Pants
44 x 22 x 10”
$1,200

The things I create are artifacts; but more importantly, they are mementos of what I encounter in life. Some of these objects have been “hanging around” for decades, cluttering my house—or maybe I am inspired by something that turned up only recently. One goal is to give new life to sentimental, but also unloved, unused, and discarded things. The process of taking something neglected and creating a new life and narrative for it, is often as important as what is fabricated. Drawing parallels between preserving, fixing and loving objects that seem insignificant to others stems from my home role as caretaker. Emotional connections emerge in the effort to make sense of relationships between these objects—the push and pull between decay and new growth, peeling away hard layers to reveal a safety net, weighing struggle against potential triumph or failure, probing the boundaries between protection and concealment. Documenting my life and that of my family is an obsession I fully embrace. The things I make are mementos. The residue of half-forgotten memories, of recalled emotions and events re-formed: the substance of the inner life expressed in material form.

Sierra Greenslade
Texas Tech University

Inkjet Print
15” x 15”
$350

The traditional values of West Texas have held onto delusions of grandeur of the American past. Over my lifetime, my complex relationship with this culture has shrouded my love for The Plains. Returning home after a decade away, I began to examine how real and imagined landscapes can shape our memories and the core parts of our identity. My work considers the connection between memory and landscape by exploring the relationship to place through photographic manipulation.

While making this artwork, I used the Polaroid transfer process, which leaves a thin layer of film that allows me to manipulate the photograph physically. The subject shifts from the actual landscape to the deterioration being made by folding the view onto itself or tearing parts of it away. Choosing what information to include or exclude enables me to explore the idea that outside forces influence our beliefs and memories.

As a lifelong resident of Texas, I am critically aware of the state’s many political and ethical issues. Idealized for the vast landscape and conservative values, West Texas represents the problematic “American Dream.” Through the physical act of manipulating the photograph, I am beginning to confront the fact that I am not just a viewer in the culture but actively participating.

Sophia Collins
Baylor University

Oil on Canvas
14 x 18
$400 SOLD

This piece was an experiment in color and stylization/abstraction. I wanted to take a relatively ordinary scene and rework it into something more vibrant and interesting while retaining the business of the café; I also wanted to portray the way everyday places we would normally not pay attention to can be beautiful and full of life when we infuse our own meaning into them.

Taryn Uribe Turner
Southern Methodist University

Oil on canvas
20” x 16” x 1”
$400 SOLD

My artworks are created from a collection of remembered places and feelings. In the wooded property where I grew up, I always hoped to find a hidden lake any day. I would find hollow spots below the surface by jumping in certain places and feel the reverberating sound of a cave, and the water underneath. Reading the dirt for clues of something uncanny; eye contact with an animal; the birds that brought me solace were how I made a world. I continue to draw from this affinity to create and explore through the familiar and strange.

Painting is a way to insert some aspect of myself into spaces I am left desiring. I have been embracing my paintings to the point of always being “finished,” no matter what stage they are in. In the past, I’ve obsessively reworked my paintings to the point of becoming something else. I am working within fragmented narratives and memories, obscuring and tailoring them to current preoccupations or dreams. Figures, spectral and fugitive, move through the oblique. Following this thinking, I am learning to find the desired painting in the in-between state. Alienation, longing and enclosure have been recent themes that have arisen in my work, frequently projecting these states onto animals.

William Soller
Houston Christian University

Acrylic on Canvas, Pecan Dyed Silk and Billboard Vinyl
22” x 24” x 2”
$850

My work connects us to the human in a hybrid and intangible state. Through the creation of a dreamlike, metaphysical space of memories, re-combinations, and trash, the work explores the individual, social, and environmental aspects of our identities. There is a dialogue with our past and our present by searching for meaning in the collections of our lives. I create industrial geodes, like grown buildings being reclaimed and molded by the pressures of the unknown. They are embodiments of connection and isolation. These relationships we share with our object creations; physical, analog, and digital; are formed within ourselves. We form them between each other, with our parental figures and our histories, and with our world. Every person, every dot of data, are connections on a web so vast, it recedes to the horizon line. This may make us feel small, but our movements are monumental, and shake the foundational points of this web and this world.

Dárē Akinwole
University of Texas - Dallas

Acrylic on Canvas
38 x 46 x 2.5 (framed)
$3,650

My paintings are a visual, satirical analyses of fanatical behaviours . I create figurative paintings about said behaviours that ignites conversations among the viewers and within a viewer; the viewer is also pushed to look inward, self-assess. My satirical expression tip toes the line between being humorous and being stern; a balance that is an extension of my personality. Balance is important to my paintings and the idea of balance can be seen throughout the paintings; extreme light juxtaposed with dark, organic form contrasted with flat areas, earth tone complemented with vibrant colours. The figures are created with very soft brush strokes that create a soft texture (air brush-like) which intrigues the viewer. The questions I constantly hear is “How did you make the texture so soft like that… did you use paint brushes?” The intrigue is part of the game; used to capture the attention of the viewer and lure them in. Also, I create a dramatic dark to light contrast on the forms. The chiaroscuro improves the form, creating a dramatic flow within the forms and improves the drama of the scenes I create. The drama does not stop within the forms; the earth tone of the forms is sharply contrasted with the vibrant, flat colours surrounding them creating a “never a dull moment” experience for the eyes of the viewers. All these elements I use to entice, draws them into the “scene” before they are met with its content.

My paintings appear static, a tableau vivant; a scene acted out by models, captured on a canvas. The models I use, are carefully posed with the props that enhances my message. The image is later edited with a computer software to design the final composition and experiment with colours before projected on to a large canvas. The large canvases the paintings are made on is a crucial part of my tactic; it envelopes the viewer, bringing them into that scene for a moment(s), they become a part of the scene making the experience more intimate. This allows the viewer to attach the scene in the painting to an experience (or inexperience). Whatever the case, the painting, the scenes become less static, it is alive.