At what age does the death of your family become normal? Expected? Easier? The installation of The View Inside a Casket is an attempt to blur the line between the celebrations of a funeral and what happens to a cemetery once we leave it. By printing larger-than-life reproductions, and incorporating different media such as found objects, printmaking techniques, and sculpture, I confront my identiy as well as my upbringing as it transitions to my present-day life as an adult.

www.mnkndy.com

I am working on silk that is painted and secured on sculptural metal frames, as well as works on paper that are collaged and assembled with sculptural dimension. The large silk pieces, as pictured here, lean against the wall as to feel temporary, informal, and casual. I physically deconstruct the silk and reassemble it on the frame, like a dislocating and reassembling to create different dimensions. The layers of translucent silk and the physical space created in the lean, play with the depth of field and the perception of solidity. The images become reflected and refracted, the layers feel inseperable as they bleed into one another with their translucent passages. This body of work moves within painting and sculpture, figuration and abstraction, landscrape, architecture, fluidity and solidity, translucency and opacity, and ephemerality.

amielegette.com

I use yarn and cotton fabric paired with a contraption called a “tufting gun” to create large-scale soft paintings. The space dividing painters from fiber artists is not as vast as we tend to think. One of the strengths of my work is that it hovers between painting and textiles, yet it refuses to fit neatly into a category. This new body of work is about unleashing momentum and energy through mark making and color; a formal investigation into how we see and communicate emotion through vision and imagination. 

@knightmight
www.hannahknightleighton.com

Landscape creates frequency. A complex ensemble that orchestrates the way we use language, the way water flows, the way tectonic plates shift. It is possible to witness these frequencies - as light, as color, as geography, as migration - the ensemble of sounds that create place. To humans and animal kin, these frequencies are perceived audibly, as sound - biophony. To land, in the lower register, these frequencies are movement - geophony. Human beings have embedded landscapes with infrastructure that disrupts acoustic ecologies - anthrophony. Jets fly overhead, power lines stretch across place, wireless communication emitted into the atmosphere, in a violent act of audible dissonance. Through these concepts, my creative practice is informed. Centering community engagement and collaborative improvisation to produce music compositions from geographic data sets, aerial videography, and mediations on relationships to land and sites of extraction. This work is about land, bodies, and resonance.

www.coverground.org

Felicia Nez is a Navajo multi-disciplinary artist with a strong emphasis on writing. Through the honesty of her writing, she processes words into the medium they want to be. She parallels writing with working with clay––harvested from her homeland in the southwest. The clay tells her what it wants to be, and she never plans her pots or sculptures. These two disciplines helped her form her spring 2021 MFA thesis show Transference. This exhibition showcases Nez’s ability to tell her story in her own form of tangible/intangible communication. Within the layers of her complex narrative, she makes historical references of how Pueblo Potters and other Native Artist coded their pot designs and art to preserve their traditions from colonist. This is her reason for making her entire thesis show coded. Nez is planning on getting her MFA at the University of New Mexico this spring of 2021.

felicianezart.com

Born with several internal malformations collectively known as VACTERL Association, my disability informs all aspects of my life and art. For this body of work, I am searching for a visual language through a blending of representational imagery, geometric shapes, and abstract impressions created from unassuming objects connected to both my surgeries and childhood as I begin to examine and comes to terms with the repeated medical traumas of my youth. It is my hope that these revelatory paintings inspire more understanding and compassion for those living with invisible disabilities especially during this world wide pandemic.

www.amp3art.com

Raised in the Southern states of Tennessee and Texas, André Ramos-Woodard (they/ them/ theirs) is a contemporary artist who uses their work to emphasize the experiences of the underrepresented: celebrating the experience of marginalized peoples while accenting the repercussions of contemporary and historical discrimination. Working in a variety of media—including photography, text, and illustration—Ramos-Woodard creates collages that convey that convey ideas of communal and personal identity centralized within internal conflicts. They are influenced by their direct experience with life as being queer and African American, both of which are obvious targets for discrimination. Focusing on Black liberation, queer justice, and the reality of mental health, Ramos-Woodard works to amplify repressed voices and bring power to the people.

andreramoswoodard.com

Through printmaking, I confront colonial narratives of the American West. Maps of specific geographic sites, along with sketches and notes from my experience in those places inform my inquiry. I engage with maps to intervene on the realities they create and validate. American expansionist maps and their modern iterations uphold the narrative of Manifest Destiny, often by imposing names and boundaries onto the land they purport to represent. I create prints that subvert these narratives by holding space for omitted histories and ecological perspectives that upend the authoritative status of maps, in turn allowing the opportunity for new narratives to emerge. Woven into each print is an account of my own experience in a place, providing an emotionally vulnerable voice that examines my own racism, masculinity, and privilege. In doing so, I hope to counter the patriarchal, racist, and extractive capitalist narratives of American westward expansion.

Small Prick Carrie Heavy Load confuses the relationship between what we do to our bodies and what is done to our bodies. For the artist, this complex dynamic arose from their decision to medically transition in their gender exploration, but the question resonates throughout a multitude of experiences. This small sculpture grapples with a much larger issue–the fact that any decision we make about our bodies is made within the systems in which we exist.

www.tannerslick.com

My current body of work is an exploration of color, surface, depth, and a visual language of the unknown and indefinite. My process consists of a call and response between deliberate and unintentional marks on a surface. I rely on chance and intuition, and where they pause between the known and chaos. These playful and imperfect environments emerge from the emotional impact and resonance of personal experience. I also view these energetic, vulnerable, and fluid spaces as reflections of an interior life. They refer to pleasure, tactility, and desire through a close relationship and proximity to the body.

racheltaylor.net