In Dante Cannatella’s work, the landscape reclaims the city. The lines between inside and outside are blurred and lives play out against the truth of uncertainty and impermanence. The paintings reflect growing up amidst the destruction and rebuilding of New Orleans. Set against this backdrop and the deluge myth, the figures are caught in a theater of human folly that explores inner worlds and outer realities and the powerful forces of nature, commerce, and mass thought that shape, nurture, and destroy them.

These politically charged paintings of lavish dinner scenes provide a critical commentary on the financial disparities in American society. Luxurious foods and fine china, juxtaposed with run-of-the-mill gingham tablecloths, challenge the disconnect between the wealthy, privileged individuals in power and the average citizen they claim to represent. With superficial notions of “bread and butter issues” at the center of campaigns, the dinner table becomes a metaphorical stage for political theater.

 I am simply an Earthling using my eyeballs as a vacuum, sucking up any inspiration that floats by and spitting it out through my hands. On an average day, I meditate on the gestures of plant life within my home and along the sidewalks in my neighborhood. Through these meditations, I imagine the alternate possibilities of the human body. If I were anything but human, I would be a plant; a long appendage who wiggles their way from dirt toward maturity and shifts daily with the direction of the sun.

My work examines questions of identity, gender, culture, and socio-economic status within the domestic and familial space. Printmaking is my primary, but not exclusive medium. The prints blend into site-specific installations and grant it—and the space—greater significance. As an artist, I am fascinated with the way that a home is perceived as a symbol of intimacy and primarily presented in a feminine point of view.

Instead of focusing on what is often lost in translation, I sift through the different shapes and symbols that are found when one is living between clashing cultures, languages, and materials. My expansive studio practice involves gathering and repurposing artifacts from my community—such as worn Kurdish dresses, fabric, and used rugs—to investigate the politics of display, painting, fashion, and borders.

 My work is an inspired narrative of life where people demonstrate love, respect, compassion, agony, oppositions, confidence, and death. In my work, I explore the psychological state of living as a Black male in the United States, always in survival mode in a culture meant to create division and separation. Through observation, I aim to re-create my personal experiences by using symbols, words, images, emotions, and environments.

 Since I found the Slave Registry of Trinidad and Tobago, I have taken an interest in archival documents and images that relate to the transatlantic slave trade. I became interested in aspects that repeat themselves in varying ways in the present. Aspects such as labor, death, erasure, oppression, violence, and discrimination are profoundly present. Even though the slave trade managed to dehumanize millions of Black people, with the consequence of continuing to do so in the present, we can find hope, resistance, and resilience.

 I was (still am) deeply sensitive and a voracious reader of science fiction, fantasy, and gothic horror. I’m also from a mixed-race family, of Black and Japanese descent. My work uses my mother’s streamlined Buddhism (which says to look to nature as the highest wisdom) and the language of literary device to develop a particular ideography. Characters and symbology from family photographs, natural history, and personal memory are recast into carefully constructed tableaus.

 Through a semi-autobiographic and queer lens, Natalie Strait’s paintings explore personal and psychological lived realities of womanhood, navigating the interplay between emotional vulnerability and gendered, social media-enforced performativity. Strait’s imposing, majestic female figures make their presence known: Their sculpturally molded bodies command the full space of the canvas and their unflinching gazes directly confront the viewer.