This work is inspired by the relationship between painting and sculpture and formed by a fascination with childlike ways of making and seeing. Moments of inconsistency leave traces of human interaction within the repetitive systems. This offers a tension between the meticulous drive for perfection and the inescapable tendency toward imperfection. A work that is suspended within the conflict of itself. By playing with baser kitsch materials and viewing them through a deconstructed viewpoint, I hope to mirror the ingenuity of intuitive childhood invention.

 Athena Quispe is a painter and poet dedicated to the cosmic endeavor of decentering modernism to privilege a Native American presence that has been displaced and regarded as “primitive art” since the beginning of colonialism during the fifteenth century. She uses long-established academic painting strategies formalized throughout Europe in order to address questions and issues around decolonizing the canon of Western art history and painting.

 In my work I seek to complicate the role of portraiture by engendering a focus on queer representation. To further establish the figures as canonized icons, I use of traditional portraiture and Americana imagery as an important strategy with which to navigate the tension of metronormativity and the journey to finding a queer utopia.

 With a background in public art, Victoria Martinez erects paintings and large-scale installations that produce similarly direct conversations with architecture. Her colorful constructions combine the durability of metal, enamel, and cement with the suppleness of textiles and the fluidity of paint. Contesting fabric’s traditional associations with craft and the decorative, she transforms swaths of cloth into structural elements. Each fragment becomes a building block of a larger assemblage that dynamically weaves in and out of space.

 My interdisciplinary practice, which branches from painting into experimental design, sculpture, and digital media, is rich with autobiographical associations to my experience as a first born, first generation child of Antiguan immigrants. The artwork is an extension of my obsessive need to record complex contemporary thoughts and issues through simple expressions. Jute rope, cigarette cartons, and paint chips take on a new world of symbolic meanings, inspired by both unconscious and meticulously researched ideas.

 My work investigates remembrances and interrogates the idea of normalcy as a preferred narrative––the sanitized idea of memory versus the messier truths and discomforts of embarrassing admissions and taboo topics. Through the use of recurring characters and appropriated childhood spaces, my work considers my own memories and insecurities as they relate to my lived experience as a young woman.

 Larry Li’s practice operates in a space of cultural contrast, juxtaposing different cultures, ideologies, symbols, and histories to illustrate the dual nature of his existence in a diaspora. He works primarily through figurative painting and collage to create works that visualize his inherited experiences and cultural identity. Drawing from archived photographs of his own family history and larger Chinese/American narratives from a contemporary perspective, his process alters his own perceived notion of what it means to be Chinese American.

 Kaylie Kaitschuck uses machine embroidery to draw with yarn and create fantastical yet overwhelming landscapes. She sources her narratives from her family, symbolism, and dreams. These embroideries serve as her own chaotic maps that hold no real navigational route or exit. Drifting through the real and the fake, they are an archive of memory that may or may not have ever existed.

 Lehna Huie is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker of Jamaican heritage. Her work concentrates on themes such as the soul, migration, nonlinear time, and remembrance.
Huie’s works weave together multiple visual forms as cultural vignettes rooted in an archival practice. Varying in scale, medium, and surface, accumulated art pieces are brought together with personal and found objects to form representational portraiture.

 Shi ei Diné nishł´. To'ahani' nishł´, Dibe'łizhini bashishchiin, Kinyaa'áanii dashicheii doo Honágháahnii dashinalí.