I am interested in the fork as my protagonist—a time-traveling, genre-bending character grounded in the familiarity of the domestic. For me, the fork represents a sort of shamaness who has the ability to travel through time and space—bearing witness to the evolution and the folly of humankind. As a symbol of both nurture and control, the fork’s pliability questions the hierarchies of value that we have placed on the ideas of “civilized” and “uncivilized,” “domestic” and “wild.” The fork is sometimes bound or entangled, and sometimes free and liberated.

Traces of us linger in the physical world, even in our absence. There is an evocative nature to domestic objects and spaces; items within homes hold the residual energy of lives once lived after those people are gone. My work depicts ordinary objects from living rooms that hold the remaining radiance and tenderness of the departed.

 I am a storyteller who uses the language of painting. I paint surrealist scenes featuring ambiguous, physically impossible figure/landscape relationships to explore existentialist themes of longing and loss. Through visual symbolism, metaphors, and magical realism, I investigate the ways in which exterior landscapes become projections of both the viewer’s and my own psychological states. My latest work combines personal and art historical allegories with enigmatic narratives to create fragmented and uncanny dreamscapes. Using

 I paint my personal and familial mythology. Working from memory, family photos, and observation, my pictures are diaristic and deal with the construction of identity, the Filipino American experience, and contemporary life in the USA. I populate the environments with traces of my disparate experiences, allowing them to conflict and converse to express a specific hybridity, building a mosaic with the remnants of cultural collisions.

 I explore strategies used by women to navigate social systems. Building on my career as a hat designer, I’ve repurposed my craft to invite public dialogues on the theatricality of gender. Using patterns and color associated with feminine ideals, my work plays on uncanny extremes that occur when women mirror fetishized personae. By highlighting the semiotic mechanism of cultural expression, my work creates a platform to reconsider the purpose of the conventional system of signification.

 Shadows emote, checkered grids undulate, and space collapses. The table sits awkwardly, unaware of its significance. An ambiguous memory shapes their meaning. Images of grid, shadow, table, and space are made to replicate moments in memory and of consciousness. There is familiarity with ambiguity. These objects are created by thought and memory of my family and my home. Memory that took place in a gridded space: spilling orange juice on my grandmother’s formica tile floor, baths in the pink-tile bathroom, ghosts in the kitchen, becoming friends with my shadow.

 Michael Ward-Rosenbaum’s sculptural wall pieces deal with the absence of image, the deconstruction of the painting surface, and the psychology of art-viewing spaces. His art-making process is intuitive and influenced by repetition, chance, and a longing for resolution. The works are often shown in multiples and attempt to create immersive experiences.

 My work focuses on psychedelic dreamscapes generated from the disorientation between physiological space and physical space, specifically through children’s eyes and bodies. I inject my paintings with autobiographical narratives through the use of anthropomorphic animals, fractured bodies, and other signifiers in undefined spaces. These juxtapositions represent the discordance caused by isolation and disconnection.

 Through the use of romantic, introspective metaphors, such as shadows, reflections, and windows, I dive into my personal memories. The three places I call home—Suriname, the Netherlands, and New York—come together in a fictional psychological landscape, where colonial relations have collapsed yet identity and race still must be performed. By playing with cultural markers and stereotypes that are often read and (mis)understood in different ways, multiple self portraits can appear. Indonesian ghost stories from rural Suriname about shape shifting creatures serve as metaphors for my own

 Drawing on historical, political, and personal narratives, my paintings are figurative compositions that conjure the complexity of the Afro-Latinx experience. The figures in my work inhabit a state of vulnerability that often encourages the viewer to question their positions on class, race, and geography. I immigrated to the United States in 2002 from the Dominican Republic.