Characters and symbols make sense within their context, but when that context is removed absurdity steps in and alienation is portrayed. In my work, I investigate the animal body as a traditional and contemporary symbol, and question how we represent them in culture, translation, and as commodities. These animal allegories provide context to my own feelings of displacement; through visual signifiers of culture, they seek to explore how the idea of what is “traditional” can differ from person to person.

 My work explores gendered tension in the domestic sphere. These paintings depict the home as a fraught refuge, evoking suspense and unease through horror film tropes. Combining naturalistic techniques with surreal elements, I examine household rituals that are rooted in my Midwestern upbringing.

 My paintings play with a tension between hiding and communicating. The images depict characters breaking pianos, grieving over violins, committing acts of betrayal, and experiencing bouts of ecstasy and terror. Pulling from my own history as a musician, I am interested in conveying psychological states through narrative and destabilized compositions. Each painting portrays solitary figures struggling against the edges of the canvas and the instrument at hand, sometimes resisting and other times merging.

 Drawing from various languages of abstraction—from Western modernist painting, to Andean textile design—I explore how the manipulation of painting, textiles, and traditional techniques can create tensions that reveal ideas about ancestral inheritance and transference, familial upbringing, and psychological contradiction. Through investigating these legacies of making, I invent studio rituals using formal painting moves and quotidian references to arrive at a place of intimacy.

I am inspired by the awkwardness of being alive and portraying moments of discomfort. Expectations push us to perform in all aspects of life; mimicking how people are expected to behave is my focus. A motif from my recent work is the smile, a symbol that embodies the pressures to alter one’s performance in social situations. I tend to gravitate toward humor to shine light on moments of embarrassment during human interactions. Though my work is playful, I take seriously thoughts about connection, intimacy, and belonging.

 Collapsing inner and outer vision onto canvas, Sabrina Piersol investigates the value of the fragment as it relates to Archaic Greek, sapphic poetry through her environmental paintings. These works raise questions around desire, temporality, and speculative extrapolation by negotiating conceptual inquiry and visual logic. Piersol intends for her paintings to be accessible in their abstraction through combining explicit allusions to the natural world with purely abstract forms via a singular, cohesive painting language that prioritizes bold color and melodic composition.

 Drawing from his own experiences, Sangun Park’s art serves as a means to confront and transcend personal pain. His series “On My Shelf” explores objects on a shelf arranged by the artist’s aesthetic and criteria of value; it reflects his concept of value as intertwined with life’s finite and infinite aspects, mortality, and the embrace of imperfection. Park’s life has limitations, while his collections can fluctuate in value, mirroring the mutable nature of his own name and works as affected by condition, time, and perspective.

 In search of a departure from prevailing ideas around figuration, I imagine the body as impermanent, morphing and changing as a representation of complex emotion and cognition. Rooted in my own longtime battle with depression—and the significant reprieve found through psychedelic therapy—I pursue world-building that draws from my studies in consciousness and melancholia, as well as theories around “deep adaptation” in the face of climate crisis.

 My family is from a people group called the Hakka (“guest”), fanning out from central China after 800 AD. Some settled in Southeast Asia and later became Singaporean. But the ancestral homeland is lost, swallowed up by the passage of time. Much of my Hakka identity has also been lost in an unrelayed oral history and denatured by the construction of “Singaporean.” Painting and performance have become vehicles to explore what is irretrievable in me.

 I work with oil paint and digital tools to express and examine the tension between ideas of intimacy, movement, perception, and the technological lens. I explore connections between people and how intimacy is experienced, grasped onto the more quiet, nuanced moments and shifting away from overtly narrative aspects. Layers, materials, and forms are merged and unified; synthetic materials and applications meet with lavish opulence to create a cheapened yet indulgent atmosphere.