While drawing inspiration from my travels around the world, my interest in folk and textile art offers an aesthetic richness full of colors, narratives, and textures. Challenging the judgment that separates textiles and fine art, my new direction in fibers embraces a technique that is traditionally “craft” and pushed into other disciplines like sewing and quilting. I investigate what the practice means and how it is possible to renew this traditional craft for a contemporary audience, hoping to remove the commercial ambition often associated with rugs or carpets.

I’m attracted to stories and characters presented in literature and media and use these examples as a litmus test to examine my own identity and the identity of those who occupy my environment. I apply the metaphors carried in these personas to my own dislocation and curiosities. The Chinese cowboy in American folklore, for example, has a comical and tragic irony that I enjoy.

Known for his vibrant, abstract compositions, Chad Kouri examines themes commonly associated with visual literacy––specifically how we see, read, and remember the world around us. His practice is influenced by minimalism, jazz, conceptual and systematic art, design, fashion, printmaking, and the gray areas in between. His most recent works are meant to prompt introspection, inspiring a slower pace in our day-to-day lives as a form of self-care and personal grounding.

Daniel Klewer continues to celebrate his love of paint in his series Linear Tactility. The paintings all share a consistent linearly divided composition with investigations into the visual and psychological resonance of color relationships and texture. A brushless paint application dominates the paintings’ surface. The works’ unique sculpturally textured paint feels as if it is reaching off the canvas toward the viewer. Tension between surface and depth, light and material, color and texture, draw you into the paintings’ surface, while the sharp cactus-like texture pushes back.

I approach the canvas as if making a three-dimensional sculpture. I want the paint to move and shift for the viewer. I expose and intertwine the hidden with the obvious: pulling the inside out and pushing the outside in. My color palette, paint surfaces, application, and composition are manipulated to make space, to box space.
I’ve lived in Chicago for over twenty years. In that time, the city’s raw and rigid buildings, streets, and people have crept into my paintings. Exposed pipes, plumbing, and wires have become part of my work. Figures are abstracted and reconstructed from

I make maps about the wilderness of public space. The raw materials come from rambling walks punctuated by stops to draw, write, and take photos. I choose places to move through that are both familiar and strange. The resulting works layer physical geography with memories and images that come to mind from other times and places. Moving across the streetscape, details get piled on in the way that life is lived—in steps, notes, beats, breaths, words, and marks.

The act of painting encompasses all of human expression. This is its inherent desire, which exists in the magnetism between an image and object. Painting is a synthesis of the imagination and reality, the unknowable and the known; it is a dynamic interrelationship of content and form, which provide a basis for its syntax and comprehension. The language of painting is internal, and replaces the verbal articulation of ideas, yet simultaneously it is about the concrete materiality of the object directly in front of us.

As a product of generation X, my life straddles the pre- and post-tech boom. During the early part of my life, I might come across a handful of images or illustrations while researching a topic in a library or encyclopedia. Presently, the amount of images available via the Internet is seemingly infinite and sometimes overwhelming.

My paintings are about feeling exposed and vulnerable. About watching and being watched. The subjects, ranging from myself figures excerpted from historical paintings, reality TV stars, and cam girls, are all depicted during intimate moments. These figures, usually aware of their roles, have a strong claim to agency but are unsure if their sexuality will be used against them. Taking the form of shaped canvases, my paintings mimic windows and folding screens to emphasize the illusion of the image and to stress the role of a watcher/viewer in a way that questions the nature of privacy.

They swim, they make love, they experience each other and the nature that surrounds them as an animating force. I paint them as if I am watching a dream or a fairy tale unfold. With my brush I work to find the light of their surroundings or a glimpse at their personality, exploring the touch that becomes the distinctive qualities of their flesh.