William Carpenter

Lately, I have been focusing on the plethora of marks, signs, symbols, and patterns that structure our daily experience. I approach painting using a variety of subjects as infrastructural components. Employing a cut-and-paste methodology, I assemble images that reveal the process of their creation. Juxtaposing material and illusory factors, I call attention to the amorphous rift between representation and reality. My pieces are informed by the mundane components of both our shared and private day-to-day experiences. I make these pieces with the aspiration

Chris Capoyianes

My paintings set the stage for addictive personalities and puts them under a spotlight. Often pulling from past work environments (typically bars) I explore an ongoing theme of nightlife, while adding snippets of dreams, superstition, and fantasy. What does superstition look like? A seedy underbelly, sometimes exposed in plain sight and at other times peeking through the shadows. Through the haze of debauchery lurks a sinister psychological frisson in which an altered state of consciousness subverts reality and appearances become deceptive.

Steve Byrnes

When making a painting, I employ only what I deem necessary. Due to this economy of material, the canvas, for example, has to do more than simply act as a surface to put an image on; it has to contribute to the image itself. To get the most out of these materials, I use them in a way that emphasizes what they are. If I am using paint, I want it to feel like paint. If I am using canvas, I want it to feel like canvas.

Anna Buckner

Liminality is soft. It is malleable, compliant, acquiescent, and supple. At its worst, it is impressionable, submissive, gullible, and feeble. At its best, it yields empathy and patience. I find strength in liminality—in vulnerability.

Clay Mahn

I think of my paintings as misfits—blemished characters that are either coming into being or left comically incomplete. I try to present the viewer with specific situations and relationships that playfully question the abstract world we live in. I am engrossed in the peculiar and the imperfect.

Stephen D'Onofrio

My work explores the relationship between physical spaces and the objects we fill them with. Often focusing on typical domestic decor and household ornaments, the work makes these inherently empty objects into simplified symbols that can then be rearranged and compressed to carry a formal sensibility. Currently, my work has concerned the idea of the painting as ornament, with the stock subjects of landscape, still life, and portraiture becoming knickknacks. I distill and consolidate these ideas, using a generic design vernacular to highlight both the

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Xi Zhang

My recent series Metallic Leaf Garden explores the way individuals’ minds reshape their physical environment. Contemporary psychological theory allows that our consciousness, emotions, and subconscious can be akin to the “paint” that consistently colors our reality. My investigation incorporates a variety of individual psychological realms, depicting them in fictionalized surroundings that confuse the relationship between perception and reality. I utilize a mixture of expressionist/abstract aesthetics in a subtle, theatrical way to construct the characters’

Casey Jex Smith

I use the structures of role-play gaming and religious ritual to create allegorical drawings. Leveling up, isometric perspective, character creation, quest items, mythical beasts, and battles are used to mirror real-life scenarios where the individual butts up against institutional power structures. I contrast the reward system in gaming that is finely tuned to providing pleasure to the reward system of global capitalism that can at times feel arbitrary and cruel. My drawings are power simulations where I rule over a white rectangle.

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