I make paintings inspired by themes of isolation, queerness, and world-building. My practice borrows from the visual aesthetics and motifs of science fiction, which has long been a site and space to imagine other ways of being and other possibilities for this world. I am interested in how queer subjects face and share an experience of isolation, and how this can drive acts of world-building. My work depicts isolated figures, singly or in groups, in desert and steppe-like landscapes.

 The figurative work I create is a layered combination of rural aesthetics, queer historical references, inherited ephemera, and personal imagery. Painting allows me to tangibly imagine queer futures while honoring a queer past by permitting these stories to coexist within one plane. As I ruminate on the interplay between these employed elements, I am cementing endangered histories and generating utopias.

 As an artist, my motivation stems from a deep desire to convey emotions through visual designs that incorporate both spiritual impressions and factual symbols inspired by my Ghanaian heritage and everyday experiences. My work is multilayered with various principal shapes—often spidery, silhouetted human figures interacting with symbols—all anchored within a neatly defined pictorial space that’s expressed by the weaving of color through an obsessive urge similar to pointillism.

 I make images that engage with the literal meaning of “representation as a repeat presentation.” Through this iterative representation, I aim, and playfully fail, to create entities that embody the contradictions of identity formation. They are between and beyond Chinese and American; boyish and nonbinary; self and other; animal and human. These spaces and faces allow for their paradox to feel truer than direct depiction.

 My work uses portraiture and self-portraiture to visualize retellings of playful conversations that I’ve had with friends and family. These stories often include inside jokes that can only be fully deciphered by those within the narrative. With that in mind, I am interested in allowing others to create personas—to form their own inside jokes—and use them to create a world of characters to compose fun action scenes.

 I am interested in how memory intersects with place, and how it shapes the Black experience.

 Married artist/designers Nathan Gorgen and Molly Jo Burke, based in Cincinnati, comprise Byproduct Studios, a collaborative practice focused on the balance of artistic, family, and professional life. Their work explores domestic life and space through the use of artifacts and materials generated by their children, home renovations, individual practices, and collections. Of particular interest to the artists are materials that are, or appear to be, soft and malleable, and that do, or seem to, slump, stretch, flow, drip, and squish.

 In my most recent body of paintings, I work by alternating the canvas between horizontal and vertical orientations in order to control the flow of water, paint, and ink seeping into the work’s surface. For me, this method is linked to the depicted landscape: a porous bedrock, subject to the flow of both aquifers and surrounding water bodies. Using tape and a blade as drawing tools early in the process, partitions of canvas are corralled in order to guide an outcome, which nevertheless, often has unexpected results.

 My work is fundamentally at odds with the pervasive “cult of busyness.” Time consuming to make and packed with detail, my paintings demand a certain level of time and attention before revealing all they have to offer. Traditional themes and compositions provide familiar entry points, luring viewers deep into dreamlike scenes from everyday life. Intense attention to detail captivates modern eyes that are more accustomed to scrolling imagery consumed at warp speed.

 Rachel Collier is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the release of internal visual language held in the emotional body, resulting in radically uplifting imagery that rides the line between the mysterious and the familiar. Her materials are activated by a meditative and repetitive process rooted in nonrepresentational painterly tradition.