In the fall of 2019, I had the privilege of living and working in the heart of Tokyo. With time to explore and create new work, I made paintings based on encounters, interactions, and observations. This began a journey I hoped might capture the freshness of this endeavor in the form of responsive imagery or documentation for future development.

 Shanique Emelife is a queer Nigerian-American self-taught painter. Their work often centers on a first-generation immigrant experience and explores family history and home.

 My work is inspired by and questions American society’s live-to-work mentality. I am concerned with the cultural and environmental impact of this obsession, as well as the physical and mental health ramifications.

 The Black people in Alexandria Couch’s work are strictly familiar—composed of multiple references, broken down and pieced together to reconstruct being. The use of found mediums, like recycled thread, fabric, and paper scraps, fuse imagery and materiality to create objects that exist on both physical and temporal planes. The friction that arises from abstraction mimics the reformation of marginal identities adapting to dislocation.

 My paintings imply a human presence through the depiction of accumulated collections. The items in each collection—including the contents of desk drawers, stacks of books, packed boxes, and objects on display—are united by systems of value shaped by mystery, sentimentality, and the matriarchal connection.

 My paintings depict psychologically infused narratives where the familiar is imbued with a sense of sublime mystery. Figures inhabit a world suspended between dreams and reality, transfixed by surreal aberrations, ethereal elements, and transported states of mind. Visual components are allusive reflections drawn in part from my past of growing up in an insular religious group, living in a milieu of end times prophecies, unsettling otherwise quiet perceptions of banal Midwestern normalcy.

 My paintings often feature strong female images, blending fantastical elements of seduction and eroticism with the apparent innocence of fairy tales and kitsch (think Disneyland meets Bollywood). Within these fabricated worlds, fairy tale–like paintings unfold but are unresolved and are not as wholesome as one might believe. My work does not imitate proper behavior, nor does it function like a monogamous relationship.

 My work explores the uncertainty of life through a Black lens. I highlight how absurd the world can feel for Black Americans by taking what can feel familiar and safe, and distorting it. The familiarity stems from my use of imagery from popular culture, such as cartoons, films, famous artworks, and myths and folklore. For many people, these media have offered representation, escapism, or a way to understand the world and bond with others.

 My work explores the symmetry between beauty and awkwardness, happiness and despair, the natural and the synthetic. Transformation and anthropomorphism interest me, as does our ability to turn any combination of shapes into a visual language.

 After moving his art practice into a warehouse studio in 2019, the inspiration and substrate of architecture and location for Rubén Aguirre’s public works shifted towards the natural land as inspiration for studio works. By building on the visual language of his murals, his current studio work has generated a new dialect, where reduced shapes and colors speak of terrestrial forms. Rendered as abstract topographies, his wood panel paintings invoke poetic contemplations on origin, self-awareness, one’s connection to the Earth, and our impermanence.