I am a visual storyteller capturing the intricate tales woven into the fabric of my subjects’ daily lives. Rooted in the principles of painting and drawing, my work is a tapestry shaped by the often overlooked narratives of the communities to which I belong. A native of New York, with a lineage that blends Southern and Jamaican heritage, I draw inspiration from the historical intricacies and layered complexities of the African diaspora.

 Dense, dreamy, and diagrammatic compositions tie seemingly disparate refer-ences together in an unwieldy knot, locking them in combat, conversation, and companionship. Metaphors are made literal, while familiar objects and lifeforms are transmuted into playful, potent symbols.

 Toledo focuses on the feminine universe, and therefore on herself. Painting from memory scenes from photographs and films to create art within her own script, Toledo’s works seek to convey fundamental emotions such as love, sadness, and loneliness through a deep investigation into the female experience with an autobiographical dimension.

 SEVEN (born Matt Ryan) is a New York City native and self-taught artist whose work is heavily influenced by early 1990s hip-hop culture and his childhood spent in the melting pot. He has always found beauty in the neglected and unconventional, which, consequently, is often his subject of focus. He recasts these uneasy truths with a more appealing palette, while still aligning with their reality of anguish.

 My work is both a rewriting and a combination of familiar or forgotten narra-tives. Visual history, folktales, human achievements (positive and negative), and “The Late Late Show with James Corden” are just the tip of the iceberg as far as inspirations. The symbolic baggage of images recombines to re-present well known stories and to create new ones; it’s as if one is looking at ideas from the other side of the page, holding it up to the light, and reading it from that side. The work connects these various accepted interpretations to either deconstruct them or rebuild them from scratch.

 TJ Rinoski’s work is an uncanny illusion that touches on a humorous edge of his memory. He paints stories without clear narratives, as memories tend to be misleading and not always truthful, yet his images are preconceived, gathered from tattered handwritten notes that only make sense to him. The words inscribed on Rinoski’s pages refer to his own experiences, and photographs, and, occasionally, a film scene.

 These most recent drawings focus on several ideas, rather than the single subject matter on which my previous work focused. As I have become interested in exploring the haziness and nonlinearity of dreams and memories, vellum film has become my go-to surface. I continue to draw in a highly representational and closely observed mode, mostly in colored pencil, with the recent addition of oil pastels. I am curious about a drawing’s ability to exist in space, whether that’s folded into a corner, overlapping itself, or cascading down a wall onto the floor.

 My paintings are a way for me to acknowledge and cherish the subtle, transitory nature of everyday life. I am particularly drawn to experiences that I share with friends and loved ones. Imbued with a warm sense of nostalgia, humor, and childlike curiosity, I find these experiences quietly enchanting and awe-inspiring. They persist in my memory and are reborn while looking over old pictures or catching up with a friend. These moments are often heightened by unusual lighting that showcases the natural beauty in an otherwise commonplace landscape.

 I combine the rigorous structure of weaving with the malleable properties of oil paint to produce tactile, visual, and associative abstractions that question the familiarity of either form. Freed from the rules of the loom, I extrude individual ‘threads’ of oil paint until they amass into illusory woven fields, entangled ridges, and corporeal structures that are seemingly pushed, pulled, gathered, and raised by unseen forces.

 My recent paintings are psychological landscapes. These fractured abstract-ions consider the literary term “pathetic fallacy,” which is used to describe the attribution of human emotion to nature.