I create mixed-media collages based on deteriorating photographs and collect-ive memories of my personal and familial history as a refugee in Vietnamese internment camps. Inspired by storytelling, crafting, and myth-making, my mixed-media base is a nod to my immigrant experience. My collage patterning and layering use craft culture as a metaphor for constructing identity. However, my work is imbued with tension in its materiality and the source of its composition. The craft store jewels sparkle as if real, emphasizing the scene’s idyllic nature and belying the traumas of exile.

 Since experiencing a near fatal auto accident in 1982, my work has focused on humanity’s impact on Earth’s exceptional garden and what we must do to protect it. The titles of my most recent bodies of paintings are “Songbirds Nesting at Twilight” and “Storm Songs.” They cover the issues of dwindling habitat due to the massive overdevelopment of every space—and in particular, Florida and Georgia.

 Risa Hricovsky is a post-discipline installation artist. Their work pushes the boundaries between painting and sculpture and between art, design, and craft. The artworks punctuate space through pattern, color, and their use of the multiple. Working though dichotomies such as order and chaos, attraction and repulsion, and similarity and difference, Hricovsky makes visual poems about perception. Through this mimicry and indexical object making begins a critique of our ideological perceptions of materiality.

 Defined by its infinite nature, time is a substantial element of human life. Over the span of one’s life, experiences are placed within time and the time we’ve lived settles in our soul. These experiences are processed through the evolution of human existence, with time playing an important role in the creation of human character.

 This body of work stems from the exploration of the term “food apartheid.” The urban landscape paintings are grounded in issues around climate change, resilience, access to food, self-sustainability, and racial, social, and economic barriers. I draw from personal experiences as well as historical references that thread together painting, light, film, architecture, and sculpture.

 My paintings communicate a state of controlled chaos as I combine two diver-gent forces and approaches: realism and abstract expression. With a proficient handling of light, a mastery of images, and a skillful mark making method, the paintings confer an illusion of reality to something that’s not real. I am playing with the light and its effect on color. The end result is a spatial between magic and illusion, rooted in the American Realist tradition.

 My childhood in Cuba, spent living in a wooden house and seeing the process of deconstruction and reconstruction, has had a great influence on my artistic evolution. From country to country, house to house, I have relocated multiple times throughout my life, which has influenced every step of my development; due to the unforeseen changes in my environment, I’ve always had the ability to adapt and create my own space within my work.

 Painting serves as a daily physical ritual and is a spiritual necessity for me. Through my work I try to draw out the colors and scenes hidden within the labyrinth of memory and extend the perceptible atmosphere of the canvas into a realm beyond.

 Folktales communicate scenes about human nature and demonstrate the idea of consequence. I create autobiographical bodies of work that depict scenes of everyday life shrouded in a layer of fantasy. Utilizing themes of community, family, wealth, consequence, and mortality, I merge each scene with multiple folk references pulled from the American South, as well as other worldly tales, and overlapping symbolism to illustrate life experiences. By creating vignettes armed with bright, alluring colors, the pieces feel familiar, even when being viewed for the first time.

 Matthew Forehand’s artwork explores personal heritage and the influence of the environment on cultural identity. He uses a collage-based approach to combine images from Colombia and his current home in South Florida, revealing the nuances and complexities of his relationship to these places. In Forehand’s collages, each image serves as a component to a larger composition, which becomes a starting point for his paintings.