I am a multidisciplinary artist. My work is concerned with the Black American vernacular experience. The work entails collecting and gathering found materials, Georgia red clay, and Dutch Wax cloth. I create a conversation between family, tradition, and the spiritual and material relationship between Africa and the South. My process is influenced by hip-hop, the way it gathers different cultural influences through sampling. Like the music, my work is charged with an energy passed down, then channeled through the diaspora

 Probing the subterranean depths within, my recent works focus on the descent to the underworld that is integral to the monomyth (“hero’s journey”). The passage of thresholds, trials, encounters, and symbolic death all find their place in this katabasis mythology. These drawings explore a quest into the cave of the mind through a combination of archetypal symbolism and uncanny aesthetics.

 I plumb the Internet, collect vernacular photography, and forage a wide range of printed materials to discover sources that are transformed by a variety of processes: burning/laser technology, accumulation, embossing/debossing, interference, physical distressing, and gilding. With its associations to value and trade, the historic role of the gold standard in establishing modern banking and the distribution of wealth, gold is central to my effort to synthesize the intersection of popular culture and history with issues related to visibility, desire, and power.

 My work examines the relationship between materiality and language. Recurring bodies and landscapes allude to historical Western painting, while a cosmic subtext, prompted by an interest in the structure of cosmologies, decentralizes traditional narrative. The allegorical processions of objects and figures usually phase in and out of their forms, referencing the permeability of the body, the fragility of structure, the body’s relationship to time, and notions of material/immaterial experiences. My practice incorporates

 200 My work takes a contemporary view on Black autonomy of self, space, and divinity. I reimagine Black, often femme, subjects in regal depictions of power, comfort, and exaltation combining both historical motifs and experiences as well as Afrofuturistic thought processes. I analyze and critique the ways in which we define power from a racial and gendered perspective, and the ways in which white supremacist foundations have shaped those definitions. My initial ideas of depicting Black Divinity stemmed from a desire to combat

 Born and raised in Baghdad, Iraq, during multiple wars, my paintings are infused with emotional tension and based on confronting destruction and decay, challenging boundaries through intentional color contrast within gestural landscapes. My interest is to express untold emotional landscapes to suggest the turmoil that can disturb the thin surface of social order and its effect on the human soul. My paintings suggest figures and places, including gardens and war zones, landscapes of lush fertility and terrible decay, cycles of life and death, that are generating order in chaos.

 Being an image maker affords me the opportunity to highlight the humanity of the viewer by illustrating the humanity of the subject. My creative process focuses on the interaction between the work and its audience. My goal is for the receiver to experience the mystery of creation while interacting with the portrait. The work’s evolution to becoming art has everything to do with the dance between the painting and the receiver. My primary subjects reflect the multiple aspects of the Black/Africanist experience in the context of a society that confines Blackness to being the

 I work from memory and intuition to invent spaces that are built from harmonious color relationships, fluid lines, and expressive mark making. I want to shift our society’s traditional notions of gender expression and use subject matter such as flowers to speak to a sense of self-affirmation and discovery. I find that human beings are full of contrasts, and our identities are so complex; often operating in dualities that are never static, we find ourselves constantly shifting. I explore this in the formal aspects of my work,

 Mike Ousley paints a direct commentary on Appalachian life and folk traditions, though their simplicity belies their depth. Ousley has painted since childhood, and though trained, he foils Western European traditions with the folk style of his youth. Born the son of a coal miner in Eastern Kentucky and having traveled all around Appalachia and the Blue Ridge Mountains, Ousley envisions his paintings as ballads to the people, places, and culture of the region. Subverting stereotypical perceptions with dark humor and a played-up naïveté, his paintings

 These works represent acts of improvisation through a formal language. If they contain narrative, it is fleeting, individual to the viewer. I want the viewer to have a moment of surprise and delight from these works: like finding something unusual in nature, not expected and moving. I want them to have familiarity and newness at the same time. Laying lines down across the canvas is for me a physical act, a bodily relationship to the canvas’s materiality and space, experimenting with different brushes and hand pressure without planning or overt intentionality. The space created