Pepe Mar

My work departs from a background in painting, which has evolved and combined with my collage sculptures. The work is heavily informed by consumer culture, as often individual parts of my compositions mainly consist of found and purchased objects. Camp and violent at the same time, I seek to explore the possibilities of mutation in color and form. My work gives visual reference to a “profound artifice.” Each of my collage works is in a way, a self-portrait, exploring aspects of my own personality, such as escapism, music, and the artificial highs and lows that come with life itself.

Shawne Major

I am interested in how the perception of reality is colored by dreams, memory, superstition, religion, bias, prejudice, and fear. My mixed media work, in general, refers to the overlay of belief systems created by the individual to piece together their personal paradigm.

Carlos Luna

I am a contemporary artist who bases his work on tradition. My need to express myself comes from memories of growing up in a little rural town, which is full of the colorful stories and personalities that are only found in country places. I work with oil on canvas and drawings on Amate paper. My drawings are the black and white interpretation of my life’s journey, while my paintings acquire an apparent happiness because of their coloring.

Michael Loveland

Inspired by antiwar posters, activist posters, Occupy Wall Street protest signs, and hand-scrawled home-for-sale signs wired to street-corner telephone poles, Loveland examines the power of the individual’s voice in society. Working with mass-produced, found graphics such as pin-up girls and rock posters, the artist obliterates everything but the mouth, the vehicle of the voice, through processes of masking and erasure. The resulting expanses of open space surrounding the figures initiate a dialogue between them—singing turns to screaming, a simple smile becomes overtly erotic.

Susan Hightower Loeb

Originally a traditional painter, classically trained to work from direct observation, I became dissatisfied, believing there must be something more to say, and increasingly aware of social concerns in my City, New Orleans. I narrowed my focus to address the absence of presence in the urban environment, represented by abandoned and blighted houses. In New Orleans, this was a result of population shifts to suburbia, followed by the demolition of public housing projects, and finally the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and its subsequent flooding.

Cathy Lees

My paintings narrate my life through symbols with personal and cultural significance, as I focus on issues of identity, sexuality, and control. By naturalistically rendering simulated scenes, I layer artifice and veracity, thereby dramatizing the uncanny nature of the reality of domestic experiences.

Aramis Gutierrez

My work employs narratives such as love, untimely death, and corruption of character while seemingly referring to idioms of a golden age in classical painting. The narratives I use refer to forgotten instinctual fears and involuntary themes of Evolutionary Psychology that have been superficially satiated by our modern reliance on rationalism. This creates a contradiction with the “classical” language in my work which harkens back to a pre-modern and pre-rational era when many of these behaviors were employed to satisfy inexplicable and uncontrollable events that threatened our preservation.

Felice Grodin

In a manner of speaking, we need not confine ourselves to the duality of innocence and guilt. In order to mitigate “reality” in both concrete and virtual terms, we must go with the flow. And this flow is comprised of a multitude of forces and frequencies that shape, pressure, and contour our experiences. Thus, by operating within the field(s) from which things emerge and recede, one may work tactically in order to hijack the grain from within the grain.

Erica Gajewski

My work documents the loss of animal species and records the last vestiges of their lives. The specific animals I focus on are endemic to Canada, the country of my citizenship, the issues surrounding their erasure however are global and affect all life, regardless of national boundaries.

Eugenio Espinosa

In my art, I aim to find what is really essential to the function or nature of the creative process or the final results of this process. I can only see art as a real, concrete space, where modification is possible only in a real and concrete manner; from this emerges the incomprehensible, the disconcerting and the imaginative. I have great interest in art based in geometrical shapes and concepts, and have always searched for an expression that is closest to the real space that surrounds us.

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