Artists — Hamiltonian Artists

Viewing entries by
Hamiltonian Artists

María Luz Bravo

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María Luz Bravo

 

María Luz Bravo (b. 1975, Mexico; lives and works in Washington, DC) is a Mexican photographer whose work highlights major social phenomena, focusing primarily on cities in conflict, political boundaries and community resilience and revolves around the use of space, both urban and architectural, in the contemporary urban landscape. She holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture from Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, Mexico and a Master of Arts in New Media Photojournalism from Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally in the US, Mexico, and Europe. María Luz Bravo’s 2014 series Reclaims was selected to be part of the XVI Photography Biennale in Mexico.

Artist statement

My body of work revolves around the use of space, both urban and architectural in the contemporary urban landscape to highlight major social phenomena, focusing primarily on cities in conflict, political boundaries, and community resilience.

In Mexico, I have photographed the effects of violence in Ciudad Juarez and the political boundaries of México City. In the US I have documented urban decline, racial segregation, and socioeconomic contrasts mainly on the East Coast and the South.

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Jason Bulluck

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Jason Bulluck

 

Jason Bulluck (b. Chester, PA; lives and works in Washington, DC) is an artist, writer, and teacher living in Washington, DC and working in both DC and Chicago. His work draws largely on the possibilities emerging from discourse between non-Western and Western world-building narratives. Bulluck holds an Masters of Fine Arts from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018), a Masters in Education from George Washington University (2010) and a Bachelors in Fine Arts from Howard University (2005). Bulluck has exhibited his work nationally at galleries including,  Take Care Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Sullivan Galleries in Chicago, Il and Conner Contemporary in Washington, DC.

Artist statement

I have situated my practice within discourses of critical geography, critical race studies, and Buddhist dialectics.

My work is grounded in early Indian, Mahayana and especially, Chan/Zen Buddhist psychology, epistemology, ontology as well as personal histories and those of the Americas and Africa. I am concerned with the provocations of black cultural theorists and the liberatory possibilities posed by engaging the work of a range of black radical thinkers, Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson, and that of Fred Moten and Hortense Spillers. I suspect that an end to anti-blackness can mean an end to much of human oppression. And I am further devoted to the range of interventions that might emerge from an even rounder dialogue. I have engaged esoteric Mahayana Buddhism in search of expedient means to deploy in a dialectic between epistemes West, Buddhist and otherwise subaltern. I suspect the possibilities of epistemic and ontological harmonies in the offing of considering the critiques of post-Marxists, critical geographers, and black radical theorists vis-a-vis an engaged and critical Buddhism.

My recent work involved the production of a series of Mahayana analog relational databases that encourage meetings of disparate philosophical traditions through material encounters with a range of objects. These are often minimalist objects that make formal gestures to be touched and considered as emerging in real-time as work made in concert with the artist, material, space, etc. The relational database has made so much of the world we now recognize possible, and while it, and more powerful database designs, pose great risks to liberatory projects, the relational database itself works well as a performative allegory representing the notion that what seems discrete in fact exists in relation to all other things.

This performative allegory offered by making objects, installations or performances help to make the consideration of some Buddhist tenets, such as interdependent origination and emptiness, perhaps more ontologically legible. I have been experimenting further with more complex databases that might offer opportunities to consider Buddhist thought in the context of material geographies and analyses of anti-black structures and histories.

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Joey Enríquez

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Joey Enríquez

 

Joey Enríquez (b. Simi Valley, CA; lives and works in Washington, DC.) makes prints and sculptural work that consist of clay monotype prints and digital renderings about location, movement through space, and the passage of time. Enríquez earned their B.A. in Art–Design from California Lutheran University (2018) and their M.F.A. in Fine Arts at the George Washington University (2020). Originally a graphic designer from Southern California, they transitioned from design to art in 2017 to explore a more interdisciplinary creative practice. Their most recent exhibition, desierto desierto at Gallery 102, unearthed family narratives and revealed erasure of indigeneity in the southwest deserts.

Artist statement

In my work, I investigate erasure of memory and experience, environmental decay, and movement through lineage across temporal spaces. I explore the effects of generational trauma and the development of contemporary social relations by looking to archives and catalogued narratives. My own movement through space is essential in the development of the sculptural objects I build and the prints that I create. I warp the site-specificity of each object and installation in order to create friction between the linear thinking of the canon of recorded history and the reality of the spatial relations we establish. Disrupting fact and fiction, past and present, I point to power dynamics, such as race, gender, and environment, that have been put in place to silence marginalized experiences and endanger the future survival of silenced identity and experience.

With my most recent sculptural work, I questioned the record of my maternal family history and the erasure of their, and subsequently my own, mexicanx identity. Through adapting and altering the process of adobe brick making, I fabricated a sculptural ruin, "if you cant find your own, store-bought is fine" (2020), based on the real ruin of a wall at my great great grandmother?s property in New Mexico. Here, the murder of my great great grandmother and one of her daughters had been lost in time?while a newspaper article recorded the event, it remained unspoken about by future generations of my family after assimilating into white American society. Mostly relying on the abstraction of my own memory as time passes, I constructed and stacked each brick with a sense of desperation. I became compelled to forge a ruin before my memory faded and became no longer legible. Juxtaposing a murder with a captivating, monumental ruin-like adobe wall fragment, I emphasize the invisible acceptance of glossing over traumatic histories of oppression, cultural death, and erasure of identity in my work.

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Stephanie Garon

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Stephanie Garon

 

Stephanie Garon is an artist and educator whose work functions as abstracted expressions of a time, place, and way of life that capture paradoxes: formalism and fragility, permanence and impermanence, and nature and nurture. Garon earned both her Bachelor of Science (1994) and a Masters of Science (1996) from Cornell University and received a Post Baccalaureate degree from Maryland Institute College of Art (2010) where she now teaches. She is set to receive her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in Studio Art Summer Low-Residency (MFAST) in 2023. Her work has been exhibited internationally in London, Colombia, and South Korea, as well as across the United States. Her writing, a critical aspect of her artistic process, has been published in international literary journals and her chapbook will be published in 2021.

Artist statement

As a five year old, I tagged along with my father to "hamfests,” radio operator gatherings held in county fair parking lots. Cars would pop open their trunks like overflowing treasure chests filled with electronic wares: old radio boxes, computer boards, cables, monitors, soldering irons. It was an oasis in the heart of wooded valleys.

My father would sell or trade items he no longer needed. My job was to display them on a tattered blanket and haggle to make the sale. The setup became my stage as I pranced about, reorganizing after each barter session. In my mind's eye, we were a traveling show.

Years later, when I find myself welding and smelling the rusty steel odor of the studio, I am driving down those dusty roads again.

My work explores the limits of nature and connection through juxtaposing industrial elements with natural materials I collect. The decomposition of the natural forms provide drama and philosophic markers of fragility: green pine needles fade to brown, cement made from melted snow crumbles, and wind switches orientation of metal sculpture around trees. Rich in associations, the work functions as abstracted expressions of a time, place, and way of life that capture paradoxes: formalism and fragility, permanence and impermanence, and nature and nurture.

My work invites the viewer to contemplate how we, as people, build structures and interact with the natural world around us. Like the items I’d curate at the hamfests, my art embraces the delicacy of transforming materials to define my visual voice.

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Lionel Frazier White III

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Lionel Frazier White III

 

Lionel Frazier White III (b. Washington, DC; lives and works in Washington, DC) is a Washington, DC, native; arts educator; and interdisciplinary conceptual artist who works in painting, drawing, wood sculpture, installation, and mixed media collage. White’s work explores themes of forced and coerced labor and their effect on family pathology, erasure, displacement, reassertion, and gentrification. White holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts from the George Washington University Corcoran School of the Arts and Design (2018) and is a graduate of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts high school in Washington, DC. His work has been exhibited at the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities, Prince George's African American Art Museum and Cultural Center, Torpedo Factory |Connect The Dots, Rush Arts Galleries, and Area 405. White was a 2019 Halcyon Arts Lab Cohort 3 Fellow in Residence in Washington, DC.

Artist statement

I am a third and fourth generation DC native who has a conceptual socially engaged practice. The themes in my work focus on gentrification, infrastructure, rememory, reassertion, and how they affect long-time DC residents. I communicate these themes through mixed media collage, installation, and performance.

I create collages by painting, cutting, stacking, and altering copies of archived images from family, friends, and historical documents taken in DC. I hold picture parties to share this practice with others. Through my work, I hope to activate memories and the sensory emotional feelings attached to them. By understanding our relationships to these images and the feelings they trigger we learn the importance of our memories and how collective memories contextualize history. As we share stories we find commonalities that express cultural nuances.

My work shows how these stories are being obscured and erased as a result of gentrification. Performance serves to stage interventions that reassert the presence of longtime DC residents. Both performance and photographic artifacts are used to understand the relationships of persons, places, and things, and show how they all define one another. The goal is to reassert and juxtapose social histories and narratives up against currently gentrified spaces to illuminate the problematic nature of gentrification. The framework of my practice is inspired by “March On,” a collaboration between Bryony Roberts, Mabel O. Wilson, and Marching Cobras and Tricia Rose’s book Black Noise. “March On” is a performance art piece that looks at the historical significance of black marching bands, and how its performance magnifies the politics of black bodies as they navigate gentrifying space while confronting a culture of hyper-surveillance. In Black Noise, Tricia Rose describes the nature of rap as a continually evolving relationship between black cultural practice, social and economic conditions, technology, sexual and social politics, and the institutional policing of the popular terrain. My practice focuses on how black bodies navigate and contest with the politics of space. For example, in the urban environment, infrastructure like apartment complexes causes the nature of community interactions to be different than in the more spaced-out suburbs. I focus on understanding the changing nature of space and maintaining resilience against forces that would erase black people and their legacy.

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Amber Eve Anderson

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Amber Eve Anderson

 

Amber Eve Anderson is a multidisciplinary artist and writer whose work is rooted in ideas of home and displacement, often combining aspects of the digital and the real. She received a BFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2005 and an MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art multidisciplinary program at MICA in 2016. In 2019 she received an Individual Artist Award in Media from the Maryland State Arts Council. Her work has been exhibited in group shows throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Finland, Morocco, and Peru. She has been awarded residencies at Wagon Station Encampment in Joshua Tree, CA and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City. She currently lives in Baltimore where she serves on the Advisory Board of the Institute of Contemporary Art in and is a regularly contributing writer at BmoreArt.

Artist statement

From a lifetime in Nebraska to a decade in South America, the Middle East, and North Africa, my conceptual, multidisciplinary work is rooted in ideas of home and the experience of displacement. I mine personal histories to construct universal narratives. Imbued with a sense of longing, the work is poetic and precise, playful and poignant. I attach nostalgia to the mundane—everyday objects acting as points of entry into the work. I collect and arrange—actions of accrual and order—attempts at orienting myself in my surroundings. I negotiate shifting memories and digital constructs, collapsing distances of time and space, grasping at permanence, a gesture in futility.

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Tommy Bobo

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Tommy Bobo

 

Tommy Bobo was born in the South, fled to the prairie, and settled in the capital. He makes art primarily with lights and computers, but also enjoys watercolors, writing, and video. His work is sometimes about people and history; the ineptitude of technology; or the color of the sky on his walk to work. Tommy received a BFA in Expanded Media Art from the University of Kansas in 2006 and his MFA in Studio Art from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014. He has taught art and design at American University and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Along with that he has held many interesting jobs like painting lines in parking lots, candle making, and raising money for the Quaker lobby in DC. He has received funding and support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Cultural DC. His work has been covered in Sculpture Magazine, the Washington City Paper, and the Washington Post.

Artist statement

My art training benefited from starting in Kansas. Outsiders complain about the flatness, but Kansans will tell you about the importance of regularly seeing the horizon. Now over a decade removed from Kansas, I still get claustrophobic when I have gone too long without seeing all of the sky. When the sun’s light hits the atmosphere, the rays get diffused and scattered across sky creating that pure blue sky. The light of day is not the single point of the sun, but a illuminated hemisphere that envelops us like a big blue blanket. All of this is to explain why I love working in the dark. Though my studio is small when the lights are off the space becomes near infinite. Working with light and darkness allows me to create my own horizons and blankets of color. The pieces I make are about amplifying nuance, giving light a physicality that confronts the viewer with something they may have otherwise taken for granted. Through materials that disperse and magnify, my work makes light tangible and produces an experience for the viewer that is a balance between a science fair and the transcendent.

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Akea Brionne

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Akea Brionne

 
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Akea Brionne is a lens-based artist whose work investigates the implications of historical racial and social structures in relation to contemporary Black life in America. With a particular focus on the ways in which history influences the contemporary cultural milieu of the Black American middle class, she explores current political and social themes, as they relate to historical forms of oppression, discrimination, and segregation in American history.

Akea received the Visual Task Force Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. Her work is also featured in the Smithsonian's Ralph Rinzler Collection and Archives, and was recently acquired by the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art Collection. She was announced the 2018 Winner for Duke University’s Center for Documentary Arts Collection Award, as the 2018 Documentarian of Color. Her series, Black Picket Fences, was acquired for their permanent collection, and is on preserve at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. She was nominated for PDN's 30 (Photo District News) 2018: New and Emerging Photographers to Watch. Brown was also named a 2019 Sondheim finalist.

Additionally, Akea cofounded the Shades Collective, an interdisciplinary collective aimed at creating discussions around the realities of people of color within the arts and academia.

Akea received her BFA (2018) from the Maryland Institute College of Art, in the dual degree program of Photography and Humanities. She is originally from New Orleans, Louisiana and is currently based in Baltimore, Maryland.

Artist statement

My work investigates the implications of historical racial and social structures in relation to the development of contemporary black life and identity within America. With a particular focus on the ways in which history influences the contemporary cultural milieu of the American black middle class, I explore today's African American community, as it relates to historical forms of oppression, discrimination, and segregation in American history. In turn, this body of work became more focused and aims to highlight an often overlooked group in contemporary American culture: the black, suburban middle class. While this group has not been entirely forgotten, it is hard to define. For some, these photographs might be the first and most intimate form of contact or interaction they might have with a black household. My work (both photographic and written) is largely inspired by one central question: If the ethos of the suburban landscape is largely understood as an ideologically “white” space, how do we begin to discuss the paradox of the black suburb and the ways in which it challenges to concept of whiteness? It became important to think about the suburban landscape, not simply in terms of a continuous area, but as an object that has the ability to be altered and shaped to benefit those who inhabit it. Through examination of physical space as a manifestation of the privileges afforded by "racializing" one another, I've expanded to examine the overwhelming display of American pride in the landscape, and it's affect on the black psyche.

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Yacine Tilala Fall

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Yacine Tilala Fall

 

Yacine Tilala Fall is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist. She received a BFA from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. Using performance, sculpture, painting and natural materials, her work investigates identity, politics, and history through the lens of the body. Her work and practice speaks to the human body and its entangled relationship with the natural environment. A Senegalese heritage and an American upbringing informs her repetitive and labor intensive art practice.

Artist statement

I am a Muslim Senegalese–Mauritanian American. My connection to my ancestry and my culture is what drives my practice and influences my perspective. I am a multidisciplinary artist concerned with the body: the body as means of creation, as material, and as a lens through which my work can be viewed. My work is political and socially conscious because my body, a black body, is inherently political. The manipulation of the body and how its internal intricacies mirror the environment we experience is a theme I continuously investigate. Our natural environment and the environment which we have built are spaces where aggressive, tense, contained and restricted relationships exist. I have developed a similar kind of relationship with my work. I allow it to manipulate my body and vice versa as a way of building a deeper connection to the material and its history.

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Madeline A. Stratton

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Madeline A. Stratton

Madeline A. Stratton (b. 1987, Memphis, TN; lives and works in Washington, DC) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. In 2018, she earned her Multidisciplinary MFA in the Mount Royal School of Art at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she received a Merit Scholarship. She holds an MA in History of Art and the Art Market: Modern and Contemporary from Christie’s Education in New York, NY and a BA in Studio Art and History of Art from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. Stratton has experience working as a cataloguer of Prints & Multiples at Christie's auction house in New York and as a cataloguer of American works on paper at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She has exhibited in Nashville, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and throughout the Washington, DC area. In 2018, she participated in the Keyholder Residency at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, MD. In her work, she enjoys using paint, textiles, and printmaking to explore ideas of memory and the juxtaposition of presence and absence. Stratton currently teaches upper school art at St. Albans School and works as a Printshop Associate at Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center.

Hamiltonian Artists × The Kreeger Museum: Unexpected Occurrences (2022)

We Were Here (2022)

Welcome Back (2020)

HS1 | public, private, urgent, intimate, sparse (2020)

Artist statement

My work is an investigation of the memory and importance of domestic objects and spaces. Utilizing traditional media such as paint, textiles, thread, and printmaking, I challenge myself to create representations stemming from my memory. By creating silhouettes of objects and simplified structures of empty spaces, I aim to convey both absence and belonging. I search for ways to memorialize and find comfort in the objects of daily rituals and the spaces in which they take place. While drawing from places and times specific to me, I hope the viewer can enter into a reflective journey of their own space and memory.

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Curtis Miller

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Curtis Miller

Curtis Miller was born in Corsicana Texas in 1979. Growing up in Texas, Curtis relocated from Austin to Baltimore in 2011 to attend Maryland Institute College of Art's Hoffberger School of Painting (2013). He has exhibited his paintings throughout Texas at K Space Contemporary, Gaddis Geeslin Gallery, Joan Grona Gallery, The South Texas Art Museum, and the Art Center of Corpus Christi. In Baltimore, Curtis has exhibited his paintings at Terrault Contemporary, City Arts, Maryland Art Place, John Fonda Gallery, Jordan Faye Contemporary, and Platform Gallery. He also exhibited his work at Marianne Boesky Gallery and The Painting Center in NYC and is a previous Sondheim Prize semi-finalist. Curtis currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD with his wife, 5 year-old daughter, and 18 year-old dog.

Artist statement

Perhaps one of painting’s strongest qualities, separating it from other visual media, is the ability to incorporate texture, to insinuate touch. It is this haptic quality that further emphasizes the value of its presence and the value of our being present. My paintings are as much built as they are painted. I think of them as stages that allow paint to exist in different contexts. The majority of my content/imagery is developed during the building of the ground using marble dust gesso tinted with dispersion pigment. Building a ground can take weeks to finish. The painting process is typically much faster. Sometimes the paint further supports/participates in the composition; Sometimes there are places designated simply for paint to be paint. I want the viewer to be rewarded for their time spent looking at my work, and especially for moving closer. I want my work to convey to the viewer the process of making itself, and perhaps suggest they, too, could participate.

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Sera Boeno

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Sera Boeno

Sera Boeno (b. 1991) is a sculptor and installation artist from Istanbul, Turkey. Her praxis is research-based and heavily influenced by the socio-politics of her motherland. Narratives of and around women in historically silenced topics –politics, sex, religion, trauma– are central to her work. Concrete, metal, wood, and digital processes make the foundations of her practice. Boeno holds a B.A. Dartmouth College with degrees in Neuroscience and Studio Art, and an M.F.A from Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art with focuses in curatorial practice, critical studies and art education. She is the recipient of several awards and grants including the Baltimore Jewelry Center Fellowship and Amalie Rothschild '34 Rinehart Award for her work. Boeno has shown and worked in various creative projects between Turkey, Japan and the United States. She is currently based in Baltimore, MD. 

Artist statement

My praxis is research based and influenced by the socio-politics of my motherland. Silenced topics –politics, sex, religion, trauma– are central to my work. I cast and catalog memories; I paint urban development; I sculpt violence against women; I make objects out of police misconduct; I collect small, intimate bits of information, and re-contextualize them in larger discourses. This transformation of particular, evanescent stories into public, enduring narratives is a constant in my work; the subject matter varies. Currently I am working on Kelimeler Kıyafetsiz: a research project on representations of women in political speech from Turkey wherein I collect quotes that refer to women re-present these in monumental forms that celebrate male glory. In 2015, the text took the form of writing stones visually drawing from Orhon Inscriptions: Turkic artifacts glorifying 8th Century Göktürk Princes. In 2016, the text was built into a concrete frieze inspired by Assyrian reliefs eulogizing kings of Nineveh. The 2018 iteration takes the form of an obelisk. The contemporaneity of the methodology and the materials is antithetical to the archeological visual language of these works, yielding modern day historical objects, reflecting the antiquated conceptualizations of womanhood in modern day patriarchies. The text reads “Men and women are….each other’s complementary”. Parallely, the 2018 monument has complementary counterparts: a set of golden mouth ornaments that cage the lips of its wearer in Turkish Illumination motifs. Delicate, seductive, and silencing, these beautiful gags confirm women’s exclusion from the linguistic realm, marginalization and ornamenatalization within history.

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Luke Ikard

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Luke Ikard

Luke Ikard (b. 1990, Houston, TX) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Baltimore, MD, where he is an Artist in Residence at the School 33 Art Center. He is an Adjunct Professor at George Washington University and Carroll Community College teaching courses in 3D design and new media. He completed his MFA in Multidisciplinary Art from the Mount Royal School of Art at Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017, and he received his BFA in Studio Art from Sam Houston State University in 2014. Ikard was a 2017 Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship finalist and Trawick Prize semifinalist. He received the 2015-2017 Merit Scholarship from the Mount Royal School of Art. His work is part of the College of Fine Art and Mass Communication permanent collection at Sam Houston State University. Ikard has also produced site-specific work at the Sam Houston Memorial Museum Park and has exhibited throughout the United States. His work has most recently been shown in group exhibitions at Maryland Art Place, School 33 Art Center, and the International Art Gallery in the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

Artist statement

I employ domestic objects guided by sound to create the opportunity to perceive an unfamiliar past or to invent a new one. I utilize my knowledge of sound, emerging technologies, and skills as a woodworker, to investigate the object's capacity to serve as a trace of authentic experiences. I use domestic materials, animation, science fiction soundscapes, stage equipment, 3D printing, cassette tapes, and interactive electronic technologies to create a sentiment of displacement; a longing for a home that no longer exists or never existed. In my work, interactive technology is paired with stage equipment to highlight the absence of a participant and as an invitation to perform with the object. I draw from objects that exist as samples of distanced experiences, an experience which the object can only evoke and resonate, and can never entirely recoup. These objects suggest potential narratives, loss, and memorial fragments which collide to form new events.

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Brian Dunn

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Brian Dunn

Brian Michael Dunn investigates pictorial abstraction through quantized landscape pattern paintings and through painted reliefs that mimic the forms and surfaces of everyday objects. Born in Milwaukee, WI in 1982, Dunn received a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting from Boston University and a Masters of Fine Art from Cornell University. Dunn was awarded a Mid-Atlantic Arts Council Fellowship to attend the Millay Residency, a Pollack-Krasner Fellowship to attend the Woodstock-Byrdcliffe Residency and the Ellen Stoeckel-Battel Fellowship to attend the Yale-Norfolk Summer Program. Dunn’s work has been exhibited in galleries across the region including Terrault (Baltimore), Nudashank (Baltimore), Automat (Philadelphia), Woskobb Family Gallery (PA) Fjord (Philadelphia), Creative Arts Workshop (New Haven) Gary Snyder Project Space (NYC), Fordham University Lipani Gallery (NYC), Hundred Forsyth (NYC), Public Address Gallery (NYC) and Ventana244 (NYC).

Artist statement

Over the past few years I’ve developed concurrently two distinct bodies of work. One group, which I call ‘Sequences,’ is a series of paintings made up of invented representations of nature constructed through a series of overlapping and interweaving patterns of geometric forms. The other group, which I’ve dubbed ‘Sheetz’ is a series of low relief paintings on sheet metal that mimic the forms and surfaces of everyday objects. In the Sheetz series, I seek to create works which operate as both object and image, abstraction and naturalistic representation, and which display aspects of both their true and depicted materiality. The objects that I have chosen to re-create all carry some quality of ‘painting-ness’ (relative flatness, color, rectalinearity) and each object’s previously functional qualities take on new roles as signifiers of meaning when re-cast as elements within a painting. The Sequences series began with an investigation into the interaction of varied patterns across a pictorial field as they go in and out of phase. I sought the parameters of following set patterns across a limited set of coordinates as a way to counter my own compositional defaults and to inject a mechanized logic into the pictures. Recently, I’ve applied this systematic, repetitive approach to composition and mechanized, depersonalized paint handling to representations of the natural world. While these two directions in my practice deal with very different sets of questions, both bodies of work stem from devoting prolonged attention to often overlooked aspects of everyday life.

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Rachel Schmidt

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Rachel Schmidt

Rachel Schmidt is an installation artist based in the Washington, DC region. She uses time-based media and installation to explore urbanization and its impact on ecosystems, future landscapes, and the roll that myth plays in our understanding of the environment. Rachel received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore before moving to Warsaw, Poland for a year of artistic research. From 2012-2016 Rachel worked as an Exhibition Coordinator at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and has been an artist in residence at the Arlington Arts Center, Taipei Artist Village, Sabhal Mor Ostaig in Scotland, Vermont Studio Center, and the Taller Portobelo Norte in Panama. Schmidt has received grants and commissions from the Halcyon House, Foggy Bottom Sculpture Biennial, Mount Vernon Triangle BID, Arlington County Public Arts, and the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County. She has exhibited throughout the US and Internationally, and has been reviewed in Sculpture Magazine, Washington Post, and numerous other print and online publications.

Artist statement

I use site-specific mixed media installations to create future myths that explore the potential realities of the Anthropocene. I am interested in futuristic visions of a world without a natural ecosystem, where a synthetic biology governs how people relate and coexist. What role will myth play in this future world and how will the action of myth building take form and evolve? How will a vanishing ecosystem manifest itself in the awareness and scarcity of material use? In a world where the rules of the game are changing so quickly, how can artists respond quickly and nimbly to a shifting planet? I consider myself a futurist and even when I allow my imagination to speculate wildly about the future of humanity, I always seem to return to the potential realities faced by non-human life. Making art on future landscapes, climate change, and artificial habitats can be a loaded political discourse, but I have never approached it as such. I see it as an inherently human issue that impacts all of us personally and I use my installations as a way to connect through these shared experiences.

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Kaitlin Jencso

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Kaitlin Jencso

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Kaitlin Jencso is a photographer who lives and works in Washington, D.C. Jencso explores the emotional terrain of ever-expanding and evolving relationships through loss, ephemera, bloodlines, and the land. Her photographs of the habitual moments in our everyday capture and communicate insular experiences. Kaitlin graduated with a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in 2012. She won Best Fine Art Series at FotoWeek DC in both 2014 and 2016 and received the Award of Merit in the 2014 Focal Point show at the Maryland Federation of Art.

Artist statement

Disenchanted grew out of the need to mediate the painful experience of death within my family. It is primarily composed of candid images in the diaristic tradition of my immediate family as we dealt with the prolonged process of death and its aftermath. We grieved the physical loss of these two people, as well as the emotional fallout and degradation of familial bonds that rippled out into the surviving family. There is never explicit imagery of their deaths, or even the people themselves, but the overall tone and melancholy of loss that seeped out into all aspects of life over the years is acutely depicted. The people shown in the images are rarely looking at the camera, but are instead presented through an intimate, yet voyeuristic lens as they go about their every day existence. Stretches of time are distilled in small, transcendent experiences that portray the underlying sorrow, beauty, and mundanity of remaining.

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Patrick Harkin

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Patrick Harkin

Patrick Harkin utilizes installation, video, sound, and photography in his artistic practice.  His theatrically staged work investigates themes of commodity criticism and concepts of ideology in modern consumer culture.  He addresses the ties between images, materiality and consumerism in order to explore the human condition under image mediated culture. 

Patrick currently teaches photography at Virginia Commonwealth University. He received his BFA from the University of Florida in 2015 and his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2017.  Recent exhibitions of his work have taken place at Virginia’s Museum of Contemporary Art (Virginia Beach), VALET (Richmond), Florida Museum of Photographic Arts (Tampa) and Gallery Protocol (Gainesville). 

Artist statement

Growing up in suburban Florida, I am well acquainted with the seasonal need to try and hurricane-proof everything in my native state. Cycles of building, destruction, and rebuilding related to the natural elements, especially water and wind, are spotlighted in my work. Memories of my upbringing living in flood zones and my relationship to rising sea levels resonates with me and informs my practice to this day. Many of the materials I work with are collected in the preparation and aftermath of hurricanes I have lived through, as well as in the wake of my own consumer habits. Use of consumer detritus, building materials, and allusions to natural disasters serve as powerful metaphors and entry points that open the work to the complex systems I strive to address.

My work addresses the ties between images, materiality, and consumerism in order to explore the human condition under image mediated culture. I examine the way in which we can read images and objects as material, spatial, and ideological models of the world. My working method involves creating objects and scenarios specifically to be photographed, as well as sculptural and video work to be presented in dialogue with traditional photographs. My aim is to reconsider sculptural and photographic tradition through material inquiry and installation in order to script my unique sense of visual reality.

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Jing (Ellen) Xu

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Jing (Ellen) Xu

I like thinking that my work instigates performance; it encourages viewers to perform in a multivalent emotional collaboration with it. I create immersive, site specific installations in all media—painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, furniture, murals, video, et al—that create dreamlike, fictional spaces that disrupt reality and present more questions than they answer. While I turn to art as a means of resolving my own identity—allowing my very private inner thoughts and questions to become public—I hope that the humble, honest manner of sharing the work serves viewers by opening up similar opportunities for reverie. I believe that if something exists in the mind, it exists in the world, the trouble seems to only come when we try to reify it. Apparently I like making trouble.

Ellen (Jing) Xu was born (1987) and raised in Inner Mongolia, China. She received a dual degree from Xiamen University, China; her MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle; and has also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. Her work has been exhibited at the ROY G BIV Gallery in Columbus, OH; the Seattle Art Museum, Soil Gallery, Interstitial Gallery, and Jacob Lawrence Gallery in Seattle; the Blue Door Art Center in Yonkers, NY; 435 Broome in SoHo, NYC; the Kaufman Arts District in Queens, NYC; Sculptureworks Ferguson in St. Louis, MO; the Helmuth Project in San Diego, CA; and others. Ellen has had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT; Paul Artspace in St. Louis, MO; and the Wassaic Artist Residency in Wassaic, NY. She was also a Media Arts Fellow at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY.

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Antonio McAfee

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Antonio McAfee

Operating with photography, video, and collage, Antonio McAfee’s work addresses the complexity of representation. Through appropriating and manipulating historical portraits, he engages in prescribed views of individuals and rework images to provide an alternate - more layered image and concept of the people depicted. His photographs oscillate between formal considerations and imaginary potential of the photographed sitter.

In his portraits, he dries glue on inkjet prints to enact a transfer process that partially removes ink from the surface, yet leaves ink on the dried glue peel to duplicate the individual. As a result, the portrait of the print is faded and fragmented with partial physical features remaining. The glue peel offspring are reused in collages to create fantastical interpretations of the bodies.

Throughout all McAfee’s work, the primary concern is to depict visual and physical transformation, in which the superficial read of others are abstracted to render it unstable. This is an attempt to encourage a layered and tangled relationship with whom and what is visually offered. One way he addresses prescribed assumptions is to use historical narratives and portraits. Through using appropriated sources, there is a basis for understanding particular ideas and stories that are passed down and sustained.

The source of the artist’s portraits is The Exhibition of American Negroes organized by W.E.B. Du Bois and Thomas Calloway for the 1900 Paris International Exposition. The exhibition was a photographic, economic, and legislative survey of middle-class blacks in Georgia.

Antonio McAfee is a photographer raised and based in Baltimore, MD. He received his BFA in Fine Art Photography from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. Shortly after, he earned his MFA in Photography from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2011, he received a Post-Graduate Diploma in Art in Arts and Culture Management from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa). His fascination with history, portraiture, and what makes photographs drives his activities.

McAfee has been featured in BmoreArt Magazine, The Washington Post, Washington City Paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mission on Tenth published by California Institute of Integrated Studies, and catalogues published by the University of Pennsylvania and Corcoran College of Art and Design. He participated in residencies at Can Serrat (Spain) and Vermont Studio Center. Antonio was awarded Civil Society Institute Fellowship, Faculty Research and Development Grant from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Fulbright IIE Grant to Johannesburg, South Africa, Howard Silvertstein Photography Beijing, China Aboard Program, and Dedalus MFA Painting and Sculpture Fellowship. His work has been exhibited at the University of Maryland, College Park Stamp Gallery, George Washington University Gallery 102, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Civilian Art Projects, Flashpoint, Michael Steinberg Gallery, and Terrault Contemporary. Currently, Antonio is an instructor at Montgomery College.

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Heather Theresa Clark

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Heather Theresa Clark

Heather Theresa Clark builds systems that critique our current world predicament. Her work plays on what she calls cultural neurosis: the human tendency to over-consume, over-build, over-groom, in lieu of direct physical exertion to ensure survival. She views this as a misdirected attempt to satisfy basic primal urges for shelter, food, and clothing in a society where actions are grossly amplified because one gallon of gasoline equals five hundred hours of human work output.

Heather’s perspective has evolved from her background in green building, urban planning, and ecology, and most recently from her life in exurbia, where she has lived and worked for the past six years. She is embedded in a landscape that feeds on cultural neurosis. Meadows, forests, and farms transitioning to tract homes and cul de sacs have become her muse. As an inhabitant of exurbia, Heather is both complicit and trapped in the consumption economy and its byproducts. Here, the uncanny valley, which is usually discussed in relation to artificial intelligence, appears to Heather in the industrially designed and generated vernacular; she works with her hands in defiance.

Heather’s work and life has led her to believe that greater satisfaction can be achieved through physical proximity to meeting one’s basic needs – building with one’s hands, using one’s body, growing one’s own food. She yearns to reinvent how we live, using art, architecture and public interventions to catalyze built environments that power themselves, cleanse themselves, transform waste, provide wildlife habitat, produce food, and deeply satisfy inhabitants.

Heather Theresa Clark utilizes art, architecture, and public interventions to catalyze built environments that power themselves, cleanse themselves, transform waste, provide wildlife habitat, produce food, and enhance the lives of people. Through her art, she demonstrates how present reality is not a given and can be crafted to make life more fulfilling. Heather approaches art making as a planner, green developer, and ecologist.  She holds a Master of Science in Real Estate Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, and a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University, summa cum laude, in Environmental Science and Community Planning, a self-designed major.  As founder of Biome Studio, she has transformed a burned building shell into an open-air theater with a living sculpture; co-created the Busycle, a 15 person-pedal powered bus; overseen the largest deep energy retrofit in the U.S.; converted historic mills into green low-income housing; and installed over one megawatt of solar pv on 2,300 low-income apartments. Heather is also an activist.  Heather is the founder of the Play-In for Climate Action, a family-oriented climate change protest held annually at the US Capitol by Moms Clean Air Force, a special project of the Environmental Defense Fund. Heather is the 2016 recipient of the Virginia Commission for the Arts Sculpture Fellowship Award and the 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the Woods Hole Research Center, the leading global climate change think tank.

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