Destany Faye
A Modern Tragedy: Addiction, Anxiety, and the American Adolescent grew from me using my art as tool to work through the realization that my mother will never be the same as she was before her addiction. I refer to this process as active grief; which I define as grieving an older version of someone who is still physically here. It is the loss of what someone once was. The central piece of my show is a film photography series about my mother's addiction and how it affects my life. It is intentionally printed dark so that the viewer must focus hard to view it. I did this to engage the viewer and entice them away from my captions long enough to view the work. The surrounding two pieces are my emotional response to the photography series. They are on fabric, which is a medium that provides a healing process for me. The technical process of mending and surface quality helps me define and relay the complex feeling and situation I am in. My goal with my work is to open a dialogue about the effects of addiction on a family. I want other kids of addicts to know that it is okay to not want a relationship with a parent and that it is okay to be unsure of your feelings towards them.
Angelica Lyublinskaya
Organically Intertwined delves into the symbiotic connection humans share with nature, as well as the lack thereof. The more we have advanced as a society, the less respect we have for our environment, causing a major disconnect. I am reconnecting humans to nature by incorporating human characteristics into organic materials. Wax is an important staple in this piece because of its affiliation with the environment and the idea of preservation. The head, faces, and hands are made of wax, which are melting and transforming. This reflects the cycle of life, transformation, and rebirth. Our attempts to preserve humanity have resulted in neglecting our environment and in return we are destroying nature along with ourselves. Although the wax is changing and melting, the found natural elements remain unchanged. In the end we will destroy ourselves and nature will win. In order to achieve balance, we need to reconnect with our environment and preserve it instead of destroying it.
Aubrey Venkler
Where I Can Never Go. is an installation that communicates my investigation into my personal family history through constructed narrative and the preservation of childhood and inherited memories.
The installation features a white, muted green and blue, and natural brown color palette to emphasize my ideas of the passage of time, preserved life, and longing. Deconstructing and reconstructing textiles into new pieces is a meditative approach to healing for my own inner struggles, spiritual renewal, and overlapping evocations of familial history. The processes of cyanotype printing, hand-stitching, and transferring of images in my work requires focus and is slow going, allowing me to be present in the moment by being physically engaged with the work and by demanding careful consideration for each action. I source the many of the textiles for my work from my own clothing and household fabrics, as well as found fabrics, books, and letters.
The artwork is an intimate space for viewers to share in my inquisitive and nostalgic tendencies. I obstruct details of the photographic imagery and use a curtain to create a boundary or separation between viewer and artist, personal memories versus inherited ones, and to emphasize the idea of a time present and another forever out of reach.
Shea Glaster
From a very young age I was always interested in expressing myself through my artistic abilities. As a creator my primary focus lies in design, color, illustration and telling a story through my art. When it comes to inspirations and my influences I am inspired by Japanese anime (animation) and manga (comic books). As an African American, I am interested in how I can combine the brilliant and inspirational nature of African American culture, fashion, history and beliefs with the beautiful, vivid, and eccentric visual aesthetic of anime and manga. my goal is to wow the eye with something cool, extraordinary, thought provoking, and wholesome.
The theme of this body of work is the concept of love. As we go about our daily lives, it is impossible to ignore the heightened focus on the negativity of the world. In our day and age love has lost it meaning among the chaos in our world and in the African American community the concept of authentic and healthy relationships is something that is often not advertised enough. In this series of digital illustrations I mix Japanese aesthetic influences with my experience as an African American to show the positives and wholesomeness of African American relationships.
Salma Hernandez
“America is White and Black and Latino and Asian. America is immigrants.” - Jose Antonio Vargas
Vargas is a journalist, filmmaker, and immigration rights activist. He founded a nonprofit organization called Define American, a leading voice for the human rights of undocumented immigrants. In 2011 the New York Times published an essay by Vargas where he disclosed his life as an undocumented immigrant.
My artwork is a critical view of social, political, and cultural issues in the United States. I referenced my Latin American heritage and upbringing to depict the hardships of undocumented aliens in the United States. I portrayed my experiences growing up in the United States as an undocumented immigrant. I used variety of processes such as intaglio, photolitho, linocut, and collage to illustrate these topics. Intaglio allowed me to get finer details and a variation of grays. Linocut gave me a more distinct style and contrast. I collaged my work to better help with the integration of colors. Main colors in my works are red, white, and blue. These three colors are easily distinguishable as being American because of the U.S. flag. Also used a variety of vibrant colors that I pulled from my Hispanic ancestry. Works such as Coyote, The Dreamer, and Madre y Hija use iconography to help represent my culture. Purpose of these works is to shed light on these issues and how illegal immigrants deal with them.
Haley Hester Knight
The unique journey of life invites us to always carry on. We are asked frequently to separate our emotional state from our physical state, in order to properly keep our regimen in the daily grind. For this work, I asked that the person slow down and acknowledge a place on their body that harbored pain, pleasure or enlightenment.
The conceptual ideas going into each form is centered around the human experience such as human fragility, the impermanence of life and the emotional state and spirituality. Each model granted an informal interview about their practices of self-care and how they created body positivity within themselves.
They incorporate a comment on the weight of everyday life, the importance of self-preservation choices and how everyday women overcome negative self-image and regain certainty in themselves.
It is our physical bodies that carry us, but our emotions that drive us. Through this work, the person can connect emotion with a physical place on the body. It is through their acknowledgement, strength is gained. In this way, I am furthering my exploration of the female form and continuing creative ways of displaying the final forms produced.
Each bronze piece brings light and fantasy to the feminine beauty and shows an aesthetic of physical and conceptual spirituality of each individual.
I created this body of work to promote cultural healing and to encourage a safe space for open dialog among women about sensitive subjects.
Izzy Looney
My work commonly explores the connection between mental health and emotional isolation. I often use the connectivity of nature as a backdrop for exploring this theme. In contrast with the organic imagery I incorporate in my work, I am also fascinated by the figure and use it symbolically to illustrate the struggles of isolation, both physically and emotionally. Often my figures are shown cropped or incomplete, reflecting the fragmentation of self that accompanies mental illness. Additionally, I sometimes incorporate animals that reflect a personal memory or feeling within the context of the piece.
Typically I use a variation of technique within a single artwork, but my work consists mostly of oil painting and illustration. Much of my technique is experimental, but the overarching theme of my work explores how we as conscious beings interact with the natural world. It calls attention to our tendency to isolate ourselves from each other and from nature, contemplating how we cope with the realities of mortality, mental illness, and detachment.
Matthew McAdams
Attika is about bringing together my love for technology and design to create a variable typeface. Variable type is a relatively new technology that benefits both designers and software developers by providing access to a range of font variation in a single file. My typeface, Attika is loosely inspired by its namesake: a region of Greece home to Athens, a haven of philosophy and democracy. In essence, Attika is a humanistic sans-serif typeface suitable for headlines and display text.
You can download the font here.
Maddie McCann
This body of work consists of marketing collateral for various corporate and political entities that exist within a dystopian American society in and around the year 2067. This absurd “alternate” world I have imagined is inspired by my inclinations that a future such as this might slowly be morphing into our current reality. A TV celebrity is our president, we're still fighting nazism and related fascist movements almost 100 years after those ideologies became forefront, and it's 2020 and our culture is still obsessed with the 90s. I’ve juxtaposed dystopian advertisements with event posters that seem to subversively oppose the special interests displayed in the other marketing pieces. When installed in a physical space, this work conveys the sense or experience of walking past the brick wall of a grimy back alley with visual information pasted one over another in competition for the viewer’s attention.
In this project, I explore current and upcoming trends in typography and design while tapping into the fears that I and other people my age have for a future controlled by corporate interest and greed. This show can be viewed as an ironic commentary on my portfolio itself, as it will serve the purpose of marketing my work to potential employers while also representing the fear many designers have of designing for a cause they don’t believe in. The work is intended to be both hopeful and grim, and to represent the role of artists and designers as forward-thinking leaders of oppositional movements.
Sophie McVicar
Derived from the Greek cathartes, roughly translating to “purifier,” Cathartidae is a body of work exploring the seven extant species of New World vultures that fall within the Cathartidae family. Drawing inspiration from the idea of the vulture as a purifier rather than a scavenger, the watercolor paintings seek to elevate these birds as integral agents within nature’s cycle. Each vulture exists centrally within a romantic, dark, and untamed atmosphere. At no point does the chaos surrounding the vulture overwhelm or subsume her—she remains the master and rests somber and sure. The vulture waits as a gatekeeper between the physical world and the phantasmal, tirelessly maintaining the cycle of life and death as she redistributes the energy of lives passed on. The vulture does not lurk, eagerly anticipating devouring rotted flesh. She possesses a glory and a dignity, not afforded her in traditional Western perceptions. The face and talons of each vulture radiate a visceral energy, a departure from the body’s regal and controlled poise. The eyes peer deeply and unforgivingly at the viewer, and prominent talons illustrate a power and potential for violence which exacerbates the stare.
Each painting is enclosed within hand-carved wood frames which borrow their stylization from Dutch auricular frames. The motifs and mark-making within the frames echo those found within the paintings, while also creating a physical reality that augments the illusion built within.