Issue 28

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Featured image: Niklas Asker Afterimage oil on canvas more on p. 118-119

ArtMaze Magazine is an independent artist-run and ad-free international print and online publication dedicated to showcasing and promoting experimental and progressive contemporary art, which reflects modern society and its environment, provokes conversation and action; and fosters innovation and diversity of mediums which make today’s art scene so intriguing and versatile.

HOW WE WORK ArtMaze Magazine is published five times per year and announces a competition-based curated call for art for each issue every 2-3 months. We invite guest curators from internationally renowned galleries as well as independent art professionals and artists to help select works for each issue’s guest-curated section of works.

We also maintain in each edition an exclusive selection curated by ArtMaze Magazine editorial team.

ArtMaze print editions offer its readers a continuous art experience which includes interviews with previously featured artists as well as our carefully curated selections of artworks which offer an insight to the inspiring progress and success of an extraordinary amount of emerging contemporary artists from all over the world who have been applying to our competition-based curated calls.

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR WORK Artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, digital, film, performance, any mixed media etc.

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Artists or any art organisations on behalf of artists from all countries are welcome to submit.

We accept works to be sent to us for consideration only via our competition-based open calls for art for print publications. Please visit our website for more details: www.artmazemag.com/call-for-art or see p. 9 Each individual submitting work to ArtMaze Magazine opportunities is provided with a fair and equal chance.

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FRONT COVER:

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Krzysztof Grzybacz Mask oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm more on p. 48-49

© 2022 print ISSN No. 2399-892X

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online ISSN No. 2399-8938

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Christina Haglid Nest watercolor and gouache on paper 11 x 8 inches more on p. 38-39

ArtMaze Magazine is printed in London, United Kingdom

by Park Communications Ltd.

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interviewed

call for art

Heave n on e art h : Je n ny Morgan’s d i a ph anou s p aint ings explor i ng t he fe m i ni ne i n nat u re .. .....12

Anniversar y E d itio n 30 .................................................... . . . . . . . . 9

A h au nt i ng: I n c onve rs at ion w ith p ai nte r Julia M ai u r i .................................................. .....24

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Contents

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guest-curated selection of works

curated selection of works

Ch r ist i na H a glid ..................................................... ................38 M at t hew S p r ung ..................................................... ................40 Ke nt aro Ok u mu ra ................................................... ................42 N icla s S chöle r ........................................................................44 Mel A rs e nault ..........................................................................46 Kr z ys z tof G r z ybacz ................................................ ................48 Lydi a F re ie r . . ........................................................... ................50 S a sh a D eya sh . .......................................................... ................52 S imone G r iff i n ......................................................... ................54 A nde rs H am ilton .....................................................................56 S of ia Be rge r . . .......................................................... ................58 Ch arb on ne au Tw i n s ................................................ ................60 A le ah Ch a p in .......................................................... ................62 Olivia Ch iga s .......................................................... ................64 E lis a L e ndvay .........................................................................66 Joh n Paul Ke sl i ng ...................................................................68 Ashley Janu ar y ........................................................................70 Iwo Zan iewsk i .........................................................................72 M ar los E’ van ........................................................... ................74 E m ily G or u m . ..........................................................................76

Jo siah E ll ner ........................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 E mily Weiner .......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Lee Maxey .............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Rich ard Dean Hughes ............................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Lau ra B en so n .......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Tho mas B il s ........................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 0 Winnie Truo ng ....................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2 Go sia Macho n ......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 4 Ky ung S o o n Park .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 6 Haoyan Zh ang ...................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 8 Lau ren dela Ro che ................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 0 Ruei-Heng Cai ....................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 J. Carino ................................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 N ick Hobbs ............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Mengqiu .................................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Chen Wei Ting ........................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 10 Guim Tió ................................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 2 Natal ia Go nzalez Martin ...................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 14 Rafael Uriegas ....................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 16 N iklas Asker .......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 8 Claud ia Greathead ................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 0 E l isa Filo mena ...................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 2 Kate B ickmo re ....................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 24 Anwar Mahd i ......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 6 Al icia Reyes McNamara ......................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 8 Al iso n Kudlow ........................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 0 Pam E ll ick .............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 2 Jackie S lanley ........................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 4 O rly Co gan ............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 6 Cr ystal Lupa ........................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 8 Yanqing Pei ............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 0 Michelle Paterok ................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2

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Anniversary Edition 30: CELEBRATING A DECADE IN CURATING AND PUBLISHING

call for art DEADLINE: September 29, 2022 Anniversary edition 30 is to be curated exclusively by ArtMaze Magazine editorial team

Submit your work for a chance to be published in print and digital issues, as well as online.

ELIGIBILITY: This competition is open to all artists, both national and international, working in all visual mediums: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, digital, performance, film, any mixed media etc.

DISTRIBUTION: ArtMaze Magazine is an independent international publication which is distributed worldwide via select book shops, and via our online store: www.artmazemag.com/shop HOW TO APPLY: Please visit our website for more details and fill in the online form via the following link: www.artmazemag.com/call-for-art You are welcome to read more information on our website: www.artmazemag.com or contact us at info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: Natalia Gonzalez Martin Agua oil on wood 30 x 42 cm more on p. 114-115

inte

erviewed:

Jenny Morgan Julia Maiuri

www.jennymorganart.com

Heaven on earth: Jenny Morgan’s diaphanous paintings exploring the feminine in nature Figurative painter Jenny Morgan is known for her technically intricate, hyper-realist psychological portraits that probe the meaning of the female body in society. In her recent work, she has extended this into an exploration of the relationship of the feminine in nature. Described by Mother Gallery as her first foray into landscape painting, the diaphanous paintings are inhabited by female figures whose features and forms undulate and merge with the landscape. Like nymphs or nature spirits, they are elemental, sensual, transformational; inhabiting a liminal space between the spheres of the known and the unknown. In these monochromatic new works, Jenny’s imperceptible brush strokes trace the lines and folds of surface textures, simultaneously concealing and revealing the subjects like a snake sloughing its skin.

In the painting Epiphany, a reclining figure reminiscent of John Everett Millais’ Ophelia is shrouded in iridescent blue satin that blurs into the ripples of a blue-green pool. As she floats on the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness, between this world and the next, the corporeal and ethereal intertwine towards a representation of the sublime. In the exhibition text that accompanies her most recent body of work To Bathe the World in a Strange Light, Jenny explains that “overlapping the landscape with the body was a way to deepen the understanding of why we need nature and our biological connections to earth, eros, creation, and belonging.” As we reckon with the reality of environmental crises, Jenny’s paintings offer a poignant reminder of our intrinsic connection with nature.

Jenny received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts New York in 2008 after completing her BFA at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, Colorado. She has exhibited her work widely in solo and group exhibitions in the USA and internationally since 2006. Jenny lives and works in Brooklyn, NYC.

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Jenny Morgan Portrait of a Woman oil on canvas 70 x 48 inches

Studio portrait courtesy of the artist

AMM: Hi Jenny! To start us off, can you share an interesting early memory that has in some way influenced your journey as an artist?

JM: I grew up believing in the existence of ghosts, spirits and the ability of disembodied souls to communicate with the living. As a kid, I searched for proof to physically validate the sensation of knowing there was something invisible surrounding me.

This kind of imaginary play and belief in the invisible has had a lasting effect on my creative practice. I think of painting as a way to manifest the unseen realm through the use of imagery.

AMM: Have you had any significant mentors in your career? What valuable lessons did they share?

JM: I feel fortunate to have been surrounded by a few women in particular who guided me through some challenging parts of my career. They are of a generation of women who were making figurative work during a time of male dominated abstract expressionism. These women all individually expressed the pain of not being recognized—they had to fight for the right to be acknowledged as valuable and not just valuable in their work, but valuable in their ideas and perspectives.

Art-making as a career is such a personal and vulnerable path, it is hard to separate yourself from your work. When your work is your identity, you have to learn to ride the waves of disappointment and failure without drowning. The most helpful advice they shared with me was that resilience and perseverance are possible through maintaining a loving relationship with your practice. It is important to always return to the simple joy of making, it will save you.

AMM: Are the figures in your work modelled on yourself? In what ways does your art reflect your own interior world and experiences?

JM: I believe there is a bit of self present in all artists’ work, but in figuration, the physical self does shine through in a more palpable way. Through the years, I have moved further away from the self-portrait, I don’t need the direct mirror anymore. I work with a subject who I consider to be my doppelganger, but even she has conceptually evolved into her own individual being and not a double or stand in for the self. So, as my focus has changed, the reflection of my personal interior world feels more subtle and unconscious.

internal life to respond to and be led by. This kind of investment in the subject required realism and empty space, the outcome was very deterministic. In the last few years, I’ve been craving more freedom and access to varied surfaces and textures. I’m not as concerned with the internal as I am with the external surfaces and information outside of the body. I’m giving myself more permission and exploring new ideas formally and conceptually.

AMM: Last year you had your first solo exhibition with Mother Gallery, To Bathe the World in a Strange Light. What themes and ideas were you exploring and did this body of work signal anything new in your practice?

JM: The work for this exhibition was a pivotal point in many ways. The essence of the work was made during quarantine and lock down in NYC. And due to the incredible unknowns that year, the body of work had a feeling of uncertainty and chaos surrounding it. The gift during that time was that I truly found sanctuary in my practice.

The only goal was to enjoy the paint and find a mental escape. Each painting served as a space to grieve and process the loss of four people in my life. The intensity of loss pushed me into new and revisited subject matter such as landscape, drapery and the transformational symbol of the snake. The chaos opened new channels and I’m still exploring.

AMM: This body of work seems to bring together ideas of nature and the feminine. Can you tell us more about these intersecting themes and those of vulnerability and pleasure?

JM: I wanted to understand the instinctual relationship of the feminine in nature— very much a continuation of exploring the meaning of the female body in society through portraiture. I was asking questions around Eros—not as a God, but the broader meaning of “life force” and the role of the feminine in the dynamic of creation. How powerful is this force? Where does this power come from? How does it originate?

It was helpful to explore the idea of power through softness and vulnerability. In the process of painting, vulnerability became a doorway to the sensation of pleasure. I have been viewing pleasure as a primary ingredient for manifestation. In the alchemical process, pleasure serves as a signal or inductor that something new is about to manifest.

AMM: Has your style and approach to painting changed much over time? In what ways has it evolved?

AMM: In art history, the female figure has been largely framed by the male gaze. In what ways does your work engage with and subvert the power dynamics implicit in this dynamic?

JM: My goal within the work has shifted through time. I spent many years investigating the portrait as a psychological study—viewing the sitter as a vessel with an

JM: Surprisingly, simply being a female identified artist painting the nude is still a subversive act in our time. I vacillate between pushing the boundaries of

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“Surprisingly, simply being a female identified artist painting the nude is still a subversive act in our time. I vacillate between pushing the boundaries of sensuality and then wanting to deny the viewer of it at the same time. That’s often where the push/ pull dynamic in the work comes from; it’s either expose/conceal or vulnerability/ safety. The use of cooltemperature greens has been a tool in subverting the nudes.

Green has connection with sickness, paganism and nature, all connotations that oppose the traditional sense of attraction and the warmth of sensuality. But my goal is never to reject any perceived gaze, as we understand that gender and attraction are complex, the rejection of the male gaze feels suppressive and denies the artist access to sensuality and erotism.”

- Jenny Morgan

Featured image (p.16): Jenny Morgan Pool oil on canvas 18 x 14 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28, Interviewed: Jenny Morgan

“The snake represented in the work is actually the pet of one of my subjects, so I have a personal relationship with this animal.

Physically handling this snake was thrilling and helped me understand why the snake is feared and revered at the same time. He represents transformation, the sharing of knowledge and danger. The plush drapery is material used to symbolize the veil between worlds, a shroud to cover the body and a malleable setting for the nude.

The hands are often distinguished and set apart formally from the rest of the body through color use as a way to denote agency and action, hands symbolize movement. Landscape and natural textures are spaces that symbolize the external and internal environment simultaneously. ” - Jenny Morgan

sensuality and then wanting to deny the viewer of it at the same time. That’s often where the push/pull dynamic in the work comes from; it’s either expose/conceal or vulnerability/safety. The use of cooltemperature greens has been a tool in subverting the nudes. Green has connection with sickness, paganism and nature, all connotations that oppose the traditional sense of attraction and the warmth of sensuality. But my goal is never to reject any perceived gaze, as we understand that

gender and attraction are complex, the rejection of the male gaze feels suppressive and denies the artist access to sensuality and erotism.

AMM: Please tell us more about the very deliberate and often monochrome use of colour in your work.

JM: Cohesiveness and a sense of control have dictated my use of the monochrome palettes.

As I have been exploring new themes or subjects, the mono palettes have been helpful to unite these new aspects and make the image feel whole.

AMM: What do some of the recurring motifs in your work symbolize—the snakes, hands, plush drapery and natural textures?

JM: The snake represented in the work is actually the pet of one of my subjects, so I have a personal relationship with this animal.

Physically handling this snake was thrilling and helped me understand why the snake is feared and revered at the same time. He represents transformation, the sharing of knowledge and danger. The plush drapery is material used to symbolize the veil between worlds, a shroud to cover the body and a malleable setting for the nude. The hands are often distinguished and set apart formally from the rest of the body through color use as a way to denote agency and action, hands symbolize movement. Landscape and natural textures are spaces that symbolize the external and internal environment simultaneously.

AMM: Walk us through a typical day in studio for you? Do you have any creative rituals that feed you creatively?

JM: My daily studio rituals include cleaning the studio, watering plants and taking walks.

Cleaning my space first thing in the morning serves a symbolic reset button, clearing out the old and making space for the new. I value having plants in the studio, it fills the space with life outside of myself and I enjoy taking care of them through ritualistic watering.

And every few hours I leave the studio for walking meditations as a way to calm the nerves, expand my visual field and give my upper body a break.

AMM: Do you work on several pieces at the same time or focus on one thing at a time? What’s your process of working?

JM: I usually work on a few pieces at once, but there are times when I want to focus solely on one canvas, especially if it’s flowing smoothly. It’s beneficial to work on multiple canvases at once because each one will teach you something about the other. I work with oil on canvas in thin layers, building up slowly through two or three passes. Each layer takes on new forms and movements.

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AMM: What is most difficult for you to get ‘right’ in your work?

JM: I find that each painting presents its own unique challenge. What I often experience is a moment in the process when the painting feels like it will ‘flip’ on me, meaning that what I thought was going well or feeling good in the painting will switch and I suddenly see its shadow. Once the shadow is revealed, I work to resolve the conflict and make it ‘right’ again by exploring new maneuvers or techniques. I recognize this sudden ‘flip’ as a psychological or emotional aspect of the creative process.

AMM: Where do you look for inspiration for your art and life?

JM: I’m open to finding inspiration everywhere. My personal life experience feeds me the most, but I also take in a lot of visual stimuli digitally and in person that works its way into my subconscious.

AMM: Are you influenced by artist friendships and relationships? Please tell us about your artistic community.

JM: I feel grateful to have a few long-term friends who are artists. We have been able to support each other through years of ups and downs. It’s valuable to have artists around you who have seen your growth and trajectory, they have a sense of who you are and where you’re going, so the advice they give is crafted from intimate knowledge of who you are as an artist. I am also a part of a few crit groups of professionals who meet and critique on a monthly basis. Having a solid community makes me feel less alone, as being a painter can feel isolating at times. I am certainly influenced and inspired by those around me, we all feed off of each other and find strength in showing up and sharing our experiences.

AMM: What are you excited about in the art world right now? What needs to change?

JM: I’m excited about the enthusiasm and appreciation for figuration happening right now. There are new voices being recognized and diverse visions being added to the historical canon, which is rewarding to witness. What needs to change within the artworld is a deeper conversation about power dynamics and money.

AMM: What are you watching, reading, listening to right now?

JM: I am listening to a range of content dealing with religious deconstruction and cult behavior. I’m interested in the structure of belief systems and understanding how and when control plays a role.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28, Interviewed: Jenny Morgan

Jenny Morgan In the Pursuit of Morning oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches

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Jenny Morgan In the Realms of Day oil on canvas 32 x 26 inches

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Jenny Morgan Hour of Reversal oil on canvas 22 x 18 inches

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Jenny Morgan The Setting oil on canvas 70 x 48 inches

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Jenny Morgan Fable Phantom oil on canvas 22 x 18 inches

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Jenny Morgan Gentle Lick of the Flame oil on canvas 22 x 18 inches

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www.juliamaiuri.com

A haunting: In conversation with painter Julia Maiuri To view Julia Maiuri’s art is to become implicated in a game of looking and being watched.

Our eyes meet other eyes in her intimately-scaled paintings—watching, waiting, witnesses to something about to happen. Eyes and hands are a recurring motif, signifying a dichotomy of stasis and action. Suspense mounts. We lean in for a closer look and become complicit in the impending drama that feels about to play out in the scene. Yet the action never actually happens; we’re left wanting, waiting, always waiting.

Julia’s painting is inextricably linked with the cinematic and draws strongly on tropes from the horror genre. Painted with soft brushstrokes and muted colors, her compositions overlap stills from films to produce fragments of narratives taught with suspense and an impending sense of foreboding. An outstretched hand holds a single key, shadows dance across walls, a rumpled note hints at an illegible clue. And always eyes are watching. Each scene is a double exposure, superimposing the threat of the unknown and violence into the ordinary and familiar.

Whether we are privy to the tandem interior and exterior view of a single subject or witnessing two separate subjects is left intentionally ambivalent. Julia likens her paintings to a “heavily coded diary” in which the worlds of dreams and memories become entangled in the symbolic language of the film stills. We realize that in this realm multiple and contrasting narratives, perspectives and selves exist simultaneously. The scenes are haunted by intrigue, latent forces and traces of the personal. “I reinterpret private narratives through uncanny phenomena such as dream worlds, shadow selves, and doppelgängers,” Julia writes in the artist statement accompanying her MA graduate exhibition. Julia’s layered compositions draw us in but ultimately leave us guessing.

Born in Michigan, Julia received a BFA from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI) in 2013 and has been living and working in the Twin Cities ever since. In 2022 Julia received her MFA from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and has been included in multiple solo and group exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Atlanta. Julia is a 2018 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and her work has been featured in numerous independent art publications.

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Julia Maiuri Shadow in the Room oil on canvas 10 x 8 inches

AMM: Hi Julia! To begin, can you take us right back to when you first decided that you wanted to be an artist. What inspired this decision and what keeps you interested in making art?

JM: Art is the only thing that has really ever clicked for me. From childhood I could always be occupied by coloring or drawing, and valued it as a tool for self-expression or comfort. Throughout school, I always loaded my schedule with art classes and the drive to make things continued at home after school or during summer, painting at the kitchen table or on the floor of my room, bringing projects home to stare at them and work out compositions. Nearly every day of high school I worked through lunch period in the art room, and it helped me secure scholarships so that I could afford to go to college. I don’t think there was ever a point where I made the decision to be an artist per se, it was just a given for me—an insatiable urge to keep going. When I finished my undergraduate I couldn’t see any alternative but to keep making work, so every decision I’ve made as an adult has been in service to sustaining that.

AMM: How has your work changed over the years and what have been some of the things that have influenced you?

JM: Thematically, my work has always revolved around the figure, the uncanny, and an exploration of contrasts. Visually, my natural instinct is to render images realistically, but I really resisted that for a few years, I’m not sure why. I think maybe I was scared of being too literal? I swung from realism, to abstract figuration, and now I’ve nudged back to realism and surrealism.

In graduate school I was challenged a lot to experiment and make work that I wouldn’t otherwise try to make, all of those little exercises helped me find my footing better.

I also have to credit my husband, who is a painter, and has been with me through a lot of different artistic phases. He really encouraged me to embrace painting in the way that comes naturally to me.

AMM: When did you first start looking to films as reference for your work and what is the story that led you there?

JM: For a while I’ve sourced images from family photos, magazines, television and film, but have begun looking almost exclusively to film as a reference in the past three years.

First, I was studying more formal elements of how directors arrange compositions, and what those compositions convey to an audience. For example, split diopter shots can build tension by reducing depth of field to juxtapose different objects or characters in a scene. With this technique something innocuous in the background is suddenly pulled forward with great importance. I began incorporating these compositional styles into my own paintings, and from there began referencing stills as gouache studies.

That led to where I am now, using actual stills as an entry point into the fantastic, and reimagining them by taking them out of context, zooming, layering, manipulating color, or superimposing them against personal photos.

“My interest in suspense and mystery is largely tied to my interest in the horror genre. I love gore, jump scares, and practical effects, but what I love most are the moments just before a monster is revealed. I want my work to linger in that “just before” space, where the monster is never shown, but perpetually suggested.

I am also drawn to fantasy narratives, especially those that just barely hover above our own reality, where the ordinariness of the uncanny and supernatural enigma begin to fuse together. I’m not interested in having a strictly linear narrative structure, so bodies of work are left open-ended, rather than reaching any concrete resolution.

The work exists as a series of feedback loops, swinging between public and private, real and imaginary...”

- Julia Maiuri

AMM: How would you describe the world depicted in your paintings?

JM: I think of the world in my paintings as a dreamscape, where real life slips more seamlessly into fantasy. The film stills act as a portal to revisit personal plotlines, functioning by the logic of dreams where free

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28, Interviewed: Julia Maiuri

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associations arise between stills, memories, or family stories. The paintings become almost like a heavily coded diary. In the same way that I work out experiences of the everyday in the subconscious of dreams, I use film to work out my feelings around family, society, or personal identity.

AMM: Please tell us more about the visual language of your work, and how these stylistic choices, for example your restrained use of colour and canvas dimensions, relate to the subject matter.

JM: My visual choices such as color and scale come from my interests in memory, dreams, subjective bias, the uncanny, and the fantastic. Working in a limited color palette and desaturated hues speaks to memory and the slippery nature of it; you can’t necessarily recall everything in vivid detail, but pops of color may stand out here and there. I’m interested in contrasts, so besides the grayscale, red and green are recurring choices for me as they live across from each other on the color wheel. Variations on the color red have become especially significant for me—it is a recurring color in my dreams.

I watch movies at night with a red bias light behind the TV to help my eyes focus, and for its calming ambiance. I’ve had many reasons for working at a smaller scale over the years, but right now it’s much more conceptual as I’ve been thinking of fantastic spaces, specifically Rosemary Jackson’s writing on spaces of enclosure as necessary for modern fantasy tales—but rather than depicting the architectural enclosures of Poe or Stoker, the canvas itself becomes a space of enclosure.

For years, my work has been primarily at an 8x10 inch scale which allows me to capitalize on more of a one-to-one ratio with the viewer’s head. This implicates them in the scene in a way that both lures and unnerves, the paintings then start to function more like windows or portals into a parallel world.

AMM: The scenes in your paintings are loaded with suspense and also mystery. We look at them and wonder what is about to happen. Please tell us more about your interest in narrative in your work.

JM: My interest in suspense and mystery is largely tied to my interest in the horror genre.

I love gore, jump scares, and practical effects, but what I love most are the moments just before a monster is revealed. I want my work to linger in that “just before” space, where the monster is never shown, but perpetually suggested. I am also drawn to fantasy narratives, especially those that just barely hover above our own reality, where the ordinariness of the uncanny and supernatural enigma begin to fuse together. I’m not interested in having a strictly linear narrative structure, so bodies of work are left openended, rather than reaching any concrete resolution. The work exists as a series of feedback loops, swinging between public and private, real and imaginary, and so on.

studio portrait courtesy of the artist

AMM: In what ways does your art reflect your own interior world?

JM: When I develop bodies of work, I start first with personal interests or experiences.

For example, the past few years a lot of my focus has revolved around uncanny doubling, stemming from my own experiences growing up in a house where I felt the need to divide myself into different versions mentally in order to get along. Likewise, as I grew up there were adult figures around me who themselves had secret or double lives which eventually became uncovered. The work is, in part, a reflection on my own private experiences of suspense, fantasy, and revelation, but I’m not interested in divulging explicit details publicly.

Working through allegory and relating to movies offers an entry point, without giving too much away.

AMM: Earlier this year you presented a body of work in the MFA graduate group exhibition “what moves between” at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery. Did this exhibition close a chapter or lay new ground for further exploration in your work?

Please tell us more about this.

JM: Although that show closed a chapter on my time in graduate school, the work I included in the exhibition was the foundation for what I am working on currently, and for the foreseeable future. I feel like I’ve finally found some harmony between form, content, and concept, so I don’t see myself shifting gears for a while. There’s still so much to explore.

AMM: Eyes and hands are a recurrent motif in your recent work. What ideas or themes are you currently exploring?

JM: Eyes and hands hold a lot of symbolic meaning and also offer strong communication where spoken language can’t. They give body and cerebral presence to what is an otherwise lifeless object (the canvas). I use eyes to look off-screen, while hands gesture towards the viewer, open doors, or make offerings. As a result, these paintings have the power to inject the spaces they are displayed in with a sense that some other, unseen presence lurks beyond the viewer. I’m continuing to explore these motifs, but have begun incorporating additional layers of intrigue to the work such as abstracted text that reads almost like a cipher, or mirrors/chromatic surfaces that give the opportunity for reflection, yet confine and distort the figures who look upon them.

AMM: Please tell us a little about how you work.

What is your research and painting process?

JM: I watch tons of movies and take screenshots for my own archive. I also watch interviews with filmmakers to get insight into their process, and download papers and articles from digital libraries to get even more theoretical frameworks for reference. When starting a new body of work, I make a lexicon of symbols that I want to thread throughout

the series. From there, I go back through my collection of stills to compile a separate folder of images that stand out to me, and begin manipulating them in photoshop, making digital collages to reference when painting.

When I get to the painting part, I don’t get too attached to images or compositions. If something isn’t working, I tend to abandon it and move on, or rework the digital collage and

“Eyes and hands hold a lot of symbolic meaning and also offer strong communication where spoken language can’t.

They give body and cerebral presence to what is an otherwise lifeless object (the canvas). I use eyes to look off-screen, while hands gesture towards the viewer, open doors, or make offerings.

As a result, these paintings have the power to inject the spaces they are displayed in with a sense that some other, unseen presence lurks beyond the viewer. I’m continuing to explore these motifs, but have begun incorporating additional layers of intrigue to the work such as abstracted text that reads almost like a cipher, or mirrors/chromatic surfaces that give the opportunity for reflection, yet confine and distort the figures who look upon them.”

- Julia Maiuri start over again. The more I paint, the more ideas for new compositions come to me— I’ll remember a certain still from my archive and incorporate it into the fold. I’m constantly moving between the physical process of painting, and the more internal process of the

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digital archive.

AMM: Do you have any studio rituals or routines?

What does a typical day in the studio look like for you?

JM: I prefer to start working in the mornings if possible, and I have some fixations around food when I’m in the studio. For like, 7 months now, I start a session by putting on noise canceling headphones and eating a yogurt (black cherry flavor). As I start painting, I snack on crispy chickpeas (everything bagel flavor) and drink coffee. Getting started on a painting can sometimes be daunting, especially if I’m trying something more intricate, so I usually have something salty and crunchy to eat, plus coffee to sip, which relieves some of the tension. I make all of my reference material at home on my computer, so once I get to the studio I can jump right into painting and maximize my time there.

AMM: What is the hardest thing for you to get ‘right’ in your work?

JM: A current hurdle I have is with scale.

I’m interested in sizing up from my current maximum size (8x10 inches), but I am feeling a real challenge with how the images should function at a larger scale. Should I simply make the images bigger? Do I Hieronymus Bosch it?

I’m feeling really indecisive about that at the moment. Nothing I’ve tried has felt right yet, but I’m getting there.

AMM: When you’re not making art, what are some of the things you enjoy doing?

JM: I love cooking and watching YouTube videos of people cooking (current favorites are Kenji López-Alt, Imamu Room, and Maangchi).

AMM: As a recent graduate, what has been your experience starting out your career in the art world? Are there things you wished you’d learned in university? Do you have any advice to share with other emerging artists?

JM: So far, I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by experienced people who are very generous with advice, but it has been a huge learning curve especially when it comes to pricing, consignment terms, taxes, etc. Basically the business end of art has been shrouded in mystery for my entire education and now the curtain is finally being pulled back…kind of. The art scene in Minnesota is heavily grant funded, which is a very different animal than the Art World™. My graduate program focused its professional practices course mostly on how to apply for grants and create a syllabus for adjunct teaching— neither of which I’m pursuing at the moment.

I wish I had learned more practical skills around tracking expenses and filing taxes as an artist, creating invoices, just the all-round basics of having a business. Because being an artist, it turns out, is more than just making art—it’s a business. I don’t have very much advice to give, as I’m still learning myself,

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28, Interviewed: Julia Maiuri

Featured image (p.28): Julia Maiuri Reaching for the Door oil on canvas 10 x 8 inches Featured image (p.30-31): Julia Maiuri Eye Contact oil on canvas 8 x 10 inches

but I think the one thing I can say is don’t be afraid to ask questions. Ask artists you respect and trust what their experiences have been.

Compare notes between galleries you work with to figure out what you like, and dislike, in those relationships. Establish a routine around record keeping. Oh, and you don’t have to say “yes” to everything.

AMM: Have you had any significant mentors that have guided you on your artistic journey? What important lessons did they teach you?

JM: Yes, all along the way there have been so many important figures. Notably, my art teacher in high school, Jennifer Allore, was so supportive and helped me cultivate independence and a serious work ethic. In my undergraduate at Wayne State, my professor Jim Nawara and his wife Lucille treated me more like a peer and friend than a student. In grad school at the University of Minnesota, my advisor Lamar Peterson and another professor, Mathew Zefeldt, always offered encouragement and career advice. At the halfway mark of school, they challenged me to make work that would “surprise them” which helped break me out of some hardwired mental ruts around what I should or shouldn’t be making. I spent a lot of grad school working with the Nash Gallery Director, Howard Oransky and Assistant Curator Teréz Iacovino, who both let me in on so many behind the scenes details of managing a gallery, curatorial work, and art installation. Information and experience that I believe is so incredibly important for artists to have, whether they ultimately want to pursue gallery work or not.

AMM: What are you watching, reading, listening to right now?

JM: I’ve recently watched a few very different, equally amazing movies: Escape from New York, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. When I’m painting, I mostly listen to soundtracks from movies and video games (notably the movie Mandy and the video game Stardew Valley). I’ve also been listening almost exclusively to The Vanished podcast for many months now. I’m not reading much at the moment, but I just got Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir by Ben Tyrer for some research I’m doing.

AMM: Do you have any projects or exhibitions coming up? What’s next for you?

JM: Yes! I looked forward to my solo show, Mindscreen, which opened at Gallery 12.26 in Dallas, Texas on August 27 and runs through to October 1, 2022.

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28, Interviewed: Julia Maiuri

Julia Maiuri Counting Steps oil on canvas 8 x 10 inches

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Julia Maiuri Look at Me oil on canvas 8 x 10 inches

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Julia Maiuri Compact oil on canvas 8 x 10 inches

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Julia Maiuri Here oil on canvas 8 x 10 inches

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guest-curated selection of works

by Paola Oxoa, founder and director of Mother gallery, New York

Featured image: Mel Arsenault A silent conversation ceramic (stoneware, porcelain, glazes, Echinacea flower) 35 x 30 x 12 cm more on p. 46-47

C h r i s t i n a

H a g l i d

www.christinahaglid.com

Image: Late March watercolor and gouache on paper 11 x 8 inches

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Christina Haglid exhibited her artwork with Ann Nathan Gallery from 1997 to 2016 and has been represented by Gallery Victor Armendariz in Chicago since 2017. A graduate of the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Haglid attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1990 and has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her artwork has been included in numerous gallery exhibitions, art fairs, and museum shows including Loyola University Museum of Art, Illinois State Museum, Greenville County Museum of Art, Art on Paper New York, Art Chicago, and Art of the 20th Century at the NY Armory. She is based in Chicago, IL. I work intuitively using a process that has taken me a long time to trust. It’s a combination of hypnagogia, lucid dreaming, and a connection between writing, poetry, and painting which has evolved over several decades. My work is inspired by nature, science, history, memory, and current events. The objects in my work are a stand-in for the figure as psychologically inspired narratives comment on the strength vs. fragility of life and nature. Items in a painting are like words on a page. Spaces and most importantly light are placed to create meaning similarly.

Image: The Junipers watercolor and gouache on paper 8 x 9 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

www.matthewsprung.com

M a t t h e w

S p r u n g

Image: Information Desk oil on unstretched canvas 80 x 72 inches

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Matthew was born in New York in 1991: After experience with photography and a class at the Art Students League, I began to teach myself to paint in 2016. My work considers political, cultural, historical, and autobiographical subject matter through a combination of expressionism, portraiture, abstraction, and figuration. Since receiving my MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021, my practice evolved into largescale oil paintings on unstretched canvas.

Image: The Carousel oil and acrylic on unstretched canvas 80 x 72 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

www.kentarookumura.com

K e n t a r o O k u m u r a

Image: Furnace oil on canvas 45 x 35 cm

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Kentaro is a Japanese artist currently studying at Camberwell College of Arts.

Complementary colors walk the thin line between the beautiful and the grotesque; the erratic, visceral layers of translucent and opaque paint flows and bleeds onto the canvas. There is a feeling of fluctuation and uncertainty, whilst holding onto the familiarity of a specific time and place in the world. Okumura’s paintings explore themes of duality; a paradox and a never-ending pursuit of a nonexistent harmony between opposing states. Chaos and Order, Violence and Serenity, Masculinity and Femininity. He is intrigued by the relationship between the physical and metaphysical reality—the constant flux within both the inner emotional world and the physical states of the world around us. His intuitive approach to painting is a result of controlled coincidences and improvisation, capturing a string of thoughts in response to photographs.

Image: Vessel oil on canvas 45 x 35 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

N i c l a s

S c h ö l e r

www.niclas-schoeler.com

Image: Untitled (yellow) oil and acrylic on canvas 45 x 31 cm

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Niclas Schöler, born 1991 in Lübeck, 2019 Diploma at University of Applied Arts Vienna; lives and works in Vienna.

My recent works are based on photos I take in my everyday life. The spectrum of motifs includes private scenes in bedrooms or hotel rooms, flower bouquets, and food. Some images correspond with my daily routine, others are based on commercials I find around me. In general, I am interested in the showing and hiding of intimacy nowadays. A single painting is less important for me than their concurrency, the sum of them and the notion of a mood.

Image: searching for AirPods oil on canvas 45 x 31 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

M e l A r s e n a u l t

www.melarsenault.com

Image: Bone Butterfly ceramic (stoneware, glazes) 30 x 20 x 20 cm

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Mel Arsenault is a Canadian artist based in Montreal. In her practice,she addresses the subjects of matter’s expressiveness and the importance of the sense of wonder and nature for human and nonhuman wellbeing. She celebrates the enchantment she feels for matter by exploring concepts of encounters and connections, the basis of all things existing, visible, or not. By shaping sculptural hybrids that unfold like networks where the traces of gestures blend with biomorphic forms, she attempts to highlight the multiple processes of matter’s entanglement. Considering clay and glazes as allies with whom she collaborates, she lets the contingency of their chemical metamorphoses have the final say.

Arsenault obtained an MFA in sculpture and ceramics from Concordia University where she previously completed her BFA in painting and drawing. In 2020, Gallery La Guilde hosted her first solo Shifting Histories, and the Project Space of Gallery Nicolas Robert showed a selection of sculptures from the body of work The Astrocytes Garden in 2021. Mel has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Canada: Projet Casa, Chromatic, Nuit Blanche. She participated in a residency at the International Ceramic Research Center in Guldagergaard, Denmark, and received the Carolyn and Richard Renaud Research Grant. Mel is a recipient of the Outstanding Work and Meaningful Contribution to Ceramics award delivered by Concordia University. In May 2022 Mel was invited to be part of the collective exhibition Conjure, co-curated by Arusha Gallery and Chantal Powell, and taking place at Arusha’s Old Silk Barn in Bruton, UK.

Image: Wood Nymph II ceramic (stoneware, porcelain, glazes) 44 x 34 x 11 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

K r z y s z t o f

G r z y b a c z

www.krzysztofgrzybacz.pl

Image: Liberty VIII oil on canvas 120 x 100 cm

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Krzysztof was born in 1993 and grew up in a little village in Poland: In 2019 I graduated from the Jan Matejko Fine Arts Academy in Cracow, a city where I currently do my living, enjoying and working.

On a large cake platter there are star-shaped chocolates. They’ve reduced their volume a little bit. I think they evaporated and were eaten together with oxygen. I like to imagine that the usual situations I see every day, are part of something bigger. Some kind of set design for a series or a documentary. Scorching dishes, cosmetic on a sticker, pasta for a friend, a dog with a warm look.

I imagine the best shots with them. I write, draw, fold my canvases and paint. I connect with people I love or fear. I combine them with other scenes, or I make up dialogues. In fact, my dream is to make films. For now, I’m painting pictures, but one day I’m going to record them.

Image: Fading into you oil on canvas 120 x 100 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

L y d i a F r e i e r

www.lydiafreier.com

Image: Hearse Pt. 2 oil on canvas 28 x 30 inches

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Lydia Freier is an artist and poet currently based in the Hudson Valley. Her work focuses on the desolation of the moment which exists outside of time, the eerie nature of the anticipatory, and the stillness that dwells as a ruin at the nucleus of the romantic.

Image: the Sun Hurts my Eyes oil on canvas 7 x 9 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

S a s h a D e y a s h

www.instagram.com/_deyash

Image: After All oil on canvas 100 x 120 cm

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Sasha was born in 1998: At the moment I am studying for a Master’s degree at the Architectural Institute.

In my art practice I mostly work with oil painting, metal and glass, sometimes resorting to the use of wood.

Creating works for me is an attempt to explore myself and determine my own place in the context of the phenomena of the surrounding reality. A recurring motif in my works is the alienation of the protagonist from the rest of the world, his turning inward and conserving in the world of his own reflections and unresolved issues. The space of my works is made up of objects that promised to become symbols of idealized beauty and peace. However, instead, they meet the main character with their cold and alienated shells, enclosing him in a lifeless space, where the shadows of events from the past lie in the corners.

Image: During the Freezing Process oil on canvas 40 x 50 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

S i m o n e

G r i f f i n

www.simonegriffin.info

Image: Dreaming Mountain acrylic on poly cotton 122 x 102 cm

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Simone Griffin is based in Warrang/Sydney, Australia. She is of Aboriginal and Australian European heritage. Her intuitive approach to painting reflects a desire to blend worlds, both practically and conceptually. Griffin emphasises a confluence between Western Formalism and traditional Indigenous Australian painting; by utilising an industrialised tool, the airbrush, to apply dot work.

Griffin’s first solo exhibition—‘New Year’s Resolution’—explores notions of transcendence and stasis—depicted through internal landscapes that employ the spiritual power of form and colour. Her visual language of ‘intimate immensity’ allows for both a macro and micro reading of the work, as the dotted airbrush technique reverberates off the canvas. Small constellations of dots are weaved and layered together to track and define broader topographies. Griffin’s work does not seek to obscure or mask; rather, it illuminates, flourishes, and celebrates.

Griffin received a BFA (Honours) from the National Art School, Sydney (2014). She was an Indigenous Emerging Finalist in the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (2021). NASHA Gallery hosted her debut solo exhibition in May 2022.

Image: Wish piece *make a wish acrylic on poly cotton 71 x 61 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

A n d e r s H a m i l t o n

www.andershamilton.com

Image: Obelisk (Lavender Pallor Mortis) cremated leaves, rare earth oxide, ceramic, twig, silver plated chain, magnets, resin, steel 7 x 7 x 9.25 inches

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Anders Hamilton (b. 1992, Everett, WA) was raised in Fargo, North Dakota and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Hamilton received his BFA from the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN) in 2015. He is a studio manager for BKLYN CLAY (Brooklyn, NY) and a designer for the BKLYN CLAY Made line. He has exhibited most recently at Fisher Parrish Gallery and the Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY).

His Obelisk sculptures are composed of a variety of materials including ceramic, glaze, rare earth oxide, and found twigs. The foliage on each twig undergoes a process of transformation akin to cremation. Each leaf is coated in several thin layers of porcelain slip and fired in a kiln. This turns the leaf to ash leaving only a paper thin ceramic shell, which is glazed shut to seal the remains inside. Each ceramic leaf therefore acts as a container for its own cremated ash, a ghost of its previous form. He then applies glaze containing rare earth oxide as a source of color. These oxides have the uncanny ability to change in response to their light source. Olive becomes pink, lavender becomes gray, green becomes yellow. Aside from the poetics of working with “rare earth” this color changing effect makes visible a transfer of energy through the absorption or refraction of light rays. It is also descriptive of the biological feeding process of plants. Glucose produced in the leaves is distributed throughout the plant to provide nourishment and stimulate growth.

Image: Obelisk (Seadragon) cremated leaves, rare earth oxide, ceramic, twig, resin, steel, glass, mahogany, maple 7 x 7 x 9 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

S o f i a B e r g e r

www.sofiaberger.ca

Image: Carrier of Burdens oil and pastel on canvas 48 x 60 inches

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Sofia was born in Požarevac, a small town located in Serbia: It was one of many areas targeted during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia from March 24th to June 10th, 1999. At bottom, the conflict was a civil war between forces of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav government and ethnic Albanian rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) who wanted independence for Kosovo, a province of Serbia. My parents and I moved to Canada, a country known as a member of NATO since its inception, fearing for our safety.

As an act of self-protection, I’m considering just how much I want to share with the public, and the varying degrees of access that I myself have as someone who is simultaneously both an insider and outsider. There exists a humility in the tight framing and intentionally limited views representing a place that I’ve been away from and, yet, still feel so strongly connected to. My poor eyesight, oftentimes attributing to headaches and sudden blurriness, has been an obstacle in confidently orienting myself. There are moments of softness within the blurred lines of the work I’m creating that question the levels of familiarity that I have of once recognizable spaces. I’m physically encountering a transient space that allows for the reflection necessary to enter an environment drained of any stresses associated with the previous psychogeographic setting. This has been a driving force in my exploration of atmospheric terrain, the concept of the void as an intermission or a cavity, as well as the architectonics of time.

Look to your left. Now, look to your right. What do you see? Has your environment changed within the past week? The past month? The past year? My work represents not only my own views, but also the distant views of an outsider, regardless of bias and misconceptions.

We each have multiple disparate worlds, worlds that we’re trying to reconcile, that can only be accessed to certain degrees. No matter where we reside, we individually have our own restrictions neighbouring the places that are part of us.

Image: I could not see, I could not read oil and graphite on canvas 36 x 48 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

www.charbonneautwins.com

C h a r b o n n e a u T w i n s

Image: Aquarium Plant and Stars mixed media drawing on paper 22 x 22 inches

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The Charbonneau twins are identical twin sisters based in Brooklyn who make collaborative work both physical and digital: As identical twins we are monozygotic—one egg split in two. The appearance of our work is based on our zygosity as mirror twins—one being right dominant and the other left. Our work mimics this scientific process as we are exploring our language as twins and how our slight differences are caused by environmental factors. As a collaborative team we seek structure in our work. Each creating individual compositions using the same references, materials, and set of conditions, we are using a systematic process—where each composition is displayed as a whole.

Our system-based process is made up of a square grid. Splitting our reference into even tiles leads to our work being non stationary; evolved, altered, duplicated, multiplied, flipped, expanded, etc. We are interested in using a square orientation as it is unbiased and uncategorized; neither portrait or landscape. It allows us to depict a conversation, language, and persona rather than a scene or viewfinder. As our work evolves, we explore contrasting themes such as harmony vs tension, scientific vs spiritual, and nature vs nurture. The final image reveals two compositions coming together to create a whole other entity.

Image: Flame and Water mixed media drawing on paper 5.5 x 5.5 feet

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

A l e a h C h a p i n

www.aleahchapin.com

Image: The Opening oil on canvas 48 x 40 inches

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Aleah Chapin (b. 1986 Seattle, WA) is a painter whose direct portrayals of the human form have expanded the conversation around western culture’s representations of the body in art. Described by Eric Fischl as “the best and most disturbing painter of flesh alive today,” Chapin’s work has explored aging, gender and beauty, influenced in part by the community within which she was raised on an island in the Pacific Northwest. More recently, Chapin’s work has taken a radically inward shift, expanding her visual language in order to better express the turbulent times we are living in. Consistent throughout her career, Chapin’s work asks the question: what does it mean to exist within a body today?

Chapin holds a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. She has attended residencies at the Leipzig International Art Program (Germany) and MacDowell (United States). Chapin has exhibited both nationally and internationally at places such as Flowers Gallery (New York, London, Hong Kong), The Belvedere Museum (Austria), and the National Portrait Gallery (London). She has been a recipient of the Promising Young Painters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York), the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (Canada), a Postgraduate Fellowship from the New York Academy of Art, and won the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery (London). Her work has been published extensively in print and online and she is a subject in the BBC documentary titled “Portrait of an Artist”. Aleah Chapin lives and works in Seattle, WA.

Image: The Unearthing oil on canvas 48 x 40 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

O l i v i a C h i g a s

www.oliviachigas.com

Image: Blue Kangaroo charcoal, chalk, colored pencil on paper 25 x 19 inches

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Olivia Chigas, born 1993 and raised in Manhattan, is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design’s Printmaking program. After living for several years in New Orleans, Louisiana, Chigas returned home to New York to obtain her graduate degree and will be part of the New York Academy of Art’s Painting MFA class of 2023.

In conversation with stylistic schools of modern painters of the early 20th century, Chigas draws significantly from historical subjects. She composes conventionally mundane images which allude to darker circumstances, perhaps just beyond the frame of the image, as a means of reflecting upon specific events and critiquing larger political and cultural hegemonies. The subjects present as innocuous still lifes, or a quiet genre scene, which upon deeper investigation reveal more complex narratives. Like a “flat surface of a perfectly calm ocean, [which] disturbs us… by all the unknown that is hidden in the depth” (Giorgio di Chirico).

Image: Jackie’s Reflection in the Hearse charcoal, chalk, sanguine conte on paper 25 x 19 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

E l i s a L e n d v a y

www.elisalendvay.com

Image: Armor (Yolk, thought plane, headspace) steel, copper wire, wire mesh, gel, paper, gesso, oil pastel 10 x 9 x 8.5 inches

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Elisa Lendvay (born 1975) is an artist living and working in Poughkeepsie, NY since 2017 after 14 years in NYC. She received an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, and a BFA from The University of Texas at Austin, and Bennington College. She was recently nominated for the Joan Mitchell Fellowship. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in New York City at Sargent’s Daughters Gallery, Underdonk, Jason McCoy Gallery, V&A Gallery and Moti Hasson, and in New Haven, Connecticut, at Fred Giampietro Gallery. Her work was recently on view at Ratio 3 Gallery, San Francisco; The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, NY; the Albany International Airport; the Beatrice M. Haggerty Gallery at the University of Dallas; form&concept, Santa Fe and The Hudson House, Hudson, NY, curated by JAG projects. She has been included in group shows in New York including Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Kansas Gallery, Asya Geisberg Gallery, Daily Operation, Lesley Heller Gallery, TSA and other venues across the country. Her work has been included in Art Forum (Critics’ picks), The NY Times Style Mag, Time Out NY, Two Coats of Paint, and the Huffington Post. She is the recipient of awards and residencies including Edward Albee Fellowship, Santa Fe Art Institute, Vermont Studio Center, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space Residency, New York Foundation of the Arts Artist Fellowship, Sculpture Finalist, The Dallas Museum of Art’s Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Award and the Dallas Museum of Art’s DeGolyer Award. She teaches at Marist College and was a visiting art faculty member at Bennington College in 2017.

Lendvay works across mediums and modes—arriving out of a haptic sensibility, the result of moving through and with her given environment. In these, she posits forms that lyricize the internal dynamics of that space—its instances of fragmentation and unity, fragility and resilience.

Image: Pauline (Time bone) aluminum, paper clay, papier mache, bottle caps, acrylic, gouache and medium 11.5 x 9 x 2 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

J o h n

P a u l

K e s l i n g

www.johnpaulkesling.com

Image: Ashes To Ashes oil, oil stick, graphite, spray paint on canvas 36 x 36 inches

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John Paul Kesling was born and raised in Northeastern Kentucky. He attended Morehead State University in Morehead, KY for his BFA in Arts and spent a semester in Europe studying art history. Kesling went on to receive his MFA in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010. He spent the next six years in Brooklyn, NY immersed in the NYC art scene. In July of 2016 he relocated to Nashville, TN. He has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), Azule (Hot Springs, NC), and Artist Residency Chattanooga (Chattanooga, TN). He is a 2021 Nashville Metro Arts Lending Library Artist and in 2020, he was the recipient of the Tri-Star Arts $1,000 Emergency Relief Fund Grant. His work has been featured in various group exhibitions at The Parthenon (Nashville, TN), Julia Martin Gallery (Nashville, TN), Create Magazine, Elephant Gallery (Nashville, TN), Piano Craft Gallery (Boston, MA), Flatwork Contemporary, I Like Your Work Podcast, New York Hall of Science & SciArts Initiative (Queens, NY), and Prince Street Gallery (New York, NY). He has had recent solo shows at the Red Arrow Gallery (Nashville, TN), OZ Arts (Nashville,TN), and WheelHouse Arts (Louisville, KY). In 2022 he was accepted to the White Columns Curated Online Artist Registry and his work was recently added to the Soho House Nashville’s permanent collection. He now owns a dog.

I paint to understand the world around me. It seems as necessary as digging in the dirt or dragging your hand through a body of water or across a freshly buzzed head. Painting is historical, primitive and elemental. Images say what words cannot, like a melody in a song. Rarely sketching, I let the materials and surfaces guide me. Employing painterly brushwork, collage, bright colors and movement, the work presents a utopian/dystopian account of the day-to-day world. Figures, landscapes, friendships, pop culture, nature, sex history, politics, the ‘art world’ and self-criticism/discovery are all equals in the work. I don’t see painting as a linear progression, but more of an archaeological dig. Each unearthing brings new answers and perhaps more importantly, more questions.

Image: Feelings acrylic, spray paint, oil stick, oil, flowers, bottle cap, fabric on canvas 48 x 48 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

A s h l e y

J a n u a r y

www.ashleyjan.com

Image: A Saving Grace oil on linen 85 x 63 inches

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Ashley creates contemporary paintings informed by her maternal experience. Due to pregnancy complications that led to her son’s premature birth, her new body of work addresses the crisis of the Black maternal mortality and morbidity rate in America. Recently, Ashley became the first recipient of the Women’s Caucus for Art, 2022 Emerging Artist Award. Additionally, she was selected as a finalist for the 2022 Artadia Chicago Award. In October 2021, Ashley was invited to show in a group exhibition for Black women’s wellness at the historical institution, South Side Community Art Center in Chicago. In recent years, her works have been exhibited in numerous venues including: Mana Contemporary, Chicago, IL; SoLA Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, IL; Viridian Artists Inc, New York, NY; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Pacific Art Foundation, Newport Beach, CA; and the Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine, CA. Recently, her paintings have been seen in the new television series, Kings of Napa, on OWN. In 2018, she was selected as a first-place award winner at the Woman Made Gallery’s Midwest Open in Chicago. In 2017, Ashley won the Beverly Bank Best of Show Award at the Beverly Arts Center’s juried competition. Ashley earned her MFA in Painting from Laguna College of Art and Design, Laguna Beach, CA in 2017 and her BS in Communication with an Advertising concentration and Minor in Studio Art from Bradley University, Peoria, IL in 2009. She lives in Chicago with her family while working from home and her studio at Mana Contemporary.

I address the Black maternal mortality and morbidity crisis in America through painting and multimedia. Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women. Influenced by my own traumatic pregnancy and survival, the imagery centers the experiences of Black mothers and children who have suffered adverse birth outcomes but challenge the institutional modes in finding solutions. Motifs are structured around ideas dictated by necessary rituals of care. Environments articulate the imposed health effects disproportionately experienced. The images serve as a call to action for more awareness, research, and eradication of unnecessary maternal and infant death in the United States of America.

Image: An era, a view of gratitude oil on birch panel 20 x 20 inches

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I w o Z a n i e w s k i

www.iwozaniewski.com

Image: Evening #2 oil on canvas 110 x 140 cm

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Iwo Zaniewski works with traditional oil painting, predominantly focusing on the matters of composition.

He consistently explores formal relations and draws on the history of figurative painting, mining his subjects from contemporary, everyday life. To reach the state of perfect visual harmony—Iwo’s ultimate goal—he has been constructing his works in a way that each element of the composition becomes irreplaceable support for the arrangement of others. A few years ago, together with a group of theoretical physicists, experimental psychologists, and neuroscience researchers, Iwo conducted research under the overarching theme ‘Algorithm of Harmony’ to explore the phenomenon of visual harmony. The concept of this ‘algorithm’ demonstrates relations most likely occurring between all forms or elements of a composition that make it reach a perfect state, where any change introduced could make it perceptibly worse.

Although Iwo Zaniewski graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland, in 1981, he has split his professional career between painting, photography, and art direction. He is a celebrated art director, but his paintings—the heart and soul of his life—still remain relatively unknown to a wider audience. Iwo Zaniewski’s exhibitions include Pinta Miami, USA (2020), Polswiss Art, Poland (2014), Today Art Museum, China (2008), Sunshine International Art Museum, China (2008), and National Museum in Cracow (2005). His works are included in private and public collections in Europe, USA, Mexico, China, and Japan.

Image: The Red Room oil on canvas 110 x 160 cm

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M a r l o s

E ’ v a n

www.theredarrowgallery.com/artist/marlos-evans

Image: Next Great Migration oil, latex, oil stick on canvas 50.5 x 50.75 inches

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Marlos E’van is a Nashville based artist. E’van interweaves different mediums such as painting, performance, and filmmaking to create worlds in which their art recollects black histories: joy, pain, celebration, sorrow, and complex emotions from reenacted scenes of American histories.

A subtle vernacular in expression has caught recognition from such publications such as Hyperallergic and Burnaway Magazine. In addition to their work as an artist, E’van cofounded/ co-designs M-SPAR, McGruder Social Practice Artist Residency out of the McGruder Center in North Nashville.

My work is a statement of the harsh, often self-contradictory ideologies on which America is built. I am interested in how dystopian landscapes speak to long-standing American social problems. My use of found materials, obsessive mark making, text, and hyperbole encourages dialogue among different classes and demographics. The symbols I use, such as historical figures and fast food elements are commonly found in the history of Western civilization; these symbols cross-examine stereotypes and institutions that allow certain inequalities to thrive.

By changing the context of these elements, I transform them into instruments of meaningful reflection and understanding.

Image: John Newton/Amazing Grace oil and acrylic on canvas, salvaged frame from hurricane Katrina 24 x 21 inches

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www.instagram.com/emilygorum

E m i l y

G o r u m

Image: Torso oil pastel on paper 9 x 12 inches

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Emily Gorum (b.1994) is a visual artist and designer whose recent drawings and paintings represent self-examinations. Much of her imagery derives from her adolescence—fishing at dusk, running in the humidity, and in the winter building bonfires after the lake drawdown.

She is interested in the idea of nostalgia and its dualities of comfort and anxiety. When feeling alone during the COVID lockdowns, there was a compulsion to focus on her memories of growing up in rural America.

The narratives in these pieces reflect the magnificence, sadness, and beauty that this pastoral environment can bring; yet, the repetitive mark making indicates Emily’s anxieties surrounding isolation and the allencompassing question of self-identity.

Image: Torso II colored pencil and oil on paper 9 x 12 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 28: guest-curated selection

curated selection of works

by ArtMaze Magazine editorial team

Featured image: Winnie Truong Twin Letdown color pencil and cut paper collage on panel 18 x 24 inches more on p. 92-93

www.josiahellner.com

J o s i a h E l l n e r

Image: Close Call oil paint on canvas 60 x 48 inches

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Josiah Ellner is a Chicago-based artist currently pursuing his Master of Fine Arts in painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ellner was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin but spent his formative years in Xi’an China.

Growing up in a city of more than 10 million people with scarce green spaces and little to no wildlife, he has always felt a disconnect from the natural world. Despite these feelings of alienation, he has found himself strangely drawn to nature and a yearning to reconnect with it. From his personal experiences of encountering and engaging with nature, Ellner weaves together playful narratives that capture these fleeting moments of intimate connection. Through careful abstraction, he is able to heighten and fully portray the whimsical and awkward interactions that he has with the natural world.

Image: Entering Hyperspace oil paint and oil pastel on canvas 60 x 48 inches

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www.emilyweiner.com

E m i l y

W e i n e r

Image: Mundus Inversus oil on linen and maple frame 35.5 x 29.5 x 2 inches

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Emily received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University and her MFA in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City: I am represented by Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, TN, and have exhibited work at Whitespace Gallery (Atlanta); David Lusk Gallery (Nashville); Gerdarsafn Museum (Iceland); Soloway (Brooklyn), and Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia), among other venues.

My paintings—oil on linen, set in ceramic or mixed-media frames—rely on intuition, personal history, research, and time. They question how images and meanings are shared and translated across generations and locations, asking: What role has visual culture played in writing our histories? Why were certain materials championed in the history of art, while others—particularly those associated with women’s work such as ceramics—were relegated to the realm of craft? How can symbols be reordered and reframed to affirm primary desires that individuals share, while transcending the stories of our canons?

My investigation into archetypal imagery is informed in part by Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious. I approach each painting without a clear plan, and by working in many layers of paint, I try to find synchronicity in combinations of colors, forms, and symbols. I hand-build multimedia frames for each painting through a similar intuitive process, elevating the frame’s importance from ornamentation to a vital part of the artwork, demarcating a space of suspended disbelief much like the proscenium of a stage.

I am a third-generation Jewish New Yorker, living and working in the American South. Since my arrival in Tennessee over three years ago, I have been thinking about the longevity of Yiddish theater and its humor in Jewish culture, as a means of recounting stories, but most importantly as a survival mechanism within an ever-shifting landscape. My recent paintings look to theater as a parallel space of paradox and suspended disbelief. They investigate the trope of “Mundus Inversus” (Latin for “Upside-Down World”) which began as a phenomenon in Greek drama wherein traditional roles were often reversed.

Symbolism in my recent works draws from Greek tragicomedy, commedia dell’arte, and music; while referencing the ongoing importance of reconciling gravity with levity.

Image: Procession oil on linen in stoneware frame 10 x 13 inches

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L e e M a x e y

www.lee-maxey.com

My recent egg tempera paintings fixate on familiar domestic spaces, warping the mundane into queer emblems of a controlling, mystical world.

The images revel in a world of spiritual otherness that borders on paranoia.

I am interested in creating spaces that allow for multiple interpretations. My religious upbringing, which I chose to leave, primed me to seek meaning from the ordinary, and I use that impulse to gaze back at it. I paint with egg tempera, an ancient medium that further connects my subject to its long history as a tool of persuasion and beauty.

Born in Arkansas, Lee Maxey lives and works in Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include solo shows in NYC at Olympia and the artist-run space Tribeca Hercules Art/Studio Program; group shows at Able Baker Contemporary, Portland, ME; and The Bureau of General Services: Queer Division, NYC; and a two-person exhibition in the 2019 SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NYC. Lee is an alumna of the Fire Island Artist Residency and the Hercules Studio/Art Program. She received her MFA in 2016 from Boston University and her BFA in 2011 from the University of Central Arkansas. She currently teaches painting at Brooklyn College.

Image: Bush egg tempera on panel 18.75 x 15 inches

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R i c h a r d

D e a n

H u g h e s

www.richarddeanhughes.com

Image: Death of a Cypress Tree. oil, stereo-lithograph print (epoxy resin), spray paint, metal 46 x 56 x 23 cm

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British artist Richard Dean Hughes lives and works in Manchester UK. He describes the slippery relationship between the real and hypothetical, his sculptural works are intrinsically entwined with object, time and place.

Hughes often revisits and describes a personal and internal space, taking artifacts, feelings and ‘visuals’ from imagined scenarios, bringing them into real time through the manipulation of material and collisional objects. His sculptures question the idea of plausibility, they question their own existence, acting as a representational display of the space in which Hughes is trying to describe.

Suggestion, and the idea of plausibility, is central to Hughes’s practice, repeated motifs and a collisional approach create unordinary but persuasive coalescence. He theoretically and conceptually slices up the time-based elements of an object, then hypothetically stitches them back together; treating the concept and history of an object as something that can be manipulated to create a new scenario, extract meaning and tell a new story.

Hughes incorporates a wide range of traditional processes alongside new technologies, and an ever-growing array of materials from resin, metal and paint, to dust and newspaper. Using small tools to carve certain works, then stereo-lithography to produce others; like his work, Hughes shifts and morphs, reacting to the concept, and the language of generated ideas. Hughes is able to draw from his material repertoire to continue an exploration of duality, the materiality and concepts of his work belong in two places at one time, can be two things at the same time; both hot and cold, utilitarian and absurd.

Image: Cold Corners hand carved polyurethane foam, epoxy resin, glass, paint, newspaper 60 x 56 x 82 cm

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L a u r a

B e n s o n

www.laurarbenson.com

Image: Mischievous/Miraculous gelli-plate print on aged paper, lead free solder 5.5 x 7 inches

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Laura Benson is a mixed media artist interested in sacredness and ritualistic practices. She is currently working on her MFA in Painting & Drawing at the University of Colorado Boulder. She got a BFA in Drawing at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Laura’s own practice is meant to be an exploration into the creation of a personal mythology. This entails creating work across a variety of mediums including clay, collaged images and found objects, metal, fabric, printmaking methods and drawing. It also includes a focus on storytelling, folklore and religious myth. She finds art making to be a valuable avenue for uncovering and exploring the mystical and mysterious aspects of the natural and supernatural world.

Image: Sentence Structure #24 gelli-plate print on aged paper, lead free solder 6.5 x 8 inches

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T h o m a s

B i l s

www.thomasbils.com

Thomas Bils (b. 1993) lives and works in Miami, FL. He received his BFA from New World School of the Arts. Bils has had group exhibitions at the Coral Gables Museum, Coral Gables, FL; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL; Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Gimpo, South Korea; and Top Painters Top Painting, online; as well as a recent solo exhibition at the NSU Art Museum, Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Bils’s work has been reviewed online and in print, including in New American Paintings and the International Painting Annual 10 (Manifest Press), among others. He is a 2018 to current resident of Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami, FL; as well as having attended residencies at Anderson Ranch, Snowmass, CO; and Void Projects, Miami, FL. Born and raised in central Florida before moving south to his current residence of Miami, Thomas Bils paints in ongoing investigation of the mutability within truth and narrative. Reflecting from the absurdities accustomed to growing up in the suburban south during the beginning of the opioid crisis, Thomas crafts autobiographical sceneries, carefully blurring the borders between truth and fiction. It is in these slippages of recollection he assumes his role as the unreliable narrator to develop an ambiguity in which viewer is engaged to consider where the fabrications occur in an attempt to grasp meaning and order.

Image: Anime Baseball Episode oil on canvas 48 x 48 inches

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W i n n i e

Tr u o n g

www.winnietruong.com

Image: Eyes At Dusk color pencil and cut paper collage on panel 20 x 24 inches

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Winnie Truong is a Toronto artist working with drawing and collage to explore ideas of identity, feminism, and fantasy along with a digital art and animation practice that includes public art and community engagement. She has exhibited across Canada, the US and Europe with solo presentations at Volta New York Art Fair, Pulse Miami Art Fair and Art Toronto and is a 2017 recipient of the Chalmers Arts Fellowship. Her work is in the collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto; Bank of Denmark, and EQ Bank.

Truong’s work provides the imaginary viewpoint of a feminist naturalist from another realm, one who undertakes their labour with great detail and care to depict the part-flora, part-creature figures by observing them in their natural environments devoid of the male presence or familiar social or biological guidelines. As these unashamed subjects shun the viewer’s gaze, they are given their own notions of agency, beauty, sensuality and purpose. These figures are seen contorted, frolicking, consuming, nurturing, conquering, and entangled in environments where you are unsure where limb ends and leaf begins. Her practice combines drawing and cut paper collage to create three-dimensional dioramas arranged in deep shadow box frames. Each vitrine offers a momentary view into an imaginary environment. The scenes are inspired by personal experiences and impressions of the natural world that are then collaged in place to express open-ended narratives. Taking place on simultaneously fertile and treacherous grounds, each work explores a harmony, conflict, and play between a figure and her landscape as well as the tension that arises when the natural world intersects the supernatural. Intertwining these two realities opens up opportunity for transgression and for the creation of new realms from which we can consider our own limited identities and experiences.

Image: Ripe Moon Rising color pencil and cut paper collage on panel 20 x 16 inches

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G o s i a M a c h o n

www.gosiamachon.de

Image: Die Taube ink on paper 50 x 40 cm

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Gosia Machon was born 1979 in Pszczyna (Poland), and lives and works in Hamburg, Germany. For many years she has been a lecturer in drawing and painting at several German art academies.

Machon paints with ink and oil on paper and canvas. Her figurative abstract paintings and drawings are created in intuitive processes and are driven by an inner archive. Her work draws from unconscious, autobiographical and collective experiences and memories.

It repeatedly revolves around the longing for untouched nature. This nature can be a biotope or a plant, and refers equally to the unfathomable meanders of our human psyche and body—the piece of wilderness within ourselves.

Gosia Machon received her diploma (2008) at HAW Hamburg, Department of Design, from which she graduated with honours (Hans-Meid-Förderpreis). She was awarded the first Prize Nord-West-Kunst (Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven) and several project fundings from Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn and Hamburger Kulturbehörde and Kulturstiftung (2012-2022). Machon has exhibited her works internationally. Her previous exhibits include ‘A room for one’s own’ at Clint Roenisch Gallery Toronto 2022 (curated by Brit Pruiksma / Mothflower); ‘Lieb Leib Leid Lied’ at HilbertRaum Berlin 2021 and ‘Durch das Getümmel’ at Kunstverein Ellwangen 2020.

Image: Erbe ink on paper 50 x 40 cm

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K y u n g

S o o n

P a r k

www.kyungsoonpark.com

Image: Us oil on paper 12 x 16 inches

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In work that is both calming and searching, Kyung Soon Park portrays idealized figures in various abstract landscapes to explore concepts of memory, identity and emotions in a surreal setting. Even though she has been living in Canada since 2000, she still questions her identity: neither her original home nor current place define her. Her dream-like figures convey her state of mind, exploring conflicted emotions to find herself visually. Park demonstrates her fondness of nature in her work and invites viewers to share her colourful appreciation of the peace she finds there.

Image: Elude oil on paper 12 x 16 inches

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www.instagram.com/zhanghaoyan_arthur

H a o y a n Z h a n g

Image: The New God Rises oil on canvas 120 x 160 cm

98

Zhang Haoyan, born in Zibo, Shandong Province in 1996.

He graduated from University of the Arts London in fine art.

He works and lives in Shanghai nowadays. Zhang Haoyan’s creation involves multiple media such as painting, image and writing. Through the use of archaeological screen images, he carries out image concept painting and video writing, and revisits the social cause and effect of the role of IP in history and contemporary times.

Image: Titan Fall oil on canvas 80 x 120 cm

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L a u r e n

d e l a

R o c h e

www.laurenrocheart.com

Image: Rose Garden oil paint, fabric pen, mineral spirit protective varnish on antique cotton feedsack 38 x 40 inches

100

I approach my studio practice with vulnerability and curiosity. I typically work on flat surfaces, using cold press cotton paper or antique woven linen textiles. My compositions feature female nudes inhabiting aural and dreamlike settings which I create by using oil sticks, fine ink lines obscured with water, and gestural paint strokes. In my work, women and animals interact in abstracted interior and exterior spaces. These figures bend and reach in gestures of an empathetic connection, revealing solidarity between impassive yet vulnerable forms. I portray ordinary objects in my work as digestible metaphors for my feminine experience. The compositions I create examine balance and unease at once: robust feminine figurative forms engage in ritualistic acts, cats and dogs live harmoniously, and wild animals appear tame and indoors. I travel the US a lot, and I keep a snapshot and mental catalog of visual influences throughout my travels. I especially love hand painted signs, woven and embroidered textiles, children’s art, and Art Deco architecture.

A self-taught artist, Lauren Roche fully embraced her talents at the encouragement of her peers, Tynan Kerr and Andrew Mazorol. Having worked the autumn sugar beet harvests together in North Dakota, the three spent their free hours in a heated trailer drawing to no end. In 2012, she exhibited her first full body of work alongside theirs at Modern Times Cafe in Minneapolis, and shortly after was awarded the Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship (2012-13). Roche was then included in a number of group shows leading to her first solo show, Silent Partner, at Bockley Gallery (2016). She has shown at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, the Delphian Gallery in London, and the Material Fair (2020), Mexico City among other venues. She was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2018) and today her works are in the collections of the North Dakota Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art along with numerous private collections. Roche currently lives and works in St Louis MO, and maintains a cabin in rural Minnesota, to which she and her partner return often.

Image: Banana Tree oil paint, fabric pen, mineral spirit protective varnish on antique cotton feedsack 40 x 40 inches

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R u e i - H e n g

C a i

www.cairueiheng.com

Image: A Ghost with Big Feet acrylic on canvas 116.5 x 91 cm

102

Cai Ruei-Heng’s (b. 1989) enigmatic paintings are characterized by the combination of figurative depiction and anxious-like quality. He paints with personal memories from the times with animals and ghosts, which represents the metaphor of the confusion he feels in life. He also questions the capability for human and creature to maintain the sense of self, which he continues to search through the similarities between both lives. He is obsessed with a wandering status like a ghost. Perhaps this is a result of some sort of mischievous attitude I have being at the mercy of current circumstances while acting apathetic.

I’m fascinated by this kind of wandering vibe because, I can’t get in and I am unable to escape; I’m just stuck in the middle. Perhaps it’s really a shameless posture. I am just stunned at the mercy, perfectly compacted and fastened tightly. It’s my imagination playing with me; it’s the game of ‘the embarrassment between me and my past creating inertia as well as social relations.’

The appearance of the feet in the painting is inspired by a ghost story I heard. I then projected the story and my imagination into the painting – a pair of feet under a long curtain. These feet appeared through the wind-blown curtains, and wandered in the room. My working process is that I write keywords in my sketchbook and do some simple sketches before working on canvas. For me this is an effective way to help me think and unify ideas. After that, I gradually concretise keywords into colours, and shapes, including the vibes. Some examples are embarrassment, humid, hot, oily, mould and a burnt smell. Then, through the different colours and brush strokes I work layer by layer to build the whole structure of the painting.

Image: Ghost and Robot acrylic on canvas 65 x 80 cm

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J .

C a r i n o

www.jcarinoart.com

Image: Buckwheat acrylic and oil on linen 26 x 21 inches

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J. Carino is a Riverside, California-based figurative artist working in a variety of mixed-media.

He is a graduate of Parsons: The New School. Influenced by many decorative arts, his work explores ideas of queerness, identity, sensuality, and nature through richly patterned, colored, and layered figures and flora. His work depicts monumental nude, queer figures in landscapes that are both idyllic and tinged with danger. His work wrestles with ideas of traditional fertility and queer intimacy, and explores how the creation of our sense of self is connected with the natural world. These works explore the relationship between queer bodies and the landscape. Queer people are often not afforded the luxury of ‘permanence’ in society, and are viewed as ‘unnatural’. Here, the figures become a part of the landscapes on different scales of time: the fleeting lives of wildflowers, the multi-decade life of the century plant/agave, and the eternity of the mountains. These paintings express the idea that there is a ‘naturalness’ to nudity, to sexuality, and to queerness that is as elemental a component of the landscape as are the rocks and trees. Through a mixture of self-portraiture and drawings from models, the bodies and faces undulate through the California landscapes.

Image: Healing acrylic and oil on linen 29 x 22inches

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N i c k H o b b s

www.nickhobbs.art

Image: Bodies graphite on paper 5.5 x 7 inches

106

These drawings are snapshots (fragments, evidence) of an attempt to reconcile two scales. First, scale of the everyday, the earthly, the personal, and the human. That which is familiar and specific to personal experience, especially those qualities that are most taken for granted. Second, the scale of deep time and the cosmological. That which exists, all or in part, beyond the boundaries of intuition.

I understand these scales to be irreconcilable, making this practice ultimately futile from the perspective of arriving at a definite conclusion. Instead, I approach it as an archaeologist, inferring what I can from the in-situ artifacts of culture, experience, memory, intimacy, and history. This fossil record is incomplete and often misleading, but a great deal of knowledge can be extrapolated from such sparse evidence.

My drawing process begins with photographs foraged from scientific archives, the personal archive of my own photographs, and from the cultural archive of the internet. Images from these varied sources are interwoven in an alchemic dance of familiarity and ambiguity to question the possibility of knowing at a distance. I want to glimpse what lies just beyond the barrier between air and void. Between you and me. Between inside and outside. My drawings are quiet windows into the overwhelming cosmological context. They are probes ill equipped for what they hope to find. They are touch and sight and time—the stuff of consciousness. Crystallized in carbon—the stuff of life. That is all they will ever be, but the process is too compelling for it to be hopeless.

Nick Hobbs is an artist based in Fayetteville, AR, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. He has been an amateur astronomer for over a decade and it influences everything he does.

Image: Mimas graphite on paper 6 x 6 inches

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M e n g q i u

www.mengqiu-li.com

Image: Fairy and her garden acrylics on canvas 50 x 70 cm

108

Painting is a natural way for me to feel the heartbeat between the heaven and earth. I simply dive into the silence when I paint, watch the colourful world containing of dreams, illusions and mystery … ever forming and dissolving.

I try to dance with them intuitively with my brushes and colours in that moment. My paintings record a journey of a longing soul’s spiritual evolvement and transformation within the inner realm. It connects me to the source of universe.

Mengqiu Li is a Chinese artist who lives and works in Berlin. 23 March 2022 - 3 April 2022 Sonyashnik auction; proceeds donated in full to humanitarian organisations in Ukraine. 10 December 2021 -19 January 2022 Group exhibition “Here Come the Suns” Bark Berlin Gallery, curated by Uwe Henneken; 07 August - 21 August 2021 Solo exhibition “Reconnect” Chinese young artist space Berlin; 15 March - 11 April 2021 Group exhibition “Spring Awakening” London Paint Club.

Image (right): Source acrylics on canvas 50 x 70 cm

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C h e n

W e i

T i n g

www.chenwts.com

Image: The Bremen Band acrylic and colored pencil on canvas 120 x 149 cm

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“If personal experience can reflect itself, I think drawing and writing are a kind of slice of self.” In my creations, I used a lot of childhood memories and symbolic figures such as teddy bears, antique toys, intuitive graffiti drawings,costume characters and so on. My painting started as diary recordings, which tend to be in a written form. This writing is more like an interpretation of my work.

“What is painting?” I often ask myself this question, which constantly deconstructs and constructs my thoughts. Specifically, instinct drives me to write about these fragments of my childhood, like words and poems in my images, figurative but present. I still remember the moment in my childhood, when I was watching television and playing by myself with toys, which I still keep, all alone in the room. Maybe, this kind of childhood experience is common in the era of declining birthrate, and some might share the same feeling—longing to play with someone and growing up without noticing the desire. My personal experience is a characteristic of my generation. It writes feelings I face unclearly, but intuitively and willfully awakening the utter innocence under my skin. I strongly believe that creation is the way I converse with the world.

Image: I thought that we died before acrylic, oil pastel and colored pencil on canvas 145 x 111.5 cm

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G u i m

T i ó

www.guimtio.com

Image: El Túnel oil on linen 162 x 130 cm

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Guim Tió was born in Barcelona. He obtained his degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts in his native town. He began his career in the world of painting in 2010 when his work was included in the Art<30 award (Spain). Guim has exhibited in Barcelona and had solo exhibitions in Taiwan, Korea, Italy and Australia. His work is part of private collections such as the SOLO Collection, the Vila Casas Foundation and the Foundation of the University of Barcelona.

His pictorial research starts from the interest in the human condition, treated with humor, irony and a strong degree of provocation reflected in his striking first portraits that capture the strangeness of the human condition. His last portraits were an exercise about memory, but the new landscapes seem to think about the tomorrow that will soon be today. Previously, he used to ask himself, where do we come from? Now, he wants to know, where are we going? That’s why the characters no longer remember or forget, but, contemplate and imagine. His paintings force us to stop for a moment and leave aside the speed of our daily life. As with Friedrich’s paintings, the main characters show their back in order to put ourselves facing an immeasurable nature that evokes each and every one of the great life questions. Perfect balance between tension and calm, the introspective drive of the scenes is stained on Tió’s vibrant tone canvases: lemon yellow soils, golden peaks or salmon-like skies seduce us like the crimson flower that grows in the grass.

Image: Dorm oil on canvas 116 x 89 cm

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N a t a l i a

G o n z a l e z

M a r t i n

www.nataliagonzalezmartin.uk

Image: Displeasures of the Flesh oil on wood 60 x 42 cm

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Natalia Gonzalez Martin (born 1995, Montejo de la Sierra, Spain) earned a BA in Painting at City & Guilds of London Art School (2017).

Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Sébastien Bertrand, Geneva (2021), Steve Turner, USA (2022) and Hannah Barry Gallery, London (2022). Gonzalez Martin’s work has also been included in several group exhibitions at galleries like Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai; Pi Artworks, London and Guts Gallery, London.

Her latest body of work splashes in the uncanny valley, revelling in the reality of painted droplets and the surreality of their shadowless environments. Individual body parts appear in unspecified yet sensually specific moments. A hand holds grapes, a foot steps on grass, bodies sit contemplatively. Painted in oil, Martín’s works refer to the long European painting tradition in medium and also in iconography.

A frequent visitor to London’s museums, Martín often draws connections between the past and the present.

Image: In Her Hand She Holds Temptation oil on wood 29.7 x 42 cm

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R a f a e l U r i e g a s

www.rafaeluriegas.com

Image: Selfportait 20 60 x 45 cm

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My paintings do not reduce themselves to the mere act of creation, they are about entering a sensitive state where color vibrations are suitable for composing another layer within the visible spectrum. Painting is a way to rescue the hints of the past, expressing the context in which we are immersed, in my case, the Euro-American tradition. When I draw, I am actively tracking light reflection and I study the movement within the grayscale space. Drawing is intimate and personal, it is an action of immediate notes which can be perfected via the mental process of contemplation.

Color behaves in a joint manner, in other words, it reacts to the surrounding colors. Since there is no such thing as isolated color, they work in conjunction and synergy with the sun: the changes in temperature, the seasons of the year, the works even subtract color waves from the surrounding objects. By painting, I am linking the constant change of vibration and the reflection of light, since any illuminated body absorbs waves and reflects them, color is not the paint, but the light that illuminates it.

Image: Self Portrait 20 60 x 45 cm

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www.niklasasker.se

N i k l a s A s k e r

Image: Piercer oil on canvas 16 x 22 cm

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Niklas considers the traditional, time consuming painting techniques he uses as a form of ritual. It’s a conversation with history but also a tool for carefully digging into the subconscious. Painting as a kind of excavation. His focus during the last few years has been to examine the blurry border between the figurative and the abstract and how the two can merge to create new visual expressions.

Niklas Asker was born 1979 in Nordingrå, Sweden. He has studied art at Konstskolan Kuben and Örebro Konstskola in Örebro where he graduated in 2001. After that he studied at Malmö Comics Art School and worked in the international comics scene for eight years. In that time his own graphic novel Second Thoughts has been published in six different languages and he has done work for a number of different publishers, including Random House Books in New York. In 2009 he started painting again and after being accepted into the Liljevalchs Spring Salon in 2011 and 2012 he started exhibiting regularly in Sweden and abroad. He has also worked with public commissions, the largest one decorating a 240 m2 pedestrian tunnel in Vellinge, Sweden.

Image: Curtain oil on canvas 80 x 120 cm

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C l a u d i a G r e a t h e a d

www.claudiagreathead.com

Image: Flowers oil on canvas 88 x 110 cm

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Claudia Greathead is a painter who was born in Brisbane in 1992 who lives and works in Naarm, Victoria, Australia and uses the medium of painting to grapple with various emotional states and memories. Through her art, Greathead conjures up an uncanny ghostliness out of the mundane. She resurrects narratives and considers the way they linger; the strangeness that pervades after the moment is imagined, distorted, or lost over time. Her paintings are shrouded in a persistent elusiveness. They show how the pursuit of truth through a revisitation of the past can sometimes lead to an even greater incomprehensibility. This only makes her work more enduring and though these images are born out of personal experience, they are autonomous in their ambiguity and take on a life of their own.

After graduating from the Queensland College of Art in 2014, she has exhibited nationally and has been a finalist in the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize (AUS) (2014,2015), a semi-finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize (AUS) (2017), and a finalist in the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship (AUS) (2019). She makes work to resolve thought and feeling and is now undergoing a Master’s of Art Therapy at La Trobe University, VIC, AUS.

Image: Room shelf oil on canvas 76 x 61 cm

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E l i s a F i l o m e n a

www.elisafilomena.com

Image: Lee acrylic on cardboard 50 x 35 cm

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The persistent quest focuses on the human figure and nature, both experienced as everlasting and tender forces in contrast and harmony with the transience of existence. The artworks are often made up of unnatural images that form dreams and tales of that which is hidden. The outcome originates from pictures of the early 1900s that are used as a starting point for the creation of tales and suggestions that come up naturally during the creative process. Canvasses, often large ones, used for the experience of and the longing for existence. Gestures and crayons on paper of eerie shapes and human masks. Man’s being and his rising, shining and fading.

Elisa Filomena, born 1976 in Turin, Italy, lives and works in the city. The Drawer magazine features an article on Filomena’s site-specific paintings in the current #21 – Wall drawings issue. On 5th November 2021 the group exhibition entitled An ego of her own, has been inaugurated in the New York City venue of Kaufmann Repetto, curated by Amanda Schmitt. In 2021, the site specific solo exhibition Eden was held at Casa Vuota in Rome as well as the two person exhibition at White Lands Art Gallery in Turin entitled Rocaille Coulisses. The Moth Magazine (Irish) featured one of Filomena’s paintings on the 10th anniversary edition front cover in 2020. In 2019, she inaugurated the Diario Notturno, solo exhibition at Circoloquadro Contemporary Art Gallery in Milan. In 2017, she took part in Landina, an en plein air painting experience. Over the past few years, her works have been exhibited widely in public institutions and private spaces such as galleries, museums, art fairs and cultural venues both in Italy and abroad, and of the main solo and group exhibitions, a short-list follows: Tornielli Museum in Ameno (2021 & 2018), Luigi Varoli Public Museum – Palazzo Sforza in Cotignola (2021 & 2018), Giovanni Fattori Public Museum in Livorno (2019 & 2018), Kommunale Galerie [City Gallery] of Mörfelden- Walldorf – Frankfurt (2018), 54° Edition of the International Art Exhibition – Venice Biennale – Piedmont Region.

Image: Ephesus crayon on paper 50 x 40 cm

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K a t e B i c k m o r e

www.katebickmore.com

Image: Laid in White Rush oil paint on canvas 12 x 10 inches

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Kate Bickmore is an emerging artist (b. Albany, New York, 1993) living in London whose practice focuses on creating florascape paintings in oils. Bickmore graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2019, during which she received the Chadwell Award. She completed her BA (honours, summa cum laude) from Hamilton College, Clinton, NY in 2015, following a semester studying abroad at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2014. She has been represented by Annka Kultys Gallery in London since 2021. Bickmore has presented two solo exhibitions with Annka Kultys gallery, as well as participated in group exhibitions with Hannah Barry gallery and PM/AM gallery in London.

Last year, she collaborated with international fashion brand Karen Millen on two capsule collections that printed her paintings on the textiles.

She has also been artist-in-residence at the Anderson Center at Tower View, Red Wing, MN; Byrdcliffe Art Colony, Woodstock, NY, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Nebraska City, NE. I create colorful, hyperrealistic florascapes inspired by my experiences as a highly sensitive, queer woman. Each work seduces me into a world simultaneously realistic and fantastic—one that intimately weaves the surfaces, depths, and desires of my body with the floral landscape. The flowers in my paintings are given a majestic and powerful status—depicted not as victims or specimens of the objective gaze, but instead as living, breathing agents that can build consciousness and create a sense of connectivity. With an emphasis on vibrant colors, varied texture, and atmospheric light, my work is inspired by the Baroque and Rococo, Pre-Raphaelite painting, Dutch floral still lifes, the Hudson River School, eighteenth century botanical exploration, Romanticism, surrealism, physics, cosmology, and the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, Henri Rousseau, and Marianne North. Within my paintings, I embrace the sensational pleasures, wonder, and enjoyment of plants as a powerful and elusive site of transformation; focusing on immersive, cosmic feeling and sensory expansiveness. They are an entryway to the unknown, the sensual, and the sacred; continually challenging categorization and the traditional notions we use to define them.

Image: Soaking in Her Sacred Waters oil paint and resin on canvas 10 x 8 inches

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A n w a r M a h d i

www.instagram.com/boi_venus

Image: The Sacred Band of Thebes colored pencil on paper 24 x 24 inches

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Born and raised in the Chicago suburbs from a Filipino mother and an Arab father, Anwar Mahdi navigates their queer identity and Eastern cultures in a society that has constantly alienated them. They focus on retelling their story of abuse, and discrimination by projecting themself onto divine beings and reimagine a narrative where power dynamics and oppressive systems are constantly being challenged and destroyed. Anwar’s current work focuses on celebrating queer bodies of color by allowing them to hold space and arming them with divine power in order to confront their enemies. Within these vibrant, lush landscapes they fuse hyper violence and satire to mock ideas of masculinity that were forced upon them from a young age and threaten the very foundation of patriarchal systems upheld within the pantheons of gods. Anwar attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Painting and Drawing.

Image: As Above colored pencil and gouache on paper 24 x 24 inches

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A l i c i a R e y e s

M c N a m a r a

Image: As They Lay pastel and coloured pencil 8.5 x 11 inches

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As a Mexican-Irish American and culturally mixed person, I am invested in opening up the concept of an in-between space, where identity is fluid and where cultures and their languages intersect. My practice explores the potential of how all things can transcend their own definition and acquire a new life or meaning. During lockdown I began a series of drawings that started as a place to put my anxieties, but it quickly became an investigation of folklore and rituals around loss, mourning and healing, in which beings and landscapes mutate and shapeshift, creating a personal imaginary of forms of embodiment.

www.aliciareyesmcnamara.net

Image: Unnamed pastel and coloured pencil 11 x 8.5 inches

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A l i s o n K u d l o w

www.alisonkudlow.net

Image (p. 132, 133): Skittering Strong ceramic, glass 24 x 20 x 20 inches

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Alison Kudlow (b. 1981) lives and works in Brooklyn. She earned a BA from the University of Southern California, a post-baccalaureate degree from Brandeis University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Studio Art. She has shown at numerous galleries including Underdonk, Field Projects, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Flux Factory, UrbanGlass, Deanna Evans Projects, Doppelgänger Projects, Paradice Palase, and at Fullerton College. She presented her first NYC solo show, Meaningful Rituals in Irrational Times, at Elijah Wheat Showroom in 2019. She will be an artist in residence at the Art Ichol Center in Maihar, India in January 2023.

Alison Kudlow captures glass in mid-motion, resulting in works that are best described with verbs rather than nouns. Conceptualizing the kiln as a condensed model of geological formation, she creates a set of pressures with heat and gravity to which her materials react. With glass oozing, bulging and frothing from ceramic forms, each sculpture feels precarious, like a moment that cannot possibly last. Often experimenting to develop new processes, Kudlow transforms ephemeral circumstances into tangible objects. She embodies unseen forces in material to slow time and expand a moment. Her work is a response to grief, both personal and environmental. Her materials, arrested in motion, reflect a refusal to accept impermanence and loss.

The sculptures echo forms from nature but are also carefully fabricated. They are simultaneously bodily, botanical, geological, and mechanical, and so defy categorization, trouble binaries, and connote infinite fluid possibilities. With the materials seemingly moving so slowly as to elude the human eye, the work implies a pace of change at a scale dramatically longer than human life, challenging an anthropocentric notion of time which allows reckless attitudes toward our planet.

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P a m E l l i c k

www.pamellick.art

Image: Bath House acrylic and oil on canvas 22 x 28 inches

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As an emergent multidisciplinary artist hailing from upstate New York, and currently residing in the Bay Area of CA, I work with printmaking, painting, ceramics, sound, and more, eternally trying to learn new techniques. My work is informed by the natural environment and may be described as a reinterpreted visualization of energy in the places I experience. In my connection to the outdoors and my longing for human connection, I pay close attention to the interplay of light, movement, and color reflected in the luminosity along the surface of a stream, the edge of a cloud, or the ebb of a tide, as well as the synergistic vibrance (or lack thereof) between people sharing the same space. Because of my passion for the outdoors and meaningful community building, I am deeply interested in the radiance and spirit present in every sprout, pebble, glance, and flicker in the world around us.

In my portfolio, aura-beings and their companions gaze and play against a saturated chromatic hue, and spectral lovers meet and flee under the green flash of a setting sun or refracted lights from a shattered mirror. My portfolio may be interpreted as a psychogeographic map; witnessing my ascent to the inner wellspring of a sensitive and overwhelmed psyche; as a signpost that marks a few directions to go, so that viewers are encouraged to discover their own narrative of the pieces while getting lost in color fields, caverns, and patterns, eventually finding their way by mystic symbology and emotional relatability.

Image: Are You Leaving Now acrylic and oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches

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J a c k i e

S l a n l e y

www.jackie-slanley.com

Image: Guards 1 plexiglass and hardware 11 x 10 x 3 inches

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Jackie Slanley is a first-generation Vietnamese American artist living in Brooklyn NY. She is world building by making objects that reimagine mythological symbols. She has been an artist in residence at Ox – Bow School of Art and a recipient of a sculpture fellowship at Vermont Studio Center. She has shown nationally and internationally and received her BFA in painting from Hunter College and her MFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute.

Image: Arthropod 1 plexiglass and hardware 21 x 10 x 20 inches (adjustable)

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O r l y C o g a n

www.orlycogan.com

Image: Childs Play hand stitched embroidery, applique and paint on vintage baby linen 48 x36 inches

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The tableaux I create are inspired by relationships, pop culture and fairy tales. I work with vintage fabrics and embroideries as a base – made by women of previous and more modest eras. I act as a collaborator, modernizing their traditional work and altering its original purpose by updating the content to incorporate the unladylike reality and wit of contemporary women: their struggles and stereotypes. These issues are different from those of the earlier generation of women who originally embroidered the textiles to ‘feminize’ their homes. I mix subversion with flirtation, humor with power, and intimacy with frivolity. My subject matter is frank and provocative, yet whimsical and poetic. Many of the narratives deal with issues of fertility, motherhood, sexuality, self-image, isolation, vulnerability, indulgence and beauty in the mundane. I challenge social stereotypes embedded within childhood fairy tales while appreciating the absurd and the humor in life. My quest is to tell fantastical stories through symbols of cultural expression with today’s brand of American confessionalism, where many of my heroes linger between a public and private realm mixed with yesteryear’s kitschy conservatism. Ultimately, my quest is to tell a story about the role of women in our ever-changing society, all the while honoring the labors of the past. In the process, I aim to provoke certain questions: What role do women want to play in society today? What kind of relationships do we want to have? Who are our role models? What are we teaching our children? I hope to ask all of this within the context of constantly shifting boundaries that define our relationships and our identities. This work explores the many flavors of feminism.

Orly Cogan lives and works in New York City. Born in Israel and educated at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in NYC and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Cogan has been included in a number of notable national and international museum and university exhibitions, including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, CT; the Museum of Arts & Design, NY; Riverside Museum, Riverside, CA; the Hudson River Museum, NY; the Textile Museum of Toronto, Canada, with Judy Chicago; the Brattleboro Museum VT; San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles; Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, WI; Fresno Metropolitan Museum,CA; the Musée International des Arts Modestes, Sete, France; the Rijswijk Textile Biennial in the Museum Rijswijk and at the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, Oslo among others. Cogan’s work has been published in several books and museum catalogues. Her reviews are included in: The New York Times, New American Paintings, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Reader, NY Press, Art Press Magazine, W Magazine, Elle, Fiber Arts, Textile Plus, Surface Design, Art In America, Tema Celeste, Interior Design, Art Press, Art News, Chronogram, Upstate House, Time Out Chicago, Time Out New York, The American Art Collector, and Art Forum, to name a few.

Image: Schiele’s Flower Basket hand stitched embroidery, applique, crochet and paint on vintage table linen 34 x34 inches

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www.crystalupa.com

C r y s t a l L u p a

Image: Soul was found after the body got lost acrylic on canvas 33 x 24 cm

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Lupa received her bachelor’s degree from Central Saint Martins, University of Arts London. She works in areas including paintings, illustrations, sculptures, ceramics, fashion design, and music composition. Regardless of the media, her visual language always exudes an air of Eastern mysticism and fantasy literature. In the construction of magical and surreal sites, she has created her own context of symbols and forms. She transforms life experiences in reality or dreams into scenes and represents them with primitive, sensuous contours to explore the psychological states of the archetypal figure.

Lupa has extended these characteristics to her compositions, giving them an arrangement like the proscenium stage to interpret the interaction between the image and the spectator. She does not express her ideas through conflicts. She chooses to achieve mutual interaction between her audience and the motif through atmosphere-evoking and immersive images to further state an inner, deeper resistance within people in the social context.

Image: Warnings of a witch acrylic on canvas

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Y a n q i n g

P e i

yanqingpei.com

Image: Shades of Dusk oil on canvas 39 1/2 x 32 3/4 inches

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My paintings are about the intimacy and integration between human beings and their surroundings with the focus on nature. I’m interested in how living beings are interconnected and interdependent in a chaotic unity, and their own story that relates to what’s around them. An object’s energy, sources and destination seem to echo with the ambiguous and inscrutable state from the otherness. The paintings intend to capture the visual forms of a kind of chaos, fluidity, or integration. In my paintings, human figures, mountains, stones, plants and animals form a symbiotic relationship—the outline of a figure turns into a ridge line, or extends to grow into the shape of a horse.

There would be blooms in ruins, renewal after corruption, and a hidden world at the end of a cave.

Image: Wander oil and watercolor on canvas 20 x 16 inches

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M i c h e l l e

P a t e r o k

www.michellepaterok.com

Image: Waiting oil on linen 14 x 18 inches

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I am a Canadian visual artist currently based in London, Ontario. I received a BFA in Art and Design from the University of Alberta in 2016 and am currently an MFA candidate in Visual Art at Western University. I primarily work in the medium of oil painting.

How are spaces experienced subjectively, and how are these experiences reconstructed in our memories? What are the affordances of painting in representing subjectivity? Finally, what role might painting have to play in addressing the environmental urgencies of the present moment? These are the questions that ground my studio practice.

In my current project, I investigate the poetics of colour and light in domestic spaces. I am particularly interested in representing the passage of time. By rendering light’s subtle shifts and nuances, I aim to express a specific emotional atmosphere of a space as I search for ways to express time unfolding in the static frame of a painting. Recently I have been working from memory as well as drawings made in situ as primary sources of imagery. As I have shifted to this way of working from a previously photo-based methodology, the work has become more reduced and quiet. I work towards omitting details I feel might be inessential to a piece, focusing on expressing the essential qualities of experiencing a particular place and time.

The ‘emotional atmosphere’ I am investigating is one of calm reflection and appreciation of my mundane, everyday surroundings, coupled with a latent sense of personal and collective anxiety toward the future that has been heightened by the Covid-19 pandemic and ongoing ecological disaster. In his 2018 book Being Ecological, Timothy Morton argues that our current historical moment is haunted by a sense of unreality. “Being in a place, being in an era, for instance an era of mass extinction,” Morton argues, “is intrinsically uncanny” (Being Ecological, 49). This is the lens through which I reinterpret my quotidian, domestic surroundings: seeking out the poetics of the everyday while simultaneously engaging with a sense of quiet mourning for its impermanence.

Image: Desk oil on linen 30 x 40 inches

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We are looking to discover more emerging artists and to publish and help further promote their work If you would like your work to be featured in our upcoming issues, please find out more details on how to apply to be considered.

See p. 9 or visit our website: www.artmazemag.com We have an open call for art for the next print issue which provides publishing opportunities.

For any questions, please feel free to get in touch with us at info@artmazemag.com