Chronicles of a Future Foretold

CHRONICLES OF A FUTURE FORETOLD

DIPTYCH BY ALBERT SULTAN

CONTRIBUTORS Albert Sultan

Julie Bell

Alex J. Dewars

Kelly Matthews

Pris Campbell

Kerra Taylor

Astrid Ritmeester

Kevin Lauderdale

Boris Vallejo

Lauren Bergman

Brianna Lee Cheney Lansard Conor Walton David Molesky David Versluis Debra Livingston Diana Adams Donna Bates

Pauline Aubey Mariana Duarte Santos Matthew James Collins Michael Bergt Michael Jewula Shana Levenson Patricia Devlin-Hill

Jan Nelson

Viktoria Savenkova

John Hyland

Zack Zdrale

www.poetsandartists.com GOSS183 PUBLISHING HOUSE 604 Vale Street Bloomington, Il 61701 USA

PUBLISHER Didi Menendez

COVER ARTIST Brianna Lee

CURATOR Dr. Samuel Peralta

BACK COVER POEM Pris Campbell

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Copyright Š 2008-2018 All rights are reserved by PoetsArtists, GOSS183, Didi Menendez, and contributing artists, writers. All writings, artwork and images are copyright of the contributors and may not be reproduced without explicit permission. This publication may not be reproduced electronically, digitally, in print or any other form, format, or media without the explicit, written permission and approval of the copyright holders. All images and artwork are used with permission of the authors/creators or their representatives. Unless otherwise noted all measurements are in inches.

EXHIBITING

Albert Sultan The Origin of Life oil on canvas 80x60 inches

Albert Sultan Is Anybody Out There? oil on canvas 80x60 inches

Alex J. Dewars All Watched Over by Machines Of Loving Grace oil on canvas 106x76 cm

Dream Police I try not to sleep, cower behind metal cans stacked along the walls of my bedroom.

The dream police have been vicious this year. Seven friends in jail for dreams about tabooed topics or plans to protest the Order like the marches not so very long ago.

The Evangelists are in charge now, along with the racists and snarky politicians.

They send their work force through undumped trash, crashed flying cars, and cell phone signals, all waiting to be searched.

Designed by well meaning scientists, now the dream machines reach into our REM nightly to augment those other reports.

When I do doze, my dead grandmother visits each time to protect me.

She fills my mind with stories about Dick and Jane, and pecans, cracked by the fireplace at night.

She tells me about days the sky colored the wheat fields at sunset and scuppernongs hung sweet from the warm southern vines.

Pris Campbell Poem

Astrid Ritmeester Facing Earth oil on canvas 80x60 cm

Boris Vallejo Not One More Step oil on board 28x20 inches

Brianna Lee A Cautionary Tale oil on panel 15x30 inches

Cheney Lansard Trust acrylic, oil bar on birch 10x8 inches

Cheney Lansard Channel X acrylic on birch 13x20 inches

Conor Walton The Man Who Sold The Moon oil on linen 10x14 inches

David Molesky Aparche oil on panel 8x12 inches

David Versluis Progenitor applewood, steel 7.5 x 5.5 x 5 inches

Debra Livingston Utopia Dreaming photo media 50x36 inches

Failure I pass out back pack on my back & awake in another place an old lady squatting over part bird part crocodile then the wind takes me with it’s raw reminders magic can & will appear, accordions, jellies, paintings across the hall at any point, I follow my nose down fruity hallways a mystic sits on a bearded bed she lends me an overcoat & tells me to go home at least until midsummer lest I end up on some moon underwater wearing underwear

Some Assembly Required

The ladder extends up to an unknown floor all the dead men pause & stop playing cards you climbed up on a whim The Interpreter of Walls arrives & taps each one these should be painted bluish-purple today, she said in the spring paint them yellow of course, you will have to build your own table-how did you find this place?

It’s hard to explain, I say it all came from a thought I fell into at lunch yes, that is the way, the key feel free to listen to music, dance or build a bookcase, but there’s no going back

Diana Adams Poems

Donna Bates Question Everything 2 oil on dibond 10x20 inches

Donna Bates Question Everything 1 oil on dibond 10x20 inches

Jan Nelson Miner’s Death Mask serigraph, coal dust, ink 24x18 inches

John Hyland The Great Red Spot oil and pencil on canvas 9x12 inches

Julie Bell Commandos oil on board 26x16 inches

Kelly Matthews She Takes Her Fire With Her encaustic, oil, metal foil on wood 36x24 inches

Kerra Taylor The Embrace oil on wood panel 12x16 inches

Kerra Taylor The Fear oil on wood panel 12x16 inches

Yard Work Carlotta said, “The first rule of yard work is-”

I held up my hand to stop her. “Hold on,” I said. “I saw this in a movie. Let me guess. ‘The first rule of yard work is: You do not talk about yard work.’”

Life is a movie. Sometimes it’s Fight Club.

Carlotta shook her head.

OK, sometimes it’s not Fight Club, even if you actually are in Los Angeles.

We were standing in front of that day’s client. Or, rather, that night’s. They had told me when I started that sometimes it would be daytime and sometimes it would be nighttime. Depended on what the Department wanted. This job, my first, just happened to be a night one.

We were in Northridge. Just off Reseda, not quite at Cal State. We’d driven past all the blocky apartments into where the single-family houses were.

Our white Department truck was parked in front of a classic single-story ranch house: beige stucco exterior, gray wood shake roof. Double front door, double windows next to that, and an attached garage. It looked a lot like my dentist’s office, actually.

The lawn was perfect.

It was one-thirty in the morning. There was only a crescent moon, and the street lamp was at the other end of the block, but I could still see that the lawn was lush and green. So green. Even in the dark, you can tell.

We were in the third year of what everyone was now calling The Great Drought, and an awful lot of water had gone into keeping that lawn so . . . verdant. And it had been edged like someone had crawled around it with nail scissors.

The musky sweet smell of jasmine hit me. There were plenty of the white, star-shaped plants on either side of the house, and the hot Santa Ana winds blowing all the way from the desert stirred them. Back when I had been a kid growing up here, the Santa Anas were pleasantly warm. Now they were just plain hot. Even in December.

As with any strong wind in L.A., it made me look up. There was a skinny palm tree on the lawn, about a foot away from the sidewalk. Its trunk raced up fifty or sixty feet. When it gets windy, sometimes palm fronds are knocked loose and fall. They can be as big as a dog, and some have sword-sharp points. A guy could get run-through.

Kevin Lauderdale Fiction

Life is a movie.

Sometimes it’s Jason and the Argonauts (Seven skeleton fighters; seven swords. #RayHarryhausenForever).

I heard the fronds wrestling and crackling above me. Was it the wind or the rats some people said nested at the tops of palms? I took a step back, placing myself out of the way in either case.

Carlotta reached in through the truck’s rolled-down front seat window and pulled out her hard hat. I’d been wearing mine ever since we’d left the dispatch office. No Dayglo orange. They were black. Of course. What else would you wear for a night job? I felt cool and stealthy it in. Plus they went great with our blue denim uniforms. Of course, I’d had to roll up my sleeves, and neither of us was wearing an undershirt. Too hot even at night.

Carlotta spoke quietly and slowly. “The first rule of yard work is: ‘It’s never personal.’”

I nodded. “It’s—”

“Shhh. It’s the middle of the night. Quietly.”

“‘It’s never personal.’” I said in hushed tones. “Got it.”

“You better Got It, kid. It’s all about the Department. What they want goes. Sometimes the homeowner might try to talk to you. A good-looking young guy like you . . . maybe the lady of the house invites you in. Maybe the man of the house even. Some of the bigger places, maybe the maid or the butler. They want to do something extra for you, so you’ll do something extra for them.” She held up a finger that declared as assuredly as any burning bush: I AM THE LORD THY GOD WHEN IT COMES TO YARD WORK. “Do not.”

Life is a movie. Sometimes it’s The Ten Commandments.

Carlotta took a deep breath and continued in an almost-whisper, “You are working for the Department. You are an employee of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. You do not get personal. You are not here because you want to be. You are not here for any reason of your own. You are not here because you like—”

“Or dislike,” I added.

“Exactamente. Glad you paid attention at orientation. Or dislike anyone personally. You are here to work.”

“I am here for the Department,” I said, throwing a noble and dramatic spin on it. “I act out their will. Ooo! Like I’m an actor and the Department is my director.”

“Shh! Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”

I nodded. I wanted to make a good impression. Carlotta was two or three times my age, and she clearly knew her stuff. Someone had told me she’d been with the DWP since the Eighties. I was honored she’d taken me on.

I’d been out of college for six months, which meant my student loan repayments had just kicked in. You’d figure in Los Angeles there would be a lot of positions for someone with a B.A. in history and a minor in film studies.

I’d always figured I could get a job in the movies, checking things to make sure no anachronisms crept in. No kilts in Braveheart because no one would wear them for a couple more centuries. No Raquel Welch poster in The

Shawshank Redemption because One Million Years B.C. didn’t come out until the year after Andy escaped. Then there’s that kid wearing a digital watch during the Civil War in Glory . . . .

Hollywood needed people like me to check things like that. Or so I’d thought. Turns out, even in Hollywood, you can’t really make up your own job. There was nothing in the Times or on Craig’s List about a professional antianachronism checker. There weren’t even any mail room jobs for me to start in and work my way up. There weren’t any mail rooms any more. It was all email.

Time was, somebody in my position might go get a job with the Post Office. But the USPS wasn’t hiring either. Budget cutbacks. So . . . the LADWP. It’s one job they can’t outsource to India or Mexico. The snowpack up in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, the aqueducts, the powerhouses, and the wires are all right here and they aren’t going anywhere. So the pay’s not great, and the hours suck, but . . . .

Life is a movie. Sometimes it’s The Wizard of Oz. And, as Frank Morgan as the Wizard says: “Times being what they were, I accepted the job.”

“The second rule of yard work is: ‘Always check your paperwork.’” From out of nowhere, it seemed, Carlotta produced a clipboard. “Okay, kid. . . . . What does the sign say?”

I looked up. “Allen Street. Number Three-Four-Two.”

“Excellent, kid. That’s what it says here on the paper. You do not want to do your job at the wrong place. First of all, you’ll only have to do it again at the right place. Plus, the place you did do it – Ay! They wake up in the morning and see someone’s messed with their yard. . . . No, kid. And The Department will hear from them, you can bet. Not good for you.”

She led me around to the side of the truck and opened one of the boxy compartments. The door slid open slowly on silent hinges. “Custom-made for the Department,” Carlotta said. “Because: Rule Number Three of Yard Work: ‘Be quiet.’ You are not supposed to disturb the homeowner. You got that, kid? In the best-case scenario, you never interact with the homeowner at all. Believe me, they don’t want to see you, so you don’t want to see them.”

She pulled out two pairs of gloves and handed me one. She pointed across the street.

“That guy over there replaced his whole lawn with a rock garden. That’s smart. We’re all supposed to be using fifty percent less water. Even less eventually. Guess that’s the easy way.”

Life is a movie. Sometimes it’s Dune. If you’re lucky, it’s Lawrence of Arabia. But it’s usually Dune.

I pointed to the house on the left of 342. “That’s the easy way,” I said. I’d noticed it as soon as we’d driven up. Whoever owned it had simply let the lawn die in the Drought. Hadn’t even bothered to replace it with anything.

Whatever remained that wasn’t dirt was yellow, brown, and scraggly. I craned my neck. The house to the right had a “lawn” of ground cover juniper that looked like a hundred downed Christmas wreaths. There were few cacti tossed in for decoration. I frowned. Which was worse, the totally deadbeat lawn or the half-assed lawn?

“Yeah,“ said Carlotta. “But I like the rocks. All rocks, no water, no yard work. Of course, that puts people like

you and me out of a job.” She put her hands on her hips. “But Mr. Three-Four-Two here . . . . A lot of work to do. He’s not even one of the biggies. Someone up in Bel-Air used almost twelve million gallons of water last year.”

“Makes sense. You got a big mansion, you got grounds.”

“Don’t they know it’s The Great Drought? That Bel-Air guy is the biggest residential user in the whole of California. It’s like war, kid. Supposed to be that we’re all in this together. At least most people have stopped hosing down their driveways. Man, that gets to me. What do they think, it’s gonna make them grow?” We walked to the back of the truck, and I pushed aside the blue plastic tarp in the bed. “I only got a ten-by-fifty strip, but I’m gonna water it ‘til it’s a circular driveway like up in Westwood. I don’t think so. Loco.”

She pointed, and I grabbed two shovels from the back of the truck.

“What about cones?” I asked. “Do we get to put out cones?” We had a couple dozen orange cones stacked in two piles on special mounts at the front of the truck. Marking our work zone with cones would be very professional.

Carlotta shook her head. “Nighttime. What do you think? Who’s gonna see? Plus we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”

I was truly disappointed. The cones would have been cool.

Life is a movie. Sometimes it’s A Christmas Story (Just the scene where Ralphie receives the pink bunny suit).

Carlotta scanned the lawn with the practiced eye of a surveyor. She positioned herself on the sidewalk at about the lawn’s midpoint. She pointed for me to stand next to her.

“Work your way up to the house. Then you turn right and work back down to the sidewalk. I’ll go to my left.

Start digging.”

“How deep?” I asked.

“Just an inch. Leave the topsoil. If you can roll up the lawn sod in nice long strips a foot or so wide, that’s best. And fastest.”

“Where’s all this stuff go anyway?”

“Back east, I guess. You don’t have to worry about how much water you use out there.” Carlotta snorted.

“Or maybe it goes to that place in Bel-Air. Hey, maybe that’s why he needs all that water. He’s a lawn hoarder.” She laughed. “I dunno. All I know is the last rule of yard work: ‘When the DWP tells you not to use so much water, you better not use so much water.’”

The house’s porch light came on.

“Uh oh,” said Carlotta. “They’re up.”

“Hey, you!” a man screamed from the front window. “Get away from my lawn! Beat it! I’m gonna kill you! I’m gonna—“

“Dig faster, kid,” Carlotta said, speeding up. “Dig faster!”

Yep, life is a movie. Sometimes it’s Repo Man.

Lauren Bergman The Time Traveler’s Bitch watercolor and gold leaf 46x36 inches

Lauren Bergman Rowing to Nirvana watercolor and acrylic 40x30 inches

Pauline Aubey Human After All (A Self-Portrait) lego bricks on assembled panel 30x30 inches

Mariana Duarte Santos Maschinenmensch oil on canvas 16x9.5 inches Next Page Mariana Duarte Santos The Future Told By The Past pen and watercolor 7.4x15.7 inches

Matthew James Collins Consolation of Philosophy oil on linen 60cm x 80cm

Matthew James Collins The Reluctant Immigrant oil on linen 60cm x 80cm

Michael Bergt Traditions gouache, color pencil 19.25x14.5 inches

Michael Bergt The Origin of Life oil on canvas 80x60 inches

Michael Bergt Nightfall gouache, color pencil 18x14 inches

Michael Jewula Farewell oil on canvas 40x30 inches

Shana Levenson Dark Dreams oil on canvas 18x14 inches

Moon How does it feel, to be crashed out from your own hot iron heart, by a billiard proto-planet fissiling the intrinsic of you into a flung torn intimate, defining you discreet, into a viscous misshapen ball, schismed onto a lengthening line to an orbit, dark side paralyzed?

With your howls blocked in vacuum, dissymmetry tore back grappling moments, that would heave tides to shatter the rock mantles that would flow and cool and close over your lost place, on the planet that was to be blue; you took a greater place perhaps.

Furtively far, your silenced influence thrashed waters, scoured rock pools the size of mountain basins, puddled fins to limbs to fins to limbs again, gills to lungs to gills to lungs again, the eon-lengthed life-emergent pendulum swings marked into your receding orbit.

And in this eon now, caught clear lit by the sun, you look in at night, the whispered parent back dropped into nursery rhymes.

Patricia Devlin-Hill Poem

Viktoria Savenkova An Experience oil on canvas 39x23 inches

Zack Zdrale Seer oil on panel 24x18 inches

Zack Zdrale Dreamer oil on panel 16x18 inches

Zack Zdrale Exhale oil on panel 6x6 inches

Diana S. Adams is an Edmonton, Alberta based writer with work published in a variety of journals. Her fourth book of poetry, Lights On The Way Out was recently published by Finishing Line Press.

Pauline Aubey aka Poupée de Chair is a French pop portrait artist who traded pastels and inks for Lego. Her artwork has been exhibited in France and across the Atlantic sea (Bristol, UK, Chicago, USA). www.poupeedechair.wordpress.com Donna Bates, a Native Southern Californian, has worked for over 20 years as a commercial illustrator and 3D artist.

Her years of experience in graphic design has evolved into a career in painting.. She is a self-taught artist that is known for her own mash-up style of urban, tough-chic edgy strong independent women or “Badass Chicks”. Her women aren’t pin-ups nor portraits, they are a different vision of power and sex flavored with leather, metal, graffiti and fantasy!

Julie Bell was born in Beaumont, Texas. A former competitive bodybuilder, she applies the same discipline and intensity to her art career. Her knowledge of anatomy has allowed her to imbue her figures of humans and animals with grace and strength. At the heart of her work is an element of empowerment and independence. She has been named a Living Master by the Art Renewal Center.

Lauren Bergman uses paint to explore female identity, and her underlying fears of the vulnerability and fragility of the world around us. Her paintings reside at the juncture of myth and social realism, utilizing a language of symbols to probe the loss of societal optimism and the ongoing irresolution of feminist issues such as sexuality versus objectification and acquiescence versus empowerment. The paintings court irony as the playful imagery and inner narratives confront the conflicting expectations of contemporary culture and the intricate ways in which female identities are formed.

Michael Bergt has been in deep dialogue with art history over the course of his career of more than thirty years. Working across drawing, sculpture, and primarily egg tempera painting, Bergt has engaged art’s long history of grappling with representational and abstract sensibilities. Inspired by early Renaissance classical mythology, and other diverse religious and spiritual imagery, his artwork represents his own play with expression and interpretation of the contemporary human condition. While grounded in these art historical and visual traditions, Bergt also profoundly breaks from these as he creates his own cast of mythic characters with their own poetic inclinations and relationships informed by modern dialogue around pressing topics such as gender and sexuality.

His works can be seen at www.mbergt.com.

Pris Campbell’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including PoetsArtists, Nixes Mate, Rusty Truck, Bicycle Review, Chiron Review, Pulse, and Outlaw Poetry Network. Nominated three times for a Pushcart, the Small Press has published nine collections of her poetry and Clemson University Press a collaboration with Scott Owens.

My Southern Childhood, from Nixes Mate, is her most recent book. A former Clinical Psychologist, sailor and bicyclist until sidelined by ME/CFS in 1990, she makes her home in the Greater West Palm Beach, Florida.

Matthew James Collins is a painter and sculptor, originally from Oak Park, IL, who currently divides his time between Chicago and Italy. His aesthetic pilgrimages and overseas journeys have served to broaden his artistic vision. An artist of unusually wide breadth, his work explores where classical ideas of beauty intersect with observations of the contemporary world.

Patricia Devlin-Hill was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and was first published in The Young Irish Writers column (Irish Times) in the 1970s. The poetry faded then with physics taking its place. Today, Patricia writes in her free time, and is published

in Poetry NI’s FourxFour Journal, Community Arts Partnership/ Literature and Verbal Arts (CAP/LaVA) anthologies, Bangor Literary Journal and Lagan Online Publications. Patricia’s poem ‘Tea’ was short listed for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing 2016.

Alex Dewars is a figurative artist from Scotland. His most recent work explores cultural and national stereotypes in his native country. He has exhibited mainly in Scotland including at the Royal Scottish Academy.

John Hyland, a painter in New York City, focuses on portraits, figure studies, landscapes and still-lifes in oil and pencil. A native of Forestville, Conn., he is largely self-taught and has shown his work in New York City, San Francisco, Budapest, Paris, New Jersey and Connecticut, as well as on Block Island, R.I. He graduated from the College of the Holy Cross and recently retired from a lengthy career in journalism, at The New York Times (1990-2017) and The Hartford Courant in Connecticut (1978-90).

Michael Jewula is a Chicago author and painter. Seeking ancient wisdom he traveled to Mexico, Peru, and Brazil where he studied with shamans and indigenous healers. His creations are inspired from his dreams and visions of these excursions to bring peace and transcendence into his life.

Cheney Lansard spent most of his life treating art as a occasional and ignored hobby that should be put aside for more pragmatic things but in 2015 after years filled with unremarkable glimpses into his own creative side, Cheney began carving out more time for his work. Painting in acrylic and oil, his work examines the disconnect between our internal feelings and their acceptance as expressed to the outside world. Cheney was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he still lives and works.

Kevin Lauderdale has written essays and articles for the Los

Angeles Times, The Dictionary of American Biography, and McSweeneys.net. His short fiction has appeared in several of Pocket Books’ Star Trek anthologies, as well as various small press publications and the science journal Nature.

Brianna Lee’s work is an exploration of the intricacies of the human condition and our connection to the natural world. Her female portraits are often set against dramatic landscapes that become metaphors for their internal world or life experiences. Her narrative portraits are marked by dramatic lighting played against soft and intricate details.

Shana Levenson is a representational painter from Albuquerque, NM. Her passion for the arts led her to pursue a BA in Fashion Design from The University of Texas, in Austin, and after the birth of her children in 2009 and 2010, an MFA in Fine Art Painting from the Academy of Art University, in San Francisco. Shana’s work focuses on portraiture and the figure.

Her inspiration comes from painting people that are important in her life, and her goal is to capture each person’s story in an honest and meaningful way. Shana draws inspiration from her own experiences and uses specific series as a way to illustrate chapters in her life.

Debra Livingston is a published photo-media artist from the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia. Her main subject is narrative and biographical concepts in which she uses photography to digitally paint surreal and unpredictable realities to question our sense of the norm in unexpected ways.

Her work is presented in solo and collaborative exhibitions locally in Queensland, nationally in Melbourne and Sydney, and international.

David Molesky primarily paints elements like fire and water as well as figurative narrative compositions using walnut oil based mediums. He is also contributing writer to Juxtapoz Magazine, and recently presented a paper called The Future Trajectory of Figurative Painting and Sculpture at the

Representational Art Conference held in the Netherlands. His paintings have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and are part of the permanent collection of a number of public museums including the Long Beach Museum of Art and the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art, Philippines.

Kelly Mathews is an artist from Chicago, IL. She was born in small town Iowa where she pursued two things, art and Arabian horses. After receiving her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, Kelly spent the next 22 years professionally training and showing Arabian horses. Her students have won numerous top National honors in the United States and Canada. Retiring in 2014 from professional riding, Kelly has returned full time to her art. Primarily using encaustic and photography, her work deals with social and political issues.

Earning a Master of Arts from the University of Wisconsin in 1977, Jan Nelson also spent time living in New York City attending New York University, working on a series of drawings under the mentorship of fellow artist and friend Don Eddy.

Jan’s work has been exhibited at the Minnesota Museum of Art, Joslyn Museum of Art, Appleton Museum of Art, Knoxville Museum of Art and the New Hampshire Institute of Art as well as several invitational and juried shows internationally.

Astrid Ritmeester is a Dutch portrait painter whose background in theater costume design adds a theatrical touch to her bright, contemporary portraits. In her work she applies 17th Century Dutch and Flemish painting methods. Her paintings were exhibited in several Dutch museums and shows. Her work has been published several times in PoetsArtists.

Viktoria Savenkova’s artistic journey began in childhood in an art studio and continued art school including college and the Academy of Art (Minsk, Belarus). She has participated in local and international exhibitions and competitions (Italy, Spain, United States) and been published in various catalogs and publications (PoetsArtists, Leonardo Art Guide 2017,

2018). The finalist of The 4th Concurso ModPortrait, the 11th International Arte Laguna Prize, the 13th International ARC Salon Competition (The Art Renewal Center).

Mariana Duarte Santos was born in 1995 in Lisbon, Portugal.

She graduated from an arts specialized high school in 2013 majoring in ceramics and in 2016, she received a Drawing and Painting Degree from Ar.Co. She is mostly a figurative artist who has participated in various exhibitions in Portugal and abroad and is currently based in Lisbon working in printmaking and oil painting.

Albert Leon Sultan is a multidisciplinary artist and designer living and working in NYC. He is a graduate from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania and further studied drawing and painting at the Jerusalem Studio School. Albert’s bold compositional flair and color sensibility results from years of immersion in the decorative arts, furniture and interior design worlds. His consistently unusual sense of style makes him an emerging artist to watch.

Kerra Taylor’s narrative, figurative paintings have been exhibited nationally, internationally and featured in multiple publications. As per-course faculty, she currently teaches beginning and intermediate drawing courses at Missouri State University. On her own time, she really enjoys submitting work to shows, giving artist talks, and leading painting workshops.

Boris Vallejo attended the National School of Fine Arts in, Lima Peru before immigrating to the United States in 1964. He arrived in the US with a suitcase of clothes, some samples of his artwork, a violin, and $80.00 in his pocket. In the years since he has become a legend in the fantasy and science fiction art world. His paintings have been seen on hundreds of book covers, calendars, magazines, and movie posters.

David Versluis’s artwork are structures which reflect the integral process of combining industrial technology and

materials with visual design elements. Versluis’s larger-scale sculptures have recently been selected by Public Art Edina (Minnesota) and Sculpt Siouxland, Sioux City, Iowa. In 2017, he was a participating artist in the “Geometric Complexions’ exhibition, curated by Sergio Gomez, at the Zhou B Art Center, Chicago.

Conor Walton was born in Ireland in 1970 and trained at NCAD in Dublin and Charles Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy.

He has had nine Irish and six international solo exhibitions. He has won numerous prizes for his work including ModPortrait

2017, Portrait Ireland 2005, The Taylor Prize 1993 and was shortlisted for the BP Portrait Award 2005. He lives and works in Wicklow, Ireland.

Zack Zdrale (b. 1977). He attended the University of Wisconsin-

Madison, earning a Bachelor of Science-Art degree in 1999.

His training culminated in a Master’s degree in figurative painting from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

He graduated with honors and now teaches in the Graduate Fine Art Department.

Orbited Out space travelers, we follow the speeding sun Anon Lost, spinning out of orbit, I join a pair of used Jimmy Choo shoes and a beat-up iPad inside an air bubble burped out of earth’s convoluted, polluted environment.

Others flung off the edge of this mad chase bob around me.

More debris passes.

The Indian Burial Grounds.

A continent of plastic.

Red baseball hats and crates of bump stocks.

A half-built Wall.

Finally, an orange wig.

We hitch a ride from Captain Kirk, circling back in time to find us: the disenfranchised remains of a planet gone suicidal.

Pris Campbell