Anniversary Issue 20 by artmazemag

Anniversary

Ed iti o

ue Iss 20 20, 20

Featured image: Krzysztof Strzelecki Olympia ceramic 41.5 x 38 x 12.5 cm more on p. 53

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.

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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 to select works for each issue’s curated section of works. ArtMaze print editions offer its readers a continuous art experience which includes interviews with our guest curators and featured artists from recently published issues; 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. Artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, digital, film, performance, any mixed media etc. Artists or any art organisations on behalf of artists from all countries are welcome to submit.

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GENERAL ENQUIRIES: info@artmazemag.com ArtMaze Magazine is printed in London, UK, five times a year by Park Communications Ltd.

We accept works to be sent to us for consideration only via our annual competition-based calls for art for print publications. Please visit our website for more details: www.artmazemag.com/call-for-art/ or see p. 11 Each individual submitting work to ArtMaze Magazine opportunities is provided with a fair and equal chance. Incoming submissions are following a very specific and unique process via Submittable platform, therefore each competition-based call for art has a transparent policy.

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FRONT COVER: Sarah Bechter Untitled (festive blush) oil on canvas 70 x 55 cm more on p. 14-27 BACK COVER: Joani Tremblay Lemons for Catherine (detail) oil on linen 36 x 30 inches more on p. 110-111

Registered office address: ArtMaze Magazine Ltd. G06, Binnacle House 10 Cobblestone Square E1W 3AR, London United Kingdom ® ArtMaze Magazine is a registered trademark

interviewed

call for art

H ide and s e ek : I n c onve rs at ion w it h Sarah Be chte r . . . . . . . . . . . ...........................................................................14

Winter E d itio n 21 ....................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1

T he inte rplay of de n sit y and s of t ne s s, st i llne s s and mot ion, i n A k s M i s y u t a’s exube rant f ig u rat ive p ai nt i ng s ...............................28

Contents

104

curated selection of works

editorial selection of works

Ast rid Te r raz as ........................................................ ................42 Ju st i n Cloud . ...........................................................................44 Adam L i n n . . . . ..........................................................................46 Ryan Wi lde . . . . ..........................................................................47 A lys s a Mc Cle nagh an ..............................................................48 S h aw n Powell .........................................................................50 A n Yan . . . . . . . . . . . . ..........................................................................52 Kr z ys z tof St r zele ck i ...............................................................53 Claudio Coltor t i ...................................................... ................54 B ony Ram i re z ..........................................................................56 M arc L i b r iz z i .......................................................... ................58 Aaron Ju p i n . ...........................................................................60 F ranc e s c a Ca pone ....................................................................61 E lle n Pong . . . . . .......................................................... ................62 S eb a st ian Su pan z ...................................................................63 A lexandra S m it h .................................................... ................64 L e igh Bar b ie r .......................................................... ................65 E liot G re e nwald ..................................................... ................66 Judd S ch i ffm an .......................................................................68 Rane e He nde rs on .................................................... ................70 L achlan H inwood ....................................................................72 Caroline Z u rmely .................................................... ................73 A le jand ro J i méne z - Flore s ...................................... ................74 M ax Mc I n n is . .......................................................... ................76 S ore n Fe rgu s on ........................................................................77 A m i ra Brow n ........................................................... ................78 M ah s a Me rc i . ..........................................................................8 0 M at t Kleb e rg . .......................................................... ................8 2 L i an Z h ang . . ...........................................................................8 4 Adam E a ston . ..........................................................................8 6 Joh n D e n ny . . . . .......................................................... ................8 7 R i ley St rom . . ........................................................... ................8 8 Judy Koo . . . . . . . . . ..........................................................................89 Caet lyn n B oot h ...................................................... ................90 Pat rick McA lindon .................................................................92 H a s an i S ahlehe ....................................................... ................94 Jane M argaret te ......................................................................9 6 Rom ain S ar rot ........................................................ ................98 G u st av H am i lton ...................................................... ..............10 0 Au st i n H ar ri s .......................................................... ...............102

Jul ia Maiu ri ............................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Jean-Ph il ippe Do rdolo ........................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Devra Fox ................................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Jo ani Tremblay ...................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 10 Nazım Ünal Yil maz ................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 2 B lake O’B rien ......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 14 Mel issa Jo seph ....................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 16 Claire Wh itehu rst .................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 7 Amber Larks .......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 8 Allan Gandh i .......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 9 Aimée Parrott ........................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 0 Cassie Pena ............................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 1 Jenny Hata B lu menfield ......................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 2 Kristina Lewis ........................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 24 Heather Merckle .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 6 Marish a Lo zada ..................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 8 Amy Kim Keeler ...................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 9 S ally S copa ............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 0 Sung Hwa Kim ......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 2 Paige Perkin s ......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 4 Xu Daro ch a ............................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 6 S ebastian Mittl ....................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 37 Ray Hwang .............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 8 Carmen Ch aparro .................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 39 Maud Mad sen ......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 0

121

Featured image: Francesca Capone Sky Net I (installation view) netted LED and glow paracord 45 x 40 inches more on p. 61

from the editor Happy Anniversary to ArtMaze! How thrilling it is to be releasing the 20th edition! Pleased to say with confidence that over the years ArtMaze hasn’t just stayed a print publication but turned into something much bigger—an extensive supportive arts community for many contemporary makers worldwide! This year has surely been a challenge for many of us and we can’t thank you enough for your trust and for your interest in our opportunities and editions. This Anniversary issue open call has seen an overwhelming number of submissions and we have been working hard together with our guest curator, Zoe Fisher, to compile our largest to date curated (p. 40-103) and editorial (p. 104-140) selections, featuring sixty five extraordinary makers. These selections reflect a great variety of mediums and narratives, as well as most diverse visual languages which make this edition such an outstanding array of contemporary artworks. We thank Zoe for joining forces with us on sculpting this issue’s content and bringing her knowledge and expertise to further diversify the curated selection section. Our biggest thanks are extended to all of the artists who applied to this Anniversary call—we feel truly honoured to be looking at your work as well as receiving all the kind messages through your applications. This means a lot and makes us work ever harder to bring even more value to everyone’s experience with ArtMaze. Our interviewed section provides you with a deep insight into the work of our two previously published artists—Sarah Bechter, who is also the cover artist of this edition, and Aks Misyuta who has been featured more than twice in our issues before. Sarah shares her intricate approach to creating work and tells how each of her pieces feeds off each other: “The main source (among others) for working lies in my own work. This allows me to generate interests within and therefore tasks and reasons to continue working.” Aks’s psychoanalysis of her work reveals the sides to her personal character and how they reflect through the visual nature of the subjects in her paintings. She talks about a main subject prevailing in her pieces which is called a ‘Timewaster’ describing its rebellious nature and why it has become a focus of her thought process whilst making work. Our upcoming 21st Winter Edition, first issue of 2021, curated selection will be led by Cassie Beadle, curator, and Victoria Williams, director, at Cob Gallery, London. Cob Gallery has truly captured our eye with its distinct shows and the sheer emerging talent it has been representing and showcasing over the years. We are ecstatic to see our first edition of 2021 shaping together over the next couple of months and we are very grateful to Cassie and Victoria for taking up the guest curators’ role for this ever-challenging task. If you are interested in submitting your work and appearing on ArtMaze’s pages and online through our interviews as well as social media features, please feel free to check out our website for more information on our open calls (www.artmazemag.com) and hopefully we’ll be able to work together in the near future. Yours truly, Editor and Founder Maria Zemtsova

p.40-103 curated selection of works

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p.104-140 editorial selection of works

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Winter Edition 21: first issue of 2021

call for art DEADLINE: December 17th, 2020 Guest Curators: Cassie Beadle, curator at Cob Gallery and Victoria Williams, director of Cob Gallery, London

Submit your work for a chance to be published in print and digital issues, as well as online on our website and social media. ELIGIBILITY: The 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: artmazemag.com/shop HOW TO APPLY: please visit our website for more details and fill in the online form via the following link: artmazemag.com/call-for-art Please visit our website for more information: www.artmazemag.com or contact us at info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: Austin Harris Collar oil on panel in an artist made poplar frame 21 x 27 inches more on p. 102-103

inte

erviewed:

Sarah Bechter Aks Misyuta

www.sarahbechter.at

Hide and seek: In conversation with Sarah Bechter A leopard lies on a blood red terrazzo floor—half camouflaged, half on display. It rests midway up a flight of stairs that go nowhere, framed on either side by enveloping pink fleshy curtains. A turquoise hand rail leads the eye directly into the composition like an arrow. Austrian painter Sarah Bechter is fascinated by visual puns and the interplay and tension between things that are on view and hidden. Her paintings have a well-articulated visual language of symbols and motifs that explore and play with this dichotomy and contradiction in different permutations that evolve across works. In another painting the leopard has become a leopard skin rug, sprawled across the terrazzo, the spots of its hide dissolving into the mottled surface. In other works the terrazzo has evolved into slices of salami, and then in Untitled (getting chummy with interior), the red and white have become the stripes of a sleeve while the leopard has bleached to a pale white and begun to fade gently into the background pattern of the wallpaper. The evolving visual vocabulary in Sarah’s work corresponds to her deep interest in the act of painting and how this plays out in relation to surface materiality. Her compositions toy with the notion of what is inside vs what is outside, and with looking and being seen. Her preoccupation with the permeability of surfaces and boundaries finds material expression through her process of applying and erasing layers of paint, and recently, experimenting with soft painted sculptural forms that extend outside of the picture frame. These painterly actions and motifs—skin and curtains in her more recent work, and the shimmering surface of a swimming pool in earlier works (and a logical precursor to terrazzo)—erode the distinction between the painting as an object and a self-referential subject. Sarah explains, “in some of my works the actual motive is the painting showing itself: The motive is the painting showing that its existence is about showing (or hiding) something.” While the pandemic has waylaid some of Sarah’s plans, she has remained busy and channelled the uncertainty of this year into constructive projects. We spoke with her about life in Austria, finding the right balance between fussy and loose brushstrokes and the perennial symbols that feature in her work.

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Untitled (Hi!) oil on canvas 45 x 30 cm, dimensions varying

photo by Sophia Mairer

AMM: Hi Sarah! To start us off please tell us a little about yourself and how you grew up. Did this in any way influence your decision to become an artist? SB: I am from the very west of Austria (Vorarlberg) and consider myself lucky to have had a rather boring and unspectacular childhood. I grew up in a little village in the countryside and from the back of my parents’ house our garden would just segue into a huge meadow. There was lots of space and one’s view could go really far. Besides we didn’t have a garden fence or anything to mark our property or stop us from just running into the meadow. I sometimes wonder whether I would be different, if I had not had this freedom. Despite the rural setting, the region has a long and rich tradition in crafts and is also well-known for its innovative architecture. There is a general appreciation for design and art, even from people who are very removed from a contemporary discourse. I am the second of three children and my parents were kind of busy. I always had the feeling that they trusted in what I was doing and they did not make a big deal out of anything I did (neither in a positive nor in a negative way). I think this gave me self-responsibility and trust. The fact that I wasn’t checked on constantly left me with a very basic feeling of consciousness in my activities and myself. I guess this taught me something very useful for my job as an artist: doing my thing regardless of the attention I get and without being too dependent on praise (or at least most of the time, ha ha). I think it’s a good tool for making art. I’ve always loved drawing, painting and creating something in general. And after attending a high school with a focus on art I decided to study painting. I was really lucky that my parents always supported this decision. Again, they did not worry about me or how I would make a living out of it (…), I guess they—usually—just thought I would figure it out. My mother was particularly happy, as she always wanted to study art herself but was not able to do so. Nevertheless she was painting at home and I sometimes joined her. I’ve always been fascinated by the colours and painting devices and found them very beautiful. Interestingly, my great grandmother studied at my university (University of Applied Arts Vienna) back in the 30s. She was into fabric design and sometimes I have fun thinking about this when painting curtains or patterns. AMM: How has your art changed and evolved over the years? SB: I think my work changed a lot in the past years, but in a way that feels totally natural to me. Rather than big steps I move

forward slowly. One work follows another and reacts somehow to previous ones. Changes happen over many paintings. I sometimes know a certain point I want to achieve, but I can’t just jump there. I need to approach it slowly through a couple of paintings in between. A bit like beating around the bush for some time until you get to the point. But then the beating around would be the paintings and the bush has to be redefined as soon as you reach it. Or shifted slightly to generate new painting questions and keep things interesting. Nevertheless, there are aspects which have always played some kind of role in my works, such as some sort of narration or fiction, considering viewers and hinting at things, humour, an interest in conditions of art production and an odd way of dealing with space and distance or looking at ordinary stuff and situations in an abstract way. AMM: Who or what have been some of the important mentors, learnings or experiences that have shaped you and your work? SB: I guess there is no one in particular or vice versa many people. I think my art teacher in high school was important with his deep interest and enthusiasm for art. My mother too, who has a very curious mind and is always enthusiastic about learning something new. This is something I admire in general—people who have the capacity for enthusiasm for something and devote themselves to it. Thanks to our constant exchange and discourse many of my friends, who are artists too, also shaped my work. And university of course. I am very lucky to be able to share and verify thoughts, doubts, problems, working struggles but also achievements with people who are on the same page. AMM: In your paintings over the years there’s been an evolution of motifs from swimming pools to rugs and animal skins to curtains. Each of these visual metaphors is a kind of divide or skin. Can you tell us more about these and how they are connected, blur and evolve into each other? SB: Discovering this similarity is already a good thought. It has to do with distance I guess. I like to use objects or space in a way which invites viewers in while simultaneously keeping them at a distance (whatever that means exactly). Moreover these symbolically charged objects are all ambivalent and somehow very much connected to the ambivalences I come across in producing art. They are able to tease the illusion of several levels or space in painting (such as the bottom of a pool or the floor under a rug). I come up with these metaphors from a content-related interest and then mostly develop them formally. One thing reminds me of another and then I work with this association, e.g. a leopard skin developing from an

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20, Interviewed: Sarah Bechter

exaggerated reflexion on the water in a pool which later turns into terrazzo floor tiles, then salami etc. AMM: Your visual language includes sensual and mysterious symbols like cats, curtains and gloves. Have you always been interested in symbolism and using visual metaphor in your work? Please tell us about developing this symbolic language. SB: I just really like to show something which could mean something else or more, rather than just representing itself. I love to hint at things through creating a certain ambience. As mentioned above, I develop my vocabulary formally but it is rooted in a subject interest. The leopard (and later cat) developed logically from a terrazzo floor. This pretentious object, something like a trophy, lies (or rather flies) on a similarly patterned floor. It blurs and is camouflaged in the interior. Showing off and hiding at the same time. Just as a curtain always implies both revealing or concealing. In some of my works the actual motive is the painting showing itself. The motive is the painting showing that its existence is about showing (or hiding) something. This has much to do with the painting being active and a kind of subject. Gloves are a second skin for hands and become active and three-dimensional as a part of the body. A curtain becomes more three dimensional and a kind of a body when revealed. Gloves bear a potential for activity… AMM: Let’s talk about hands and eyes—what do these represent in your recent work? SB: Producing art (and especially painting) is largely about a subjective or a supposedly subjective moment. I am interested in this aspect, where to find it and to work with it. Or to simulate such a thing—treating paintings like subjects, giving them eyes and hands isn’t so far to seek. They are active and react to my touch (or the touch of the brush) and I have to react on them and their moods and needs. The eyes are catching the look of a viewer just in the moment one looks at the painting. They make the act of looking at them a subject of discussion by looking back. Hands have the capability of action, as well as a self-reference. They are the hands of the painting, the motive and the hands of the painter. AMM: In a few recent works you’ve moved beyond a stretched canvas and onto soft sculptural forms. Is this an entirely new direction for you? What possibilities does this experimentation bring to your painting? SB: It’s paintings expanding their body to space. Some works adapt to the space and their hanging in varying ways. Depending on the installation works can claim a whole wall as a part of their body, as is the case for Untitled (Hi!). Going three-dimensional is quite new to me, even though I have

“...Starting a new painting I react on some aspect of the previous one(s): Searching for an answer for some kind of question which occurred, reworking some weakness, exaggerating some moment or making fun of it, quoting or referencing something etc. The main source (among others) for working lies in my own work. This allows me to generate interests within and therefore tasks and reasons to continue working. As an effect the paintings communicate among themselves: a confusing, complicated debate about colour, temperature, surface, brushstroke, gesture, composition, format—so their existence is painting...” - Sarah Bechter

sometimes built benches or a stand in past exhibitions. But these elements were rather meant as a display in support of the paintings. But this is a different approach which has developed. It used to be quite challenging for me to work through something so seemingly out of context, but I’ve learned to accept and try to follow this process and treat these works as a kind of excursion—which you just do for the sake of it or to get some refreshment and change of perspective. AMM: What ideas and concepts are you currently exploring in your work? SB: Subject(ive), object(ive) and fiction in my work. First person and Souffleuses (prompt). Ambience, colour, temperature. Gesture and working traces. Power and decisiveness in lightness and fragility (formal). Festivity in lightness and fragility. Painting a figure in my preferably least figurative way. Thinking of a figure in possibly the most disembodied way. Thinking of a figure as architecture, a device. Thinking of a figure as a body made out of paint and colour. Fortunately, lots to do..! AMM: Give us a peek inside your studio: What’s your process of working? Do you start with sketches and colour tests, planning everything out, or just dive in and allow paintings to evolve organically? SB: I don’t do sketches or plan stuff out. I’ve got a little notebook and many loose sheets for writing down ideas or objects and situations I am interested in. This has very little to do with a nice sketch book and is just some descriptive words to remember my thoughts. At the same time, I read a lot and I collect words and phrases which I like or which are important to me. This is more about the aesthetics of the words, the images they create, the associations they open up—words more in the sense of material and material properties than a means for creating a clear sentence. A bit like in my paintings, which are less concerned with particular content or clear message, and more about the language, the tone of the voice, the atmosphere, the way this thing is talked (painted) about. As mentioned before my paintings are formally and content-wise connected to each other. So, starting a new painting I react on some aspect of the previous one(s): Searching for an answer for some kind of question which occurred, reworking some weakness, exaggerating some moment or making fun of it, quoting or referencing something etc. The main source (among others) for working lies in my own work. This allows me to generate interests within and therefore tasks and reasons to continue working. As an effect the paintings communicate among themselves: a confusing, complicated debate about colour, temperature, surface, brushstroke, gesture, composition, format—so their existence is painting. I often think, I would be better off

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20, Interviewed: Sarah Bechter

with sketches, as I always end up cleaning and overworking lots of stuff and working traces. That’s why the act of painting is literally very much connected to cleaning and reducing for me. Simultaneously I know that this is the fun part about it, just starting and trying to figure things out on the canvas. Trying to find a solution on the canvas. AMM: Do you have any daily habits or rituals that feed you creatively? SB: Not really. I really like to think of my work as an ordinary job, so I try to work against some romanticised artist fantasy. This also helps to take stuff seriously and free it from an activity which you just follow when you feel like it. It helps to accept the days when you really don’t want to paint or occupy yourself with your work. It is a tricky thing if you don’t feel like doing the thing you like most—while always knowing that this is a total luxury—especially if you have another job too. Seeing it as a job—with all the joy and toil this includes—helps. I’ve got quite a strict schedule of being in the studio from morning till evening— working in different ways. I have to create my own tasks and complete them as well. I am employer and employee in one and like to prevent myself from daily internal discussions about working hours with a clear schedule. The only daily habit is my commute to the studio. For me it is essential that my private and working space are separated. I enjoy having my studio a bit further and I mostly go there by bike. On my way I already think about how to start, what to do and how to deal with the painting I am working on. It is a casual way to get into the day. Besides this I read a lot, check out exhibitions regularly and try to stay active in contemporary discourse. This and discussions and exchange about painting and art in general, as well as studio visits are very important and stimulating. AMM: You play with negative space and perspective to interesting effect. Please tell us more about this aspect of your compositions. SB: As mentioned previously, this has to do with pulling in while keeping out, to creating a certain distance. I like to think about objects and space in an abstract way. Thinking about their form and caring very much about their surfaces they often become independent. I think there is a certain humour in my works which is generated through an odd treatment of line and surface—flirting frivolously with perspective and space. AMM: In what ways does your art relate to your own emotional or psychological state of being? SB: I’ve been occupying myself quite a lot with this and the old refrain of painting being very subjective. This relates to my interest in the subject/object topic. It’s a

“It’s a ubiquitous question; to what extent you exhibit yourself, when exhibiting works. I like to work with this and reflect on the notion of fiction. Being a painter I have the possibility to simulate a direct connection to my work and my emotional state with certain use of materials. Nevertheless, my paintings are naturally connected to my psychological state, but not necessarily in terms of some obvious narrative. Often my most personal works turn out to be the most powerful—for outsiders too. I think this has got to do with some kind of honesty and really meaning something. It’s something I learned in painting—it’s obvious if somebody really means it, no matter whether you understand it exactly.” - Sarah Bechter

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20, Interviewed: Sarah Bechter

ubiquitous question; to what extent you exhibit yourself, when exhibiting works. I like to work with this and reflect on the notion of fiction. Being a painter I have the possibility to simulate a direct connection to my work and my emotional state with certain use of materials. Nevertheless, my paintings are naturally connected to my psychological state, but not necessarily in terms of some obvious narrative. Often my most personal works turn out to be the most powerful—for outsiders too. I think this has got to do with some kind of honesty and really meaning something. It’s something I learned in painting—it’s obvious if somebody really means it, no matter whether you understand it exactly. AMM: Surveying your work over the past few years two colour palettes stand out: blue and pink. While the gendered connotations of these shades don’t seem to have a direct bearing on the subject matter, it would be interesting to learn more about your approach to colour in your work. SB: It’s funny that you start your question with a gender related thought. Being an artist, you always come across this theme— when your work gets judged in some genderconnected categories or people imagine your gender as obvious in your work. I’m not working with this directly but I guess it plays a role, as it is a subject I’m dealing with and reflecting on in everyday life on a daily base. Furthermore, it is really important to me. In older works I’ve been eager to have some kind of sober, austere atmosphere. Cold, chalky colours seemed appropriate for the mood I wanted to create. In my recent works I move away from this and allow myself to celebrate colours with more subtlety. I used to be afraid of being too “decorative” or “sensual” in my painting—adjectives with a feminine connotation. I am well aware of the supposed difference between me and fellow male colleagues painting decorative patterns. Yet I can’t deny my love of painting them sometimes and being “pretty” in a painterly manner. So, I try to work with this and make it my own and overcome these stereotypes in a productive manner. Colour is really important and a very physical, perceptible and sensual thing. I use it to give a general impression or hint. It has and creates a certain temperature, light, time. There are colours which seem to have an urgency, while others are more silent. Different colours have different weights and saturations etc. AMM: The hand and arm motifs draw attention to the gestural quality of the brushstrokes and pigment in your paintings. What is your relationship with surface and materiality of painting? SB: I really like to have lots of layers but I am keen on thin surfaces. I sometimes use pigments in a transparent grounding, to save one layer of paint but still have a

Featured image (p.18):

Featured image (p.21):

Untitled (baroque lassitude) oil on canvas 170 x 150 cm

PPP (post presentation painting) oil on canvas 45 x 30 cm

Untitled (the unloved painting) oil on canvas 170 x 150 cm photography: Galerie Thoman/Kunstdokumentation.com

colour underneath. Similarly when I just use transparent grounding—I already count the colour of the canvas as a first layer. I think one of the most pleasant and exciting things about painting is to combine layers of different colours and get a result which is not always predictable. It feels a bit like creating and solving a puzzle at the same time. So, it is very much about trying to bring these two formal preferences together: many layers but thin colour surfaces. It’s a lot about applying colour and then wiping loads away again, rubbing the colour into the canvas or the layer underneath. Like merging the different layers together, trying to make them one homogenous layer while still showing the accumulation of layers. I also try to treat things differently in a painterly manner—some parts are worked out rather precisely, while others are painted more roughly or loosely. I come across different painting problems and try to work with them, such as how to paint a big surface, where nothing seems to happen, in an interesting way etc. In my recent works I have been thinking quite a lot about gesture and gestural painting and I want to be precise when working with this. It is a very charged topic. I want my gesture to be rather festive as opposed to aggressive; nonchalant instead of forced and loud. AMM: What are the hardest things for you to get ‘right’ in your art? SB: Currently, my challenge is keeping a formal balance between power and decisiveness and lightness and fragility in painting. I often work on parts for a long time till I am satisfied and it’s a very fine line not to end up in some forced and uptight space. Concerning working process, it is doubts and a healthy way to cope with them. On one hand I have to fight them to be able to continue working, while at the same time I have to cultivate them, knowing they are a precious and important aspect of developing my work and thoughts. AMM: Has the pandemic had an effect on your wellbeing? Have the unprecedented experiences of this year influenced your art at all? SB: Sure! Being your own employer is sometimes tough and can lead to some dramatic questions about whether what I’m doing actually makes sense. In my work I don’t have a job in a conventional sense, but any project I look forward to and work on is a kind of job. There are very few each year but they are of great relevance for my motivation and drive. So, when my residency and my solo show got postponed to some indefinite future date, I found myself confronted with this question in a new

dimension. I had a very tough time finding a reason to paint so I tricked myself and worked on a portfolio, website and all the stuff I always postpone. I felt very good and productive about getting these unpopular tasks done and it helped me to get back into painting quite fast. I think that being an artist one is already kind of used to being thrown back on one’s own devices. The capacity to be able to be self-sufficient is an advantage in any situation of crisis. AMM: You were supposed to go on a residency in New York this year. What were you looking forward to from that experience? SB: Luckily the residency programme is flexible so I’m still supposed to go there for a month as soon as it’s possible again. I was engaging with Florine Stettheimer’s work and her social life and the salons she held in the 20s in NY. I’m fascinated by her and her network. I am going to rent a flat with a studio and work on my paintings for the time of the residency. Simultaneously I will check out exhibitions and meet people. At the end of my residency I will host a salon and show my works in a studio exhibition. It’s a conceptual work juxtaposing the physical paintings to the network or social context. AMM: What is the Austrian contemporary art scene like? Do you feel at home in it? SB: Yes, I do feel at home. Vienna has quite an active art scene, maybe because of the two art universities. I consider myself very lucky to be surrounded by a great and active art scene with so many off spaces. Many of my closest friends are artists and many of them painters too. It is such a luxury to be able to exchange thoughts, problems, input and so on with people who understand. Still, Vienna is not very big so every now and then it gets a little cosy and I feel like getting some air—for example in NY. AMM: Despite all the global uncertainty, do you have any new projects coming up? What’s next for you? SB: I hope I’ll be able to go to NY this summer. I have an institutional duo show coming up in March 2021 and I am currently thinking of another duo show with a sculptor friend who is working with glass, but we are still thinking of a space and setting. Fingers crossed it can happen!

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20, Interviewed: Sarah Bechter

Sarah Bechter Untitled (bundle of nerves) oil on leather 100 x 20 x 8 cm

Sarah Bechter Untitled oil on canvas, broomstick dimensions varying

photography: Galerie Thoman/Kunstdokumentation.com

Sarah Bechter Untitled (looking at your enchanting eyes, looking into my eyes) oil on canvas, leather 77 x 44 cm

Sarah Bechter Untitled (Hi!) oil on canvas 45 x 30 cm, dimensions varying

Sarah Bechter Viscous posture (still life with forget-me-not) oil on canvas 150 x 100 cm

www.aksmisyuta.com

The interplay of density and softness, stillness and motion, in Aks Misyuta’s exuberant figurative paintings Painter Aks Misyuta has forged a distinctive practice of composing figurative still lifes made up of inflated figures endowed with exaggerated physical presence. Her pathway towards her current artistic work lay outside the conventional trajectory set out by art school and training. Although Aks studied for a journalism degree, visual expression has long held precedence for her. Her illustrative work earned her a commission by a newspaper when she was in her early teens, and while pursuing a journalistic career she regularly contributed drawings alongside written articles. Unsatisfied, however, with her creative endeavours being relegated to the sidelines, Aks left her newspaper job to put her energy into her drawing. She worked as a fashion illustrator before ultimately deciding to focus on her personal practice. Since this life-altering decision, her work has evolved from drawing to painting. Her images, which retain the illustrative elements of her early artistic pursuits, are centred around exuberant, large-limbed anthropomorphic figures in various attitudes of reclining, running, leaping, dancing, bathing, bending and stretching. Using a high-contrast palette of muted pastel hues with dense greys and blacks, Aks sculpts forms that are almost statuesque in their starkly shadowed planes and highlighted contours, yet which have all the kinetic dynamism of bodies in motion. There is a solidity to her figures, in the heaviness of their hands and feet, the firmness of their stances and in how they take up space in the composition, but they simultaneously carry a distinct sense of poise and lightness in the fluidity of their movements, their purposeful grace. Ambiguity of identity is another important aspect of Aks’ work. Her figures’ lack of distinguishing features means they can be read as anonymous; they are, in Aks’ words, “no-one and everyone”, both painter and viewer, and at the same time neither. Aks obliquely complicates the anonymity of her figures by designating a central character or concept around which her work revolves—an allegorical figure she refers to as “Timewaster”. Timewaster defies the capitalist imperative to do, to produce, to monetise on time; Timewaster values idleness as a legitimate way of spending time, as a worthy pursuit in itself. Aks’ Timewaster is present in various ways in all her figures, who, without becoming homogenous, defiantly and persistently embody the Timewaster’s ethos. In this, Aks’ works drift continually between ambiguity and specificity, the focus constantly shifting, identities never allowed to settle, features never quite arranging themselves into particularity but always reticent, indistinct. Currently, Aks is continuing to cultivate her instinctive approach to creating from her home studio in Istanbul, in the company of her one-eyed cat and attended by her love of reading, long walks and picture-taking.

interview by Rebecca Irwin

Featured image: Aks Misyuta Two of you acrylic on canvas 110 x 90 cm

AMM: Hello, Aks! To start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey towards becoming an artist? AM: Hello! Thank you for having me. Right now I’m sitting in my tiny studio in Istanbul answering questions on my art, although I hail from a provincial Russian city (Bryansk) and have never attended any art courses! Fifteen years ago, I was working at very boring jobs in small local newspapers, as I studied Journalism at university. I’ve always been drawing and my first ever job was a series of illustrations for a newspaper when I was thirteen. My parents have always cherished my creativity as they loved art themselves. However, they wished I’d go into something “more serious” as a profession. I guess a lot of post-Soviet people used to romanticise journalism, believing it could help change the world for the better. Journalistic work was very alien to my nature, even though I tried my best. Yes, back then I accompanied some writings with illustrations I made, but this compromise didn’t help with my ever-growing feeling of living someone else’s life. In 2007 I created a blog and started posting my daily drawings— in a while I started receiving commissions. Then, as happens with many people, one day I woke up with a firm decision to quit my job and to drastically change the path of my life. This decision—which scared my parents— led to a decade-long career as a fashion illustrator. I liked it; it helped me to become more thick-skinned. But painting has always been an outlet for my emotions, being a very intimate part of my life. I started sharing personal works and gained some visibility. Today, I focus on my painting practice. So technically, I am a professional journalist turned fashion illustrator, turned painter. AMM: Your style is very distinctive—how did you begin making these kinds of images? AM: Looking at my commercial works, I can see how drastically they differ from my paintings. I guess it was a natural response of my imagination during a busy time to keep me sane by expressing something more personal, with the help of a medium that felt more relaxed compared to drawing. It helped me to avoid burnout. My style has been changing as I myself have been changing. With time, I see works becoming less detailed, and that reflects the process of growing and how what seems to be important might lose its relevance. A few years ago my approach was more illustrative, since it was an attempt to depict certain thoughts. Now, I allow myself to paint whatever my hands want without thinking— it’s a flow. I have no concept beforehand, I just spill whatever I feel onto canvas, so all the things happening around me and affecting me find their way out from the labyrinths of my head. AMM: There is something almost statuesque about the figures in your work, in both the

“Perhaps my confident hand paints an insecure part of my personality. Those big, statuesque feet strive to stand firmly, while big hands would love to have more control... A tradition of using hyperbola and synecdoche in art is widespread ... When a body part is exaggerated it stresses its quality or points out a process that is associated with this particular member. I assume my approach might be an echo of that logic. My characters are vulnerable, and it shows in the balloonish, inflatable nature I bestow on them. I like this ambiguity of plumpness; it’s hard to tell whether a thing is lightweight or heavy.” - Aks Misyuta shading and in the solidity of their bodies, yet there is also a distinct softness to them. How do you think about this relation of power and vulnerability? AM: In my work I tend to depict characters— those formally anthropomorphic figures— as still lifes. I was thinking the other day about the hyperbolised proportions in my

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20, Interviewed: Aks Misyuta

photo by Nikita Evsuk

work, and the thought process was akin to psychoanalysis, sending me into the realm of unspoken. Perhaps my confident hand paints an insecure part of my personality. Those big, statuesque feet strive to stand firmly, while big hands would love to have more control. A tradition of using hyperbola and synecdoche in art is widespread (in ancient and folk art)—the emphasised ears of Hathor as a symbol of compassion, genitalia as a symbol of fertility, etc. When a body part is exaggerated it stresses its quality or points out a process that is associated with this particular member. I assume my approach might be an echo of that logic. My characters are vulnerable, and it shows in the balloonish, inflatable nature I bestow on them. I like this ambiguity of plumpness; it’s hard to tell whether a thing is lightweight or heavy. AMM: We notice a very stark use of high-contrast shadows and contouring in your work. Can you tell us about your approach to light and darkness? AM: The contrast shading I use in my work is not only an artistic tool I love for its ability to give depth. It fully conveys the dual nature of the works. Although they are quite cartoonish, they always have eschatalogical undertones. The latter could be considered as something dark, but the ironical aspect of subjects brings the works into another plane; they are about celebrating a moment. We describe the reality we know by using oppositions. Light and darkness, both literally and metaphorically, are what define the world we navigate. AMM: What materials are integral to your work, and what is it about these that is important to your process? AM: I used to use oils and I’ve also been experimenting with engraving. But nothing gives me as much satisfaction as acrylics on canvas. No fancy tools or techniques involved. I love the surface to be smooth— I don’t like texture in my work. Black paint is essential for me. For me, it’s easy to see compositions in a dark background. Sometimes people mistakenly think that I am depressive, but black for me has always been a symbol of cosmos, of great emptiness, so it has nothing to do with gloom. It is a symbol of a great beginning. AMM: There seems to be an ambiguity of identity when it comes to distinguishing between the figures in your work—they have no clear discerning features. Where do your subjects come from? Do you think of them as having different personalities? AM: Every painting is a form of self-portrait, my own sentiments depicted. My work is not about personalities, it is about the emotions and feelings we are all prone to,

“I was raised in a culture where “the clock is ticking” metaphor was widely used, I mean it always puts you under pressure. Unfortunately, society tells us not about carpe diem (which is an amazing motto), it is more about reminding that you owe something to it (to society). Especially it feels acute for women. Very often endeavors which go beyond social expectations, family hopes etc are depreciated. So my character is a symbol of a quiet rebel, Timewaster celebrates the act of timewasting.We all might be Timewasters, especially in the eyes of strangers.” - Aks Misyuta no matter who we are in society. My artistic universe spins around one character named Timewaster. It appears in many forms and always symbolises me, you and other people. No one and everyone. That lack of personal features helps to shift the focal point in the perception of a painting, so it’s more “why?” than any other question.

AMM: How did the idea of ‘Timewaster’ evolve? And why did this symbolic character become so central to your practice? AM: I was raised in a culture where “the clock is ticking” metaphor was widely used, I mean it always puts you under pressure. Unfortunately, society tells us not about carpe diem (which is an amazing motto), it is more about reminding that you owe something to it (to society). Especially it feels acute for women. Very often endeavors which go beyond social expectations, family hopes etc are depreciated. So my character is a symbol of a quiet rebel, Timewaster celebrates the act of time-wasting. We all might be Timewasters, especially in the eyes of strangers. AMM: What kinds of emotions do you hope viewers will project when encountering your work? Do you intend certain moods? AM: Feeling is an engine in perceiving art, in my opinion. I don’t believe that the initial creative impulse could be fully explained in statements or comments. What could be shown couldn’t be said. So if a viewer feels something, it’s great, if they remain unmoved, it’s normal. Sometimes the title of a work gives viewers a hint, a starting point. But at the same time it could be absolutely misleading. As I see it, any attempt to rationalise a work of art with verbal explanations is a sort of second translation, which might cut out some meaningful details. The first translation is what the artists themselves do when incarnating a vague idea into a tangible something. I wouldn’t like to rob viewers by dictating the way they should read my work, as I am myself skeptical when someone forces me to feel what I don’t feel. What I love about art, when it is sincere, is that it’s liberating for both artist and viewer. Since I paint for myself in the first place, I find the idea of an artwork as an open form very sympathetic. AMM: We love the awkward grace and poise of your figures. What draws you to this kind of physicality? AM: I think of them as of sets of objects that are gathered by storm, slightly chaotic yet complete. They are caught in the act—they are not posing. AMM: There is a very exuberant kinetic quality to your images. How does your work deal with movement? AM: I describe them as freeze-frames from a movie that disappeared.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20, Interviewed: Aks Misyuta

Featured image (p.32):

Featured image (p.34-35):

Pink sun acrylic on canvas 60 x 80 cm

Before the storm acrylic on canvas 45 x 54 cm

AMM: Are there any particular themes that you keep coming back to in your work? AM: Yes, I guess there’s a range of themes that circulate in my works. Solitude, procrastination, anticipation, love, the end of the world. They are always entwined. AMM: What is your process like when it comes to creating a composition? Do you have an image in your head before you begin? AM: It starts with a feeling, with an urge to release something from my head. It is always an impulse. I do not do any preliminary work; I do not sketch. I begin by painting a canvas in black (or sometimes red or blue) and trace the image I see there with a brush. I need to do it quickly. At this point I always feel slightly anxious, but it’s a vaguely erotic feeling too. AMM: Where do you seek inspiration for your art? Are you influenced by disciplines beyond your own, for example film or literature? AM: In order to create I need to feel something. I work when I’m happy, when I’m sad, when I’m scared. So basically emotions are my fuel. I’d say literature is a great source of inspiration since it tells us about human nature and irritates our feelings. I love reading. But mundane life is also good for inspiration. Speaking about art, visiting museums is hugely inspiring. Time freezes when I look narrowly at paintings. Even if they don’t speak to me, I love seeing a human being in all the strokes. The amount of amazing things mankind has managed to create in spite of everything is fascinating in itself. Creative genius is inspiring. Once, in a museum, I dared to gently touch an ancient artefact made of stone. It felt like the hand of the person who’d created it touched me back. I’ve always loved archaeological museums and ancient things, as well as all the things cosmos-related. I think these fields of my interests give me a lot of energy. Stargazing is uplifting. Seeing myriads of stars, feeling that we all are equal parts of a huge sophisticated system we have no idea about – that gives me confidence.

comfortable working in my little chamber, as everything I need is at arm’s length. I don’t like speaking while working, and everyone who has seen me work knows that it looks like a machine with a brush. My main concern is daily light, but proper lamps solve that problem. AMM: How do you spend your time when you’re not working directly on your artistic practice? AM: For me it’s hard to find a balance. Painting is an obsession. The majority of my time belongs to it. I often blame myself for being unable to focus on other things – it’s a never-ending fight. But when equilibrium is found I am more than happy. Reading is what I love. I also have a passion for fragrances; it’s my hobby. Long walks bring me joy, and I take hundreds of pictures, especially of cats. I’m not a huge fan of crowded places, I prefer spending my time with my family and laughing to tears with my loved ones. AMM: Are you working towards anything exciting just now? AM: I started working on bigger scale paintings for an upcoming show. Considering the current situation, it would be too presumptuous of me to say where and when, since plans have never looked as ephemeral as they look today!

AMM: What is your studio setup like? AM: I left the studio I used to share with friends when lockdown started. For the moment I’m working in the intimate atmosphere of my home studio. It’s a tiny space and it doesn’t allow me to share with anyone bigger than a cat. My one-eyed cat Miakish takes advantage of being petite and always watches me from the desk. It’s rather

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20, Interviewed: Aks Misyuta

Aks Misyuta Breaking news acrylic on canvas

Aks Misyuta Ultimate autumn day acrylic on canvas 80 x 70 cm

Aks Misyuta Betelgeuse bursts acrylic on canvas 100 x 90 cm

Aks Misyuta They are gone acrylic on canvas 50 x 60 cm

curated selection of works by Zoe Fisher, founder and curator at @zoefisherprojects and co-owner and director of Fisher Parrish Gallery, NYC

Featured image: Gustav Hamilton For New Salem Sue glazed ceramic 17 ¼ × 13 × 13 inches more on p. 100-101

A s t r i d

Te r r a z a s

www.astridterrazas.com

Image: Gestating in a Chasm stoneware and resin 14.5 x 10 x 10 inches

Astrid Terrazas lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens. Her multidisciplinary work acts as a blueprint for imagined worlds; her narratives reflect lived experiences, social engagements, and fleeting memory. They are speculative places that push personal and communal trauma towards tangible healing. Terrazas uses recurring motifs as artifacts of protection, meant to cast a safety spell upon anyone who encounters them. The work takes the form of painting, illustrated ceramic vessels, and mixed media sculpture.

Image: the thorn will lick its own wounds! These voices hurt! acrylic on canvas 50 x 59 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

J u s t i n

C l o u d

www.justincloud.net

Image: Lunette steel 32h x 36w x 4d inches

Justin Cloud (b. 1987 Houston, TX) is a visual artist from a family of farmers, mechanics, and engineers. Having worked as an automotive technician himself, his work often references machinery and automation and its relation with nature. He moved from Wyoming to NYC, receiving his MFA from CUNY Hunter College in 2018. During the 2020 outbreak of Covid-19, while sheltering at his home in Brooklyn, Cloud discovered his current artistic focus through cultivating a garden, growing vegetables and plants, and giving away food to his local community. The garden became a means for him to handle the realities of the current moment while also serving as a laboratory for introspection, criticality, and community activism. His work has been shown nationally and has been included in recent exhibitions with ltd los angeles, Fredric Snitzer Gallery, and Thierry Goldberg. He has been featured in Brooklyn Rail, ARTnews, Daily Lazy and several other publications. Justin currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. My work represents the projection of self as it relates to nature and technology. I want people to be able to identify some part of who they are with the various characters in my work. It’s less about narrative and more about what drives one to empathize with the world around one’s self. I’m interested in the specific limbic spark that triggers you to identify with a plant, animal, or machine.

Image: Bisou steel, suede, ornamental grass 17h x 12w x 24d inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

A d a m

L i n n

www.adamlinn.net

My work relates my own queerness to the abjective nature of anthropomorphism. I depict a feline-humanoid character performing quotidian behaviors that mimic reality. This character grapples with themes of desire, seduction, isolation and technology as a way to highlight the specific curiosities that surround existence in a queer body. The cat figure embraces a harmonious coexistence of the feminine and the masculine by blurring the distinctions between genders. The sinuous, exaggerated and coquettish nature of the cat highlights queer signifiers of wardrobe, styling, and mannerisms. My work serves as a tool to eradicate my own internalized homophobia through the glamorous portrayal of unabashed faggotry. In creating a character of my own design, I am able to question elements of contemporary gay culture that feel rooted in internalized homophobia. Additionally, the character serves as an avatar through which to investigate nuances of an identity largely formed by video games and the internet. In blending languages of cartooning and realism, I render a space floating somewhere in between the real and the imaginary. This space references the digital realm, the origin of my fascinations with the perverse world of anthropomorphic cartoons. Drawing allows me to render these themes softly in layers, creating textures that act as both a filter and a window. Through exaggerating the bodily nature of space and material, I seduce the viewer into accepting an alternative look at the spaces we inhabit, the emotions we feel and the objects we love. Adam Linn (b. 1995 Pittsburgh, PA) is an artist based in Pittsburgh, working in drawing and print media. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 with a BFA in Printmaking. Following graduation, Adam has participated in residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and the Brew House Distillery.

Image: Wet Daydreams graphite on paper 10 x 12 inches

R y a n

W i l d e

www.ryanwilde.com

Ryan Wilde is an artist living and working in Queens, NY. Her work stems from a career as a milliner in New York City. After years of designing for fashion houses and institutions, such as the Metropolitan Opera, Wilde expanded on her practice by repurposing the millinery process to create objects that encourage discussions on gender performance. Her work references tropes of femininity and masquerade in relation to fetish and objectification. Wilde’s work has been exhibited at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Marinaro Gallery, and Halsey McKay Gallery. Wilde is a sculptor and painter who explores the visual stratagems used by women to navigate patriarchal systems. Building on her previous career as a hat designer, Wilde repurposes her technical skills to invite public dialogues on the theatricality of gender and the development of the female self. Constructed with materials and colors often associated with feminine ideals, her work manifests the uncanny extreme that is identified with the objectification of women and the fetishization of their clothing in our culture. By highlighting the semiotic mechanism of the cultural expression, Wilde’s work creates a platform to reconsider the purpose of the conventional system of signification.

Image: Kinkster felt, silicone, synthetic hair 24 x 14 x 13 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

A l y s s a

M c C l e n a g h a n

www.alyssamcclenaghan.com

Image: Paying Bills Sometimes Lent Her the Illusion of Order foam insulation, joint compound, dura-bond, acrylic exterior house paint 48 x 12 x 9.5 inches

Alyssa McClenaghan received her MFA in Painting from Brooklyn College in 2016. She has shown her work throughout the US including the Albany Public Library, Pine Hills, Albany, NY; the Hunter Thomas Project Room, NYC, NY; Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL; Novado Gallery, Jersey City, NJ; and Site: Brooklyn Gallery, Brooklyn NY. She has been an artist in residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA, at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild and at the ChaNorth Residency of ChaShaMa. In my work, materials traditionally used in the construction and adornment of homes are composed into bodily creatures and domestic objects. My most recent sculptures, a series of flesh toned radiators, examine the relationship between materials and gender. For me, radiators represent the complexity of deep internal systems. Combining liquid, pressure, and time their heat is permeating, yet slow to cool. Although they are made of cast iron, they can be quite delicate and are vulnerable to freeze, expand and burst. I see many parallels between radiators, the human body and psyche. Particularly that of the feminine experience, like the long history of the female in a supporting role. Dialogues of femininity, domesticity, warmth, comfort, fragility, strength, necessity, and motherhood are addressed through this collection of objects. By imparting a personality into them, giving each more human-like colors, gestures and forms, I begin to unravel my own history. Every sculpture is made of foam insulation board, plasters, and paint. The materials transform, recreate, and reimagine the traditional radiator while at the same time, reference the human body. The foam is heavily layered and built into cube-like forms that are then carved into each unique shape. After multiple layers and coats of plaster are put on and sanded down, the objects are painted in matte acrylic house paints. “Paying Bills Sometimes Lent Her the Illusion of Order”, along with the other titles of the work in this series are aptly taken from Joan Didion’s seminal novel “Play It as It Lays”. This story of a woman in her thirties navigating marriage, divorce, motherhood, abortion, addiction and mental illness speaks to the often overlooked reality of the feminine experience.

Image: She Wished She Had a Cigarette foam insulation, joint compound, acrylic exterior house paint 27 x 32 x 17 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

S h a w n

P o w e l l

www.shawnkpowell.com

Image: Beach Towel, Rubber Gloves and Hot Dogs acrylic on canvas 66 x 30 inches

Shawn Powell has presented solo exhibitions at 106 Green, Brooklyn, NY; Chapter, New York, NY; Kent State University, Kent, OH; and at Webster University, St. Louis, MO among others. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions including shows at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo NY; NADA NY, New York, NY; and La Esquina, Kansas City, MO. This year he was included in a two-person exhibition at Abattoir Gallery in Cleveland, OH. His work has been featured in Vanity Fair, Brooklyn Magazine, Bedford + Bowery, Art F City, Hyperallergic, FORMA, the CAN Journal, the White Columns Artist Registry, Cleveland Scene and Juxtapoz Magazine. He received his BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA in Painting from Hunter College where he was presented a Tony Smith Award Grant. Flotsam and Jetsam: objects on the beach: In 1965, Daniel Buren purchased fabric with pre-printed alternating white and colored stripes each 8.7 cm wide. The textile material was commonly recognizable as a commercially manufactured awning cloth. For Buren, this banal, everyday linear pattern canceled out the conventional use of illusion and narrative traditionally found in painting, utilizing a readymade motif that, at the time, was void of symbolic content. Stripes have become a pervasive part of painting. They are utilized to indicate a domestic setting, to elicit a sensory experience, as pattern and decoration, and now, 55 years after Buren’s appropriation of the everyday stripe, they have become an iconic signifier for conceptual abstraction. Appropriating Buren’s iconic stripe pattern, these paintings attempt to reclaim the stripes’ original utility by applying them as beach towel patterns on 66 x 30 inch canvases, a size and shape inherent to the subject. The stripes in these paintings are indexical; simultaneously acting as a signifier for both the everyday object and abstract painting. Trompe l’oeil folds are an act of peeling back the opaque layers of conceptual abstraction, revealing playful arrangements of everyday objects such as hotdogs, notebook paper, tube socks and chicken bones. The imagery found in these works institute mysterious narratives of disquieting unease, indicative of Surrealism, film noir, or the French Nouveau Roman. The paintings are viewed from a cinematic, top-down viewpoint, providing an awkward perspective. This viewpoint is direct, neutral or removed (especially if void of people). It enhances the object-ness of the beach towels and flips painting on its head. Traditionally, painting is about looking into the picture. For this body of work, viewers are asked to look at them.

Image: Beach Towel, Socks, Chicken Bones, and Sunglasses acrylic on canvas 66 x 30 inches

Image: Beach Towel, Notebook Paper, Eraser, Envelopes, Six-pack Rings and Peppermint acrylic on canvas 66 x 30 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

A n Y a n

www.yananyanan.com

An Yan is an artist born in Beijing, lives and works in London and has recently graduated from Central Saint Martins. Yan’s practice investigates the untranslatability of specific East Asian cultural symbols and tropes through painting in order to go beyond cultural relativism. Operating in the space that exists between the two like the transitioning of socialism to socialist- capitalism in China during the 1980s, Yan hopes to remark on the ever-shifting nature of painting and culture.

Image: Jade Touch oil on wood 61 x 91 cm

K r z y s z t o f S t r z e l e c k i

www.krzysztofstrzelecki.com

My main lockdown project has been to explore the idea of ‘cruising fantasies’. I have made sixteen vases so far (more are coming) around the theme of ‘cruising’. Many artists have visited parks and lakes to watch people and sketch them at play, but gay men used parks, forests and abandoned parts of the city as venues for illicit sexual encounters. Cruising sites have now lost their ‘aura’ and today most gay ‘cruising’ happens online, privately behind their phone screens. Following this shift to online life, I have focused on sourcing images from the web to conjure up new scenarios, new encounters. The content is often explicit but some of my vases are based on famous paintings offering a new perspective. Mimicking these ‘utopian’ painterly visions instils the idea of ‘cruising’ as integral to everyday life. A sculpture ‘Adam’ is a preview of a new series ‘The forbidden Garden’ where Adam and Steve take over the Garden of Eden and the paradise changes into a cruising area. The mythical octopus, the Kraken, brings Steve to Adam as a variation of the Bible story. Mythical and historical characters mix together making a new vision of a colourful world with humour, sex and a little bit of Kitsch. Krzysztof Strzelecki was born in 1993 in Świdnica, South West Poland. He studied BA (Hons) in Fine Art Photography at the University of the Arts London (UAL), Camberwell, 2016-19. Currently, he alternates between London and Świdnica, and works in a variety of media including ceramics, photography and site-specific installations. Strzelecki’s influences encompass Christian iconography and ancient mythology; he explores the differences (and similarities) between man and the environment, contrasting the wilds of nature with the fragility of the human form. His work often engages with queer culture and considers how different societies relate to LGBT+ issues of acceptance and prejudice. Image: The Great Wave ceramic 23 x 38, 5 x 9 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

C l a u d i o C o l t o r t i

www.museoapparente.eu/index.php?/root/claudio-coltorti

Image: Sto kafeneio oil on canvas 40 x 30 cm

I am a painter living and working in Athens, Greece. In my paintings I try to search and shake the substance of people and things around me. This is my way to recreate a “visual system” that has to be similar with ours. I always start from mental images. I start to play with colours and then something maybe appears (or maybe not, and the game starts again). I am curious about all kinds of images.

Image: Senza titolo oil on wood panel 20 x 15 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

B o n y R a m i r e z

www.bonyramirez.com

Image: Musa X Paradisiaca acrylic paint, color pencil, soft oil pastel, wallpaper ; paper figure on wood panel 48 x 36 inches

Bony Ramirez (b. 1996, Tenares, Salcedo, Dominican Republic) lives and works in Perth Amboy, NJ, USA. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY; the Perth Amboy Center for the Arts, Perth Amboy, NJ; and the Shiman Art Gallery, Newark, NJ; including a solo exhibition at the Perth Amboy Center for the Arts. Born in a small town in the Dominican Republic, before moving to the States as an early teen, Bony Ramirez retains a connection to his Dominican heritage through his art, incorporating elements of the Caribbean with his distinctive figures and details. It was during his early education in the Dominican Republic that the artist was first exposed to local iconography, with the easily identifiable symbols and motifs still making appearances in his current work, acting as a common visual language across cultures.

Image: Es Colmado, No Bodega acrylic paint, color pencil, soft oil pastel; paper figure on wood panel 48 x 36 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

M a r c

L i b r i z z i

www.instagram.com/marc_librizzi

Image: Fountain For Light glass, solder, stained wood veneer, led light bulbs 11 x 11 x 20 inches

How amazing would it be if you’re having a conversation with someone and as you’re conversing this landscape of both your combined thoughts forms before your eyes. You can enter this material landscape of conversation, explore it, begin to understand what is happening with a sense of depth never before experienced. The intangible as tangible. Marc’s work nests bodies within bodies and stacks rooms within rooms. Their structures fold and expand as you float/slither in and around architectural and cerebral space, suspended by mystery and play. What could an emotional space look like if it manifested itself as a physical space with its own embodied infrastructure? Domestic spaces can become entire ecosystems with rooms acting as distinct biomes and every object inside in direct influence with each other, whether that be symbiotically or in a way to cause chaos. The relation of the lavender striped throw pillow on your bed, to the brass switch of the floor lamp, to the uneven table you leave your keys on; is all connected in a complex web of interactions the same way a tree flourishing with ivy, is to a lake near the point of overflowing, is to a cobblestone bridge weathered by the rain. Marc is a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design where they studied Furniture Design. Now based in New York they work as a Furniture Maker and use their free time to make small intimate sculptures, paintings, and drawings in their bedroom studio. Although their work extends well beyond just furniture, the principles learned from studying furniture remain integral to their practice, placing an importance on what it means to live with an object.

Image: Space Between Eyes oil on canvas in carved and dyed wood frame 37 x 31 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

A a r o n

J u p i n

www.aaronelvisjupin.com

Born in Fullerton California, he received a BFA in 2014 from Otis College of Art and Design. Work consists of collage and photo manipulation of personal and found imagery that is then executed through the use of airbrush. It acts as an ode to the distance between reality and memory. Anti real and the false sense of familiarity is something that is a constant theme in the works. Using cartoon logic to deconstruct the domestic. Through a naive view he hints at environmental issues in a playful and comedic way in hopes to poke fun and bring up bigger issues at hand.

Image: A Letter to Ray vinyl and acrylic on canvas 13.5 x 16.5 inches

F r a n c e s c a

C a p o n e

www.francescacapone.com

Amongst the painful circumstances and uncertainty keeping the city Portland, OR and our world sheltered in place in 2020, Francesca Capone’s recent body of work, Light Journal, exhibited May 15 - June 26, 2020 intended to give the local community a temporary place for respite and hope. Exhibited in the windows at Nationale—which, as a non-essential business, was closed March through July—the show lit up for a few hours nightly starting before dusk. It was presented with an urgency and provided a warm calming glow, an invitation to be present, and a visual reprieve for passersby to see and experience at a distance. The work comes accompanied by a beautiful essay by Rachel Valinsky. Francesca Capone is a visual artist, writer, and materials designer. Her work is primarily concerned with the creation of materials and a poetic consideration of their meaning. She is interested in how tactile forms simultaneously serve as functional surfaces for daily life and as a mode of communication or symbol within the cultural paradigm. Her books Woven Places (Some Other Books, 2018), Text means Tissue (2017), and Weaving Language (information as material 2018, Self Published 2015) focus on textile poetics. They are available for purchase via Printed Matter, and are available for viewing at the MoMA Library and the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery in London, LUMA/Westbau in Switzerland, Textile Arts Center in NYC, and 99¢ Plus Gallery in Brooklyn. She has been an artist in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West. Her academic work includes lectures and workshops at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Reed College, University of Washington, and Alberta College of Art and Design, among others.

Image: Moon Fullness, Foggy Halo handwoven LED cord 18 x 40 inches photography by Mario Gallucci

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

E l l e n

P o n g

www.ellenjpong.com

Ellen Pong (b. 1995) is a ceramicist based in Brooklyn, New York. She attended the University of California, Berkeley and graduated in 2018 with a Bachelor’s degree in art history. Embracing furniture-making as a process of translation, of giving new form to a shared meaning or concept, Ellen Pong takes on the role of an unreliable narrator. She reconceptualizes functionality as a flexible category, using the cold, hard and heavy qualities of ceramic, a material otherwise thought to be fragile, to build sculptural furniture and home goods that put pressure on our understanding of what these objects can look and feel like. Pong takes interest in ceramics as a medium oriented towards posterity: a technology for communicating with the future demonstrated by the survival of ceramic artifacts across time. In works like Tennis Jug (2020) and Antipastissue Box (2020), she aims to capture certain specificities of our visual and material culture, and translate them in the mode of uncanny and confused realism that so characterizes our time.

Image: Key Hole Chair ceramic 16.5 x 16.5 x 24 inches

S e b a s t i a n

S u p a n z

www.sebastiansupanz.com

Supanz was born in 1989 in Graz, Austria and attended University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria 2013 - 2020 and FAAP São Paulo, Brazil in 2017. Exhibitions: 2020: Colours of a sleepless knight (diploma exhibition/solo); Alternate mode, Angewandte Festival, Vienna (group); Staycation Is A New Artwork On Your Wall, FouFou Contemporary, Vienna (group); Raus Project Vol.2, Hamburg (group); Group Show 2, Serving the People curated by Lucien Smith (online/group); While you were out, Alt Wien, Vienna (group). 2019: Collage Collage, Galerie Aa Collections, Vienna (group); Ciphers of Regression ft. der Hausfreund, Vienna (solo); Soft Opening, STAR1, Vienna (solo); Matinee avec croissants, Vienna (group). 2018: NogNog, Justice, Vienna (group). 2017: The Essence, Alte Post, Vienna (group); MIX, Vienna (group), Grubisic und Supanz - Zeichnungen, Justice, Vienna (group). 2016: Parallel Vienna (group); Galerija Laval Nugent, Zagreb (group); No Show, Justice, Vienna (group). 2014: The Essence, Künstlerhaus Vienna (group). Last year I went to the paint shop to buy some new colors and by accident, I discovered colored wool. The pure, unmixed colors and the soft materiality of wool immediately reminded me of my own childhood. So I decided to create a new body of work, made out of felted wool. Instead of liquid paint I use dry paint and instead of a brush, I use a felting needle to produce them. I regard them as paintings, however. The motif of the knight is based on a children’s drawing by my older brother and it has multiple meanings to me. Due to the fact that I work in series, repetition plays an important role in my practice. With each further repetition the motif of the knight became more and more a symbol for the process itself. While the depiction of the knight can be also associated with a romantic image of masculinity, of power and strength, the material wool is much more related to femineity, also in an art historical context, and I really like the gentle way the wool embeds the knight. Image: Untitled felted wool through canvas 32 x 27 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

A l e x a n d r a

S m i t h

www.alexandra-smith.com

Alexandra Smith paints sexually charged scenes and close-cropped portraits that produce an uncomfortable intimacy. Centering on depictions of the female-figure and sexualized forms—twisting of nipples, butts with zit cream, sex toys, exposed sunburnt skin—Smith lures the viewer within these private acts, do you look? Should you avert your eyes? These observations position themselves through a female-gaze, asserting that the represented images are idealistic. These representations are awkward, dark, and humorous. Smith relies on observational drawing and photography for these references. Alexandra Smith (b. 1995) was born in Watertown, New York. She holds a BFA from Alfred University, where she was a recipient of the Louis Mendez ‘52 Award. Smith was an artist-in-residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico during the winter and spring of 2019. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Image: Erotic Hand at Sunset oil on paper 7.75 x 7.25 inches

L e i g h

B a r b i e r

www.leighbarbier.com

Leigh Barbier is a full-time artist living and working in San Francisco. Born and raised in Los Angeles she grew up in the shadows of the movie industry. Her grandfather was a PR man for MGM during the classic Hollywood era, her father, a still photographer for Universal Pictures, began his career in the 60s. In the early 90s Leigh became the third generation to work in film by joining the special effect house ‘Industrial, Light and Magic’ in the Bay Area. She worked first as model maker and later as digital painter up until 3 years ago when she left to pursue her art full time. All through her career in film she maintained a dedicated art practice while finding opportunities for solo and group shows in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and the Czech Republic. My most recent work, the Quarantine paintings, source from very detailed drawings that I create while in bed and usually in the morning. The drawings are the image language of my unconscious and the equivalent of my sleeping dreams. The drawings build a visual language which I depend on while creating the paintings. From March of this year until late September I finished nine paintings of various sizes. I experienced a particularly fruitful time in solitude and silence in my studio and the larger building that held it, which was absent of all others due to the pandemic.

Image: The Pioneers acrylic on canvas 48 x 60 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

E l i o t G r e e n w a l d

www.eliot-greenwald.com

Image: Night Car (mirror) acrylic on canvas ~39 x 48 x 2 inches

In 1990, as a 7 year old, I attempted and succeeded in selling dirt off of my parents’ front lawn in Portland, Maine. It was November, hardly gardening weather, however, I ended up selling 10 dollars worth to a man driving by in a clunky station wagon. In 2013, I found out from my mother that the man who bought that dirt was in fact a friend of her friend who she had convinced to come over and buy some dirt from me. By the time I found out about this I had already dropped out of college, moved to California, and committed to a lifelong practice of speculation and communication through visual representation. Today I live in New York City, I’ve been here for 9 years. Lately all I want to make are paintings of a car at night and two identical planets somewhere above it. It’s not enough to say what a painting is, but it helps of course. In this series of work, I have created a simple mythology, a poem. This poem is a comedy, the confusing kind of comedy you learned about in high school that was somehow tragic. These paintings are influenced by theoretical physics, Pee-wee Herman, and camping; transference of energy from one state to the next; the next beginning always somehow tasting a bit like the last end. I can’t say that this work reflects my identity in a contemporary world but I strive to represent something about the way we can all be simultaneously here and nowhere.

Image: Night Car (lake) oil on canvas ~39 x 48 x 2 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

J u d d S c h i f f m a n

www.instagram.com/juddschiffman

Image: Quarantine ceramic 33 x 34 x 2 inches

Judd Schiffman (b. 1982) is a Providence, Rhode Island based artist working primarily in ceramics. He has lectured at Harvard University Ceramics and Brown University, and participated in residencies at the Zentrum Für Keramiks in Berlin, Germany and Arch Contemporary in Tiverton, Rhode Island. Schiffman received his MFA from the University of Colorado in 2015, and his BA from Prescott College in 2007. In 2016, he received an emerging artists award from the National Council for the Education of Ceramic Arts. Schiffman is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Ceramics at Providence College. Using clay as a drawing material, my ceramic wall sculptures are a psychedelic concoction of lived and imagined experiences that ponder the power of our personal stories. As social and political tensions continue to build in the world, there seems to be little room for compromise as we all become more identified with our own story of how things should be. Through exploring personal narrative, my work seeks to look beyond the story in order to find the space where collaboration can happen. The framed narratives open up a common ground where the viewer can enter into dialogue as a participant among the characters, objects, and landscapes. The content and process of my studio work is informed by my life with my three year old daughter, Franny and wife, Athena. As we navigate children’s stories, YouTube cartoons, songs, and art history books together, we discover and collaborate on images that I then refine and make out of clay. Utilizing the objects and images that Franny gravitates towards, the textiles Athena makes, and other powerful relics, narratives are composed reflecting the inner life of the contemporary family, rites of passage, and grappling with the complexities of being a father. My work explores themes of masculinity, discovery of self, sexuality, and family, and all the nuanced guilt, confusion, and elation that exist in tandem. Along with relics found in my own domestic environment, depictions of animals in museum collections have become the ideal actors in this drama. Being a father, I am in the midst of one of the most significant transitions of my life, and my work over the past three years expresses the complexity of the patriarchal, nuclear family system I find myself in, as well as the tenderness and energy I receive through my new family. Raising a young child at its best is a collaborative experience, and my work follows suit. Ideas of authorship and the role of the individual artist are challenged as I copy and skew historical images and objects, and then invite my wife and artist friends into my studio to arrange and re-arrange the installation.

Image: FeverFlame ceramic 27 x 41 x 2 icnhes

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

R a n e e

H e n d e r s o n

www.raneehenderson.com

Image: We be vigil, vigilance, and vigilante oil on canvas 48 x 36 inches

I make work that is self-structured. I paint a scene that gives my account, sometimes through fable, sometimes through fact. I use metaphors and symbols—not as some perverse puzzle that I seek pleasure in posing—but to quietly breed something unexpected. My most recent paintings are manufactured through trials and tickles that frame up my personalized street-smarts codex (clout, grind, squid-inking, impotence, layaway, racket…). Each of these is a keystone, which serves as a perverse umbrella that presides over the painting. Side components support the main star(s) through somewhat common associations. The multiples (arrowheads, coins) represent mobilization. They fly away or towards their targets in overactive arches. They are alive, but are essentially agents for the uses of others. The second fiddles (millipedes, figure on a hook) sit on guard, tracing those movements. They are gestures, not bold enough to act, but ultimately more potent as figures for change, or icons. The starring roles are played by boogers. There were booger dances once. Crashing down upon every social gathering the tsu’nigadu’li, or “many persons’ faces covered over,” would force vigilance upon their tribe through choreographed chaos. The existence of this ritual was new information to me, but the intent was something that I have always promoted within myself. I welcome the crow that strikes at me at the moment of peak happiness. I leave my windows open for it because I do not want to get too comfortable; it is prudent to stay mindful. My Cherokee ancestors employed these dancers to don their masks and hassle the tribe as a reminder of impending distresses. I revere the booger masks in my paintings for the same reason. It is simultaneously destructive and constructive, an Amor fati. The booger mask is an exemplary emblem of my ideal street-smart model. Each infraction or exaltation enacted by or upon us is a lesson fertile for future use, and for the strengthening of capability muscle (grit). Utilizing each experience gifts another notch to sculpt into an arrowhead, or an imprint to pound into the facade of my own mask. Or, I suppose, a squirt of cad red for my next painting. But ultimately, I see it as belief. Ranee Henderson (b. 1981, Lincoln, Nebraska) graduated from both Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2010-Fine Art), and Art Center College of Design (2015-Illustration). She completed her MFA at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2019. Most recently, she completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has built up a diverse body of work, which has been exhibited in Canada and the United States. Henderson currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Image: Dummy, can’t you see me? I’m wearing one now. oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

L a c h l a n H i n w o o d

www.lachlanhinwood.com

Lachlan Hinwood is a painter based out of Iowa City. I am interested in visions, myth, and histories of the landscape. I like to represent the landscape with imagery that reflects on the quiet passage of time. Feeling is most important.

Image: Moon, Angel, Tree oil on board, frame made with salvaged wood 11 x 14 inches

C a r o l i n e Z u r m e l y

www.instagram.com/carolinezurmely

Caroline Zurmely is a Dallas-based artist and graduate of Rhode Island School of Design (2017). Her three-dimensional paintings are made by manipulating the fibers of repurposed towels to create relief images. Interested in consumer culture, the accoutrements of celebrity is a common motif in her work.

Image: Sunglasses terrycloth 18 x 24 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

A l e j a n d r o J i m é n e z - F l o r e s

www.alejandrojflores.com

Image: kiki spritz! gozandolo! acrylic gouache on muslin 20 x 25 inches

Alejandro Jiménez-Flores is a process-based conceptual artist making gestures that occupy the space of painting, writing, and performance. Their practice is concerned with how the language we have, or lack, subordinates our subjectivities, identity formations, and the space we are allowed to occupy. Just as Alejandro uses their relationship with flowers to develop frameworks for new language propositions, florencio—a conceptual personae—is another framework to interact with language enacted (facilitated) by Alejandro. A framework that exists within their practice and extends to others by providing collaborative prompts. They attained a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2012 & a very minor in Poetry from School of Poetics in Marseille, France in 2013. They have had recent solo exhibitions at BAR4000 (Chicago, IL), Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL), and ADDS DONNA (Chicago, IL) as well as a two-person exhibition at Apparatus Projects (Chicago, IL) and performances at Gallery 400 (Chicago, IL) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. They have been featured in reviews and publications such as New American Paintings, Chicago Artist Writers, Newcity Art and Sixty Inches From Center.

Image: florencio paints a portrait of kiki as she takes a sip from an unattended Aperol Spritz on a patio… que tulipan tan raro... acrylic gouache on muslin 20 x 32 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

M a x

M c I n n i s

www.maxmcinnis.com

Max McInnis’ work centers around what was once called “postindustrial Surrealism”. Their work is fed by a constant hope to see them self-reflected in the image landscape of the Upper Midwest. Originating from Davenport, Iowa, their life began with a mixture of the suburban American standard with the “hick” lifestyle stereotyped with activities such as hunting, watching NASCAR, and blue collar work. They attended the Rhode Island School of Design after following the narrative of the small-town queer kid running to the progressive East. Upon graduation from the Furniture Design program in 2018 they moved to Minneapolis. Here they make sculptural furniture pieces and begins to piece together the narrative structure that follows all their work. Their process is an ongoing dialogue between memories, things they call memories, and a healthy obsession with objects like: radio towers, roadside attractions, and the World’s Largest Truck Stop, IOWA 80.

Image: Marlynn Chair in red mixed media, found objects, wood pulp, red velour, swarovski crystal 21 x 20 x 27 inches

S o r e n

F e r g u s o n

www.instagram.com/soren.ferguson

Soren Ferguson (b. 1997) is an artist and designer living in Brooklyn. Unbound to a single medium his work is a response to ebbing interests in materials and modes of production. Notions of craft are prodded as bespoke and industrial processes work in concert to create functional and nonfunctional objects. Iconography and humorous seating are recurring themes in the work’s contribution to a new domestic environment.

Image: Copper Chair copper, lead free solder 89 x 81 x 48 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

A m i r a B r o w n

www.amirahb.art

Image: Fudge acrylic on canvas 18 x 24 inches

Though born in New York, I have resided in New Haven for a majority of my life and started reading and drawing in childhood. My parents both inspired me to work hard and think outside of the box to achieve my goals, leading me to pursue art through self-research until I could take college art classes as a teen. After receiving my BFA at Paier College of Art in 2016 I have been working and living in New Haven. My work is inspired by the psychological aspects and factors that drive and liberate black consciousness and articulate their depth. Academic essays and poetry such as Blue Clerk by Dionne Brand and Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde largely inspire my work. I focus on capturing the ambiguities of life, moving past the representational ideals of diversity and moving into unresolved and imaginative aspects of blackness. Traditionally black representation in history was used to disenfranchise and justify oppression through visual propaganda and stereotype through the use of mammies, aunt Jemima, and more. Through my work I refuse the societal standard of black value as cultural capital to be exploited and create narratives of our own empowerment and nuance. Using various substrates and materials from my own home and community I create multilayered portraits moving from the representational into the speculative and abstract.

Image: I’m Lost, Red Directions acrylic on canvas 12 x 16 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

M a h s a

M e r c i

www.instagram.com/mahsa.merci

Image: Love oil on canvas 40 x 30 cm

Mahsa Merci, born in Tehran, Iran, holds a Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design from Tehran University of Art and a Master of Painting from Azad University in Iran. Currently, she is studying under a full scholarship from the University of Manitoba, Canada and working toward a Master of Fine Arts degree. Mahsa Merci has exhibited her works in over fifty solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Italy, UAE, India, Cyprus, Canada, UK and Iran. Her works are internationally published in various magazines in Iran, the UK, United States, and Norway. From her point of view, as a queer artist, the human face is the only part of the body that gives us the fundamental knowledge of a person, where the intent is to represent a specific human subject. Portrait paintings can reveal the sitter’s place in society, their identity, gender, hobbies, occupation, or aspects of their personality or beliefs. She has worked on different types of portraits over the years. Currently, she is working on LGBTQIA+ portraits and her main focus is on how she envisions aesthetics in her own way. She is eager to show the spectrum of beauty, softness and harshness, and masculine and feminine. Thus, in this new series, she called it ‘‘Between’’. She paints the LGBTQIA+ community, from gays and lesbians to drag queens and transsexuals with oil colors on small canvases to show intimacy to people. She invites the audience to come closer to the portraits to see them more meticulously and discover all the details and textures. This gesture encourages the viewer to engage with the portraits. She believes in these portraits, she draws the pain, the mental damage, the family concerns, the cultural, social, and political issues that they have dealt with. Why Between? Because she believes there is always a spectrum between the two poles; poles that are at times contradictory and others complementary, and at the same time, they are turbulent and sometimes unexplored.

Image: Amour oil on canvas 40 x 30 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

M a t t

K l e b e r g

www.mattkleberg.com

Image: Blind Arcade (Piñata) oil stick on canvas 84 x 64 inches

Matt Kleberg (b.1985, Kingsville TX) received his BA from the University of Virginia in 2008 and his MFA from Pratt Institute in 2015. He is represented by Hiram Butler Gallery, Barry Whistler Gallery, and Sorry We’re Closed. Recent exhibitions include Good Naked Gallery (NY); Morgan Lehman Gallery (NY); Johansson Projects (CA); Barry Whistler Gallery (TX); Hiram Butler Gallery (TX); Albada Jelgersma Gallery (Netherlands), and Sorry We’re Closed (Belgium). His work has been written about in the New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Painting is Dead, Artsy, Vice, Maake Magazine, ArtDaily, New American Paintings, Blouin Artinfo, ArtMaze Magazine, Artillery Magazine, and Hyperallergic. His work is included in public and private collections, including the Williams College Museum of Art, the University of California Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Old Jail Art Center, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the National Gallery of Art. Kleberg lives and works in San Antonio, TX. My paintings often resemble architectural facades, altarpieces, and vacated prosceniums. I try to construct a set of expectations and then try to subvert or question those expectations. For me, a painting is finished when its animating buzz is some tension between contradictory features—it feels stable but wonky, it seems empty yet full, it feels spacious and compressed. Let those differences dance around each other and try to work it out. I’m interested in painting as a thing in the room and as a pictorial space, and I’m always negotiating between the internal logic of the image with the physical edges of the support, whether that’s a conventionally rectangular painting or a shaped canvas. The scale of the paintings addresses the viewer as a body in a place, and that address oscillates between open invitation and barrier.

Image: Full Force Gale oil stick on canvas 72 x 60 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

L i a n Z h a n g

www.lycheeone.com/wp/artist/lian-zhang

Image: Loop of Jade oil on canvas 50 x 35cm

Rather than being introduced into a leaden sense of suspended time, we are instead invited to roam through a lost or yet to come labyrinth of temporalities. The dominate mood circulates around various modes of enchantment, as opposed to anxieties born out of late time. Attached to this circulation are registers related to virtual, childhood, mythic, and mystical spaces that all float free from the weight of historical exactness. Following from this the tone of the paintings are light in ways that induce sensations related to reverie or imaginative drifting. These paintings are born out of the last three months of ‘lock down’ in which other resources of living and absorption have to be invented. A counter intuitive response has been formed within this contraction of social space, a response that invites a multiplicity of optical attachments that pass over, through and before. All of this occurs without the process of objectification or fixed modes of identification manifesting as a constellation of images as opposed to a serialised progression. Part of this difference between constellation and serialised progression is, or can be viewed as a relationship between fragmentation and detachment becoming re-inscribed into metamorphic patterns of becomings born out a belief in the world being composed out of a single substance. In this world all elements appear to reconnect with dispute realms in a series of fresh encounters mixing the realms of the vegetal, animal, insect, human, objects, elements, and gestures. Within this, there are the circulation of moods connected to the play of absorption and fascination in which detachment and abstract measure are abolished. The paintings themselves are sensual, even fleshy, inviting a touch feel relationship as a way of being-with as surface encounter. In many ways this marks a turning away from earlier work with its preoccupations with the detached fragment, image appropriation, visual arrest, collage and layering. This indicates quite another perspective not only in regard to painting but more fundamentally the world in its passage from one schema to another. The question which is being posed within this shift relates to how the artist might make manifest this moment of both temporal register and schematic reconfiguration. Being thrown to the wind and finding a place within a remote order of things is to follow a gesture, a mode of gesture that finds its coherence within the multiplicity of folds of temporality and the image.

Image: The unloved oil on canvas 40 x 30cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

A d a m

E a s t o n

www.aeaston.com

Adam Easton, was born 1989, in Daytona Beach, Florida and received a BFA in painting from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 2016 and an MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2019. Adam lives and works in New Haven, CT and is currently focused on a personal and contrived form of still life painting.

Image: Green Hills oil on panel 16 x 20 inches

J o h n

D e n n y

www.johndenny.com

John Denny is an artist. They were born in 1993 and raised in Toronto, Canada. In 2015 they received a BFA in Studio Arts, with an emphasis in painting, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They now live in Dover, New Hampshire, USA. My recent art has been the result of my experiments in creating my own materials. I began by turning used cardboard into paper pulp to push the texture and volume of my acrylic paints. I noticed its qualities were in competition with the paint so I started to add less and loved how strong the pulp could become alone. I removed the paint completely instead bleaching and dyeing the pulp primary colours adding as little glue as possible. I loved that instead of being covered in acrylic the texture of the paper was revealed. I started engineering molds that could handle high pressure so I could produce many paper logs that dried fast, evenly, solid and smooth. I used the paper logs, adding wool balls as furniture pads, to construct a lamp to see the material fully functional. As I thought more about compression and the limits of paper I noticed used plastic around me. Plastic gave me the strength from compression that I loved about paper pulp but it was more malleable. I began producing plastic logs that I could reheat and bend to express the plastics qualities in my trays. I eventually returned to paper through experimental painting. The visual compression of the trays became the frame and background for the mounted paper. I wanted to reflect this in the paper to push against its rigidity. So I started hand rolling the pulp in fabric to see how fine an organic line I could make. The paper became an object that I could cut, bleed wax into or fill with starch clay and plastic. As I tried to push the thinness of my paper I started to gravitate towards used clothes to fill that material need. I bought a box of used clothes and started to think about weaving and compression. I started cutting little squares that I could stack onto an armature so the fabric could have the strength of the plastic and paper logs. I loved how the clothes’ weave reflected the fibres of the paper and the internal plastic armature added malleability that was satisfying. This resulted in “Patch Lamp” that combines all my material investigations.

Image: Paper Lamp used paper, used plastic, dyed wool, hardware 13 × 22 × 16 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

R i l e y

S t r o m

wwwrileystrom.com

Riley Strom (b. 1991, Los Angeles) is a painter and educator based in Philadelphia. Her paintings explore the relationship between image and phenomenology by means of figuration and abstraction. She codirected the artist-run gallery 99 Cent Plus Gallery in Brooklyn, NY from 2013-2015. She has an MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University and a BFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Image: Punched! oil on canvas 72 x 60.5 inches

J u d y

K o o

www.judykoo.com

Junghee Judy Koo (b. 1991, South Korea) is a Korean-American painter working in and around New Jersey and New York City. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from Hunter College at the City University of New York in 2020, and a BFA in Visual Arts from Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University. Judy Koo uses mundane moments of our everyday as a source of inspiration. Growing up on diet of Japanese, Korean graphic novels and American animations, Koo looks for archetypal imagery and form that mimic, articulate and interpret emotional and psychological spaces. She weaves narratives into her painting to emphasize accumulations of memory and bring her own experiences of identity.

Image: Gentle Prodding acrylic gouache on watercolor paper 5 x 4 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

C a e t l y n n

B o o t h

www.caetlynnbooth.com

Image: Synchronized Mirror III, Study 4 oil on paper 12 x 9 inches

Caetlynn Booth (b. Napa, CA) is an artist based in Queens, NY. Last year, she and Amy Lincoln had a two-person exhibition at Project: ARTspace (New York, NY), and over the past few years, her work has been featured at Pulse Art Fair in Miami Beach with Project: ARTspace (New York); and in shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Brooklyn); Able Baker Contemporary (Portland, ME); The American Academy of Arts & Letters Gallery (New York); ODETTA (Brooklyn); and Penn State Galleries (State College, PA), among others. Booth was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a DAAD grant for a painting and research project in Berlin, Germany, and she has completed residencies at I-A-M Institut and GlogauAIR in Berlin, at the Vermont Studio Center, and at the Noxubee Wildlife Refuge in Mississippi. She received her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University (2011), and BA from the University of California at Davis (2002). My work depicts in-between domains that explore both internal and external spaces. Alternating between bodies of work in the studio, cross-pollination leads to unexpected relationships and associations. Each body of work takes as its starting point an element of figurative imagery, such as grasses reflected in a swamp, or the silhouette of a swimmer. Drawing from imagery developed at residencies and from lived experience, a symbolic language has emerged through which I explore abstraction and metamorphosis.

Image: Synchronized Mirror II oil on paper 16 x 12 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

P a t r i c k M c A l i n d o n

Image: The Departure oil on canvas 51.5 x 64 cm

www.patrickmcalindon.com

Born in Scotland, 1994, Patrick McAlindon lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art 2019, Erasmus exchange at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wein. He is currently working on a publishing project looking at homes in Scotland with collaborators Dr Charlie Lynch and David Sillars.

Image: The Bouncers oil on canvas 64 x 51.5 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

H a s a n i S a h l e h e

www.hasanisahlehe.com

Image: Your tears are just temporary acrylic on canvas 14 x 11 inches

Hasani Sahlehe is a multidisciplinary artist. His work reasons with themes related to memory, migration, and the supernatural. Sahlehe employs abstracted depictions of Natural and cultural phenomena that diverge into vigorous compositions to reference the aforementioned concepts. Sahlehe’s work aligns with the autonomous pursuits of the Abstract Expressionists. It calls on the visual language of urban art by incorporating the use of icon, text, a spirited color palette, found materials, collage, and energetic paint application. His work contemplates the malleability of perception by distorting familiar imagery while invoking the historical practice of elevating man-made objects to a hallowed status. In so doing, it seeks new meanings for established ideals. Significant exhibitions of Sahlehe’s work have taken place at SCAD Museum of Art, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and NADA Miami. His work has been published in Art Papers, New American Paintings (with Noteworthy Artist distinction), and Burnaway. He was awarded the SCAD Alumni Atelier, MINT Leap Year Residency, and the Hambidge Residency for the Arts and Sciences. Collectors of his work include SCAD, and Michael Rooks, curator, High Museum of Art. Sahlehe currently serves as the teaching artist at the Morris Museum of Art. Sahlehe received his Painting BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design a year later. He is originally from St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands.

Image: Four Waters acrylic on canvas 60 x 42 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

J a n e M a r g a r e t t e

www.janemargarette.com

Image: Chain (Part of “Precautionaries Series”) ceramics, glaze, magnets, epoxy 80 x 43 x 7 inches

Jane Margarette (b.1985) is a Filipino-American artist living in Los Angeles. Born and raised in San Diego, she spent her formative years training as a classical musician, before transitioning her artistic endeavors into a visual arts practice. Jane began working in ceramics while studying at California State University Long Beach where she received a BFA in 2016. She then received her MFA in ceramics from UCLA in 2020. In my work, I am interested in constructing objects that hold significant emotional weight. I often draw from particular memories of childhood and recreate objects that I once had a physical and psychic connection to, objects that have haunted and followed me through the years. I am interested in how these particular objects, once rendered in ceramics (a fragile yet weighty material) have the ability to capture a certain nostalgia or reverence of its original. It emphasizes its symbology. A large door chain made of ceramics, a typically mundane object that blends into its domestic landscape,can now draw attention to its ability or inability to keep one safe, or the desire to find safety in an unstable world. Or, a ceramic grandfather clock, typically a living/breathing fixture in living rooms in need of winding, care, and attention. But rendered stone-like,it no longer lives. Its heartbeat is unmoving. We are left with a shell of what used to be or of a time spent. It is within these mundane domesticities that I have personal connections to, that I find a richness in their meaning and subjectivity which I am greatly interested in exploring.

Image: Latch 1 (Part of “Precautionaries Series”) ceramics, glaze, magnets 32 x 19 x 5 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

R o m a i n S a r r o t

Childhood is the age of authority and constraint. Somehow, this memory has been the impulse of my first works and still influences my artistic production today. Recollection of childhood, recounted histories, tropism of the imagination are in my production. I often use body-related images that allow me to question myself, in a deceptively innocent way, about sexuality and religion. The recreational objects I produce, and the effectiveness of their almost genuine structure, are essential. Inheritance is another side of my work I am dealing with. How it embellishes traditions, habits, creating projection for some phantasmagorical elsewhere. The memories and reminiscences I explore are not only personal, they are also the work of mythologies, references to history, art and literature. Those references to antiquity and cultural paradigms have been leading me to work on the enduring desire of civilizations to represent themselves over time and to magnify memories which will be deeply rooted in history. Further to this pandemic where nature in a few weeks has taken over these rights, I have been particularly interested in those moments when nature slowly regains ground and reabsorbs, in a way a world erected by man and supposedly unalterable.

Image: Internship silicone, plastic, sand & metal 20 x 20 x 6 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

www.romain-sarrot.com

Image: Black dog mineral putty, hose clamp 42 x 40 x 22 cm

G u s t a v H a m i l t o n

www.gustavhamilton.com

Image: Face to Face glazed ceramic 17 × 13 × 2 inches

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Surfaces meant for sitting, eating and entertaining, become surfaces upon which ornate illustrations create illusions of another dimension. Painted in ceramic glaze, are trompe l’oeil everyday objects, flowers, birds and fruit. In other areas, holes, crevices and windows create surreal portals in which “the viewer has a chance to escape from the regular world”. These surreal moments speak not only to Magritte’s Human Condition paintings, but also Wile E. Coyote and his fantastical tunnel and road paintings. This work provides a literal and figurative space to set aside reality, your daily coffee, and dream perhaps of a lighter, happier place. Gustav Hamilton (b.1990, Everett, WA) was raised in Fargo, North Dakota and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and his BFA from the University of Montana. Prior to moving to New York City, he was a Visiting Professor at Colorado State University. He is currently a Studio Manager at BKLYN CLAY. He has exhibited most recently at Fisher Parrish Gallery, The Hole, Steuben Gallery, the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, and BKLYN CLAY in New York, as well as Springbox Gallery and Lacuna Gallery in Minnesota and David B. Smith Gallery in Colorado.

Image: Soft clouds on the home front glazed ceramic 17 × 23 ½ × 2 inches

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A u s t i n

H a r r i s

www.instagram.com/austin_harris_art

Image: Can You Teach an Old Dog New tricks? oil on linen in artist made poplar frame 78 x 78 inches

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With my paintings, I am in a way, investigating my own background. Both at a young age and my formative teenage years. Growing up in a rural community, I was surrounded by hypermasculine behavior, drugs, alcohol, violence, right wing political views and misogyny from both my peers and father. It seemed to be a trend for young men, including myself, to follow their parents’ every footstep. Rather than empathy, I was taught how to fight. Rather than loving my friends, we drank. I never felt like my true self. I was a reproduction of my surroundings. Growing older, I have seen many flaws in the way myself and other men are raised. I grew up poor and my parents frequented both prison and county jail. Rather than crying, humor became a way for me to cope. Between comedy and my sense of form, I am recreating the aggressive, violent, infectious and artificial nature that surrounded both myself and others. Sense of form is something that remains important in my new body of work. Within the figures, I am focusing on a plastic, artificial surface. A surface that represents both skin and rubber. Also, something that can be molded and manipulated. This represents the artificial self. Or the alienation of the subject’s individuality. When the figures are repeated, I am not interested in the person, but a representation of society as a whole. The form within the environment remains just as important as form constructing the figure. Without the environment, the figure does not exist. Every object is treated like an individual. The hard edges and sharp environment represent the dangerous world that men have created. Something that is constantly pressuring the individual’s subjectivity. Humor is a unique human trait. A direct consequence of consciousness. Perhaps a response to our fear of death. We use humor to lighten the load of an emotional subject. Humor in my work, is a way to invite the viewer into my paintings. I want to offer a lighter perception. I want to give the viewer time to observe my paintings and discover the inner workings later. Not immediately.

Image: Unleashed oil on linen in artist made poplar frame 78 x 78 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 20: curated selection

editorial selection of works Featured image: Aimée Parrott Budding monotype and acrylic on cotton with walnut surround 56 x 41 cm more on p. 120

J u l i a M a i u r i

www.juliamaiuri.com

Image: Portal oil and wax on canvas 10 x 8 inches

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Julia Maiuri (b. 1991) received a BFA from Wayne State University in 2013 and is a current MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. She has been included in multiple solo and group exhibitions in Minneapolis, Detroit, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York City. Her work has been featured in Floorr Magazine, WOPOZI, and the 10th Anniversary Edition of ArtMaze Magazine. Maiuri reflects on how family stories, mythologies, lies, and misconceptions shape intergenerational relationships and personal identity. Through painting, Maiuri connects the dots between opposing perspectives, blurring the line between memory and reality, truth and lies, and past and present. Weaving her personal experiences with music, horror tropes, and figures in ancient mythology, Maiuri finds common ground and understanding of her own experiences of grief, anxiety, humor, and love.

Image: Leaving the house oil and wax on canvas 10 x 8 inches

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J e a n - P h i l i p p e

D o r d o l o

www.jeanphilippedordolo.com

I’m interested in modes of representation and hierarchies. My work refers to art history, and culture at large while investigating notions of power and subversion. These are often treated with a touch of humour and pathos. I have been working on ‘cast paintings’. My interest in 17th century Dutch genre painting led me to question the place/role of a viewer and that of the subject matter in the image. My cast objects describe scenes of a certain nature (portraiture, still life, etc.) but are not paintings as such since no paint is being used to produce them. Instead the structure and technique has been adopted to make resin casts, which cheats the viewer in assuming that it is painting, because it looks like (the back of a) canvas and talks the language of painting. My recent cast paintings include an oil paint panel inlay. They take after the ‘Tronies’—a type of Dutch painting that shows exaggerated facial expression – and the recurring trope of the ‘hillbilly’ in the horror movies. I am interested in the tension emanating from the difference in texture (resin against oil paint), making processes (sculpting against painting) and the layering of two separate images. These formal and material concerns are echoed in my larger sculptural works. I organise oversized heads around built structures. Aluminium racks provide me with a platform on which I carefully arrange items, fragments and colourful motifs. The heads are caricatural, drawn on with pastels and crayons. The recurrence of hats is yet again a play on hierarchy. As Bruce McLean once said Beuys became more successful than Latham because he wore a hat.

Image: Viele Kerzen und ein gemächliches Leben (sagten Sie) graphite and pencils on fine grain heavyweight 200gsm acid free paper 42 x 59.4 cm (unframed)

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D e v r a

F o x

www.devrafox.com

As humans we witness transformations on a daily basis, in our physical bodies, emotional consciousnesses and in the natural world. I am captivated by these great and subtle progressions, our inability to control them and what remains once they come to an end. I am compelled by the desire for and expressions of bodily containment; the concept of nature, and our powerlessness to sway it. I question how these reactions seep outside our bodies, molding our physicality and creating attachment to places and objects. My work is often driven by the desire to animate my internal state, seeking understanding by creating palpable forms of sentiment, memory and relationship. I return over and over again to the repetitive, meticulous, and meditative practice drawing provides. The current climate demands a greater outward awareness while granting an opportunity for singular introspection. I aim to combine these states, creating art that extends from personal to universal, giving tangible presence to the inanimate. Devra Fox (b. 1989) received her MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University in 2016 and BA in Studio Art from Bard College in 2011. She participated in residencies at the Women’s Studio Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, Pocoapoco, Kala Art Institute and was a Visiting Artist at Cow House Studios. She has shown in galleries in New York and California, and internationally in Germany and China. Devra lives and works as an artist and educator in San Francisco, CA.

Image: Wrapped Around Three Fingers graphite on paper 22 x 15 inches

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J o a n i Tr e m b l a y

www.joanitremblay.com

Image: Quaderno 5 oil on linen 36 x 30 inches

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Through painting and sculpture, Joani Tremblay investigates the perception of place through the relationship between landscape and its simulations and reproductions. In our contemporary times our understanding of nature has been entirely affected by its many simulations and reproductions, ranging from films and photographs to theme park attractions, computer games and advertisements, from pages to screens to physical spaces and back again. This sense of multiple—and yet simultaneously layered—experiences of place influences their process. Tremblay does not paint from traditional observed landscapes, but from a constructed idea of a place assembling images from a variety of sources, both old and new (advertisements, postcards, Instagram architecture influencers, social media, mass communications, and from field research). Tremblay assembles these images in digital collage, testing hundreds of possibilities, before translating them into painting and considering different application of the oil paint. The artist further emphasizes a sensitivity towards place by installing sculptures, as well as paintings, in their solo exhibitions. Joani Tremblay holds an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal (2017). Tremblay’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions notably in Stockholm (Pony Sugar), Tokyo (3331 Arts Chiyoda), Los Angeles (Kantor LA), Edmonton (Latitude 53), Toronto (Zalucky Contemporary) and in group exhibitions notably in New York (Asya Geisberg Gallery), Brooklyn (Interstate Projects), Los Angeles (0-0 LA), Romania (Bucharest Art Week), Denver (Dateline Gallery), Mexico City (Material Art Fair) and Montreal (Projet Pangée). They have an upcoming solo exhibition at Harper’s Apartment in New York in 2021 and group exhibitions notably at Marie-Laure Fleisch gallery in Brussels. They have participated in residencies in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin and Tokyo, and have upcoming residencies in 2021 at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York, as well as White Leaves Residency in New Mexico. Tremblay is the recipient of numerous grants, the most recent of which is The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2020). Their work appeared notably in Art Viewer, Maake Magazine, Daily Lazy, Gather Journal, Canadian Art, Art Observed and ArtFCity.

Image: What Makes Life Worth Living 1 oil on linen 36 x 30 inches

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N a z ı m

Ü n a l

Y i l m a z

www.instagram.com/nazimunalyilmaz

Image: Big Fish Small Fish oil on aluminum 180 x 123 cm

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My painting often results from a change between spontaneity and consideration, and deals with matters of the private and the public. My technique and the content of the picture should be mirror images of each other, both in a constant rubbing of the times, both always opposed to let something else come out of the depths and often with humor. On the other hand, a certain disrespect for the canon of painting, while using and working on it, (a disrespect also for myself and its construction), cut up and reassemble are characterizing my artistic activity. Brushstrokes looking like they were blown up by a breeze, but landed exactly; a certain negligence, while at the same time being very aware of what l am contributing to; even tastelessness, deliberate dilettantism, unpleasant colors and blurring are always intended. Although I deal with topics such as identity and nature, the works are not didactic, or polemical. They should consciously invite the viewer to participate in the decoding of the painting. It is also a fact that I have an interest in breaking down the painterly space and representing emotional spaces. In doing so, I conflict the old with the new, the classic framework conditions of painting, history and myths are juxtaposed with the subjective and/ or contemporary politics. In broad terms, the works exemplify a desire on the part of a generation of artists to engage painting and to deploy this highly personalized mode of expression in the service of a temperament that balances the political and the idiosyncratic. Nazım Ünal Yılmaz (1981, Turkey) studied and completed a master′s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2010. Fellow resident in SVA, New York 2011 and in 2014-15 in Künstlerhaus Balmoral, Bad Ems. Since 2020 September assistant professor in the class of Daniel Richter at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, living and working in Vienna. I have held several solo exhibitions such as: Theological Time,… in 2020 Exile Gallery, Vienna; Cold-Sore Moon in 2018 PSM, Berlin; Sibel’s Beauty Parlor in 2017 Sanatorium, Istanbul; Hotel Principles, in 2015, Function Room, London; Waiting for the Barbarians, in 2012, Pilevneli Project, Istanbul; Straight, in 2007, Kunstbuero, Vienna. Participated in many group exhibitions, among others: Open Landscape, Tallinn Art Hall, in 2020 Tallinn; Zwei Alter: Jung, Gallery Crone, 2019 Berlin; l can bite…, Carbon12, 2018, Dubai; A Fleshly School of Poetry, Kunstraum D21, 2017, Leipzig; Untitled, Arp Museum, 2015, Remagen; Howl, 44A, 2014, Istanbul; Transtone, Krokus Gallery, 2013 Bratislava; Making Normative Orders, Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2012, Frankfurt; Double Crescent, C24, 2011, New York; Pants on Fire, Ve.Sch, 2010 Vienna; Made in Turkey, Ernst Barlach Museum 2009, Wedel, Hamburg; With a Different View, AusstellungsHalle, 2008, Frankfurt; Kunstforum BACA, 2007, Vienna; Junge Kunst, Kunsthalle Krems 2006, and New Suggestions, New Propositions, 2005, Borusan, Istanbul.

Image: Tough Document oil on canvas 200 x 160 cm

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B l a k e O ’ B r i e n

www.blakeobrienstudio.com

Image: Untitled/Sans Titre/Ohne Titel oil on wood panel 23.5 x 17.5 inches

114

I was born in Gulfport, Mississippi and received my BFA and MFA from the University of Southern Mississippi and Indiana University, respectively. I have been awarded an Artist Fellowship Grant by the Mississippi Arts Commission, a Chapter Career Award by the National Society of Arts and Letters, and a Mary Jane McIntire Endowed Fellowship by Indiana University. Through a loose focus on subjects as varied as origin stories, sequels, the changing functions of art objects, romantic love, and religious ideologies, I collect disparate elements into indexes of time and culture. I am interested in the repetition of mistakes (another fascist in power, another frustrated text to my mom, another Star Wars movie); I am interested in the signifier’s subjugation over reality (an artwork is valued in terms of money; poverty is aestheticized and commodified in Hobby Lobby; The Olive Garden franchise thrives). My paintings’ parts are pulled from many sources, amalgamating into something that tries to be a whole—but these parts are categorized and codified with no linear order or hierarchy, forming syncretisms in which different traditions of art, politics, and inner life are melded. I aim to find the joinery between these interests; this gesture of cultural and social democratization is not an attempt to level the playing field, it is an attempt to find the underlying connectedness among the parts of the larger whole that is being. I find meaning in my work more often than I impose it, and the meaning is often discovered through the physical process of manipulating and exploring the boundaries of my materials. I place equal value in a material decision as I do in that of an image-subject, and I find my work’s content often lies in the relationship between the material form and the image form. This reactionary approach to both meaning and making often produces paintings with multiple layers, whether semantic or material, of concrete or fresco, and wherein one surface obscures a portion of the one beneath. Through these layers, the paintings act as palimpsests, recording the history of their own making as they also reflect on the histories of Painting with a capital P. This layered surface is important: I think about my paintings as figural objects meant to confront us in our own space, rather than as illusionistic windows, so complicating the object’s interior and exterior reflects its complicated identity as both an object made by an individual as well as one bound to the grandiose history of the medium.

Image: Hermes 3 fresco on burlap on oil, watercolor, and acrylic on linen and wood panel 14 x 11 inches

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M e l i s s a J o s e p h

www.melissajoseph.net

Melissa Joseph is interested in connecting people through shared memories and experiences. Her work addresses themes of memory, family history, and the politics of how we occupy both physical and emotional spaces. Melissa’s work has been shown at the Delaware Contemporary, Woodmere Art Museum, the PAFA Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and featured in New American Paintings, Maake Magazine and was a Hopper Prize finalist. She is currently a member of the BRIClab Video Art residency. One of the most meaningful roles I have taken on is a “keeper of stories” which I accept and tend to with particular care. My father brought with him from India in 1972 a particularly enthusiastic affinity for colors, patterns, and materials. This affinity survived the border unscathed as it was free, invisible, and impossible to confiscate by customs or immigration officials. Funnily, it may be the most tangible part of culture that he shared with us since he tried so hard to assimilate to “American” life and culture. We grew up with rainbows on our furniture, on our walls, on our bodies and on our plates. This constant interaction with shiny, soft, dazzling, crinkly materials forms the infrastructure of my memory, my relationship to the world, and my identity. It was my first language. It is this language that I use in my practice, to search for answers to questions about how bodies are permitted to move through space.

Image: After Thanksgiving Dinner 1983 wet felted wool and sari silk 20 x 23 inches

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C l a i r e W h i t e h u r s t

www.clairewhitehurst.com

Claire Whitehurst is a painter, printmaker and ceramicist living and working in Iowa City, Iowa, where she received her MFA in Painting from the University of Iowa. She was born in Louisiana and raised in Mississippi. Her work explores dreams, memory, time, identity, happiness and loss through color, form, texture and pattern. Paintings, prints, and ceramic sculpture play with the boundaries of emotional performance through formal qualities as well as the metaphysical relationships we have between image and object and what is left unsaid between things. These works on paper speak to dualities, reflections, and myths inflicted upon themselves through drawn lines of color and texture. The organic forms reflect off of themselves in symmetry and content, referencing the interior and exterior simultaneously. Each side speaks to the other in its inaccuracies and deviations, mimicking realness and how the inside and outside of things rarely align. These drawings are poems—representing dreams and memories blending into mirage. Between fact and execution is the state of daydream, and these drawings aim to be contained there.

Image: garden in the moonlight trace monotype and colored pencil on mulberry paper 9 x 11 inches

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A m b e r L a r k s

www.amberlarks.com

Amber Larks is a Seattle-based oil painter, born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. Amber graduated from Washington State University with a business degree and emphasis in fine arts. Her work invites viewers to a world where reality blends with the subconscious. In this dreamlike plane, she furthers the exploration of modern-day reflections. She has shown her work in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Pullman and has been published in a variety of art journals and contemporary art blogs including Visionary Art Collective. She has also been profiled by the Los Angeles Times and enjoys using her artwork as a means to help. With her work, she has supported NAACP , Seattle’s Facing Homelessness , Seattle’s Youthcare for homeless teens, ACLU, Amazon Conservation Association, and the COVID-19 Response Fund for WHO. I find solace that art transcends time; an avenue to connect humanity’s most universal feelings and motifs. My current work focuses on inward exploration of the human condition and communicates this through realities and worlds other than our own. Most of my artistic visions become present during late hours of the night, in-between wake and sleep. Because of this, symbolism has a strong hold in my work. I work to create pieces that encourage reflection on humanity’s unique existence.

Image: Cicadas and Calamites oil on canvas 30 x 40 inches

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A l l a n G a n d h i

www.allangsf.com

Allan Gandhi (Brazil, b. 1989) is a self-taught visual artist and photographer based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has participated in several group exhibitions with photographs and paintings. His practice springs from acute observation of his surroundings and feelings. Through photographs he manages to capture fleeting instances and details from reality that could easily go by unnoticed but acquire sense of mystery. Subtlety is a constant in compositions where human beings seem to numbly inhabit. With their dormant gestures they sometimes fade. Differently from the ethereal quality of the photographs, Gandhi’s paintings have a heavier presence due to their color and thick use of paint. Distorted men and faces are usually the main subjects, drawn repeatedly, almost obsessively, in fast brushstrokes. These male figures are usually alone and entranced by their own dense, sometimes deformed bodies, as if trying to find some definition for how they are or used to be.

Image: Eyebrows oil on canvas 100 x 150 cm

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A i m é e

P a r r o t t

www.aimeeparrott.com

Aimée Parrott is a visual artist who lives and works in London. Her practice spans painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture. Parrott combines painting and printmaking with techniques more traditionally associated with craft to create works that explore her relationship with time, memory, and trace. The translation of semi-recalled sensory memories achieved through varying touch, tone and pace encourage an engagement with the work that unfolds gradually and calls to mind the way in which the exterior world impresses itself upon us – not simply as a series of static solid objects but as shifting perceptual fragments. Parrott (b.1987, Brighton, England) graduated with a Post Graduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools in 2014, she completed her degree at University College Falmouth with a BA Fine Art in 2009. Recent awards include the inaugural Dentons Art Prize in 2016, the Archie Sherman Scholarship 2011-14. Residencies include Villa Lena, Italy, 2020 (postponed); the Cill Rialaig Residency, Ireland, 2017 and The Artists League of New York in 2014. Upcoming Exhibitions include Gaia’s Kidney, Broadway Gallery, Letchworth, and a solo presentation at Mackintosh Lane, London in 2021. Parrott made her curatorial debut in 2019 with All That the Rain Promises and More... for Edinburgh Arts Festival, hosted by Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh. Recent exhibitions include: Studio at 4am, group show at Hastings Contemporary; Kate McMillan and Aimée Parrott, 2020, Two person booth at Zona Maco with Arusha Gallery, Mexico City. Blood, Sea, a solo show at Pippy Houldsworth in 2018; Without moving a muscle, a group show curated by Daniel Lipp and David Noonan, Mackintosh Lane, 2017; 31 Women, a group show at Breese Little, 2017; Implicit Touch, group show at Stadgalerie Villa Dessauer, Bamberg, Germany 2017, and a solo presentation at Breese Little Gallery, London, 2016. Image: The Bath monotype and acrylic on cotton with walnut surround 56 x 41 cm

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C a s s i e

P e n a

www.instagram.com/hi_byeeeeeeeeeeee

Children intuitively translate the world around them through play and experimentation. Without judgement of right or wrong that translation communicates critical information about the nature of being human. Art making for me is an act of serious play that allows me to wrestle with the humor and tragedy of what it means to be alive. I work predominantly in clay because it is simultaneously crude and complicated, and I work with porcelain because I relish making that which is pure and precious into something bulky and crass. Cassie Renee Pena is a self-taught artist, trained therapist, and health department contact tracer based in Philadelphia, PA. She grew up moving back and forth between Texas and North Carolina and eventually moved to the northeast as an adult. During graduate school studying to be a therapist at Appalachian State University she began going to the school’s clay studio, sitting in on classes and acted as if she were an art student. She worked for studio artist Brian Giniewski until the great COVID layoff of 2020, and now spends her days calling people who have COVID and her nights working with clay.

Image: I Put On a Long White Coat porcelain, underglaze, glaze 14 x 15 inches

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J e n n y

H a t a

B l u m e n f i e l d

www.jennyblumenfield.com

Image: SeeingVessel 1 lucite 11.5 x 13 x 12 inches

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Jenny Hata Blumenfield’s ceramic and lucite sculptures disassemble preconceived notions of identity, both past and present, through the symbolic language of the vessel. Significant in its characterization, the vessel acts as a conceptualized structure for the feminine body, cultural ambiguity and liminal space. Often interweaving these symbols through a lucite lens, opacity meets translucency and color meets psychological meaning to create contrasting moments. Blumenfield defines these moments as spaces of the “in-between”, ambiguous in nature and malleable to objectivity. It is through these acts of cutting apart and reconstructing that abstraction lends itself to a language of symbols, much like ideograms. Jenny Hata Blumenfield is a graduate with Honors of the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Ceramics and after more than a decade of living and working in New York, she has recently returned to her hometown of Los Angeles, CA where she currently resides. Previously seen at venues including Christie’s Auction House in New York; The Hole in New York City; Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey; Fisher Parrish Gallery in Brooklyn, New York and the Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles, California. She has been invited to speak as a panelist for the Asia Society in Tokyo, Japan; Lux Art Institute in Encinitas, California and was a resident at the European Ceramic Work Center (EKWC) in Oisterwijk, Netherlands as well as Anderson Ranch Artist in Residence Ceramic program in Snowmass Village, Colorado.

Image: VesselBlue glazed ceramic and lucite

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www.kristinalewis.com

K r i s t i n a L e w i s

Image: Hard Wave Dome tufstone, pigment, acrylic, adhesive, polymer varnish 7.5 x 7.5 x 7 inches

Image: Stone Index hydrocal, fiberglass, gouache, cast acrylic sheet, wood, acrylic (paint), polymer varnish 11 x 6.5 x 6 inches

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Kristina Lewis begins each project by investigating a utilitarian object (or material) that no longer functions. Either the item is already obsolete, broken and abandoned—or she breaks it herself. In this way, she disassociates the object from habitual ways of relating to it. Reconstructing it based on innate characteristics—she attempts to defamiliarize and confuse herself (as well as her audience) in order to re-set its value, a value that is usually abstract or impalpable. Recently, she’s been fascinated more specifically with the future archeological potential of objects—imagining our discards resurrected and studied years from now, even perhaps, protected reverentially. Pre-emptively digging through the ruins, she memorializes everyday detritus—as she imagines people outside of our era might do—attempting to find in things whatever is invulnerable to time or wreckage. Kristina Lewis received her BA from the University of Colorado and her MFA from California College of the Arts. She currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area and has exhibited her work locally at Bass & Reiner, Johansson Projects, SOEX, Sonoma State University Art Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Oakland Museum of California’s Sculpture Court at City Center, and Park Life. Her work has also been exhibited at Next Art Fair in Chicago and Aqua Art Fair in Miami—as well as being included in solo and group shows in Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles.

Image: Ripped Stone tufstone, pigment, epoxy clay, wood, acrylic, polymer varnish 12 x 7.5 x 2 inches

Image: Hard Stack hydrocal, fiberglass, pigment, epoxy clay, wood, acrylic, polymer varnish 15 x 7 x 2 inches

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H e a t h e r M e r c k l e

www.heathermerckle.com

Image: Hairy corner #1, executive suite acrylic and hair on paper 11 x 14 inches

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Heather Merckle is a multidisciplinary artist based in Queens, NY. Her work merges art and science through an overlap of factual research and imaginative investigation into areas of particle physics, gravity, and the perception of time. Merckle holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited in New York, most recently, with Trestle Gallery, NARS Foundation, and SPRING/BREAK Art Show, as well as internationally in Berlin, Reykjavík and London. Merckle has been featured in several publications including New American Paintings Issues 77 and 83, Studio Visit Magazine, and Maake magazine Issue 6. Over the past two years, she has been an artist in residence with coGalleries and the Institut für Alles Mögliche, both in Berlin, Germany; Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA; Outpost Artists Resources, Queens, NY; SÍM, Reykjavík, Iceland; and Lumen, Atina, Italy. Invoking a sense of humor in our mundane, everyday spaces, my recent series, “Watch out for those hairy corners!” invites a closer look at the accumulations of living and domesticating. Using human hair and acrylic on paper these paintings are a continued exploration of my fascination with piles and time. The paintings show different spaces: executive suite, vintage bath, doll house, bunker, etc., cropped and focused onto areas often overlooked. In these pieces I’m working with what we physically shed of ourselves and how it collects and commingles with other detritus in the corners and recesses of spaces in which we exist. These accumulations build up, shift around, expand and recede, performing as a vessel of time on a minuscule scale.

Image: Hairy corner #2, vintage bath acrylic and hair on paper 11 x 14 inches

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M a r i s h a L o z a d a

www.marishalozada.com

I’m interested in how acts of commemoration annotate, disrupt, or reimagine remembered histories. I am fascinated at how intergenerational attempts to preserve longstanding cultural memories often revise—or even overwrite—the past. In my work, I reconstruct and embellish personal memories to connect them with progressive understandings of spirituality, relationships, and remembrance. To build loose autobiographical narratives about irrational fears, adolescent fixations, bisexuality, and performative self-image, I layer and fragment motifs drawn from a personal archive that includes childhood fanart, teenage diaries, and Eastern Orthodox iconography. My painting incorporates handcrafts such as rug hooking, needlepoint, and woodworking for the meditative and ritualistic nature of their processes. I further annotate images with homespun textiles, toylike carvings, and trinket remnants that range from newly-made to pulled from childhood collections to purchased from thrift stores, ultimately blurring the line between relic and recreation. Decorative trompe l’oeil techniques borrowed from set painting interfere with these forms to underscore the theatricality of commemoration. By embedding and repeating abstracted layers of disparate imagery, I redraw the past with a gaze at once irreverent and empathetic. My work releases memories from their original contexts and builds them revised surroundings, ultimately suggesting new examples of what I deem worthy of veneration. Marisha Lozada (b. 1994 in Scranton, PA) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Since earning her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, she has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Providence, and Italy. Image: Burial 2 graphite, oil pastel, and colored pencil on paper 11 x 15 inches

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A m y

K i m

K e e l e r

www.amykimkeeler.com

Amy Kim Keeler was born in Los Angeles, CA where she currently lives and works. Keeler creates abstractions out of cardboard and fiber-based materials. Through a series of handmade stitches, patterns and shapes arise reminiscent of formations derived from nature—light and sound waves, striations in rock formations, water flow and the paths it cuts. Informed by concepts in Anthroposophist philosophy and the explorations of Goethe, Keeler’s works acknowledge that only through a connection to natural rhythms and imperfections are we able to imagine, grow, learn and progress. Keeler’s works have been exhibited at galleries and institutions including Fortnight Institute, New York, NY; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; Lowell Ryan Projects, Los Angeles, CA; San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, San Jose, CA; and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA. Amy has been a resident artist at Pocoapoco, Oaxaca, Mexico; and upcoming residencies include the Icelandic Textile Center, Blönduós, Iceland and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine.

Image: Magnetic Mountain cotton thread, corrugated cardboard 16h x 14w inches

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S a l l y S c o p a

www.sallyscopa.com

Image: Purple Tangle acrylic on panel 9 x 12 inches

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A “tangle” is a snare or a mishap, yet “to tangle” with someone or something means to confront a gritty problem head-on. This dual sense of the word—which not only describes a snare, but also the process of facing one’s ensnarer—guides my approach to painting and living at the moment. Now more than ever, I am fascinated by the human ability to tangle with and adapt to difficult circumstances: to cultivate a sense of freedom within limitations, both in art and in life. In my work, I consider this question of adaptation, of “making do”, formally, by approaching the frame of each painting as a limitation, barrier, or obstacle. I paint layers of dense, swirling marks that push against the frame, generating a sense of tension and motion. My “Tangle” paintings are primarily formal experiments, and do not explicitly speak to processes of adaptation. However, they are very much a product of limiting circumstances in my own life. Like many artists, I had difficulty obtaining materials at the beginning of quarantine. The “Tangle” pieces were originally tests for larger paintings, which I found myself unable to make. Surprisingly, the longer these small tests sat around the studio, and the longer I kept them company, the more I felt tempted to return to them, to rework them, and ultimately to frame them. In these paintings, loops and curves crowd inside a rectilinear frame, but not to suggest claustrophobia or confinement. Instead, I see my paintings as deeply optimistic. Just as playful mark-making and vivid color can occur within these tiny frames, invention and exuberance can occur under difficult circumstances. Sally Scopa (b. 1990) is a painter from San Francisco, California. She graduated from Harvard University in 2013 with a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies, and from Stanford University in 2019 with an MFA in Art Practice. Recent shows include solo exhibitions at Eve Leibe Gallery (London), Biquini Wax EPS (Mexico City), and Disneyland Paris (Melbourne, upcoming). She has been awarded residencies at SOMA in Mexico City and the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France. She currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is a visiting lecturer in Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History.

Image: Rose Tangle acrylic on panel 9 x 12 inches

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S u n g

H w a

K i m

www.sunghwakim.com

Image: Nocturne-Waiting for morning to arrive like a new era acrylic on canvas 58 x 42 inches

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Sung Hwa Kim (b. 1985, Seoul, South Korea) received his MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2012, and his BFA from The Art Institute of Boston in 2008. After graduating from MICA, Kim attended the Windy Mowing Painting Residency in Halifax, Vermont and was a semi-finalist for the prestigious Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Kim has exhibited his work throughout the northern east coast in Maryland, Massachusetts and New York. Since 2014 Kim has been featured in many sources including ArtMaze Magazine, Hyperallergic, Young Space, Friend of The Artist and CHAOS Magazine. Kim moved to New York City in 2014 where he currently lives and works. It’s been difficult for me to create anything this year. Especially under the current situation and knowing what everybody has gone through. There was a lot of anger, anxiety, and fear building up caused by an uncertain future and the system. I felt somewhat silly to make something and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who felt this way. Where do I go from here? I still don’t know. Ever since the pandemic started I stopped using any public transportation system. I’ve been using Citi Bikes and I don’t know how it all started but that’s when I’d go for long late-night bike rides. It was helping me not to lose my composure. That’s when the nocturne series occurred in my studio. It’s not about art for art’s sake or concern about any trends. It’s something that happened in my studio without any intention. It was the only thing that brought peace and comfort for me and I hope it can do it for the others.

Image: Nocturne: This love will keep us through blinding of the eyes, silence in the ears, and darkness of the mind until it’s time acrylic on canvas 36 x 30 inches

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P a i g e P e r k i n s

www.paigeperkins.co.uk

Image: Song of Amergin oil on canvas 91.5 x 76 cm

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Paige Perkins’ work reflects a personal folklore where the borders between human and animal, fantasy and reality dissolve. The paintings reveal a visionary world where time and space unfold with a strange logic that springs from darker sources, including myths, pagan mysticism and fairy tales. Perkins attended the Turps Banana Art School from 2014 to 2016 and holds an MFA from University of Brighton 2006. She lives and works in London and is represented by Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh.

Image (left):

Image (right):

Wandering oil on canvas 76.5 x 61 cm

Abide with Me oil on canvas 92 x 77 cm

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X u D a r o c h a

www.xudarocha.com

Born and raised in China, I immigrated to the US in 2001 after I graduated art school in Shanghai. Having experienced the two distinctive and seemingly opposite cultures of the East and the West, I have become drawn to deeper connections, universal symbols and languages that speak to us all. “What’s the most personal is the most universal”; I believe the integration of the self brings about the integration of the nations and cultures. With intent to challenge the boundaries of reality, I have developed an intimate approach to depict dream states and surreal visions. Animals, natures and figures from myth, collective consciousness and current cultures are coexisting, morphing into each other, and creating harmonious images and objects without the need to make hierarchy. The innate balance inherited in processes and chaos organically unfolds as I work on many pieces, paintings, drawings and sculptures, at once. The spaces and the structures of paintings and sculptures are often cross-referenced between the mediums. The reflections and conversations in different stages of the pieces create possibilities for greater freedom and alchemy.

Image: Spellbound acrylic and oil on canvas 36 x 50 inches

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S e b a s t i a n M i t t l

www.sebastianmittl.com

Born 1991. 2020 Diploma Art and Communication, University of Applied Arts Vienna. Since 2016 studying Painting at Henning Bohl class, University of Applied Arts Vienna. Lives and works in Vienna. 2016: Artist in Residence, Paliano, Italy; Young Art Auction, 21er Haus, Vienna. 2017: Essence 2017 (Group Show); Vienna Contemporary (Group Show). 2018: Unknown Symbol, Gallery Wolke, Tokyo (Solo Show); Harsh Astral - The Radiants 2, Green Tea Gallery at Francesca Pia, Zurich (Group Show); No Reptiles, JUSTICE, Vienna (Group Show). 2019: Crust Flow, STAR 1/2, Vienna (Group Show); The Swamp of Lerna, Warehouse9, Copenhagen (Group Show). 2020: “While you were out”, Cafe Alt Wien, Vienna (Group Show); “the lorries are speaking”, Sinkhole Project, Vienna. Julius Pristauz about the practice of Sebastian Mittl: Mostly working within painting and sculpture, Sebastian Mittl creates works that unapologetically intersect not only these two mediums but also the origins of their content, as he draws inspiration from the often opposed fields of science and spiritualism. Besides tapping into shamanism, animism and the imagined vivification of objects, he makes use of optical illusions to imagine three-dimensional shapes as well as clearly depicting them. With each new work feeding into an ever-growing language of a personal science-fiction, his pieces continue to remind of psychedelic art and special effects. Exactly in this manner of adapting reality in order to construct fantasies but at the same time questioning mechanisms of their becoming, his pieces transport a message about our individual perception’s sublimity and uncanniness.

Image: Alien Arcade 92 x 120 cm oil on canvas

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R a y H w a n g

www.rayhwangart.com

Ray Hwang (b. 1992) is an artist from Los Angeles currently living and working in New York City. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2016 and has participated in exhibitions throughout NY and the surrounding area since then. Using a combination of comedy, cartoon imagery and personal artifacts, he creates work that often speaks to his relationship with his cultural upbringing as a second generation Asian American. These artifacts, objects or symbols that hold significance in personal history, are used to weave his own narratives that reference how humor and violence have frequently intersected throughout his life.

Image: grappling with the euphoric paranoia that guides your Sixth sense acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 inches

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C a r m e n C h a p a r r o

www.carmenchaparro.com

Carmen Chaparro was born in Dayton, Ohio and raised in south Florida. She attended SAIC for her undergraduate degree. Trouble in paradise is the easiest way to put the work. I am forever interested in painting as it relates to being a voyeur. Being a native of Florida yet feeling like an outsider has led to my making paintings that are looking in at possibly vulnerable and unknowing subjects. Amorphous bodies and figures without identity populate the works. The work is using simple signifiers and color to place these figures by the poolside, you can see this most clearly in the shiny railings that confuse the lighting and punctuate the forms of an ever present pool water blue. The pool for me is more specifically a residential one, a presumed semi-private place that can also be home to exhibitionists. There’s often backs turned, and dark foliage that separates and obscures the subjects, that often wear nothing more than a small thong, from the viewer. As of recent I’m focusing more on inanimate objects taking the place of the body. This second layer of separation from the subjects lets me as a painter think more about the paintings formally and play. In these paintings the subjects exist in more of a vacuum. Ideas of images and flatness vs seeing are at the forefront with more simple compositions. In these works, pots and dogs with slick limbs and flesh like sheen exist in a matte void that gives a nod to the poolside. Material wise, oil paint is a quick connection to flesh but still holds the mark of the hand. Most of the work is finished in glossy walnut oil to push the notion of skin and a slick wetness.

Image: Cooling off oil, acrylic and flashe on canvas 52 x 52 inches

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M a u d

M a d s e n

www.maudmadsen.com

Maud Madsen (born in 1993, Edmonton, Alberta) is a New York based artist. Madsen holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alberta (2016), and a Master of Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art (2020). She is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and is a current Chubb Fellow at the New York Academy of Art. Madsen’s work focuses on sanitized group narratives versus messier truths, embarrassing admissions, and taboo topics. It examines the tension between an idealized collective memory and a singular truth; her current series features childhood spaces and objects, and a character named Chicken Skin who externalizes her bodily insecurities. The pieces evoke feelings of discomfort through the use of disembodied adult figures complicit in childhood experiences and insecurities, bright but off-putting colour palettes, and dysmorphic bodily proportions.

Image: Need a Ride? acrylic on panel 48 x 36 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. 11 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