Artist Daniel Alfaya lives and works in Medellin, Colombia. Here are some of his words:

“Textiles, Berber Tapestries from Morocco as well as Indigenous handbags in Colombia are a source of inspiration, but so are painters like Klee and Albers teachers of the Bauhaus. I could make an endless list of artists who at some point have influenced me … Matisse, Diebenkorn, Scully, Chillida...

“I work on paper, mixed technique, abstract and figurative, I am interested in composition, balance, I have no conscious aspirations to convey an idea, not even a feeling. I look for a decorative object and have learned from the makers and decorators.”

“I was born in a small city in North Africa, Ceuta (Spain) in 1974. Until I was 8 years old I lived in different countries, although the most vivid memories are of Fez (Morocco). I did my high school studies and a photography course in Madrid (Spain), one of the best cities to admire painting. At the age of 20, in 1994, I moved to Belgium and studied Fine Arts, 2 years at the Academie Royale de Beux Arts in Brussels. In 1997 I returned to Spain. In 1999 I returned to Morocco and in 2001 I traveled for the first time to Colombia where I settled for good in 2006 in Envigato, next to Medellín. In 2009, together with my wife Diana Cardona, we set up the environmental solutions company Kontrolgrun SAS which occupied most of my working time until 2019. In 2022, , with a daughter in college, and a teenage son, I began to focus on my Art.

“From my early days I have three memories: Alejandro Lamas, who was a professor of photography at a cultural center in Madrid that I went to in my teens, taught us that dividing each side of the photograph into three parts created four imaginary points to which we had to pay attention in the composition. What it was all about was playing.

“A few years later, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, Franz Mabille, in the last year before his retirement, he explained to me why unconsciously I had signed on the upper left margin in a drawing, to compensate for all the space that was on the sheet and attract the look and balance the void.

“After leaving the Academy, I returned to Madrid. I attended a workshop by Venancio Blanco. He made 3 drawings of a skull in 20 seconds. "When choosing one of them over the others you start working, minimum 5 minutes every day", was his recommendation.”

These paintings are made with cut out pieces of brown paper, and a mix of oil stick, acrylic, dirt water, ink, and watercolor.

Daniel’s work has been exhibited widely in Europe and Colombia.

www.ferntapfel.com

www.paulbowen.org

Paul Bowen, who grew up in a seaside town in Wales, lived and worked near the waterfront in Provincetown on Cape Cod for 30 years. He has always been interested in material with a history—wood he has scavenged that was once part of ships, houses, salt works, barrels, cable drums, or crates. He has also worked with ships' flags, tar, canvas, rope and other marine detritus. His drawings and prints derive their imagery from his environment and he has created his own inks from squid, Xerox toner and walnuts.

His small-scale sculptures, constructed from wood fragments, use limited means such as stacking, piling, and simple carpentry and often appear to float across or torque away from the surface of the wall. He also builds large-scale sculptures, primarily commissioned for private homes and museums, with massive timbers, like those culled from old beer vats and other salvaged sources.

Since moving to Vermont with his wife, many of his drawings merge images of covered bridges with wharfs, reflecting his new environment as well as that of the Cape. His new sculptures combine sea-worn wood he has gathered from Provincetown's beaches with wood from the Wilder Dam in New Hampshire (sometimes chewed by beavers or stained with iron that has leached from surrounding rocks).

Bowen has been a recipient of fellowships from the Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Artist's Resource Trust.

Roger Brouard’s work is a synthesis, grounded in memory from building wooden lobster boats and houses on the coast of Maine and Nova Scotia. From the daily routine of working with wood, from steam bending oak for frames, to cedar for planking on boats and framing to finish on houses.  Working in rural coastal communities, boarded on the North Atlantic, through the seasons with their unique ‘coastal culture’ laid the groundwork for his sculpture and works on paper.

In 2002 Brouard launched a tool bag company. On the long flights from NY to China, he started his ink and wite-out drawings, to record ideas for sculptures.

Brouard, (born 1946) has exhibited his work at the Drawing Center in NY, Brick Lane Gallery in London, University of Maine and other New England galleries. While living in NYC for 3 summers, Brouard helped the artist H. C. Westermann with the building of his house and studio in Brookfield, CT.

i was raised in a family of non-artists. a family of many parts and blends and one of kinds. the core of most of my work has been defined by this. i have tried to find a way through art to help make sense of what was hard to see.

www.deanbrownart.com

www.alexcallender.com

“My current work proposes an alternative Atlantic history, performed in scenes by women channeled from colonial painting imagery and archives. Remixing the works of Agostino Brunias, an 18th-century painter who depicted (for European audiences) various scenes of daily life and social class in the Caribbean, I reconstruct parts of these works to explore representations of gender, racialization, and the development of consumer buying power as a primary marker of identity. My interest in using historical source material is not to reanimate the past, but to consider how artworks that “naturalize” certain types of people (women, people of color, and migrants) to representations of cultural assimilation, are often depicting economic narratives that attempt to normalize inequity and invisible labor. In this world, I play with modes of science fiction as a tool of translation to think about the colonial project. Conditions of Sci-Fi mutability allow for time travel, multiple embodiment, and hybrid spaces to complicate identity narratives and interrupt history. The exhibition considers how identities are formed in love and in resistance to the brutality of colonial world making.

In Midnight Dialogues, an ongoing series of drawings, I explore the historical lineages of drawing and the invention of the avatar as a political tool. In these drawn works I reference tableaus from the Brésil Panoramiques and other French panoramic wallpapers. These signature printed materials were a feature of Victorian luxury home design, and would often depict scenes originally drafted as ethnographic studies, or travelogues by colonial Europeans abroad, thus re-presenting people who existed on the margins of colonial time. This panoramic imagery became a visual way of transporting people as ideas, or avatars, through time and into a commodity form, one commingled with Western political imagination of gender and race. I use the formats of panoramic wallpapers and maquette-style drawings to create a series that narrates a fictive kinship and family history, embodied by a line of women during the colonial period who merge into a hydra figure to consolidate their power and resistance towards the state. In these drawings I think about political identity and embodiment, referencing how black labor was absorbed and constitutive to the Western optics and aesthetics of free will and identity construction. Through this project I have begun to think more about contemporary moments of economic speculation, and how these periods mirror earlier episodes of land extraction, embodied labor, and economic disparity being performed as identity for global markets.”

Alex Callender, b.1980 in New York City, graduated with her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2005. Callender works in the mediums of painting, drawing and installation, and has shown nationally and internationally and completed residencies with art institutions such as Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Vermont Studio Center, Urban Glass in Brooklyn and DRAWinternational in France. Her work is held in the collections of the American Embassy in Kyrgyzstan and the Tides Institute and Museum of Art. Alex Callender currently lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Smith College.

www.donnabellecasis.com

I am fascinated by visual perception and how meaning is derived from what we see. I look for hidden geometries which may connect discrete perspectives to form a greater whole. My current paintings explore the relationship of personal identity to visual systems of signification in both ancient and modern cultures. I draw from various sources such as Filipino tribal tattoos and textiles, facial recognition software, cosmology and the philosophy of metaphysics, among others. Filipino tribal imagery is tied to storytelling, marks of accomplishment, and societal roles. Facial recognition software maps physical characteristics which determine one’s visual identity. My interest in the tangible universe and what transcends experience helps me understand my place in the world and beyond.

I am a Filipina-American artist living and working in Western Massachusetts. I earned an MFA in painting from the University of Washington. work has been included in national and international group and solo exhibitions, most recently at Platform Gallery, Albany Center Gallery, Tacoma Art Museum, Newport Art Museum, ChaShaMa NYC, Geoffrey Young Gallery, LABSpace, Carroll and Sons Gallery, Boeckercontemporary, Andrew Edlin Gallery, among others. I have received numerous awards and grants, including the Neddy Artist Fellowship for painting granted by the Behnke Foundation and grants from the Northampton Arts Council/Massachusetts Cultural Council. My work is included in several public and private collections.

You can hear about area art happenings on my ArtBeat Report segment on the Bill Newman Show on Fridays on WHMP. I am a Co-Curator of The ArtSalon, and a Board Member of BOMBYX Center for Arts & Equity. I am also the founder and producer of Florence Night Out, an annual one-night art street festival celebrating community through creativity in Florence, MA.

series of pen on vintage ledger paper drawings.

all $400 each.

www.tibichelcea.net

The “Circuit Floorplan” series is inspired by common symbols from electronic design. The schematic and the layout design are the two main stages in electronic board design. In the schematic stage, the circuit is drawn and verified for electrical correctness; in the layout stage, the circuit is laid out as a circuit board and verified for mechanical correctness. “Floorplaning” is a stage in between these two, where a drawing is created to indicate general areas where blocks of circuitry are to be placed on the board, thus bridging the gap between the schematic drawing and the physical layout. In this series, I have used the idea of floorplan drawings as a springboard to explore the graphic potential of electronic symbols.

This series ‘Faulty Electrodes’ is repurposing faulty/misprinted electronics teaching materials as the basis for paintings. These works are painted on carbon paper (a slightly conductive paper) used in teaching college grade students to measure voltage gradients; the silvery areas are screenprinted metallic electrodesto which electric currents are applied in order to create these voltaic gradients.However, these particular pieces of paper were misprinted. Thus, these works, taking theirtitles from these faulty printed electrodes, allude to the correctness (or not) of our electronic tools.

Tibi Chelcea takes elements and processes of traditional art disciplines, such as printmaking and drawing, and combines them with parts and operations of digital technologies. His work demonstrates unexpected correlations between old and new technologies, and issues of consumption, serial design, automated vs labor-intensive processes, are brought to the fore. His works have been exhibited throughout the United States (New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Iowa, and other states) as well as Mexico, Egypt and Brazil, and has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and an Iowa Artist Fellowship. He was born in Romania and came to the United States to pursue a PhD in Computer Science. He has received several awards, fellowships, and patents in the field of electronic and digital design, which continues to be a major source of inspiration for his art.

https://www.brantnerdeatley.com/

“I want to do that” is a continuing thread in the 30 year practice of artist Brantner DeAtley. Whether he is searching to infuse a lump of clay with animal spirit  or untangling the emotion of an imaginary landscape there is no part of art history that can’t be filtered through his process and explored.

“Working with clay in those formative grade school years, taught me to lose time. I learned to focus, to melt into the material and the process. Clay was my gateway to creation, a lifetime of making paintings and objects. This body of ceramic work is my first in 25 years. It’s still influenced by the funk ceramics, Bob Arneson David Gillhooly, I had loved in college. But I have  accumulated so many more obsessions from George Ohr, Staffordshire figurines, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Alice Mackler,  Mississipian effigy jars, southern face jugs, the list is long. These influences are entry points or launching pads that inspire me to begin.  I am bringing the investigation of the immediate surroundings that I share with my family and the wildlife that pass  through it out from within this material. Working quickly to capture the idea of a moment.

“ From these paintings I am looking to coax the image from within the canvas to evoke the feeling of a moment. The elements are re-imagined from my daily walks through the woods where I concentrate on looking and being present with the rocks and trees, mosses and water. We have lived on the same hill for quite a while now, watching the small changes  from year to year. Birds, Bears and Bobcats returning to their familiar territories. My creative life ebbs and flows with these changes.”

“The beginning intention for the sculptural animals was to find a use for all of the leftover house paint and other miscellaneous materials that tend to accumulate around my home and studio, most of the materials used would otherwise end up in a landfill. For many of these creatures I have used old stuffed animals that were my son’s and then were passed onto the dogs to play with. This handling has imbued the objects ,used as armatures, with energy, tying them to the original influences, folk animal craft and weathered antique objects.”

“As I am writing and thinking of these marred surfaces I can’t help but think of the devastation our human impact is having on our world.  A mindset that equates monetary gain with progress has no understanding of the importance of a symbiotic relationship with the natural world. We live in a world where the trees are talking to each other through the mycelium that surrounds their roots. To me that is a magic I would like to celebrate, not pave over.”

Brantner has shown at The Geoffrey Young Gallery, LABspace, Ober Gallery, Exit Art, The Oresman Gallery at Smith College, The Ely Center for the Arts and Carroll and Sons.

His work is in the collection of the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA. As well as many private collections across the country.

A graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University he now lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife, son and many animals. 

www.recorder.com (click for article)

For 40 years, Tim De Christopher has been carving in stone. He has a long list of public, private and corporate commissions - from carving gargoyles for the facade of the Jewish Museum in New York City to twenty-four 4’x4’ panels for the Huffington Library in Culver, Indiana. As well as a wide ranging exhibition history, including the DeCordova Museum and a 30 year retrospective at the Amy H. Carberry Gallery in Springfield, MA. Tim was born in 1954 and grew up outside of San Francisco. He attended The Cooper Union School of Art, and a year at Columbia University School of Architecture before being drawn away to follow his love of stone.

I was not surprised that two artists identified by Tim as significantly influencing him are Simon Rodia, who over a 33 year period created Watts Towers in Los Angeles, Ca and A.G. Rizzoli, whose visionary architectural drawings were first discovered in the 1990’s. What unites these artists is a strong drive, a distinct voice, and an obsession to get the work out. Out of their heads, and into the world. And Tim is a master of filling stone with magic, lightness, history, humor and humanity.

“We love to use phrases “etched in stone”, with an ironic wink, but to me it has a vital immediacy. I am a stone carver and I tell stories in stone. We know our ancient history largely from artifacts in stone left behind by past civilizations. I want to follow that tradition but with a contemporary twist. My vision is to capture events, general and specific moments in time, that relay milestones in our shared human experience, events that have marked episodes in our collective history. “ - Tim Dechristopher

www.rebeccadoughty.com

“The animals of childhood, both real and imagined, were my closest companions. They were confidants, comforters, clowns, heroes. They stood by me and stood in for me. I see them now as stand-ins for all of us, still navigating life’s comedies and tragedies, bearing the weight of our anxious world.”

Alan Doyle is a self taught artist who lives in Wicklow , Ireland. His charcoal works on paper, inhabited by elongated figures and animals are drawn from his subconscious and provide a portal into a world that exists beyond time and just below the surface. This is Doyle’s first exhibition in the U.S. His work is represented in the UK by the Henry Boxer Gallery, home of artists Madge Gill & Adolph Wolfi and other European Art Brute masters.

Here are excerpts from an article written by Colin Rhodes, Hunan Normal University, for a French Publication.

Alan Doyle's recent black and white drawings seem to emanate from a primal realm. His figures and creatures are autochthons revealed for twenty-first century eyes. They are very much of the earth. They belong absolutely to the landscapes they occupy and from which they seemingly arise. The artist achieves all this with a striking economy of means – sometimes even pictorial clues to the places his figures inhabit are absent, and yet the viewer is led to believe, somehow, in their existence in an activated space that forever hovers at the ill-defined boundary between the mundane visual world and unformed realm of eternal form-making.

Each drawing characteristically contains only a limited number of participants, ranging from human and animal figures to hybrid creatures, that only intensify the sense of an ancient psychic elsewhere.

Doyle was born in 1984 in County Meath, Ireland, an area well known for its prehistoric monuments. The third of four children, he grew up mostly in County Wicklow, south of Dublin, which he still calls home today. His schooling was disrupted at times because of ill-health, and he was unable to fully participate in the kinds of physical play in which most children engage. These solitary periods actually fed his early discovery of drawing and making things. Time spent in artistic pursuits gave form and structure to the passing hours and enabled him to engage in acts of constant creation and recreation of imaginative worlds that reflected his developing personal vision.

Although he applied to study art, his disrupted schooling had left him without the qualifications deemed necessary for his preferred course. He enrolled on another, but soon dropped out when he realized it would not deliver the things he wanted from art making. Disheartened by it all, for a few years he concentrated instead on a regular job. But the call to make art and music was irresistible. He gave up the security of paid employment and from that time on devoted himself full time to the creative vocation.

The mystery in Doyle’s drawings is reinforced by his reluctance to give them titles. This is not a result of any desire on his part to obfuscate, but rather to allow individual viewers scope to interrogate and interpret images in the ways in which they might speak as directly to them as they do him. “I’ve always been apprehensive about leading the viewer too much,” he tells us, “I like to leave room for interpretation and for people to bring their own ideas to the work.” There is, to be sure, a certain organicist belief here in the communicative power of his drawings: “I love words and poetry,” he says, “And I read and write. But I like the images to speak for themselves.”

Alexandra Duprez (b. 1974, Quimper, France) is an established contemporary artist living in Douarnenez in western Brittany. During a one-year stay in Australia at the age of seventeen, Alexandra discovered Aboriginal painting and so began to paint herself. On her return, she attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Quimper.

Alexandra dedicates herself exclusively to drawing and painting from the top of her house where her studio lies.

The artist is also represented by Aarne Anton Gallery in New York and Galerie du Lendemain in Paris. She has also collaborated with publishing houses including Esperluète in Belgium and Chose Commune in France.

I hope you will accept that I wish not to speak specifically about my paintings, my intentions, or what you might hope to see in my work. The paintings stand on their own and speak for themselves. 

I will say something more generally that I hope is not too obvious. Painting is a visual medium first and foremost. It is a language with its own peculiarities. I would ask that you look at paintings with an open mind and attempt to engage any work before you. There can just as easily be a failure of the artist to make something compelling as there is the failure of a viewer to dismiss and not seriously engage the artist’s work. I say this with the hope that your experience with the visual arts can be as rich and rewarding as possible. 

Billy Evans was born in Massachusetts and he earned his BFA in Painting at Massachusetts College of Art where he studied painting and sculpture. He currently lives and works in Cape Ann, MA. He relocated from Carmel, CA several years ago, where he had his own gallery for thirteen years.

Evans’ paintings can be found in hundreds of private collections all over the world. His work has been collected by many public institutions including; the Denver Art Museum, the Rose Art Museum, the Heckscher Art Museum, and the Mississippi Museum of Art. His works on paper (www.evansgallery.org) executed in vibrant colors, continue his exploration of shape and form, and are derived from everyday life and the world around him, from which he finds continuous inspiration.

The current body of work reflects a desire to explore color and its relationship to emotion and visual power. Shedding some of my self-imposed parameters, the approach in these paintings allows me to express a non-verbal human experience freely. I am striving to trust my intuition and embrace ambiguity and imperfection in an effort to convey feeling. For me, color composed in these abstract formats conveys unexpressable feelings similar to the way music does. Documenting my impulses includes painting, editing, overpainting, and adjusting over time to to create visual objects that gives form to fleeting sensations that reflect my outer and inner experiences in this time and circumstance. For me, it provides a way of discovering balance within circumstances of uncertainty.

“My recent practice begins by gathering images from outside sources, such as a film still or a photograph I have taken while walking through Philadelphia and the surrounding landscape. I’m drawn in by the beauty of old buildings, the secret history left within the structures and the people that previously or currently inhabit them. I initiate my process with these elements and a hazy image of a finished piece. However the painting itself always takes over and after weeks, months or years of layering, scraping, and erasing, the final painting reveals itself.”

Griffin received his B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in Painting and Printmaking in 2008. Griffin’s work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, including at the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, PA. From 2017 until 2019, he was associated with The Professional Artist Membership Program at the Mainline Art Center. Today, Griffin’s paintings are included in private collections across the country and abroad.

www.annahelpler.com

“My involvement with the cyanotype process began in the summer of 2014 while I was teaching a collage workshop at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, Colorado. A fellow instructor working in the next studio incorporated cyanotype into her experimental drawing curriculum. Her students placed objects and film negatives on photo sensitized paper for brief exposures to the Colorado sun. As I watched them work, it occurred to me that one could also make cyanotype prints with paper cutouts. I proceeded to cut images of figures, buildings, plants, and animals out of opaque and translucent paper and organized them on clear acetate. I was essentially constructing photo negatives with scissors and tape.

“In 2019, I began to make “cyanotype collages” by cutting up misprinted cyanotypes I had accumulated over the previous four years and reassembling them into new compositions. This approach reminded me of quiltmakers who recycle scraps of printed fabric to construct fresh compositions. Indeed, my interest in collage parallels a long fascination with traditional quilts, especially those featuring pictorial appliqué. Making these collages, I felt connected to those pictorial quiltmakers.”

David Hornung is a painter and collage artist whose work has been widely exhibited. He is the author of Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers (Laurence King Pub Ltd.). This textbook, currently in its third edition, has been translated into six languages and is used in art schools and private studios around the world. David has held professorships at Indiana University, Skidmore College, The Rhode Island School of Design and Adelphi University.

“I think painting is the most marvelous activity humans have invented. With color, shape, line and tone, the beauty, the mystery, the sadness , and the joy of life can be distilled into a silent rectangle. The right placement of these few ingredients can make a true connection, and the meaning we all seek.”

A resident of the Pioneer Valley since 1992, Amy “BannerQueen” Johnquest is a mixed media artist currently residing in Holyoke. Preferring to work low tech and hand wrought, Johnquest creates in a wide variety of disciplines including installations, murals, and set designs. By using found objects, vintage photos, and textiles as her base, Johnquest (AKA the BannerQueen) alters and paints over these materials creating transcendent atmospheres. Ranging from the sublime to cosmic jokes, Johnquest likes to consider the big picture (life and death) in a reverent yet playful way. Johnquest obtained the moniker of BannerQueen in 1999 when she began painting sideshow banner themed art with a pop culture twist. Her work has been widely collected and shown. Much of her art continues to evoke a carnivalesque feel and it often advertises things that are not for sale or perhaps may not even exist.

Jeffrey Katz is a principal at C&J Katz Studio in Boston. Started in 1984 with his wife, Cheryl Katz, the studio is engaged in a broad range of design including residential, institutional, hospitality, retail, corporate, exhibition, and furniture.

Jeffrey studied architecture at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard. He has been teaching at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) since 1980. He first taught in the Architecture Department, but after a hiatus to establish the studio, he returned to RISD and is currently a Senior Critic in the Interior Architecture Department—a subject more closely aligned with his professional practice.

Jeffrey began making art in the late 1990’s. He started out by taking painting classes with David Andrus at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. For many summers since, he’s been taking classes at the Fine Arts work Center (FAWC): painting with Jim Peters and Hanneline Rogeberg, watercolor with Linda Bond, and printmaking with Daniel Heyman, Peik Larsen, Jim Stroud, Bert Yarborough and Vicky Tomayko.

While he has worked on copper and zinc plates, most of his prints are monotypes. In the past year, he has had four week-long residencies in the Print Shop at FAWC where he has been working on a series that explores layering and perspective. Using a reductive process, the prints allow a perception of depth that would be difficult to achieve in drawing.

At his art studio in Truro, he has been working on a series of plaid drawings. How design and decoration intersect is a constant topic at both C&J Katz Studio and for his classes at RISD. Paper bags seem standard, perhaps even undesigned, but tear them open into the flat plane that they once were, and each opens differently. There is a certain irony in embellishing them.

Back to his architectural roots, both the prints and the drawings employ grids and drafting, and an exploration of surface and space.

https://toraikeita.com/

Every day I draw, take pictures, and write poems. Even if asked why, i can’t explain. Anyway, art is essential for my life. But, I have never been educated in art. It's all self-taught. Many foreign countries have conflicts going on to this day. discrimination and violence too. Why those won't disappear around the world? The moment you see something beautiful, your heart becomes peaceful. I think that world peace can begin today. I hope my art piece will make people's mind peaceful.

torai keita was born and lives in japan.

My work explores perception and memory – specifically how the information received through each is fragmented and elusive, yet made whole through our bodies. In this way our experience of the world oscillates between dissolution and synthesis. Ultimately, I want the images to speak to a broad audience; using familiar terms to challenge our assumed relationships to the world.

The subject of my work is landscape; sites and spaces that resonate on a personal, aesthetic, and emotional level. The raw materials for these include reference photos, sketches, color swatches, written descriptions – anything I can use to reassemble and reconstitute the experience. Different elements become synchronized in one image: Multiple points of view are combined. Events in the distance are pulled forward. Objects are described based on subjective importance and interest. Color is chosen by sensation and mood.

My materials include water based painting and drawing media. These allow me to experiment with the descriptive means: contour, shape, wash, opacity, pattern, and so on. Forms vary within the same piece: fluid to concrete, schematic to solid, rough to refined. Disparate categories are reconciled: real vs. contrived, drawing vs. painting, ironic vs. sincere, harmonious vs. dissonant. Despite this oscillation between dissolution and synthesis, the body of the viewer is reaffirmed, absorbing fragments and knitting them into a comprehensive vision.

Born in Hartford, CT, Justin Kim received a B.A. from Yale and an MFA from the American University in Washington, D.C.

He has exhibited across the Northeast including: Denise Bibro, Brenda Taylor, EFA, and Bowery Gallery in New York City; and Smith College and Montserrat College of Art. Recent residencies include, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Jentel Foundation, and The Studios at Mass MoCA. He is currently based at The Elizabeth Foundation in New York.

Mr. Kim has taught at Yale, Dartmouth, Smith College, The University of Massachusetts, and Deep Springs College in California.

PULP is pleased to announce a Solo Exhibition of work by Babel Khan (born Vincent Johnson). The Exhibition will run from Feb. 25th through March 26th. Opening Day is Saturday, February 25th from 1-4pm.

Over the years, Babel Khan has quietly built an extraordinary and visionary body of work from his farm in North Carolina. This will be his first exhibition of his Art. His rich and distinctive visual and written language explores Babylon Canton. It is Kahn’s Homeland. His State of Mind. Where his experience and knowledge of the world comes together - into a tapestry of painted, stamped and collaged images.

Inflation, War, the Rise and Fall of Nations, Globalization, the Military Industrial Complex, Financial Institutions, Prophecy, Apocalypse, Political, Economic, Social/Cultural themes are explored in his work.

Khan writes:

In his classic novel Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed's character Abdul Hamid (born Johnny James) describes his path in life as follows:

"I applied myself. I went through biochemistry, philosophy, math. I learned languages . . . . I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. . . . It occurred to me that I was borrowing from all of these systems : Religion,  Philosophy,  Music, Science and even Painting, and building 1 of my own composed of their elements. It was like a Griffin. I had patched something together out of my own procedure and the way I taught myself became my style, my art, my process."

Reed's description of Abdul Hamid's journey can be applied to me.

http://www.kathranneknight.com/

Kathranne Knight holds an MFA from The Yale University School of Art. Her drawings speak in the packed way of a symbol, often stripped down and elemental, but ricocheting with associations and metaphoric possibilities. Impermanence, multiplication, and issues of representation are plumbed through materials as various as fly paper, silver, tears, and graphite; while the action and materiality of drawing are stretched, performed, and reconfigured. Knight has been artist in residence at Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation and the Connemara Conservancy Foundation, Dallas, Texas. Her work has been shown in The Danforth Museum of Art, Mass MoCA, The Des Moines Art Center, Carroll and Sons Gallery, (Boston, MA), Geoffrey Young Gallery, (Gt. Barrington, MA) Muriel Guepin Gallery, (New York, NY) and many others. Knight was an Iowa Artist Fellow in 2014, awarded an Iowa Artist Grant in 2015, and is co-publisher of the art+poetry press, Correspondence Publishing.

www.sethkoen.com

My recent work has proceeded on two parallel tracks, sculpture in the real world and sculpture in a perfect world. The three-dimensional work is bound by the limits of physics, especially gravity. This often provides the moments of problem solving I find the most compelling in conceiving and realizing the work.

The source materials for the prints are photographs of sculpture and drawings I have made over the last fifteen years. In translating these works back into the two-dimensional, they are freed from the bounds of the original pieces. No material, no color, no gravity! Without these constraints, they are reduced to only form. I welcome the clarity this brings, allowing drawn, painted and sculpted forms to occupy a common place.

www.alongigo.com/mom

"Mostly, I work as an independent drawer of pictures. In my head, I consider myself something of a visual researcher: a passenger of the world. My work is site-specific, existing as a reflection of my own process to stabilize where I am. The process becomes an accumulation of location and emotion; what is around and what my mind is focused on at that moment. Recycling from the environment is my speciality, whether it is images, materials, or human compassion.

I was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. After working for several years around the States I was able to attend the New School in NYC, where I graduated with a degree in Liberal Arts and a minor in Urban Studies. My time at the New School enabled me much experimentation; illustration, urban planning,documentary media, anthropology, etc.

Since graduating in 2019, I have left the US, and have been applying myself to other parts of the world to see what resonates with me.

To produce art is my emotional practice: to achieve balance, to integrate, and to connect with the world.”

-Andrew Joseph Long

Man in the Woods

I am an artist and I make artefacts that tell the story of strange, rural Britain.

Friday Walk

In 2018 I began my Friday Walk, which has become the ongoing research that informs my work.

One Friday, I left home and walked 18km out into the countryside, had a pint of ale at a village pub and got the bus home.

The following Friday I took the bus back to that pub and carried on walking.

Every week since then (when there's not a pandemic on) I've taken a bus or train (or both) to where my previous walk ended, and continued my journey around the English countryside.

It’s not about visiting beauty spots, conquering peaks, or hiking long trails, but walking: gently moving through fields and woods, along footpaths and green lanes that are hundreds, often thousands, of years old; slowly getting to know the land around me, and embedding myself in the landscape.

Museum of Mump

As I wander about, I collect place names, people, stories, and whole landscapes. And the things I make are a reaction to them.

The Mump is a semi-fictional, composite world where I deposit and grow the strange rituals, places and people that I find. And the things I make are artefacts that give us a little glimpse of that world.

Welcome to the Museum of Mump.

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www.nathanmargalit.com

In subject matter, the paintings combine both real and imagined scenarios that are colored by my experience of life lived in the U.S. and South Africa. The imagery reflects a renewed interest in the representational world and its unique narrative power to convey a story in its own words.

Themes and ideas that emerge in the paintings depend on feeling rooted in one's surroundings: a familiarity with the distinctive rhythms of life in the U.S. and a greater sense of identification with American culture and history. All this has influenced my work providing fresh impetus in bridging the divide between 'old world' concerns and those of the 'new.'

“I was born in Moscow, Russia. Being raised in a family of physicists, I chose Mathematics as my career path, and that is still a part of my life. After moving to the Pacific Northwest twelve years ago, I started painting. It truly unified my soul. My works are mostly memories of scenes which have been observed, imagined, or seemed to be seen.”

Maria Michurina is a mixed media artist who currently lives and works in Redmond, WA. She has a degree in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics from Moscow State University.

Her work has been featured in group shows, including Art At Kings Oaks, the International Quilt Festival, Cerulean Arts Gallery, and Blue Mountain Gallery. She will be a Resident at James Castle House starting in early February, and is the recipient of various awards including 1st place at the PNW! Quilt Show and the Seattle Co-Arts Scholarship Award.

We will be exhibiting work from 2 collage series, as well as Landscape paintings.

www.mattneckers.com

“I started carving creatures in March of last year. I’m sure everyone reading this will remember, but it seemed like the world was ending. Everything was closed - except for my studio. To keep myself sane, I challenged myself to create at least one of these carvings a day, using only materials I had on hand or things I could harvest from our property in rural Vermont. I kept up this pace for several months, making well over a hundred before the end of last spring. I continued making them with less frequency through the summer and fall. Each figure represents something about the day it was carved, and the way I was feeling at the time. As a whole, the collection represents a visual journal of time, place and emotion.” matt neckers, 2.21

Matt Neckers is a visual artist who works in a variety of media including sculpture, photography, painting and installation. Matt’s work has been featured by Hyperallergic, Art New England, Vermont Public Radio, the Whitefish Review, Seven Days, and Vermont Art Guide. Take Magazine named him a “2017 Artist to Watch”. Matt received a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, for his Mobile Museum Project, The Vermont International Museum of Contemporary Art + Design, which toured multiple locations in Vermont including the Kent Museum, an abandoned asbestos mine, a remote pond, Burlington City Arts, and the Fairbanks Museum. He also created an interactive museum inside of a 1940s refrigerator, which was shown at the Fleming Museum in 2019. In 2020 the Bennington Museum installed his work Ascension on the facade of the museum.

For his teaching, Matt was named Vermont’s 2016 Lead PBS LearningMedia Digital Innovator. This national honor is given to one educator from each state. He was named a Juried Teaching Artist by the Vermont Arts Council. He was also given a Distinguished Arts Education Leader Award by The Vermont Alliance for Arts Education (Affiliated with the Kennedy Center Alliance for Art Education).

Matt studied painting at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, WA, and received his M.Ed. Arts in Education from St. Michael’s College, in Colchester, Vermont. Matt has taught for a variety of schools including St. Michael’s College and Green Mountain Tech.

Matt lives in Northern Vermont with his family.

FUND RAISER TO HELP DEAN NIMMER

Thanks to everyone who has bought work. We have sold 32 works so far. We just updated the website with new work that is available. And removed the 32 that sold for easier scrolling.

Dean Nimmer, world-class painter, educator, author, collector, and one of a kind has developed a debilitating chronic respiratory condition and needs help paying for a chairlift so he can remain mobile in his house. We are having a sale of some of Dean’s work at the gallery this Saturday/Sunday, January 28th and 29th from 11-4pm. All the work is $100 each.

If you are interested in purchasing please message me at pulpholyoke@gmail.com or call 413 362 6368 to reserve the work.

All work is numbered for easy reference. We will also accept any donations. Dean Nimmer, who I refer to as Dean One, and sometimes Arch Nemesis Dean, has been a friend, mentor, role model and inspiration to me.

“As an abstract painter, I develop my artworks out of pure instinct and intuition without having a pre-planned vision of what my pictures will look like. Though I don’t necessarily set out to depict a figure, still life or landscape, all of my work derives from my direct physical and emotional experience of the world that is reinvented and filtered through my imagination.”

Dean Nimmer has exhibited his art in over 200 solo and group exhibitions across the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia since he began his art career in 1970. His artworks are in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, DeCordova Art Museum, Smith College Art Museum, Harvard University and many others across the U.S. and abroad.

Nimmer is the author of Creating Abstract Art, Ideas and Inspiration for Passionate Art Making, and Art from Intuition. He is also Emeritus Professor and the former Chairman of the Painting and Printmaking programs at the Massachusetts College of Art .

Dean is also Emeritus Professor and the former Chairman of the Painting and

Printmaking programs at the Massachusetts College of Art and he is listed in Who’s Who

Sean Noonan (b.1986) makes paintings that interpret moments from the outside world with a markedly present touch. He paints on surfaces often found nearby, such as weathered wood and collected papers, embracing the inherent history within the materials and evoking recollections of inferred and imagined pasts. He strives to keep the language of his mark-making unfastened and free, summoning early crude forms that carry weight, feeling, and personalities which exist in our world but have no inherent defining reference. Seeking to capture marks singularly his own, similar to the cultivation of a person’s own handwriting developed through years of use, these motifs exist in a fluid state, with the artist anchoring them through methods and traditions of historical painting.

Noonan is a Hudson Valley based artist and a graduate of Pratt Institute. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include: LKIF Gallery - Seoul, Korea; Resort - Baltimore, MD; Left Field Gallery - Ojai, CA; Galleri Kai - Copenhagen, Denmark; Poker Flats - Williamstown, MA; Teffia Gallery - Kingston, NY; Art at Kings Oaks - Newtown, PA; SOHO Review - London, UK.

Ali Osborn is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. His work seeks to defamiliarize commonplace things to see them again for the first time. Through drawings, prints, books, and sculptures, he investigates how art can simultaneously flatten out a subject and bring it into sharper focus. These recent drawings depict tools used for erasure, removal, correction, and stoppage.

Osborn’s artwork is held in the collections of the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMASS Amherst and the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University. He has completed residencies at Epicenter in Green River, Utah and the Vermont Studio Center where he was sponsored by the Nadine Goldsmith Fellowship Award. Following graduate school at Rutgers University he co-founded a printing concern called The Press which operates out of Brooklyn Army Terminal. Osborn currently works as a visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan University where he teaches printmaking, graphic design, and typography courses.

www.ozereko.com

These prints are made using mono print and transfer printmaking techniques. Each print is unique. Each color is applied separately creating a slightly textured surface resembling a painting. The subject of these prints is the “vase”, imaginary and improbable vases that probably could not be made using ceramic techniques.

Frank is a retired professor, having taught for more than thirty years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He graduated from Alfred University with his MFA in Ceramics and from Massachusetts College of Art with a BFA.

Professionally, he is best known for his ceramic work and has been rewarded for his efforts with a number of grants, residencies and inclusion in public and private collections. These include an NEA, and two Massachusetts Arts Council grants.

Frank lives in Pelham, MA with his wife, artist Francine Ozereko.

“Brief Encounters is an iteration of on-going series Forgetting is so long, where I enlarge abandoned family photographs to life-size and paint over them as a kind of re-enlivening and presence. The exhibition is focused specifically on the portrait, a form that reveals the person depicted and their sense of self; the portrait holds both an understanding and meeting of the individual shown. These works expand and complicate the fractures of time—discarded photographs transfigured into painted portraits—by inviting viewers to consider each work as a form of visitation or return.

“Who do we choose to remember, and how? This fraught terrain encompasses family relationships, identities, and collective memorialization. For some, living memory can lengthen the presence of loved ones in our lives; we only succumb to a blank past when our histories are no longer recalled and held by those that once cared for us. The family photograph is a vessel for retrieving memory, but as time accumulates, these emotionally laden images become unknowable, missing their necessary translators.”

Daisy Patton is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Los Angeles, CA to a white mother from the American South and an Iranian father she never met. She spent her childhood moving between California and Oklahoma, deeply affected by these conflicting cultural landscapes and the ambiguous absences within her family. Influenced by collective and political histories, Patton explores storytelling and story-carrying, the meaning and social conventions of families, and what shapes living memory. Her work also examines in-between spaces and identities, including the fallibility of the body and the complexities of relationship and connection.

Currently residing in western Massachusetts, Patton has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including a solo at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado, the Chautauqua Institution and the Fulginitti Pavilion at the Center for Bioethics at the Anschutz Medical Campus, as well as group shows with Spring/Break NYC, the Katonah Museum of Art, The Delaware Contemporary, the International Museum of Science and Art, among others. She has paintings held in public and private collections such as the Denver Art Museum, the Tampa Museum of Art, Seattle University, Fidelity Investments Art Collection, and in international airport Hartsfield-Jackson with Delta Airlines, among others. Patton’s work has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, The Jealous Curator, Transition Magazine, The Denver Post, The Chautauquan Daily, The Seattle Met, and more. Minerva Projects Press has published Broken Time Machines: Daisy Patton, a book with essays and poetry on Patton’s practice that debuted spring 2021.

Patton has completed artist residencies at Anderson Ranch, the Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, Minerva Projects, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. She has been awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, an Assets for Artists Massachusetts Matched Savings grant, a Montage Travel Award from SMFA for research in Dresden, Germany, as well as longlisted for the Aesthetica Prize 2022. She earned her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program, and has a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and an Honors degree. K Contemporary represents Patton in Denver, CO, and Foto Relevance represents her in Houston, TX.

We are grateful to John for shipping work from Sheffield, England.

“Why printmaking I hear you cry. Well, it’s woodcut printmaking to be specific. I’ve been a bit stupid about this for decades; my lifelong commitment to a primitive mark was going OK but I needed something else. I’ve been a builder and maker all my life with a love of woodworking so looking back at putting my drawing and carpentry together just seems ridiculous to have missed it for so long. But what’s done is done and the main thing is that the epiphany occurred about five years ago. I like to think that it was a bit like Rothko thinking ‘you know what, I’m just going to do massive ethereal swathes of iridescent colour from now on, see how that pans out’. Or Pollock making a promise with himself to only drip paint for the rest of the day just to see where brushless painting would take him.

“Woodcut printmaking slows me down and allows me to put great industry into the simplest mark. It also offers the magic of happenstance and unpredictability which allows no end of inspiration and frustration, but mainly inspiration.

“I’ve never told anybody this before but I made a decision to fully embrace two dimensions so my work is right on the surface of the paper. I make no apologies for being the polar opposite of the ‘Star Wars’ special effects team but I don’t believe that my design ability is any less sophisticated; I create restriction to search for creativity. You should try it, restriction is actually very liberating.

“My name is John Pedder and I think of bullshit like this literally all the time!”

...the boy watches his father as he comes back from work in his railway uniform. He sees him eat without a rest. He sees him go out with his tools to his other job, as a bricklayer. The boy stares at him. Looking how he uses his tools, the same ones he uses to make tin and wood toys for him. He watches him hammer the rivets and nails and the boy learns. Nowadays, many years later, the boy, now an adult, uses the tools, he hammers, draws, paints... he plays. I was born on October 18th 1961, at José Mármol, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina.

"...el niño ve a su padre regresar del trabajo con su uniforme de ferroviario. Lo ve comer rápido y sin descanso. Lo ve salir con sus herramientas hacia su otro trabajo, de albañil. El niño lo mira. Mira cómo usa las herramientas, con las mismas que le hace juguetes de hojalata y madera. Lo ve martillar los remaches y los clavos y el niño aprende. Hoy en día, muchos años después, el niño ya adulto, usa las herramientas, martilla, dibuja, graba, pinta ...Juega. Nací el 18 de octubre de 1961, en José Mármol, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina.

www.lynnpeterfreund.com

Over the years, I have become more interested in what is inside rather than external things. Pulling from childhood memories, repressed thoughts, unresolved relationships… I make art about things that I do not know or do not understand. Painting brings the unknown a little bit closer and possibly closer to an acceptance of uncertainty.

This new series uses form to sum up a collection of reoccurring feelings of my personal history. I hope the paintings create a space for reflection of a shared human experience.

Kelly Popoff

2023

 “In my drawings I explore memory, time, and the changeable nature of our experience of both.  The works layer images drawn from recent and distant personal experiences with remembered images from media, design and art history.  They are a catalogue of visual and personal experience as well as an examination of the way the memory of these experiences has been warped and condensed by the passage of time and my changing perspective into a newly altered visual geometry.” - Nora Riggs

Nora Riggs was born in 1972 in Boston, MA. She lives and works in Northampton, MA. She has an MFA from Indiana University and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. She has had recent solo shows at Tif Sigfrids, Comer, Georgia and Assembly Room, New York, NY And Queens, Los Angeles, CA.

“I walk alone a lot, now with some more company, my little dog, but I still get out almost everyday. Whether it’s a familiar trail somewhere in town or a less frequented path somewhere in the state or beyond, I try to explore the region. Growing up in Western Mass, living my formative years here, and finally buying a home in the area, this work attempts to express the deep connection I have with this place.

There were times I tried to count my breath as I walked, or tried to identify as many plants, trees, fungi, or wildlife I could- now I just walk and look. Things sink in that way; it’s almost like the images have become my breath. Snippets of Owls, Porcupines I spotted along the trail, dead trees, cloud formations, our mountains and the way winter light hits them- they paint themselves for us really, I’m just trying my go at it.”

“Keeping a sketchbook has been a constant in my creative practice for a decade plus. It’s a grounding element that I can always come back to. Whether keeping a visual road trip diary or writing a few poems, I try to keep the expression open to whatever comes to me at a given moment- no limits. When going out on the road or just taking a walk down a familiar path, having a sketchbook on hand helps me put things on pause for reflection. I’ve made dozens of photocopied zines in the past, and these days, applying various media to the different format books I pick up brings the process full circle. I’d like to consider this Clouds Journal as a one-off zine in process.”

Sean Sawicki lives in Belchertown, MA and has lived in half a dozen towns throughout Hampden and Hampshire county. He has a BA from UMASS Amherst, where he studied literature and creative writing through a sociopolitical lens. Sean has a Masters of Arts in Teaching from Smith College, and works as a Special Education teacher with students on the Autism Spectrum. He has shown his work previously in Holyoke at the Guided Brick, has read poetry at the Headquarters, and has been a part of solo and group exhibitions at Flywheel in Easthampton.

Works on paper from the series - “we are all vessels”.

MAY, SEPTEMBER & NOVEMBER are still available. The others have sold.

“Soon after the pandemic emerged, I began considering various ways to grapple with the sudden and dire situation at hand. After mucking around in the studio those first hazy weeks, this project initially took shape on April 1st—coinciding with April fools day, which I can’t help but associate with the current president and his mishandling of the Covid crisis. The starting point for this series was my collection of historic pieces of timber, mostly dating between 140 and 230 years old. Many of them come from our property—a two-hundred-year-old dairy farm in Cummington, MA. In thinking about how to personally and creatively deal with the pandemic, I decided to paint a stripe around one of these timbers, and I just kept going, painting one stripe each day. The days turned into a month, and at the end of that first month, I concluded that timber and started fresh with a new one. So each timber represents a one-month duration of the pandemic, and I will continue the project for one full year, ending with twelve painted timbers.

“Painting each stripe a different color and a different width has become a daily meditative exercise that marks each day as time passes during this strange, difficult period. The stripes are not pre-determined; I select the color and the width of each band as I’m painting it. I intuitively respond to my mood and the previous stripes for each subsequent band of color. In doing so, they reflect the idea of marking time; much the way prisoners draw hash marks on the walls of their cell. This parallel resonates with our individual but collective experience of the ongoing lockdowns and social restrictions. The bands also are reminiscent of the stripes on convicts’ uniforms found in pictures of chain gangs—referencing both the history of oppression experienced by Black Americans and the shameful continuation of racial injustice in America today.

“Another vein of work within this “stripes” series are pieces incorporating older hand tools that I paint with scale-appropriate colored bands. In this body of work, the bands of color are symbolic of time and the repetition of manual labor.”

Larry Slezak October, 2020

Larry Slezak has exhibited in dozens of exhibitions around the world for almost 50 years, and taught art from 1972 - 2009. His work is in a number of Institutional and Private collections.

With a background in fine art and biology, Queens, NY artist G.R. Stanger found traditional photography to be the ideal intersection between art and science. In recent years he moved away from the camera, negative, and print; choosing to work with only light sensitive photographic emulsion. Without representing the outside world, Stanger’s imagery abandons photography’s conventional role of documentation. Instead his work focuses in on form, light, and time; exploring a broader, more abstract truth. Stanger’s cyanotype-based artworks on folded paper are built up through multiple layers of emulsions, exposures, and processings. The creases in the paper act a structural template on which the emulsion is applied in repetitive patterns and fields. The cumulative effect of the layers of Prussian blue emulsion and the play of light and shadow on the folded surface of the paper create illusionary effects that oscillate between order and disorder.

www.mtholyoke.edu/~smithj

I am a materialist/formalist and I believe in the power of objects as a way of constructing a space of experience. In that space I hope to generate a variety of meanings. The sculpture I make may use domestic objects or salvaged objects from the discarded past or new material, all handled usually in a formal manner. With these I hope to create the space of wildness and revelation, the space of a story or the space of remembrance and memory, or it may create a kind of space that makes me move differently when I approach it or move through it. I want the objects or materials I use to have a kinesthetic effect on me, through their intrinsic qualities and how I find a new use for them. That is, I want my sculptures to do something in an action or a feeling that produces instability that takes the form of an opening or clearing of thought and feeling. Some meanings may move into that clearing and possibly in that way it moves beyond my desires or me and into the larger world of experience.  

www.deborrastewartpettengill

MORE TO COME!!

www.kevin-umana.com

Umaña’s work utilizes a mathematical approach to modernity, exploring the essential relationships between form, composition, and color. These concepts are then utilized in analyzing the concept of experience and perception in the form of time and memory. Subtly adjusting and reworking these connections, Umaña is able to highlight materiality, space and point of view.

Inspired by architecture and urban design, Umaña’s paintings are constructed with everyday materials. Making use of functional elements, Umaña is able to achieve a dialogue between the tangible and conceptual. His canvases are built up with layers of gouache, acrylic, stucco, sand, marble dust and fabric paste. From afar, the work appears clean, simple, reductive, but upon closer inspection, they’re raw, textural and gestural. Umaña relies heavily on painting as an object. The raw paint is applied laboriously through technical methodologies, from dry brushing into the canvas’s weave, to complex layering techniques: each application calls attention to the materiality of each individual component.

Through the use of bold colors, dynamic gestures, and expressive marks. The work proposes a dialogue between the systematic and the open-ended. The result embraces chance as a tool for liberating creativity from rational thought. Ultimately setting up the conditions in which my materials and gestures become somewhat autonomous. Emphasizing a rich use of color, line, and texture inspired by the musical qualities of painting. The artwork is composed of multiple interlocking patterns, expressing ambiguous figure-ground relationships while echoing the geometric plan of their three-dimensional setting. Thus, creating fluid relationships between physical phenomena and intuited symbols.

In addition to process, Umaña’s titles raise the larger ideas at play in his work. Each title pays homage to a specific location the artist has experienced. The work seeks to minimize the superfluous details of experience to more core values and essentials. The most basic elements are then synthesized to their purest aesthetics and unique visual language in an attempt to personify the characteristics of structure and design. Through this process, Umaña is able to underline the specific memories, senses and emotions of that place and time.

Through Umaña’s distinct abstract vocabulary, his work is open to interpretation, leaving his viewers the unique ability to draw upon their own experiences and associations. Color, at its most basic form, is remarkable in its power to disrupt, emote, and shift perception. Umaña sees his paintings as implements of transformation, able to re-wire our modes of thinking and alter the way we see the world.

Rocks, Squids, Clouds, and Other Beings

I am driven by a deep sense of wonder and curiosity about the non-human world. As an extremely shy child, I dreamed of being able to express myself with bioluminescence, or by quietly passing information through a network of fungal filaments, instead of with spoken words. These desires evolved into a fascination with alternative languages and non-human methods of connection.

Today I study the sentience and sensory capabilities of rocks, squids, clouds, and other beings. I aim to weave stories about desire and longing. Paintings of moth-like Night Pollinators are in conversation with sculptures of flower-like-forms. A pink mist and an awkward rock sit side-by- side. A hand tentatively holds a poisonous centipede. My work is a series of “communication attempts.” Relationships between paintings and sculptures are inspired by interspecies communication, conversations between living and non-living things, and a desire to mitigate ecological and human loneliness. How fully can we understand a cloud, a tree, or a rock? Can we develop a vocabulary that enables us to do that?

Abstract footnotes and color studies accompany certain works, serving as a record of my own (often failed) attempts to connect with the non-human world. They contain information about animal communication, questions about the nature of language, and my deep desire for interspecies understanding.

I believe in the importance of listening to quiet organisms. When human noise and industry drown out the messages between other beings, we miss urgent warning calls about climate change and environmental disasters, as well as opportunities for repair. We also begin to lose quieter transmissions: desire expressed by mating fruit bats, the grief of a bereaved elephant, or expressions of interspecies mutualism and care. I believe in the intrinsic value of these intimate stories.

What does our desire to engage with the non-human world tell us about ourselves? My central goal as an artist is to discover alternative, more vibrant ways of interacting with nature and with each other.

-Ashley Eliza Williams

Ashley Eliza Williams, born in the Blue Ridge Mountains in SW Virginia, makes work about interspecies communication and non-human language. Williams has exhibited widely including at Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (CO), Hersbruck Museum (Germany), The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder (CO), The New York Hall of Science (NY), and Wasserman Projects in Detroit (MI). Her work has been featured in many publications including New American Paintings, The Denver Post, and The Washington Post. In 2022, Williams was an artist-in-residence at Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island Maine and an MA Fellow at Mass MoCA Studios. Recent residencies include: Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Vermont Studio Center, and Shangyuan Art Museum, China. This summer she will be a Lucille Walton Fellow and resident artist at the University of Virginia Mountain Lake Biological Station.

Williams often works with scientists, including at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Boston MA, and McDonald Observatory in West Texas. She is also a founding member of Sprechgesang Institute, an NYC-based interdisciplinary collective working on projects at the intersection of visual art, performance, journalism, music, and the science of in-between languages. Williams lives and works in Western Massachusetts

Frédérique Q.R. Zacharia was born and raised in the Netherlands. Enrolled in art and sculpture classes from a young age, she went on to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague and earned a degree in Interior and Architectural design. After moving to New York in 1985 she worked as an interior architect for Kohn Pedersen Fox Conway Associates in New York City before raising four children. Always with one foot in the arts, she has explored woodworking, welding and sewing, alongside her lifelong passion for photography and design. In 2021, after purchasing her first typewriter, Frédérique embarked on a prolific exploration of its possibilities for making art.

Artist statement

“Something happened to me after I bought my first typewriter, it started a love affair that is hard to describe. There was a profound shift when I realized that although there were letters, there did not need to be words. 

My attraction to the humble typewriter was partially born out of frustration with digital technology. The permanence of a typewritten piece, the undeniable mistakes, and the physical work that is part of it all feel reassuring and wholesome. I enjoy the typewriter’s constraints as well as the complexity of its possibilities. 

I am fascinated by patterns, rhythms and textures as well as the different sounds typewriters make. When I type, rather than counting out the keystrokes I use its rhythmic sounds as a tool, especially when I create more complex patterns. Some of my typewriters have quirks, and after initial frustration I had the liberating realization that I needed to embrace their shortcomings, and use them as opportunities rather than limitations.

Letters and their graphics have always been interesting to me, and for that reason I use a variety of typewriters. They have diverse fonts and alphabets representing a range of languages and cultures, including Japanese, Farsi/Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Cyrillic. At times I combine multiple typewriters and fonts in the same project. With a growing collection of over 25 typewriters, most between 50 and 100 years old, I still get excited when I find one with new possibilities.

More recently I started using sewing in my projects, which has added a three-dimensional and tactile texture. Sewing is a slow, steady process, and it feels meditative to integrate it into my typed work. 

Three years into this typewriter adventure I have realized that when I am working on a piece, the busyness in my head calms down. The process of typing is tedious yet cathartic. The sound of the typewriter, the need for focus and repetitive action is an introvertive experience that has given me a newfound sense of peace.”

-Frederique Q. R. Zacharia