Laurie Alpert.

This work was inspired by a group show entitled "Lighten Up". The timing couldn’t have been better. I’d been working with imagery inspired by the Dead Sea Scrolls and the tension in the Middle East. A dominant motif was imagery of a soldier pointing his gun toward Syria. The timing was right for a new direction and my work has since evolved to be a bit more playful.

Angela Bacon Kidwell.

"Say not, I have found the truth, but rather I have found a truth.” These words of Kahlil Gibran reach out to me and compel my own search. My work emerges from a journey of recovering a sense of self, strength and spirituality through an examination of my identities as daughter, granddaughter, wife, mother and artist. For 20 years I have been making art that documents my struggle for identity, serenity and strength.

Deborah Barlow.

I am interested by what is not obvious. Looking for the hidden side of things is what compels me most. I use painting to construct a particular sense of order from many rich and complex sources. Drawing from elements that are both explicit and implicit - from the microscopic to the intergalactic - each work becomes a unique record of how to search, listen and respond multi-dimensionally.

Mark Beck.

My paintings reveal my personal experiences and ideas on being an American. Images of homes, buildings and landscapes are my starting point. I focus on introducing pared down images and odd juxtapositions of American beauty, tragedy and culture.

Jesse and Maggie Blanchard.

This work is a result of a many year search for a seamless blend of our skills – Maggie’s photography and Jesse’s printmaking. Collaborating enabled us to express our mutual enthusiasm for color theory, form and the perfect-imperfection of things handmade.

Cody Brothers.

In expressing the narrative of “The Western Abandon” Cody Brothers concentrates his focus on abandoned farms, crumbling homes, neglected churches, aging cemeteries, forgotten cars and other objects, set within the vastness of the southwestern landscape.  He works almost entirely with infrared film, using a range of different cameras, from a 4x5, a 6x17 panoramic, to a pinhole.

MF Cardamone.

By blending elements of 18th and 19th-century botanical illustrations with the imaginative randomness of Dada and Surrealist collage methods, MF Cardamone creates playful interpretations of the intersection of nature, taxonomy, and popular culture.

Patty Carroll.

Photographers comment on the world we live in by interacting with reality and visibly displaying their perceptions. I believe that every artist has a moment or time which became a defining point in their life view. As we struggle to discover that, we repeat work trying to recreate or redefine it. For me, photography seems to be the most satisfying way of expressing how these inner and outer worlds converge.

Charles Clary.

This work questions the notion of microbial outbreaks and their similarity to the visual representation of sound waves, transforming them into something more playful. By layering paper I'm able to build land formations that mimic viral colonies and concentric sound waves. These strange landmasses contaminate and infect the surfaces they inhabit transforming the space into something suitable for their gestation.

Duane Cregger.

My work forms a vivid abstract narrative that echoes my rural-to-urban-to-rural migration experience and a reconciliation to the rural Virginia mountains of my childhood. As I process these experiences through the dual lenses of urban and rural life, these subtle themes become evident in the work. The deep mark-making into the surface of the paintings is a rudimentary symbolic language that is intuited as I create.

Marilyn Dillard.

My work is inspired by the natural landscape, especially the visual qualities of rock, soil, and vegetation in its many variations. I’ve photographed many deserts, mountains, and plains in all kinds of seasonal weather. It is those visuals seen in the land that create a beauty of contrast, textured imperfections, and emotions that I toss through my imagination when spontaneously painting abstract imagery.

Robert DiMatteo.

My drawings are about the relationship of organic and synthetic worlds. I am very interested in this dichotomy. The work presents this relationship through a vocabulary of odd shapes (organic and geometric) that focus on form, space and surface/tactile qualities that challenge perception and engage on a multitude of levels, in particular, the way in which memory and experience translate into texture and form.

Raul Dorn.

Painting is an intuitive and spontaneous endeavor that allows me to investigate abstraction while dealing with the self beneath my stubborn ego, initiating a shift to a higher vibration, much like meditation. I am interested in that which lies beneath, beyond and behind the visual natural world, and the limitations of naming nouns.

Linda Fillhardt.

I call this series of my work Altered Reality. It is a melding of still life and surrealism. These works are about contrasts and differences, they are playful and dream-like. I like putting together odd and ordinary things. I also like the merging of the photos into the paint, a way to emphasize what is real and what is not.

Carol Golemboski.

Carol Golemboski photographs antiquated objects in carefully staged scenes. Her haunting still life imagery draws upon past eras to suggest human emotions and anxieties, particularly relating to the experience of women. Shooting with film and manipulating traditional photographic materials in the darkroom, Golemboski creates images where photography and drawing blur the line between fact and fiction.

Ben Haggard.

Light and unity of light is the subject of my work. Light enables seeing, seeing organizes light. Light reveals the surfaces of things and emanates from within them. Ubiquitous light: light of the sun, light electric, light reflected, light unseen, light remembered, light of the spirit, light of the world. I seek to dissolve what I see back into light.

Eric L Hansen.

I am a visual anthropologist, fully engaged with 21st century post-modern culture. I storyboard our disparate beliefs about love, family, home and relationships, what we say is real and what we value. While I draw and paint, the bulk of my work is lens-based. In my images, the past and the future conflate like spiral staircases collapsed into single moments layered with meaning.

Natalie Hardcastle.

I analyze and respond to the imagery I encounter in my life, documenting an invented, personal space. The hand-stitching process that’s incorporated in each piece demands an intimate conversation with the paper. Paper has many of the same qualities as skin and fabric: forms become birthmarks and scars, patches and bits of embroidery. The fibers of the paper always remember their journey in my obsessive hands.

Patrick Dean Hubbell.

My work is an investigation of identity. I am drawn to the subtle questioning of this examination. I find inspiration in everything and I use various themes rooted in the correlation and the conflict of both my Native American and contemporary mindset. I am equally interested in the abstract qualities of expression as well as the human figure.

Jean Jack.

America's heartland influences the bulk of my work. I have traveled from one corner of the country to the other searching for just the right scene. I usually get goose bumps when I come across what I want to paint and I sometimes paint the same farmhouse and barn several times in different ways, some more abstract than others. Shapes occurring by circumstance intrigue me far more than deliberate artifice.

Mike Kelly.

The primary focus of my landscape work is exploring the edge between abstraction and representation. I strive to achieve this by creating unique color relationships within each piece. Color alone has the power to evoke emotion. I love using a wide ranging palette, from vivid to subdued to create a compelling image.

Jessica Kennedy.

My love of process, action, and the physicality of paint are the driving forces of my work. I think about animals, the human body, and plant life and I attempt to create a world in which my painting, can embody all three simultaneously. I depict scenes that could take place in a rainforest, a pond, a laboratory, or inside the human body. I aim to create imagery that has the potential for that slippage.

Marietta Patricia Leis.

In Zen, “…the ideas of the poet should be noble and simple.” My paintings, influenced by these concepts, are also entrenched in the formal properties of the painting process—color, edge, space and form. Colors transfuse the surface and each other in magical ways. I layer paint until I capture the right note. My reductive color fields run the risk of invisibility because like poetry, deep listening is fundamental.

Stephanie Lerma.

I: make accumulate repeat obsess struggle transform tell
It is: constant urgent unavoidable abundant survival purposeful work
I feel: fear purged panic pain release surrender joy

My work gravitates toward labor intensive, highly repetitive methods of accumulation. I enjoy combining modern inventions with traditional making methods and strive to weave them into a collective whole. For the...

Marla Lipkin.

Light inspires me and moves me forward to the next painting. It's a journey, a great quest taking me to various parts of the country to witness its' beauty. Light defines form, it creates mood, it reflects color and illuminates the natural world into something poetic, like the light and darkness of storms or the brilliance of sunsets.

Melissa Mahoney.

Vortices draw into their powerful currents all that surround them. I'm interested in these masses of energy and how they can contain and then transfer their energy. With my paintings, each piece is intended to convey a sense of motion and an energy that captures and then transcends the particular subject matter.

Liette Marcil.

I am fascinated with ancient and primitive cultures. I borrow images from those ancient sources and introduce my patterns and markings, creating my personal world of mythical dimension. I enjoy experimenting with colors and mixed media, looking for unexpected results which I then work intuitively in my paintings, combining the use of repetitive patterns, markings, textured layers and subtle transparencies.

Kathleen McCloud.

I use a variety of media to explore the ways we humans record the experience of being alive. I like paper because of the way it holds memory, from printed words to stains and creases. Each work on paper is unique. Ink, paint, graphite, ephemera, and text, converge in what appear as urgent records of discovery, inviting the mind to wonder, searching the fringe of consciousness for a narrative thread.

Erin McIntosh.

Poetically depicting the nature of human thought, my paintings investigate impermanence, the invisible, and abstraction. As a process driven artist, my paintings and drawings come into being through improvisational play with materials, geometry and color. Dancing between intuitive impulse and controlled edits, each piece organically develops into visual form to delight the eye and mind.

Adalberto Ortiz.

I was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in New York City. Working mostly with acrylics, I'm primarily interested in lines, geometric shapes and surface textures, often created by light and shadows and arranged in simple formal compositions. I've done graphic design and theatrical set design over the years and you can see that influence in my paintings.

Sarah Nicole Phillips.

I create collages with discarded, patterned, security envelopes. Security envelopes obscure their contents. It is impossible to read what is inside, even when they are held up to light. Offset and imprecise patterns create a scrim, which serves as a decorative backdrop to our bureaucratic tangles. I often create images dense with flora, that echo the envelope’s intended use as camouflage to hide private documents.

Stephen Remick.

I’m concentrating on familiar, everyday sights: a moonlit roof, a backyard swingset, a stone wall. When you isolate something, you bring it to the attention of others, helping them think about it in a deeper way, to realize our connection to each other and our environment.

KX2 Ruth Avra & Dana Kleinman.

At a distance the work looks sleek and high contrast with hyper-pigmented painting and shiny metal surfaces. Up close you are struck by hand sanded intricate patterns softening the metal and textural multi-layered paintings. Intersecting lines are specific cross products in geometry, and represent us as sisters with our paths crossing, or how any seemingly separate entities come together in space and time.

Jeff Schaller.

I paint in the unique medium of encaustic, creating textural pieces, which incorporate representational form with the printed word. In essence, the visual and written symbols merge to create a unique aesthetic language that is provocative and whimsical. Images ranging from polka dots to pop culture, evoke memories and emotions. The images tell a story and provoke a personal exchange with the audience.

Julie Schumer.

My figures series began years ago with an exploration of various construction materials that allowed me to create a heavily textured surface into which I could draw and melt with water, exposing the layers of paint underneath. The figures, which have an excavated quality, mix a feeling of the ancient with the contemporary. Their anonymous nature depicts universal human relationships.

Traer Scott.

Natural History is a series of candid, in-camera single exposure images, which merge the living and the dead, creating allegorical narratives of our troubled co-existence with nature. Ghost-like reflections of visitors viewing wildlife dioramas are juxtaposed against the preserved subjects, housed behind the thick glass with their faces molded into permanent expressions of fear, aggression or fleeting passivity.

Barbara Shapiro.

My abstract, hand-made prints on archival paper have multiple layers of different printmaking and painting techniques. I use the beauty of textures, colors, patterns and shapes from bark, leaves, plants, stones, sky and other things from nature to capture a particular mood or experience. I use man-made architectural or geometric shapes and lines to contrast and emphasize this weathered, irregular natural beauty.

Maureen Sheldon.

I have an eclectic interest comprising many different mediums and formats. Through heritage, I am connected to Design, Printing, Print Making, and the evolution of these processes in various format. The more commercial large-scale evolution compared to that which is produced by the artist's hand is fascinating to me. It allows me to enjoy, expose, and transform through process evolution.

Joyce Shupe.

I paint a low relief language of parallel lines that represent the underlying order of the cycle of life, that hopefully continues in spite of whatever chaos mankind or nature creates. The lines are obsessive in their insistence, soothing in their constancy, mantra-like, a metaphor for continuum.

Richard Sloat.

The artist adventure is an inward journey, a journey of ideas into little explored regions of the human consciousness. Such is the artistic quest, an examination in visual thought of the world and the imagination. One attempts to enter the depths of what it is to be and be human. Attaining and communicating visual knowledge. Worthwhile for the artist and hopefully the viewer as well.

Teresa Stanley.

My paintings center on the theme of the garden. My connection to all things botanical was not born out of a particular love of plants, as I am an indifferent gardener. I see the garden as a metaphorical space, one that represents a cyclical or circular view of life, where loss and renewal coexist as part of harmonious interplay.

Christine Tegeler Beneman.

An early spring walk along the High Line park in New York has been the spark for this series. I love the framework of the old elevated subway line and how it interacts with the structures around it. The prints are constructed using a combination of processes; collagraphs, monoprint and trace monotypes. Many of these pieces are then cut out and layered.

Brandon Thibodeaux.

My personal work is firmly rooted in the documentary tradition but leans upon more dreamlike imagery from time to time to weave its tales. I am enticed by portraiture and long form narratives that allow me the time to develop intimate relationships with the people I am photographing. I tend to leave behind as much as I take away.

Janet Yagoda Shagam.

The hand of the invisible mark-maker is an on-going influence in my work. The invisible mark-maker includes such things as weathering and the wear-and-tear people impose on surfaces. Finding, collecting, and transferring these marks into my work takes the ability to welcome serendipitous events and the insight to respond to and incorporate inherited marks into my work.