Abby King

I spent the pandemic staring at a screen. Relatable. I used my time plugged in for work meetings, family chats, and Netflix but most importantly re-discovering my drawing practice. Each week for the last year I’ve joined a queer drawing session online, connecting. Seen here are a collection of drawings of the artist and performer Body Confidence, also known as Alex Schimdt. Shown here are her personas, inspired by figures like photographer Sarah Lucas, Marie Antoinette, as well as embodying past artist muses like bodybuilder Lisa Lyon and Ilana Staller (La Cicciolina.) The result is not a figure/artist relationship but a collaborative making. These are my interactions with Schimdt’s performances through our laptops, neither party passive but part of the result.

Exhibited across the room alongside my quick life drawings are hand tufted pieces. These textile portraits take time, creating space for myself to think through my relationship with this traditionally feminine medium with queer imagery.

Together the works explore sex, identity, and playing with yourself on zoom.

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Tyler Kline

My work is concentrated on carving out forms that define the Chthulucene, this new epoch we have entered, Post-Pandemic, post-Anthropocene, tentacular, multi-optic, and multi-specied. I’m interested in quarantine social contracts, digital instantiation, how our technologies have worked through our central nervous systems and etched marks in our flesh. I feel we are internalizing rapidly shifting currents of change, social upheavals, and mutation cultural norms that are moving at velocities that momentarily transcend literal articulation. Acts of kindness, pictures and forms work best now, gestures that are quick and close to thinking, and space enough to capture new forms from flickering ephemera.

These sculptures serve multiple purposes: avatars, fetishes, shrines, game pieces, exploration of hyperbolic form, and speculation on non anthropocentric life forms. I am extremely influenced by collaboration, composting and gardening, and search for kinship with sentient beings other than humans, particularly trees and rivers, a sentiment echoed in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. The sculptures are 3D prints, first modeled on a tablet in a tactile and gestural manner, often incorporating 3D scans of people important to me. Games such as Dungeons and Dragons, early commodore 64 video games, and Hive Carbon are seminal in the aesthetic choices I make; the memory of playing these games with friends and family guide my hand, lend a sense of atmosphere, and create systems to follow. The dynamics of graphic novel narratives are also influential to my voice for this body of work. The escalation of these stories from sequential art to moving images to interactive games has opened my eyes to the possibilities of cross-platform meta-narratives. Finally, all these concerns often run through numerous instantiations, mold making, metal casting, to arrive at a power object of hand held talisman proportions.

Future Goals consist of creating mobile temples, sites of divination, and accumulation of photosynthesised energies in the form of Viridian Quantum Loop Vessels. I need to build space ships.

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Heather Raquel Phillips

Presidential Descendants in Helvetica
(Respect due to Sally) Banner
Velvet, Sequins, Felt, Fringe
2020

Heather Raquel Phillips is a mixed baby artist thinking about secrets & erasure.

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Julia Staples

In a world where we are disconnected, overworked and overly anxious, I am interested in the potential benefits offered by fringe and counter culture spiritual and healing practices. Currently fascinated with hypnosis, positive thinking, and color healing, I have been making installations which include sound-scapes, animation and 3-D lenticular photographs. I study the allure to non-scientific healing and spiritual practices where it is suggested that finding enlightenment could happen with ease.

Growing up in a home where each week presented a new miracle cure, I like to flirt with the possibility that my shortcomings can be solved with the aid of a pair of green-colored glasses or by sitting inside of a hand-made pyramid placed in the living room. While for decades I rejected these ideas, I am interested in the dreams offered by the emotional highs of a quick fix. What if we could become hypnotized and wake up perfectly healthy and happy? Even if we cannot, many of these practices offer the potential for slowing down and connecting with one another or even just looking at the world around us from a different perspective.

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Rebecca Tennenbaum

These drawings are from an ongoing series investigating decision-making processes, a perspective seen from an intersection of psychology and behavioral economics. Every day we work with or against frameworks, self-created or socially structured. I question the position of the individual: are we ever responsible for constructing the framework around our decisions? When are we influenced to make certain decisions over others, and how often are we aware of this influence?

I am particularly interested in Heuristics, a term coined by Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1974. Heuristics are cognitive rules of thumb an individual develops from past experiences to make decisions quickly and effectively. Although they allow the individual to feel like they should trust their intuition when making decisions, heuristics also have the potential to prevent them from experimenting, since it’s easier to default to our personal biases.

“Opt-In”, “Opt-Out”, “Active-Choice” and “Default Settings” are types of frameworks we experience in the external world. I would like to expand on these systems as a metaphor for our internal frameworks. Can people identify their own “default settings” to challenge their behavior? Can a risk-adverse person become more risk-seeking by adjusting their framing of a particular problem?

Each drawing portrays a rupture, similar yet different parts which prevents a system from completing in a predictable way. Expressive mark-making is used as a mechanism to show the emotion or humanness of the individual, contrasted against rigid geometry or natural concepts (grids, repetition, order) which represent different frameworks, self-imposed or external. Repetition of shape implies repetitive thought or development of a pattern. I often use symmetry/asymmetry as a metaphor for weighing the value of outcomes of decisions and arrival at a choice.

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Tamsen Wojtanowski

Little Box Of Rocks, was a series of prints made during the transition time of 2019 into 2020. While we collectively shared much of the uncertainty and chaos of those months, personally I was facing some of my own. As a queer artist in the third trimester of my first pregnancy, I was looking to relocate my anchor. Facing a long list of unknowns, I needed to find ground. At this time I let my studio practice lead me, calm me, exhaust me. I was reminded, the studio practice always provides. When in doubt, make. When in doubt, dream.

Using cyanotype emulsion with hand drawn negatives, I work with abstract imagery, further complicating the visual plane with multiple layers of exposure and information. In this body of work I explore feelings of otherness and motherhood

The process of cyanotype attracts me in that it offers an accessible means of producing without the need of specialized equipment or facilities. It is a process easily shared with another, regardless of education or background. I believe that accessibility makes the process welcoming and allows it to have a sense of immediacy, giving the artist a feeling of quick control over the act of making (whether that is accurate or not).