The 15th Annual International Juried Exhibition
February 5-28, 2026
Since 2011, Gallery 110’s juried exhibition has showcased works by emerging and established artists chosen by a prominent juror with ties to the artistic community of the Pacific Northwest. Our location and reputation offer artists exposure to professional reviews, access to Seattle’s Pioneer Square gallery district, and the popular First Thursday Art Walk.
Finalists’ works will be displayed at Gallery 110 from February 5 through February 28, 2026. The juror will award first, second and third place prizes of $1000, $500 and $300 at the Awards Reception on Friday, February 6th. There will also be a ‘People’s Choice” award of $200, tallied from all votes gathered from visitors at the preview night and the Pioneer Square Art Walk.
About the Juror
Stefano Catalani is the Museum of Northwest Art's Executive Director. He began his tenure at MoNA in 2022 after leading Gage Academy of Art, Seattle for 5 years, also in the role of Executive Director. Previously, Catalani was the Director of Art, Craft & Design at Bellevue Arts Museum. He conceived and launched the successful series Bellevue Arts Museum Biennials, focused on celebrating craft and design in the Pacific Northwest.
About the Artists
Angela Fleet
My work explores the space between observation and invention through narrative painting. I often start with a real place or object that catches my eye. One ongoing source of inspiration is an untouched midcentury laundromat in Tieton, Washington. It has become a kind of stage where I can place figures and build scenes that feel both familiar and imagined. I collect visual data through sketches, photos, and studies, then use it to create new compositions that are exciting to me. The figures I paint come from people I know, memories, or historical works. My process is physical and intuitive. I layer paint, scrape down, shift color, and rework compositions as I go. I often use a grid to keep the surface active and balanced. Painting is a way for me to explore questions and make sense of what is around me. I am most inspired when there is room for ambiguity, interpretation, and the unexpected.
Ari Madian
Nature is the greatest possible artist. Above all else I hope to capture even a fraction of its magic and to help others see and feel what I do, to gain common understanding and share an experience. I want to bring joy to others with my work - to scratch an itch they didn't know they had, to show them wonders of the world they might not otherwise see. I want to inspire change. The wonderful places in my work are being threatened by a variety of actors; it is imperative that we do what we can to defend them. I am autistic. I struggle with overstimulation and getting out of my comfort zone every day. I find that the natural world looks into me as I look into it. It teaches me about myself. The world is often too loud, chaotic, and confusing for me. In my work, I seek simplicity and elegance as a refuge from overstimulation. I focus on pattern, texture, and intentional color palettes.
Arvid Choudhury
The artworks submitted are from KILLING BUTTERFLIES AT A QUARTER TO 4 AM; a series I began after a trip to Washington and Portland in late August of this year. At 3:45 am I was in a car in Vancouver, Wa waiting for my mother and brother to drive into Portland when a gorgeously neon butterfly came in my line of vision, immediately I asked myself what would it mean to rob this butterfly of its life of its beauty, to cut off the brightness and hope that neon butterfly imbued? Canvases and skin are both porous; the initial insight was to treat canvas as skin and suffocate that body with paint making it the representative of the American Other, this exploration came about from wanting to cope with and understand the murder of George Floyd. KILLING BUTTERFLIES AT A QUARTER TO 4 AM addresses societal patterns as it pertains to black bodies, brown bodies, immigrant lives and otherness through repetitive mark making mapping change in behavior and treatment.
Caitlin Lanza
Caitlin Lanza is a multidisciplinary artist based in the Pacific Northwest. She fell in love with art at an early age and went on to earn her BFA from The Evergreen State College in 2014. Though her career has taken unexpected turns, art has remained a constant. Since 2005, she has created consistently—both for herself and on a freelance basis—while working full-time in roles that didn't always reflect her creative passions. She explores themes of femininity, fashion, and character design, celebrating creativity as a universal language. Her work is expressive, accessible, and rooted in authenticity. For Caitlin, art is not just a skill—it's a way to communicate, reflect, and imagine. In this next chapter of her journey, she is leaning fully into her creative process, reconnecting with her artistic voice, and sharing it with others. She is excited to grow and grateful for every opportunity to do so.
Carlos Sullivan
My work is anti-cynical and anti-nihilistic. It enacts futility, collapse, destruction, emptiness, incoherence and failure, firstly and only, in order to then demonstrate meaning's persistence. This comes from a place of self-conscious indeterminism, which is generated by resisting and blurring binary oppositions. It is to be neither this or that, to be neither brittle nor intangible. It is a practice of letting go and reasserting control incompletely. It is a cycle of loss and reclamation, obscuring and revealing and obscuring again. It is a place in which an audience may also embrace indeterminism, and therefore perform an irrational, romantic act. My works both perform and present an opportunity to self-consciously let go of the strictly rational and cynical in favor of irrationality and sentimentality.
Cathy Braasch
Daily Drawings is Cathy Braasch's series of durational works on paper in ink and graphite. Braasch constructs each image by adding one layer per weekday over the course of a month. Together, these drawings become a personal, graphic record of time, experience, and perception, rendered with deliberateness and happenstance alike. Conceptually, the drawings operate simultaneously across three interconnected scales. First, the personal experience—a meditative ritual that accepts the variations and incongruities of daily life and is a receptacle for memory. Then, imagined as architectural studies—the accumulation of simple geometries generating complexity. Finally, at the scale of the city—a reflection of the inspiring, incremental development of the built environment and the productive qualities that arise from this growth. The work encourages the appreciation not only of the outcomes but also of the experience of creative production.
Christopher Hartshorne
My current series "Graphic Myths" shows scenes of figures in states of contemplation. They are large relief prints made by carving linoleum blocks and pressing them onto Japanese paper. The imagery is influenced by both the design and content of graphic novels. They show figures in a state of indecision and quiet anxiety. My figures are stoic but physically altered. One figure is fragmented and has overly sized hands, another has no body at all. It's just a head in a cage. These suggest dark themes, but I also see these prints as humorous. The illustrative style and the absurdity of the imagery takes the edge off the darker themes. I am interested in narrative but leaving enough unclear for the viewer to complete the story. It's my hope that no matter how bizarre the imagery, the spectator can find something to connect with.
Claire Renaut
I am a fiber textile artist with a lifelong love with textiles and texture. I am fascinated by the "Art Fabric" artists from the 1960s and 70s for their incredible innovation in materials and forms, they moved the craft into an art form on its own. In my artistic practice I use materials that I manipulate in a way that diverts them from their original purpose. Newspapers that I spin into yarn and weave or wrap it, and roving flax fibers that I transform using a papermaking technique to make sculptural forms. Disrupting the notion of fiber and textile and blurring the lines between textile and sculpture. By converting those materials, the meaning of the objects I transform is both amplified and changed, a shift challenges the viewer's perceptions and feelings. In times of faster technology, I enjoy the slow and deliberate pace of using hands-on traditional tools and methods.
Colin Fox
the inside of an absurd world where humans are dominated and overwhelmed
I entered this world by choice, enticed by its excitement and rewards, only to get chewed up and spat out by this system
the wear and tear, the emotional scars, the loss of culture
some just accept it for what it is
keep showing up
feeding the corporations
empowering the politicians
staying in the system
Daniel R. Smith
I grew up on the Tulalip Reservation in a house my mother leased from our tribe near the water. When the lease was ended in order to restore the land, our house was worthless and we eventually gave it away. After graduating from the University of Washington in 1994, I bought an affordable house in the Central District, then majority black, next to my best friend. We renovated, planted trees, and established a community garden. When he moved, I bought his house and become a landlord. Now, having seen the racial balance in my neighborhood change dramatically, I must ask: Am I a gentrifier?
Donna Leavitt
I have a passion for trees. They are the heroes of our environment and I want to honor them in my art. I am drawn (literally) to the work I do and the way I do it as the result of decades of observing and drawing trees from a distance, creeping closer and closer to explore all they have to offer to the inquiring eye. From 2006 to 2008 I served in Peace Corps/Macedonia and in order to bring my at work home I had to devise a way that large drawings could be packed into a suitcase! So the composite drawings that could be disassembled and put into a tablet evolved! This approach allow me to work on a large scale for the drama and interest it evokes. I keep them unframed for portability and storage. Trees are great healers, as everyone who has walked amongst them, hugged a tree for blessing or comfort, enjoy their shade and listened to their voice can attest to.
Fatima Jamil
I am a multidisciplinary artist working across digitally altered composite photography, traditional painting, fabric art, and film. My practice is rooted in figuration, where each figure becomes a vessel for narrative—drawing from both personal memory and shared human experience. The figures in my work reflect an internal dialogue, a quiet yet persistent conversation with the self. They invite viewers to confront contradiction, to reflect on the dualities within themselves and the world around them. Pattern and light are essential to my visual language. As vital as the figures themselves, they speak to the complexity of existence—how beauty and difficulty often arrive hand in hand. My work seeks to hold space for these paradoxes, revealing what lies beneath the surface of being.
Garima Naredi
I primarily work in oils and charcoal, drawn to their rich traditions, exploring life and our deep, often overlooked connection with nature. My love for the natural world—plants, animals, birds—appears as symbolic imagery, touching on themes of equality among life forms, transformation, and life's cycles. Many symbols are inspired by Hindu mythology, spiritual beliefs, and South Asian culture. The female figure is central to my practice. As a woman and mother, I see the world through a female lens, shaping my storytelling and imagery. My brushwork reflects Impressionist influence, while my color choices are symbolic and expressive, adding layers of meaning. I've expanded into mixed media—watercolor, charcoal, and pastels—creating ornamental, experimental works on florals, animals, people, and landscapes. Narrative underpins my art, but I allow it to unfold intuitively, blending realism and fantasy, the earthly and the astral, evoking the mystery of magical realism.
Garric Simonsen
Garric Simonsen's artwork draws from a large collection of family history. Simonsen works with traditional materials and interdisciplinary approaches, including dry-etching, encaustic and collage, the evolution of what could be classified as his antipainter persona. Garric's artistic research pushes the meaning of an evolving selfperception, redefining self as nature does. Defined through a language of signs and pictures, his work requires little intellectual description or hypothetical analysis. His roots in Pacific Northwest history pull away from abstraction and focus on artifact and the quality of object and picture.
Graham Cassano
Gray Davidson
The RENDITIONS series are investigations into the asymmetrical duality of ancestry using steel, jute, and burlap materials. I created these sculptures while processing my place in lineage — both as descendant (my family's exile from fascist Spain nearly a century past) and as potential ancestor (navigating with my partners whether and how to become a parent). The works explore the technologies we create for moving between states: from stasis to motion, from received story to chosen narrative, from one generation's ending to another's beginning. Each RENDITION is a kind of emotional alchemy. Transmuting sorrow into grace. Conflict into compersion. The weight of infinite past and infinite future, compressed into the present moment where we decide what to pass on.
Greg Navratil
These paintings explore the abstract and chaotic qualities of nature. The work arises from inspiration found in colorful natural areas. Back in the studio, tiny, intricately placed shapes of vivid acrylic colors, reminiscent of pointillism transform the canvas, establishing a delicate balance between abstraction and realism. By moving away from traditional brushes to squeeze bottle dispensers are utilized, to create textured, pure hues that lend the work a distinctiveness. The result is a powerful interplay of color and form that demands contemplation from both up close and a distance. These paintings remind viewers that abstraction is deeply connected to the natural world, sharing the same chaotic force and essence.
Hannah Zizza
In my work I am fascinated by the concept of meat and the conflicting ways it is understood within our culture. To me, meat embodies the cognitive dissonance that permeates so much of our modern capitalist society. It is at once a banal, everyday object and a site of profound horror when we are forced to confront its origin within a once-living body. Reestablishing the link between meat and the body, my work interrogates how both human and nonhuman animals are perceived and treated in our culture, exposing the intersection of misogyny and speciesism as intertwined systems of objectification and violence that reduce sentient beings to mere products for consumption by those in power. Similarly by hybridizing human and animal forms, I draw connections between the oppression of animals and the ways marginalized identities are often framed as bestial, or other, while simultaneously reclaiming the beastly as a source of strength, resistance and power.
Harold Nelson
My medium is paper collage. My process is slow, intuitive and improvisational. Using bits of paper, I try to create new images that I sometimes cannot even conceive of at the outset. I let each piece happen and use whatever mix of the abstract and figurative that will lead to the best outcome. My pieces are meant to be looked at from a distance as well as from close up and provide different visual rewards from varying perspectives.
Heidi Keith
I make large ink paintings on paper. Water—both medium and metaphor—becomes a language for what is vital, vulnerable, and always in flux. Rooted in dialogue between body and self, my work explores shifting landscapes of identity, society, and shared space. The body is not just form, but a vessel of memory, pressure, and potential—a site of isolation and communion. Through it, I trace quiet, unspoken agreements: grace, dignity, space, care. Figures emerge fluid—gestural, porous, unresolved—slipping between body and water, subject and shape, presence and disappearance. I'm not interested in fixed identities or heroic forms. These bodies bend, collapse, extend, dissolve. Their fluidity is not weakness, but wisdom. Through blurred boundaries—body and land, self and other, stillness and change—my work becomes an offering: a quiet insistence that we can still move with reverence and respect for one another and the world.
Helena Sarah Richardson
I am an artist working primarily in drawing, writing, and textile processes – interlacing strings and structures, colors and textures into storied cloth. The loom brings order to the chaos of loose threads and wild fibers, both natural and synthetic. I use almost anything as a weft – like a kinetic verb that moves left and right, back and forth – intersecting a warp. Weaving is my meditation. The finished cloth traps narratives that I see playing out in my imagination and in the world.
Jeanette Jones
I'm getting older, caring less and more at the same time. Caring less about "things" and how I'm perceived. Caring more about those I love and who love me. I enjoy boredom and watching shadows shift across walls, therefore my work reflects this stage of my life. Painting in oils, I paint things from my daily life that strike me. Planned out, I paint in multiple layers sometimes scraping and wiping away as I go. Although I have a plan I leave myself open to possibilities and will change course when necessary.
Jennifer lovold
My work aims to illustrate the history of our propaganda and the contrast between our dark reality and the promises made 70 years ago when baby boomers were indoctrinated using the "golden age of illustration." All of the work is sustainable and hand cut sourced from the materials I have found in my day job as a vintage dealer. The work is deeply feminist reflecting my reality of growing up the only child of a woman with a diagnosed cluster b disorder and her coercive control over me for the first 30 years of my life. Growing up I was told I could not cut straight and her inability to accept reality without irony has led me to communicate through collage. I have embraced the shadow work of healing and expressed the joy of survival through my art. At first things are humorous, then disturbing, then with further contemplation they become complicated. It is all interesting and keeps happening, all of it leading closer towards the truth.
Jessica Teckemeyer
My creative impulses are fueled by media stories and observing social interactions, which lead me to creating animal sculptures exploring the multiplicity of human behavior. I am interested in the complexity of behavior driven by instinctual reactions and culturally learned responses. As social creatures, we combat reason versus instinct. By translating human experience into the form of an animal, we look at ourselves from another viewpoint. My artistic process is rooted in research, particularly on the psychological impacts of historical situations that resonate with our contemporary experiences. I explore concepts developed by psychologists, authors, film makers, and the media, revealing insights into how humans develop socially. These sources inform my choice of animal representation, often pairing predator and prey creatures to symbolize a situation. The resulting sculptures are visual manifestations of social dynamics.
John Subert
My images are created from a title, comprised of anything which captures my interest and ignites my passion. The title then represents a problem in my mind and is the driving force to create a reasoned visual solution. Some resulting images are representational whereas others are more abstract, but all are concrete expressions of the concept to be encountered by the viewer, each image for itself. This philosophy and process is in direct opposition to divining a title for automatistic art after its completion. A descriptive paragraph or title adjacent to my art is unnecessary as the title, a useful clue to the viewer, is a provided on the front. This strategy invites closer examination by the sensitive viewer, who becomes more intimate with the image and its physical surface, establishing a connection in relation to their own consciousness. This anomalous approach to creating contemporary art has not been very well received by the art communities in the Pacific Northwest.
John Worthey
John Worthey is a Seattle-born painter whose subject matter comes from both the urban and natural environments. His use at both manmade and nature-made elements is conceived as a statement that harmony can exist between man and nature, and as a metaphor of personal fulfillment. This could generally be seen as man's dependence on nature for his own survival and spiritual welfare. His use of both man-made and nature-made elements is conceived as a statement that harmony can exist between man and nature and as a metaphor of personal fulfillment. This could generally be seen as man's dependence on nature for his own survival and spiritual welfare. John Worthey's works have been shown nationwide as well as in Canada and Japan. Educated at the University Of Washington School of Art; he studied under Bill Holm, George Tsutakawa and Jacob Lawrence.
Jonathan Hoffman
The Duck and Cover series started as a reaction to politics and cultural events of the last few years. My reference images are culled from nuclear safety films of the 1950s and 60s. These films are often degraded and only available in poor resolution. Many of the details of the shots are lost, some areas dissolve into incoherent masses of shapes and noise. These areas of incoherence are important as I am not looking to recreate reality, I am attempting to create a work that feels like a true reflection of the absurd. These paintings are an attempt to accept the futility of understanding. My work addresses the dread of "what could possibly come next," the devastating lack of empathy, the feeling of complete powerlessness, the attacks on social cohesion, the attempted normalization of profoundly disturbing events.
Liz Ewings
I am fascinated by water. I love its movement and chaos, its transparency, how it reflects and absorbs light and color. In the paintings of the Icons series, I explore falling water in cascades in Pacific forests. I approached these paintings as both color studies in green, and gestural studies of the flow of water. I used a red (alizarin crimson) underpainting, and left some of the red lines unpainted to create a vibrating contrast with the intense greens. Scale is significant in these pieces. I embraced the physicality and expressiveness of the flow of water. I use thick paint and thicker strokes, as I imagine following the path of tumbling water molecules as they fall over the rocks. The waterfalls of the Icons paintings reflect the constant change that takes place in nature, revealing the complexities of geologic scales and the ephemeral nature of our planet.
Mela M
I'm interested in the association of architectural objects and the way these are viewed from memory. But not necessarily as the specific architectural objects per se. In my paintings, you have a feeling of recognizing specific objects, such as a window, room or street, but the more you look at them you realize they do not make actual sense. They don't correspond to each other spatially and they are not depicted as distinct objects. Instead, they reinforce the idea of a quasirational, architectonic three-dimensional space. The dialogue between space and form and light and shadow have to be negotiated by the viewer.
Michael Stasinos
My goal is to capture a moment in time through detailed observation and meditation. Painting is like a marathon in which I must push the painting as far as my skill and patience allows. I view the potential of details in a work can build a suggestion of narrative for the subject and more convincingly document that can give a sense of time and place. I don't pursue detail simply for the sake of detail for its own sake; rather its pursuit serves deeper aesthetic purposes. Details are also a way to help make a painting interesting from any viewing distance. Certain painters—like Vermeer, and the Dutch Fijnschilder like Gerrit Dou of the 17th century—pursued such realism with this meticulous detail. My hope is that this struggle will always lead to an interesting visual experience.
Michelle Ramin
After years of digital bombardment from Zoom calls, mobile news alerts, social media pings, and seemingly endless layers of open laptop windows, I have returned to drawing with color pencil - the medium I associate most with analog creation and childhood wonder. Rendering my observed reality in broken yet contained, overlapping boxes has become a form of meditation; building this visual journal helps me process and analyze what's in front of me, however disjointed. As each saturated rectangle upon rectangle screams for attention with news articles, messages, and to-do lists - showing no clear delineation between physical, digital, and psychological space - this body of work reveals how completely flooded my brain has become since the beginning of the pandemic. By sketching the virtual world out in detail and playing with the compositions through my personal lens of self-portraiture and the everyday, I discover a sense of control and, on the good days, peace and calm.
Morgan Curtis
Portland-based artist Morgan Curtis paints at the intersection of dream and recollection—works that are playful, unsettling, and alive with the logic of the subconscious. Using oil and acrylic in luminous pastels and experimental scales, he constructs cinematic brainscapes where figure and ground collide, forming hallucinatory riddles that feel both comic and uncanny. Each painting unfolds through improvisation and revision, guided as much by chance as intention. Curtis invites viewers into shifting worlds where meaning stays fluid and discovery never ends. His paintings are open-eyed dreams—dialogues between the familiar and the strange, urging us not to decode but to wander, to meet the unexpected both on the canvas and within ourselves.
Morgan Humphrey
I'm a self-taught oil painter from the Pacific Northwest. My work explores the space between memory and presence—the parts of ourselves that are carried forward, reshaped, and never fully left behind. Working in oil paint and oil pastel, I use contrast to reflect the meeting point between inner experience and outer reality. My paintings engage with intimacy, aging, and the quiet influence of memory on identity. Painting is my way of making sense of being human; each piece becomes a conversation with time, a reminder that we're made of many versions of ourselves.
Nathan Hein
I strive to develop color combinations, patterns, and textures that surprise me and collide them in intuitive, unplanned compositions, looking for the beauty that exists inside the chaos. I use scratching, scraping, and layering techniques to leave room for the unexpected.
Olena Burykina
Each painting in the series Sacred Place captures the essence of the everyday moment in people' that I know homes, where they grew up, feel the most happy, safe and free.
Paul Adams
Rebecca Meloy
My bond with trees and land has been strong since childhood. Seeing magnificent trees felled to build a grocery store set my path at age five, due to my anger, and then living on a small Oregon farm, for a dozen years, amplified my embrace for nature. When in the 1980s my father planted our farm with a thousand evergreens, as a family, we rose up against the spotted-owl political fight. My visual voice, depicting land in my art, is increasingly challenged. The clearing of trees and forests disrupts wild life. Drought conditions increase, flooding occurs, temperatures rise, soil dies, and increased fire, wind, and rain storms ensue. Unnecessary pain is caused. Watching. Waiting. I paint what I love and reach for a hopeful future.
Rebecca Woodhouse
Richard Longstreet
I have been learning and teaching art for over sixty years. While I have accumulated degrees and credentials, my primary sources have always been individual artists I have encountered or worked with; briefly or for extended periods and, of course, every student I have ever known. I believe that art is, beyond whatever decorative or polemic functions it may incidentally perform, a synthesis of all that is felt or known, however contradictory.
Ricki Klages
I am continually intrigued by detritus: things accumulating in gutters, fireplaces and compost piles. There is a beauty in decomposition and refuse, in odd assembled groups of objects that I find visually intriguing. This current body of work references still life objects with the idea of color or absence of color: Black can be all colors or the complete absence of color. White is never fully white since it absorbs and reflects the colors and values around it. Grey is many variations of mixes of values. Using observation, I am interested in how we determine such simple categories for such complex ideas of color or shades utilizing an assortment of objects that loosely tie together via color or shade.
Rora Blue
I live in a body with bones that ache, a heart that beats twice as fast as everyone else's, and fingertips that go numb. Most of the time my body does not feel like mine. This is not a tragedy; it is simply a fact of my existence. Queer and disabled people are often viewed as unnatural. I respond to this in my work through using natural materials and imagery of the outdoors. My work repositions the queer and disabled body as being synonymous with nature. Outdoor spaces can be inaccessible, and it is important for me to reclaim my body's relationship to the environment. I introduce an alternate trans-disabled reality by utilizing transgender and disability-specific medical objects that are commonly disposed of or hidden away. Through the overlaying of photographs on top of hospital fluorescent lights, weaving flowers in between bandages, and suspending images of the sky within IV bags, I propose a world in which bodies like mine are cared for and celebrated.
Sharon Allicotti
My work embraces the time-honored practice of creating psychologically-resonant pictorial tableau emphasizing an evocative, lyrical relationship between the human subject and the environment in which they are situated. I strive to compellingly depict observed appearances, remaining faithful especially to my sitter's features—but ultimately—to transcend illusionist specificity in favor of eliciting a more universal response: the beholder's empathy. It is my belief that figurative realist Art's power lies in its capacity to provoke imaginative interpretation, especially through recognition of our common experience.
Sharony Ray
Having grown up in bustling urban environments and initially immersed in traditional art forms and mediums, my artistic journey has led me to embrace minimalistic geometric abstraction and the exploration of color. Through my current series of work, I aim to present fragmented glimpses of urban landscapes, highlighting their infinite possibilities through simplicity and abstraction, rather than traditional depictions. My artistic approach is driven by an interest in how color, shape, line, interior-exterior space, and perspective interact to evoke emotion, moving beyond realism to create a more intuitive and immersive experience.
Sheila Sondik
Often it's the play of light that captures my eye, or an interesting arrangement of shapes and textures in small details of the landscape. Sometimes the reward for paying attention is a sense of mystery within the artwork, a visual echo of the Mystery that seems to exist in this life, in this place. I can't force or count on the appearance of this sensation, which is akin to the Japanese concept of Yugen, but I welcome its presence. By painting on crinkled paper, I discovered the satisfaction of relinquishing some control to the art medium itself. Printmaking, too, has a built-in element of surprise because the image on the paper is always the reverse of what the artist creates on the plate. There is a constant give-and-take between my intentions and the results of each pass through the press. Chance is my partner in creation, and our collaboration allows the work to move beyond the close observation of nature to create its own hypnotic reality of quiet intensity.
Steffani Bailey
There's a lot that goes into the making of something, this statement describes my general approach: When I work, I begin a process of "finding", moving myself through steps and stages, where each step suggests the next. I work on the wall with wood panels and oils, at times conventional canvas. There's painting, arranging, reviewing, adding, and subtracting. I move things around quite a bit, it's both an emergent process and a formal one. The wood panels and their fragments have an architecture: I'm aware of shape, texture, line – color can often be my starting point. More recently I've been using raw, soft, canvas in contrast to these solid surfaces… I can go through numerous arrangements, photographing them as I go is helpful. I'm forever influenced by what the natural environment shows me, be it the weather, light, color, flora or fauna, it's always there in my work. In conclusion, I strive for something distilled, evocative, offering a visual conversation.
Suneeva Saldanha
The tale of a monkey befriending a crocodile who lives in the river. Their friendship is tested when the crocodile's greedy wife demands the monkey's heart, believing it is sweet from the fruits the monkey eats. The monkey cleverly escapes by tricking the crocodile into taking him back to the tree, revealing he left his heart there, but ultimately the monkey realizes there's no such thing and that the crocodile was not a true friend.
Suze Woolf
Suze Woolf watched glaciers shrink and burned forests increase; she painted landscapes but had to portray their ecological disturbances. Portraits of individual burned trees are her metaphor for human impact. Despite anxiety, she also sees unusual beauty: fire-carved snags are the same – carbonized, eaten away; yet different – the fire's physics and plant structure create sculptures. Painting them is a climate crisis meditation. Hiking to burned forests, she sees hieroglyphics on bark. Beetle-kill, like fire, is compounded by climate: stressed trees are vulnerable; and beetle larvae don't freeze in winter. Their runic chewings, called "galleries," are a message we just don't get. A book is a collection of messages, and incorporating raw materials from nature becomes another meditation on our impact. Many scientists and artists have been advisors, collaborators and beneficiaries: her work helps them begin and continue important conversations.
Tom McIntire
I believe in the miracle of right now and often mourn a beautiful passing moment. Stories, and our perception of precious time that stories attempt to capture, drive me. Nature as our companion and as it expresses itself in personal symbology collides with the built environment and technology in my work, as it does in our urban lives. I seek out breaths of whimsy or humor but am swimming through dark undercurrents.
Weston Lambert
In the studio, I accelerate the slow violence of geological processes. My materials are engaged in a condensed passage of time—modified by my brief tenure, on a timeline charted by millennia, not decades. The heat of the kiln allows molten glass to nestle into stone; days of grinding/polishing simulate eons of erosion. In my pursuit of permanence, I create invulnerable, seamless objects that have been broken and mended outside of geological time. My work is about dualities and the balancing of contrasting forces. I'm looking for the coexistence of transparency/opacity, and ephemeral/eternal, each taking part in creating equilibrium. This dynamic relationship turns fragility into an asset and rigidity into liability. In the context of human lives, rock embodies strength, consistency, and timelessness. There's safety in its solidity, but the natural world is in constant flux. Granite and sand share each other's future—forever shattered and recast.
