As a woman artist, I feel most qualified to offer perspectives on what it means to be a woman in the world. Such work enables us to consider women in ways that focus on our lives, passions, and past histories, and consider how the male gaze has historically objectified women, fragmenting their outward appearance from their personhood and psychological experiences.
This piece has been drawn with a gel pen. The drawing depicts Kolkata, India, my hometown, as it used to be when the British still ruled. The piece represents the city during the 1920s-30s.
My work delves into the themes of impermanence, decay, and the beauty that emerges from deterioration. I hope to capture moments of transition, where familiar forms are altered through spontaneous and unpredictable processes of chemical disruption and physical manipulation. Polaroids, known for their instantaneity and clarity, are subjected to forces that warp, dissolve, and transform the images.
Lawani Sunday deals with important social issues with a strong emphasis on the subject of the position of women in society. His paintings tell stories that concern each person one way or another. Lawani’s art speaks directly to compassion and empathy in the depths of our soul. Thus, his work becomes part of the spiritual world.
As an artist, my goal is to capture the unique essence of each person I paint. As well, I bring their personality, emotions and expressions alive through portraiture.
Having been an art teacher, woodcarver and a printmaker in my formative years, I
emerged as a painter, joyously overwhelmed by color and searching for pattern.
Color and pattern are everywhere, but the seeing and interpretation of them are
different for each of us. Pattern in nature is primal to me – which fuels my desire to
find a glimmer of logic in vastly complicated, confusing and tumbled landscapes.
On July 23rd of 2018 I witnessed a 10’ flash flood tear past my Santa Fe home, a tsunami in a quiet valley, washing downstream animals, debris and tumbling boulders, leaving behind a raw, reordered landscape. My work went from the universal to the personal, understanding that our presumed control over the environment had evolved to a “new norm.”
Collage is my primary medium and my way of giving visual expression to my inner world. I find beauty in creating something whole and meaningful from the broken pieces of different elements. In this, I feel like collage is a metaphor for all of life. I live for the spaces that I can create with collage; spaces of peace, beauty, safety, comfort, and love.
Through art, Uzomah explores the role of being a person with a disability in society, other issues, and people that go unnoticed. Her abilities draw from her personal experiences and expose the daily struggle of being disabled. Translating all of this into art is her goal as an artist and activist.
“Spatial Empathy” describes the awareness of an individual to the proximity, activities, and comfort of people surrounding them. It is related to the notion of personal space, the concept that an individual has ownership of their immediate surroundings; and for others to invade this space represents an infringement on their privacy.
I stole the title for this body of work from my three-year-old niece. She was initially afraid of the shadows created by the canopy her mom placed over her bed. My sister-in-law was about to take it down when she said, “never mind, shadows love me!” These neon gel pen drawings were first exhibited in Portland, Oregon, at a café called Albina Press, in the Fall of 2022
As a poet, appropriation and collage have always been my primary mode. Distilling and transforming text. Layering and arranging text. My poetic interests have also leaned towards the visual arts: typography, page-space, dirty minimalism.
These junkmail collages were intended as a daily practice. Use only what falls through the mail slot. Be attentive to the rips and stains and bruises the paper incurred in its travels.
As much as anything, I think that what has guided and sustained my work as a photographer is curiosity, the desire to see what something looks like as a photograph. I’ve always been fascinated by the “what it is, what it isn’t” factor of photography—how the literal can become figurative by changing the angle of view, the distance from the subject, or the light.
I started work on the “Gloomy Blooms” photo series in May 2020. The country had gone into Covid lockdown in March, and like many people, I was struggling to adapt to my new, more isolated life. I’m an introvert, and alone time is very important to me, but even introverts have our limits. The lockdown made me realize how much I depend on seeing my friends and family.
This series is a reimagining of older photographs I’ve taken with more recent polaroid’s put over top—a visual translation of the conversations an artist has with themselves, with their old work, with what they’re doing now. Everything I’ve created, whether it be visual art, sculptures, or poetry—they’re participating in one conversation, stacking up meaning.
My deepest influences are found equally within the surrealists and Outsider Art pieces such as street preacher James Hampton’s The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. I approach painting with a conscious rawness. With reference to Outsider Art, my artistic insights meet the paint and paper with technical and emotional directness.
The digital photographs represent two series of still life images for back lit prints, Hard Flesh and Fashioned.
I’ve wandered the globe as a travel journalist for decades, often watching the world and its people from behind; whether in the hub of London, a backstreet in Havana, or alone from a window in a squat hotel room in Paris; whether with a 35 mm camera or an iPhone.
The series results from numerous conversations about nomadic life and its expressions, as experienced by the artists on the move. Within the paradigm of continuous “new beginnings” and “ending chapters,” we are often finding ourselves, short-term and long-term, within the “grey” zone both legislation-wise and concerning the sense of belonging, with “black and white” phases, and with bright patterns of events
I primarily use acrylic paint, latex paints, inks, papers, charcoal and alcohol inks for my paintings. My images contain many diverse layers of meaning, from the universal to the specific and personal. Many of my works are abstract.
At the beginning of my professional career, after graduating Yale University’s School of Arts MFA program, my artists soul was torn between Flemish painting of the 15th-16th century and the ideas imbedded in the 20th century DADA art movement. Specifically I was drawn to the Apocalyptic visions of artists like Van Eyck, Bruegel and Bosch and simultaneously to the anti-art of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia.
Year: 2009
Digital photograph printed with mineral pigment on cotton paper.
Format: 60cm x 90cm
Location: Minas Gerais, Brazil
Those odd phases and periods, the stolen moments in-between, there is always this strange infolding of vacuity, a mental collapse of sorts. Uncanny, even mystical to say the least. . .
My current research and work involves explorations in visual art and creative writing largely concerned with investments that transform geographic spaces into personal places. This includes, for example, unfamiliar space becoming intimate or familiar; single locations endowed with multiple meanings by different people or communities; or the way place is bestowed with power and presence. . .
White reflects all color. Look at a “white” wall and concentrate. You will see browns, blues, yellows, magentas and infinite shades of reality.[…]
Art is the human species’ most incredible form in the expression of life by far. Nothing else that is human-made can match the power of art. It moves us, motivates us, frightens us, and it can make us fall in love. . .
“Between Fire and Ice” is an ongoing photographic entry around the subject of wildfires within the forefront of climate change. Fire, to me, is alive and shares a deep relationship with our universal family. After the most destructive wildfire in the history of California in 2018, I began photographing fire-dependent ecosystems across the United States. . .
The act of painting, moving my hand across the canvas, is pure freedom—and fear. I continue to draw lines, wipe parts of them away, then redraw and wipe parts away again—joining, obscuring, and overlaying these lines many times. Different linear elements clash and struggle to be together—to make sense together. . .
These theatrical scenes are inspired by my Filipino ancestry and by The Darangen: the epic poetic narrative of the Maranao people, as well as by the textile traditions of the Southern Philippines. Each of these scenes attempts to capture and articulate the narrative imagery recovered from the psyche: a scene interrupted, a glimpse of some symbolic interior—as it might be staged in a theater.[…]
Artists are in the business of making models: windows into the soul of society that put into context the human condition. It is an aim to coalesce our shared reality through the lens of a single individual, the artist, and their experience, perspective, and opinions.[…]
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