The focus of work is a feminist, gender equality and women's rights project, which explores the way women are viewed and society's expectations of them. A series of portraits of feminist icons, show strong, powerful and self-motivated women, some of whom have reached iconic status for their work and influence, and in themselves are agents of change in society. Female icons are at the very forefront of the women’s rights movement because of all the things that these women have achieved and the circumstances in which they achieved them. Women leaders in all fields, be it political, scientific, business, artistic or humanitarian are under intense and constant scrutiny.
Hillary's intent is to reveal the human bias present in everyday thinking. Working primarily in oil paint she pushes the medium to its limits of subtlety to represent the commonplace, the underrepresented, and misunderstood. Hillary predominantly tackles the innately human notion that everything on earth is for our use. The formal context of a gallery changes her subject matter's significance causing the perception each entity to shift enabling the audience to question their previous ideology of the things as unworthy.
King creates emotionally intense and intimate hyperrealistic contemporary portraits that undress the cultural layers that determine worth and shape identity within the social stratum. The subjects in King's work serve to shift the status quo and challenge norms, while deconstructing the preconceptions of the many roles within cultural levels.
Willis was largely interested in oil painting throughout graduate school, where he created a series or portraits that identified the community of artists who shaped his experience during his M.F.A. program. He then grew tired of trying to render form and wanted to explore more of what he had learned about color, relationships, layering, composition and texture.
The pattern paintings he makes now derive from concepts of optical art. In contrast his use of materials has allowed him to go beyond creating a visual depth, adding a third dimension of suspending paint, iridescent pigment and glitter in many layers of resin. Willis says, "My patterns do not just end in paint. Their repetitive nature has provided a fluid outlet for collage, digital, mixed media and installation in my work."
A calculated, soulful artist whose work is both characterized and marshaled by the focused flow of color and form, with swift, steady hands combined with meditative mind states, his graffiti like creations, whether on canvas or on the streets, articulately braid variations of deliberate lines and wild pigments. As he vehemently yanks these elements from their initial two dimensional state, fragmented and splintered characters from alternate portals dramatically emerge, producing colorful and carefully carved dimensions which pop, bounce and penetrate in a thunderously playful, yet poignant way. And similar to warped vertical and horizontal stretching which occurs when you look into a mirror at a fun house, when faced with his canvases, viewers are evoked to poke around puzzling questions surrounding the validity of their own egotistical presence.
Arthur Brouthers is well known in the world of social media as a pioneer of an abstract fluid painting technique that achieves cellular like separations, with the use of acrylic paints and other chemical agents. In his figurative works, these unconventional methods are used as bottom layers or the “skins” of his subjects. Arthur uses anywhere from 4 to 15 layers of clear resin between layers of acrylic paint, pigmented inks, and spray paint to show depth, giving a 3D effect.
Wilkinson attended Pratt Institute in New York and upon returning to Texas, he began creating large scale installations and experiences within the local underground art and music scene. This lead to the founding and inaugural installation show of Bobby On Drums in 2015. Since then Wilkinson has co-founded The Art Tooth Gallery Project, been awarded the first Art South Residency and painted in The Bass Performance Hall, Casa Manana Theatre and The Kimbell Art Museum.
Wilkinson's work is an exploration of the assemblage of the human condition. He uses portraiture to construct expressive views of soft and emotional human characters. They have deeply rich classical truth to them, almost as if they were convoluted literary figures captured in a point of shift. He portrays this small narrative by twisting, pulling, adding or removing from the image to create implied lies between what you expect them to be and what they truly are. This is overtly true of his painting works and neatly hidden into his sculpture and larger installations which seem to push past the normal limits of what he is as an artist.
Wagner’s interest in combining 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional forms, alternative use of materials, and hybrid approaches to printmaking, and massive site-specific installations, have led to her artwork being exhibited extensively in the U.S and abroad. Her most recent commissions include a large-scale installation for the internationally recognized band The Flaming Lips. a large shadow box for GNU a snowboard company out of Portland, OR, a large-scale installation piece for NIKE, presented in the Shrine Auditorium for The KOBE X Blackout Experience, and most recently two installations for Viacom, one of which is a 117 ft piece at thier headquarters in Times Square.It was featured by the New York Times and was broadcast on national television on VH1's Top 20 Countdown.
Lam enjoys the unpredictable quality of her process. This is seen in the way she manipulates the foam structures and handles the resin. She couples this with the tedious and controlled placement of her acrylic “spikes” and surface designs. This opposition is crucial to her work. Whether seen in the process itself, or the final result, which exudes both an intense beauty and an intense uncomfortability, Lam plays with these polarities and examines them closely.
The polymorphous, multi-textural and ambiguous qualities of her work both confuse and delight the viewer, leaving you craving more and wishing you could touch them. Dan Lam is just getting started. The objects that she is making are difficult to identify and definitely impossible to forget.
My paintings are for beauty. I want people to look at them and be suspended in the moment. This is what I want to share. I’m fascinated by layers, faces, and figures. I prefer to paint and render realistically. In my current process I begin with a line drawing or traditional figure painting in oil on board. Then I pour a thin layer of resin and add anything from latex paint and found objects to various other chemicals and substances. Once that layer dries, I pour another one and repeat the process until the painting doesn’t want anything else. The result is an added three dimensionality and richness to the paintings. The layers, all frozen in time, pull you into the moment and hold you there. What I love about this process is that I have complete confidence and control during the initial drawing or painting. But I have no control over the reaction of the resin to whatever I add to it.
The art of Marshall Harris is best described as autobiographic. Most of his works are larger than life, just like the artist, and each is infused with an obsessive attention to detail, technique, quantity and quality. Harris’s skill set is vast. He is an innovator, a spiritual and rich thinker, and most compelling of all, he makes things. All kinds of things. From his hyperrealistic drawings that are complex and detailed, conjured up with graphite on Mylar, to the completely vacant and quiet emptiness of his Stripped Naked and Numbered sculpture series, Harris’s work proves to be black, white and everything between.
Harris's drawings, at times, span beyond one hundred inches in width and present the most photographically impossible details. He offers works he has tediously drawn and colorized in the negative format, only to then digitize them, in order to reverse the negative to create a new positive image. And if his technical ability were not enough, he has content — truly deep, thought-provoking content. He is not afraid to be confrontational. He is not afraid to make a statement. He is not afraid to stand for something. But even in this confrontation, a softness still emerges.
Drigo's work focuses on the idea of a young conscious mind and the merging of various cultures. In his work, he places his indigenous characters in unique, decorated head pieces; accompanied by colorful landscape-like environments unique to each painting acting as a glimpse into the astral plane. Primarily working in gouache, spray paint, and acrylics, Drigo uses patterning and his bright color palette to convey heavy cultural influence within each of his beings.
Douglas Hoekzema attempts to show us a different way of viewing time through a means of exploring its natural fabric. His work creates a new foundation and approach to evaluating and appreciating time. The oscillation of the pendulum paints time through gravity’s natural pull. Expressing how we can be pulled in one direction, when we are really meant to be going in another. How resistance creates a struggle and a false sense of control. Where if we follow the natural flow of times predetermined, yet unseen path, an experience of beauty and pure form will take shape.
Slinkachu (b. 1979, Devon, UK) has been “abandoning” his miniature people on the streets of cities around the world since 2006. His work embodies elements of street art, sculpture, installation art and photography and has been exhibited in galleries and museums globally. His images have been collected in three best-selling art books; Little People in the City (Boxtree, 2009), Big Bad City(Lebowski, 2010) and Global Model Village (Boxtree, 2012) that have collectively sold over 300,000 copies worldwide.
Jeremy Joel is a self-taught multimedia artist currently working and residing in Fort Worth. Originally from Denver, Colorado, Joel's deliberately folksy, distinctive and exuberant street style can be seen throughout Fort Worth, most notably in his beloved murals on the Southside. He has exhibited at F6 Gallery, The Grackle, and most recently at Fort Works Art. He is co-founder of art collective Bobby on Drums.
