Joey Watson’s studio practice investigates how highly specific utility informs the purpose and implementation of a designed object and the ways that form language is employed to communicate and manipulate the interface between tool and user.

Watson is interested in the subtle manners that are learned from interacting with objects that are non-casual in their functionality. Ideas in his work often reference the specificity of ritual implements and how carefully they’re infused in special contexts. He’s captivated by ideas pertaining to supernaturality and how objects are imbued with those energies through the rigor of ritual procedure and the transformative potential they carry within them as a result.

Nedra Bonds learned traditional quilting at the feet    of her great grandmother and grandmothers. Quilting has been a tradition    in her family from as far back as anyone can remember.  Bonds uses visual literacy techniques to construct impressions of issues involving social justice, women’s concerns and current events.  

Her interest in symbolism has led to researching the meaning found within African and indigenous patterns.  She recently began experimenting with beads, as media and as embellishments in her work. It is in the hands of people making textiles, that the artist connects, particularly to people of color. It is also the motivation behind her travel to Cuba.

Kukuli Velarde and Doug Herren are ceramic artists who work together while each developing their own body of work. Velarde’s work, which revolves around the consequences of colonization in Latin American contemporary culture, is a visual investigation about aesthetics, cultural survival, and inheritance. Her focus is on Latin American history, particularly that of Perú, because it is the reality with which I am familiar. Herren aspires to attain in his work the wedding of the prosaic yet intimate qualities of functional pottery to the more assertive power of industrial tools, both relegated to an age more closely attuned to human labor and striving.  It is less a matter of describing a sense of loss than to invoke wonder and curiosity in the work he now produces.

As a couple, they are seeking to merge their different aesthetics. The search for a shared language is a metaphor of interculturalism. Velarde is from Perú and Doug Herren (Velarde’s husband) is from Kansas, this fact has provoked the couple to wonder if they can extend the harmony of their human relationship to their work.

Tori Lawrence is interested in deepening the dialogue between the theatrical/staged and the real/authentic.  Viewing landscapes as sites, her work looks at how the human body is also a site, shaped by how it perceives and experiences the world. The possibilities that can be realized and performed by the body signify the perspective dialogue between the self and its social/physical environments.  Lawrence creates site specific dances in remote unconventional spaces, intermedia performances for the stage, and dances for the camera.

Her current choreographic research is in immersive digital/live performance - using technology to invoke empathetic connections so that audience members are encouraged to participate collectively in the experience of the performance.

Lyndon Barrois Jr.’s practice is informed by constructed realities, material economy, and nuanced representations of marginal identities. Barrois often uses found, altered, or replicated printed and cinematic media, and is interested in opportunities that tether the image as a constructed experience from one context to another.  

His curiosity regarding the poetics of entanglements seeks to destabilize essentialized identities and their associations using juxtapositions of text, ethnographic imagery, and commercial printing ephemera. By injecting ambiguity, and offering ironic connections across material and image contexts, Barrois negotiates what is learned, inherited, and desired, on a path to self-determinacy.

Magalie Guerin immigrated to the United States 17 years ago. Guerin is a studio artist and painter.  The foundation of her work is the examination and exploration of an “internal architecture”. Her studio work is a balance of productivity and reflection - there are days when she writes more than she paints or look more than do. The completed paintings reflect the history of their construction and the psychology of the artist.  

Currently, Guerin is looking to connect with the larger world and take a global approach in her attempt to communicate via a visual language.

Cody Kauhl is an electronic composer/digital media artist.  He records then delicately arranges inconspicuous or disregarded sound sources to produce intimate human agency from otherwise lifeless objects or reinterpret the sound saturation of daily life. The resulting product often juxtaposes the delicate and visceral, the intricate and sparse, while maintaining an unabashed intimacy throughout.

Another critical component of Kauhl’s art practice utilizes data-driven instruments. When preparing to create a new composition, he develops programs that read information retrieved by accelerometers, web cams, and infrared cameras in order to create expressive musical instruments or sound modifiers. Kauhl endeavors to perform with electronics as one would with any acoustic instrument.

Jackie Brown’s work stems from an interest in nature, science, and living systems.  Her current focus is sculpture installations in which she invites the viewer into imagined biological systems.  Brown’s works suggest limitless potential for growth, movement, and transformation. Her use of abstraction seeks to blur boundaries between the real and the imagined as the viewer encounters a myriad of forms, colors and surfaces.   

Recent advances in bioengineering and experiments involving combining or altering the basic components of nature serves as an inspiration point for Brown who seeks to comment on our complex relationship with nature and biology. 

Jason Cady’s operas originate with a speculative or comedic premise for a story or scene. A few examples of his stories include: 1. “I Need Space,”about a couple breaking up while on their way to Mars, 2. “I Screwed Up the Future,” about a time-traveler from the present going back in time to the 1990s to prevent Y2K, only to return and find that she had created the problems our society now faces, and 3. “Dead Inside,” a monologue by a zombie who does not realize he is a zombie. The music and everything else (instrumentation, form, etc.) follows from the narrative.

Being a composer/performer is important to Cady’s identity as an artist because he believes that is a significant aspect of experimental music. His direct participation as a performer of his work—along with the stories that he writes for many of his operas — result in a more integrated and distinctive style.  Cady’s music combines the experimental with vernacular (i.e. folk and pop) idioms and is inspired by the lineage of opera from Monteverdi to more recent composers like Robert Ashley and Anthony Braxton; and by genres such as Jazz, Funk, and Dub.