Ben Gould is an artist currently living and working in New York City. After being diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome, his studio practice transformed to harbor a new investment in the body, exploring limits, resistance, and the loss of control. Grounded in performance, his multidisciplinary practice is built upon intimacy, urgency, collaboration, and learning.  He has cultivated a deep interest in how energy is directed, rerouted, transformed and transferred. His condition has become a motor for movement-based performance, driving an evolving practice of energetic restraint and release learned through training and research into the specifics of his own body and other energy systems. 

Gould’s work, while rooted in performance, draws from the history of sculpture, the built and natural world, ancient symbology, and a care for the principles of craft. Sculpture, drawing, images and video are used to further research and expand ideas into new forms. With the body as a source, often in collaboration with others, materials, and the environment, each endeavor is powered by a search for deeper understanding, meaning, transformation, and empathy.

Drawn to the mental effect of socio-cultural spaces on an individual, Chijioke Anyacho’s work explores the various subjective responses of individuals to issues of identity and acceptance. It seeks to go beyond the obvious and reconnect one with the self.  His blending of photography with performance allows the subject to appear to be in a continuous state of feeling and experience. 

Through his series of portraits, he questions the place of an individual in domestic life and how we react to the issues of political, religious and sexual bias in the society.

Elise Kirk is a photofilmic artist exploring the human condition, particularly as it relates to constructs of place.  Raised in middle Missouri, she has long been marked by the formative landscape of my American Midwest—the vast seas of fallow land and back roads through tangled inner worlds, the architecture of agriculture grounding us in place, and the rivers and byways suggesting a state to be imagined beyond. 

As a conceptual visual storyteller, she develops slow long-form projects, weaving illusions of documentary veracity, narrative allegory, and cinematic continuity into elliptical lyric sequences that evoke open interpretations of perspective and experience.

Erica Ferrari is interested in the relationship between three-dimensional constructions and the formation of identity in the public space. 

Ferrari studied the historical layers of Brazil's national palaces, which includes a past rooted  in violence and struggle. These palaces now serve as museums or cultural spaces. Her research has evolved to cover other spaces that have similar characteristics and that act as constructs of local identity from its use and the cultivated memory.  Ferrari incorporates these layers into her work, in order to reflect about identity and city. Her site-specific work is presented as objects or installations, constructed with materials like wood, plaster, cement and formica.

Jennie Frederick is interested in the notion of textile structure as marker; using line, repetition, texture, and symbol — particularly the circle — to represent events in time. Her work holds influences and memories gathered through observation and research of indigenous textile and paper-making techniques in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Peru. The works become dimensional drawings or artifacts symbolizing people, places, and actions.

Frederick transforms functional emphasis into abstractions based on the union of organic elasticity and ordered complexity.  Her studies of the ancient crafts of textiles and paper-making has led to an appreciation of their cultural resonance that underlies Frederick’s contemporary art making.

Jenny Yurshansky is a refugee exploring otherness and trauma of displacement by interrogating notions of who does and does not belong through site, historical traces and social constructions, often formally manifested as absence, loss or erasure. 

Yurshansky creates discourse through narratives.  She is interested in relaying the stories of generations of migrants, by creating work that goes beyond walls and crosses cultural borders.

Her work often uses plants as allegory and metaphor to speak about the topic of migration, such as the subject of “blacklisted invasive plant species”.  This intrinsically ties to the discussion of native vs. non-native. Her practice is a way to speak about borders and the absurdity of them in terms of our globalized political, economic, and trade structures.

Jon Young’s work is about the development of language and signage. He creates wood, sand, and fabric sculptures.  These works, called “waymarks”, use historical symbols taken from Paleolithic cave paintings, ancient Greek pottery, and even the line in the sand from Hollywood Westerns and Looney Tune cartoons. 

Through this use of popular imagery of the US West, he grounds the “waymarks” in the histories and mythologies of the frontier, an ideological concept popularized by the historian Fredrick Jackson Turner, which has signified both European opportunity and indigenous genocide. Reflecting this dual nature of the US West, his work is informed both by his nomadic childhood in a constantly uprooted US military family and by the cultural displacement of his Native American heritage.

Read Jon Young’s Report here

Maura García is an Indigenous woman (non-enrolled Cherokee/Mattamuskeet), dancer, choreographer and the artistic director of Maura Garcia Dance (MGD). MGD offers performances featuring my choreographic works and collaborating artists.

Through narrative driven choreography Garcia seeks to form connections, empower Indigenous cultural values and explore the rhythms of the natural world.  Her work is powered by a desire to perpetuate ancestral knowledge and to highlight the importance and relevance of Indigenous ways of knowing as a path towards social justice.  Garcia is fascinated by the power of stories to form and change our realities: family anecdotes, traditional tribal stories and the stories we create about identity.

Victoria Manganiello uses traditional textile-based media: she spins her own yarn, mixes her own color dyes (natural and synthetic) and weaves her own constructions. She integrates historical methods alongside surprising technologies and modern alternatives like computer code and fluid dynamics. 

Using abstraction derived from world geography and statistical mapping, her work takes the form of sculptural installation, wall hanging, performance, and social practice. She is interested in using weaving as code and language.  She finds inspiration in the history of computer coding and the jacquard loom, as well as covert communication via knitting patterns or underground railroad quilts. Her work seeks to connect common materials like textiles to common behaviors like communication. Manganiello uses the stories of the past with the mood of the present to create experiential artworks that speculate on the future.