Artist Relief Program

During the COVID-19 crisis, MadArt’s team got creative in finding ways to continue its mission of supporting artists, while safely producing new and engaging virtual content for our community.  In response, we developed and launched the Artist Relief Program, awarding 75 artists with grant support in exchange for photos and videos that provided an inside look into the artists’ studio practice. The program was open to regional artists from all disciplines, and the resulting submissions included sculpture, painting, mixed media, printmaking, music, photography, textile art, performance, and street murals. Explore the wide range of modalities and see how artists adapted to new limitations placed on their practices by circumstances surrounding the global pandemic. 

Studio Visits

Julie Alexander

Seattle, WA

http://www.juliealexander.net

 

Julie Alexander paints organic grids that are about relationship. She amasses horizontal and vertical lines into a landscape that contains layered color, surface tension, undercurrents of dispersal, and social bundling. Her practice also incorporates printmaking, collage, and minimalistic sculptures. She often dismantles the painting to both reach out into the viewerʻs space and to bring the artistʻs studio space and evidence of process to the viewer. Alexander uses a variety of mediums and a variety of surfaces and objects with a strong preference toward what’s ordinary and found on hand.

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Naomi Allen

Seattle, WA

Naomi Allen is a photographer and digital artist based in Seattle. Her collages and photos focus on the beauty of the mundane and questioning perspectives of our known reality. She is inspired by scenes of the landscape: hiking trails, wildflowers, clouds, etc. Allen works as a lifestyle and portrait photographer but has evolved her practice to include digital collaging through Photoshop.

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Juan Alonso-Rodriguez

Seattle, WA

http://www.juanalonsostudio.com@juanalonsostudio

 

Juan Alonso-Rodríguez is a Cuban-born, self-taught painter who’s worked as an artist in Seattle for more than 30 years. He works primarily with acrylic and wood, creating depths of color in his striated layering process with upwards of 25 coats of translucent acrylic paint. The work is then finished with a polymer varnish to protect and seal each piece, creating subtle contrasts and effects that evoke veined marble. These multi-leveled compositions featured in the clip, titled the “Strata” series, are intended to emulate relationships between human impact and the natural world.⠀

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Ross Beecher

Seattle, WA

https://www.gregkucera.com/beecher.htm

 

Ross Beecher practices with a variety of mixed mediums including oil paint, assemblages from found objects, and portraits made of cut and folded tin. The primary identifier of her work is classic quilt patterns comprised of contemporary castaway products. The fabrication of Beecher’s stems from making art out of worldly abundance. While many things were scarce during various recessions, she enjoyed the bounty of novel and peculiar pieces from the collection of discarded items.

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Gregory Blackstock

Seattle, WA

https://www.gregkucera.com/blackstock.htm

 

Seattle native Gregory Blackstock, who is autistic, finds great comfort in facts. His universe is made up of countless things that should be discovered, identified, and arranged: bugs, birds, planes or vegetables. His need to bring order to what, for him, is a very unpredictable world finds a deeply satisfying outlet in his art. While the artist is obsessive about having the image details correct, they are neither life-like nor comparably true to scale. The attentive detail to his process aided by his innate memory skill is what defines the compelling nature of Blackstock’s practice.

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Lauren Boilini

Seattle, WA

http://www.laurenboilini.com@laurenboilini

 

Lauren Boilini’s body of work explores concepts of excess; when images of excess become meaningless and fall into the realm of pattern. This idea of gluttony is reflected in America’s current culture. She believes it is a hedonistic society, always seeking more until it inevitably loses its meaning. Boilini’s studio practice primarily focuses on large-scale, mural-sized oil paintings, though she often works directly on the wall, exploring painting as installation. The dimension of her work relates to the size of the human body and the potential for a painting to physically overwhelm the viewer. She works directly on the wall while experimenting closely with the architecture to make paintings that engage floor to ceiling. Thematically, Boilini is inspired by epic narratives, recreating her own stories woven into each of her paintings.

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Mollie Bryan

Seattle, WA

http://www.lusiolights.com@mokedo

 

Mollie Bryan is a multifaceted artist with experience working in a variety of mediums such as painting, photography, sculpture, light, video, textiles, and paper. Her scope of work revolves around an interest in natural patterns, textures, music, and acts of exploration and play. Bryan invites playfulness into her pieces and creates patterns that mimic the similarities of how life is designed; layered and complex.

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Dawn Cerny

Seattle, WA

http://www.dawncerny.com@cerny_studio

 

Dawn Cerny is a multimedia artist who recently developed a formal lexicon of two- and three-dimensional shapes that evoke a sensation of familial dynamics through photography, drawing, and small wire and paper clay sculptures. Cerny realizes these investigations into form as drawing, with wire, cut paper, or photograph. This observational process of emotions and lived experiences are translated into the conceptual set of intentions used in large-scale furniture like sculptures. She records the sensations and dynamics of their experience to translate and represent the rigor, humor, and poignancy of everyday life.

 

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Drie Chapek

Seattle, WA

http://www.driechapek.com@drie_chapek

 

Drie Chapek is a Seattle-based painter represented by Greg Kucera Gallery. Her featured series is created with a light touch on the top of space, entanglement, flow, and the relationship of all

of those elements occurring simultaneously. Through variation of paint application, mark, image, and flatforms, the observer is provided a mental map to allow present thoughts to lay out amongst the physicality of paint.

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Kelsie Coker

Seattle, WA

http://www.kelsiecoker.net@kelscoker

 

Kelsie Coker is an Anchorage-born artist based in Seattle who is entirely self-taught in her painting practice. Coker is inspired by the innate beauty of the Earth, translating it into her work via romantically messy, heavy-handed brushstrokes. In addition to creating visual art, Coker has also produced and self-published her poetry editions entitled “Midnight Afternoon”.

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Buster Connolly

Seattle, WA

Buster Connolly is a local graphic designer who begins his works with the basic tools of pen and pencil to illustrate his designs. He then translates these hand-drawn works into a digital platform to continue adding color, texture, and other effects. His pieces evoke themes of playful and comedic, child-like concepts with the use of bright and primary color palettes.

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Casey Curran

Seattle, WA

http://www.caseycurran.com@casey_curran

 

For his exhibition Parable of Gravity at MadArt Studio, Seattle-based artist Casey Curran combines elements of mythology, science, and religion to foster a conversation around humanity’s goals and visions for the future on earth. This is considered through the lens of intergenerational impact and how we navigate the choices of our forebears while considering the impact of our decisions on the coming generations. Comprised of several large sculptural elements, this exhibition is a parable of a landscape in transition: a decomposing environment that nurses the new life it brings forth. It is a display of both decay and growth, referencing the unstoppable momentum of significant human innovations that have the capability of shifting our cultural paradigm. Visit inside Casey’s studio here to learn more about his creative practice with kinetic sculpture and multimedia fabrication.

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Lee Davignon

Seattle, WA

http://cargocollective.com/leeanndavignon@supposed_lee

 

Lee Davignon is a mixed media artist working in textiles, sculpture and installation. Through a combination of traditional techniques, sculptural experiments and material play, her work explores themes of production, labor, value, craft and consumerism. As a weaver, Davignon’s interests lie in the connection between the rise of disposability culture and the disappearance of craftsmanship from commercial production. Materially, she works in the waste stream, mining her own daily interactions with “disposable” objects for potential art supplies. These sources have ranged from used bike tires to collecting waste material from construction sites. By doing so, she creates a sort of material mapping system for the viewer who may recognize a logo, print or texture. Davignon’s pursuit is to create work that provokes curiosity and encourages discourse on our role as consumers within systems of commodification and waste.

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Nichole DeMent

Seattle, WA

http://www.nicholedement.com@nichole_dement

 

Nichole DeMent is a mixed media artist and intuitive spiritual leader. With over two decades as a professional artist, teacher, and arts leader, she has supported many individuals in their imaginative and creative connections to self. Her artistic practice reflects a conceptual beauty found in decay and based in nature-centered spirituality and inclination for growth and transformation. The concepts in her artworks are complexly layered to create images that speak to a forward-thinking universal conversation on the human condition. 

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Tammie Dupuis

Bremerton, WA

http://www.dupuiscreative.com@tammie.dupuis

Tammie Dupuis seeks to tell stories through her practice that explore questions of identity, agency, relationships, and what it means to be an ambiguous person living in a patriarchal society. Patriarchy demands binary thinking, while Dupuis argues that the world itself, dreams and wishes are much more nuanced than this. Stories have always been an important part of Dupuis’ life. Narratives of her dual lineage childhood told from her father’s Indigenous heritage and her mother’s European heritage has influenced her pieces in intersectional, sometimes conflicting ways and reflected in the ambiguity of her work. The main narratives that are present in Dupuis’ work are concerned with the mother-child bond, movement between spaces, transition and transformation, ambiguity, and identity. Universal themes that cross cultures and contain archetypal imagery. Her goal in using archetypes is to create narratives that are rooted in the space between, which embrace ambiguity and celebrate it.

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Janet Fagan

Seattle, WA

http://www.janetfagan.com@janet_fagan_artist

Janet Fagan is a painter, printmaker, and art teaching instructor. Fagan’s work is defined by her experiences in nature, as well as an intuitive response to the materials used. Various elements of the landscape are incorporated to inform a sense of identity and inclusion. In a world infused with the movement of weather patterns, migrations, relocations and impermanence, the idea of home becomes filled with paradox. Her work offers an interpretation of the natural world in a way that invites others to participate in wildlife conservation and awareness, recognizing parallels between the effects of a changing climate, global unrest and healing through a connection to nature.

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Kelsey Fernkopf

Seattle, WA

https://www.travergallery.com/artists/kelsey-fernkopf/@kfasshat

 

Kelsey Fernkopf has been an exhibiting artist in Seattle for the last 30 years. His recent works, BIG NEON, are the culmination of his industry experience and arts background. They display the linear luminous qualities of bent glass tubing, and contrast the fragility of glass with simple, bold design. Using his unique single tube technique, Fernkopf creates tubes up to 30 linear feet in length and 20mm in diameter, challenging the boundaries of the medium. In 2017, Fernkopf cofounded the nonprofit Western Neon School of Art, where he is the technical director and instructor. ⠀

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Sarah Fetterman

Seattle, WA

www.sarahfettermanstudios.com@sarahfettermanstudios

 

Sarah Fetterman is a Seattle-based artist who works in performative sculpture. Her works often incorporate mixed media components, previewed in this video through forged metal and wood. The featured project culminates in a large, hurricane-shaped installation consisting of a swirl of tree limbs and welded metal cuffs that are kinetic while installed, and activated by collaboration with contemporary dance performers.

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Baso Fibonacci

Seattle, WA

www.thebaso.tumblr.com/@basofibonacci

 

Baso Fibonacci is a Seattle-based painter and muralist known for nature-inspired works brought to life through his distinctive use of color and line. If you’ve ever ridden the Link through the scenic SoDo Track’s collection of murals, you can spot his brilliantly colored wolf fleeing the ashes of a city skyline set ablaze, a collaboration with Jean Nagai titled “Escaping a Burning Culture”. Viewed here are a collection of in-progress works on boarded-up businesses in the Pioneer Square area that speak to the 2020 cultural climate: women chatting while social distancing in a park, Chief Seattle featured in a mask, rabbits running rampant in the springtime, and two men embracing post-shutdown measures.⠀

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Claudia Fitch

Mt. Vernon, WA

www.claudiafitch.com

 

Claudia Fitch is a sculptor and installation artist who relates her work with ceramic objects as both figural and functional. Making wry commentary of the worn metaphor “female as vessel”, Fitch’s work presents her own female physical form also as a functional object – bottle, pedestal, architectural decor – staged to test models of femininity both brutal and humorous. Fitch is an old-fashioned surrealist; her visual process is triggered by the discovery of found objects or images that are ubiquitous, but mysteriously powerful. The image leads her through a more unconscious, viscerally felt journey of making a drawing or sculpture.

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Pete Fleming

White Center, WA

www.petefleming.info@pe.t.e

 

Pete Fleming is an installation artist working with digital images from a materialist position. His work engages with objects and processes that interweave virtual and physical space. Integral to this practice is his concept of the photograph as word-image-touch-object, a term that is intended to articulate the materiality of a photograph as it moves between servers, fingertips, light emissions, and feelings. Fleming seeks to activate an engagement with images in the making: by highlighting material transgressions between bodies and images or extrapolating photographic blemishes into sculptural motifs. He uses a silicone photo-transfer process developed specifically for making these works, where the ink from a paper print is bonded and sealed into the silicone. The traces of fingerprints on screens are transformed into a vestigial and flexible image: an amorphous object, the screen as skin, an erotic mutation of the image into pseudo-flesh.

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Eroyn Franklin

Seattle, WA

www.eroynfranklin.com@eroynfranklin

 

Eroyn Franklin is a Seattle-based illustrator, ceramicist, educator and occasional shadow puppeteer. She is the co-founder and former creative director of Short Run Comix and Arts Festival. Her current project incorporates larger-than-life representations of her friends’ faces. The eyes provide peepholes to interior dioramas, utilizing lights, rope, cut paper and plexiglass to depict scenes of gratitude and longing during isolation. These sculptures will become kinetic and participatory with cranks so the faces become a miniature theater of the human experience.

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Tory Franklin

Seattle, WA

www.folktalefabrications.com@toryfranklin_print

 

Seattle based-artist Tory Franklin’s narrative work incorporates a diverse amount of media unified by her use of pattern, print and scale. There is a constant skipping between the handmade and digitally produced elements in her work, with the site dictating which process is the victor. Franklin received her BFA focusing on drawing and photography in 2000 from Cornish College of the Arts and her MFA focusing on print and paper installation in 2007 from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers. She is the Evening Print Resource Lab Technician at Cornish and volunteers her screen printing knowledge, fabrication and troubleshooting skills for Short Run Comix & Arts Festival.⠀

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Christian French

Seattle, WA

www.christianfrenchestatesale.com@xfrench1

 

Christian French is an artist, curator, and arts activist whose background in photography and experimental cinema transcends into a multimedia-spanning creative practice that pushes the boundaries of conventional and conformist. Pulling from his eclectic collection of found objects, French continues to explore sculpture from thrift store gatherings and documenting the relationships between subject and captor in his photography.

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Sullivan Giles

Seattle, WA

www.sullivan-giles.com@sullivangiles

 

Sullivan Giles is a local painter based in Seattle. Her work is inspired by the relationship of marks on flesh (scars, tattoos, wrinkles) as a reflection of an individual’s psychology, and the ways it mirrors the language of visual art. Giles is interested in the approaches to expressing bodily autonomy, and how experiences can inform our visual and emotional identity. These recurring themes of flesh and decorative pattern refer to psychic armor, self-ornamentation, and protective talismans. Painting is how Giles explores the ways life marks, mars, builds and breaks the human experience.

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Ari Glass

Seattle, WA

www.arimuseum.com@thesoufender

 

Ari Glass is a self-taught artist who works with multi-media collages and sculptures to explore concepts of royalty. He aims to vitalize the idea that everyone is a sovereign ruler in their own kingdom, empowering the artist and the viewer. In Glass’s artwork, he often works with gold elements. Due to its color, luster, and incorruptibility, gold is recognized as the representation of the sun on Earth. The process of gilding uplifts the work to a spiritual elevation, akin to sacred artwork found across the globe.

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KT Hancock

Seattle, WA

www.kthancock.com@velvet_nugget_studios

 

KT Hancock’s exploration of adornment can be found through the creation of jewels and jewelry-like objects. It is this mark of preciousness and esteemed value within the pieces that draw the audience and maker in. The repetition of these shapes through history has perpetuated the cultural identity of gemstones being something of high value. There is an inherent grandeur in the forms of gemstones that is highlighted by these encased glass objects. Through the isolation of a cultural obsession of gemstones and their contributions to status, Hancock’s work is a study of worth.

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Dionne Haroutunian

Langley, WA

www.4artandadventure.com@worldpeace_1friendship_atatime

Dionne Haroutunian is a printmaking artist who is a regularly active participant in the Ballard Art Walk. She discovered printmaking at the Pratt Fine Arts Center in 1989 and continues her studio practice both at home and nomadically on her motorcycle. In 2016, she began “4 Art and Adventure”, where she travels, blogs, and lectures as a means to connect with others across Turkey, Pakistan, and Morocco. The prints she’s created from these experiences are life-size portraits as part of a multimedia banner installation to create a “human quilt”.

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Meg Hartwig

Seattle, WA

www.meghartwig.com@hartwigstudio

 

Meg Hartwig’s work questions constructs of power and control that enforce imbalance, personally and socio-culturally. She uses the art-making and exhibition process as an active and urgent attempt to create a movable fulcrum, one that cooperatively draws attention, questioning and awareness. Her work merges formal training of finely crafted ceramic objects and illustration with experimental approaches to process and new material. Specific place, space and material context are often integral to Hartwig’s work.

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Victoria Haven

Seattle, WA

www.vichaven.com@victoria.haven

 

Victoria Haven’s work draws on lived experience to explore a series of real and imagined spaces through drawings, object-making and more recently a choreography collaboration. Often based on the relationship to Northwest geography, personal narratives, music or filmic references, her work nevertheless sits squarely within the abstract register. Recent projects explore the relationship between the artist and her specific surroundings through word pairings, abstraction and documentation. Featured in the video is a project titled Studio X: a 10-month timelapse and video projection that documents her studio space from two viewpoints in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle.

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Luke Haynes

Kansas City, MO

www.lukehaynes.com@entropies

 

Luke Haynes is a textile and installation artist who experiments with the art of quilting. He subverts its traditional form by integrating modern concepts, which transform the comfortably familiar into the visually evocative. Haynes was born and raised across the American South, receiving formal training in art and architecture at Cooper Union in New York. A chance encounter with a box of fabric remnants sparked his imagination, leading to his first quilt. As he continued to experiment, he created a system to piece manageable parts into a larger whole, applying a modern design sense to a familiar process. He uses reclaimed materials from the communities he works with in order to speak with the textile language of each region.

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Soo Hong

Bellevue, WA

www.soo-hong.com@soohongartist

 

Soo Hong’s painting process consists of analyzing, interpreting and understanding her own experiences. She fills open space with bright colors, peculiar shapes, chromatic gradation and fine, gestural lines. Sometimes she challenges her painting through pouring in search of unprecedented textures. This process implements a stream of unconsciousness and an automatism technique, creating innate freedom. Uncertainty and obscurity are concepts explored in Hong’s work; she produces abstract images that aim to capture a state of ambiguity from her own identity moving nomadically from place to place since childhood.

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Perri Lynch Howard

Twisp, WA

www.perrilynchhoward.com@velocitymadegood

 

Perri Lynch Howard’s work focuses on charting or mapping of sites and situations expressed through painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound. Subtle qualities of landscape are combined with symbols, maps, and icons to convey the complexity of real-world experience. She has always worked with this orientation in search of her own felt sense of place, and that of others. Sound is an intensely engaging, yet often overlooked, component of landscape and space. Over time, Howard awakened to this spatial force, integrating audio components with visual art to create installations that work in concert with the outside world.

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Stasia Irons

Seattle, WA

stastheeboss.bandcamp.com/@stastheeboss

 

Stasia Irons is a Seattle-based artist who has produced music for the last 12 years. In 2008, Irons formed the band THEESatisfaction with Catherine Harris-White, a hip-hop/R&B/neo-soul duo that toured worldwide for 8 years before its disbandment. Her production style is self-described as chopped up samples, layered with wet basslines, futuristic synthesizer chords and heavy 808 drums. Her influences come from “Be Bop”, or regional sound like “Minneapolis Early 80s”. She continues to DJ regularly with weekly residencies in the Capitol Hill area.

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Henry Jackson-Spieker

Seattle, WA

www.hjsculpture.com@henryjacksonspieker

 

Henry Jackson-Spieker is a sculptor and installation artist whose work explores concepts of tension, balance, and reflection. He forms these ideas through the interdisciplinary study of contrasting materials: glass, bronze, steel, wood, and fiber. By incorporating physical tension, positive/negative space and organic and architectural forms, Jackson-Spieker challenges the traditional characteristics of each medium to create a unified duality in a sculptural form. In the past few years of his installation work, he’s begun to examine how society and community utilize and influence space. These installations disrupt, alter and draw insight into the environment. They invite viewers to analyze their preconceived notions of the space and its wider connotations to these types of spaces at large.

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Quinlyn Johnson

Seattle, WA

quinlynjohnson.wixsite.com/arts@quinlyn_art

 

Quinlyn Johnson is a sculptor whose work replicates or references dispensable objects, usually domestic; pens, staplers, lamps, and other distinctly purposeful things. With the capacity to indicate value based on material and the level of craftsmanship, these imitation art objects can range from feeling precious to even cheapened. Whether it is plaster, concrete, or wood the mimicry no longer holds the functional value of its namesake. The artwork is a forgery of implied function, such as toilet paper made solidly of plaster or scissors made delicate with thin wooden blades. At the time of sheltering in place, Johnson bridged into a new medium of felting that allowed her to accommodate her practice within home studio limitations.

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Satpreet Kahlon

Seattle, WA

www.satpreetkahlon.com@itssatpreet

 

Satpreet Kahlon is a Punjabi-born artist, curator and educator based in Seattle. Through her work, she is interested in creating visual language and immersive encounters that express and explore intersectional cultural experiences as well as the manufactured systems of inequity that dictate their boundaries. Kahlon is a co-curator of yəhaw̓, as well as the managing editor of New Archives, a non-profit arts journal covering the Northwest Coast. She has also designed and taught youth programming across the U.S., most notably running the Design Your Neighborhood program with the Seattle Art Museum.

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Vanessa Kent

Seattle, WA

www.vanessamariekent.com@nesssss__

 

Vanessa Kent explores the symbiotic and parasitic relationships found in nature through her practice. She creates iterations of her own taxonomic language to form an alternative reality existing in physical space. Her use of found and recycled materials to create work aims to draw attention to the microscopic and undervalued parts of the Linnean classification system. These works culminate into the creation of layered ecosystems of a complete alien world.

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Bobbi Kindred

Seattle, WA

@theboiyantbody

 

Bobbi Kindred is a writer, author, and storyteller. Their research and artivist praxis is rooted in Black Feminist Theory and centers the experiences of Black women, queer and trans folk whose lived experiences intersect with navigating substance addiction. They aim to reveal the intersections of Black agency, spoken word, and theater as a ritualistic practice that allows for the expansion of literature to encompass marginalized voices and experiences.

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Paul Komada

Seattle, WA

http://www.paulkomada.com@paulkomada

 

Paul Komada is a Japanese-American artist who works in painting, music and in recent years included knitting. The shift in medium has opened up the possibility for him to explore the boundaries between art, craft and design, and it has initiated his continuing search for the “hybridity” in the works. Komada further extends the exploration through incorporating various digital tools, such as chroma key, field recording and video editing in his workflow. He also composes soundtracks for the videos. Komada is also an instructor of digital art at North Seattle College. Whilst teaching, he contemplates the relevancy and the function of abstract art in the post-digital society.

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Sean Lafferty

Seattle, WA

https://iamseanlafferty.square.site@iamseanlafferty_

 

Sean Lafferty’s practice centers around layering diverse processes. By first writing and sketching, Lafferty utilizes those renderings as foundations for ink drawings. From there, the drawings can take a number of different paths. They will either remain as is, grow into larger and more complex drawings, become prints, be used as collage elements in larger mixed media works or some combination thereof. The mixed media works also often contain a highly textured, colorfully painted paper that is a byproduct of other works, made using an energetic application of many layers of thin acrylic paint.

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Fulgencio Lazo

Seattle, WA

http://fulgenciolazoart.com/

 

Fulgencio Lazo is an abstract painter who creates warm, vibrant and whimsical images that celebrate family and community. His prints and paintings depict elements characteristic of his Oaxacan and Mexican heritage, like masks and human figures in an exploration of themes of identity. Color and graceful lines evoking free movement are ever-present in the pieces, bringing joy to the viewer. Whether at a wedding, at an outdoor market, or on the street corner where neighbors gather, these shared experiences strengthen and define a culture. Lazo takes these experiences in and tries to synthesize them with his brush. Using iconographic motifs and symbolic representations, Lazo strives to recreate and celebrate the life cycle of his Zapotec Indian heritage. In a tangible way, he expresses the resilience of his own identity.

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Pamela Lee

Seattle, WA

https://www.bainbridgecurrents.com/artist/pamela-lee/

 

Pamela Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice traverses both performing and visual arts. Lee is a dancer, director, singer, visual artist, educator and social justice advocate. Her work takes on many forms: shadowbox and installation, site-specific performance, gallery and museum exhibits, dance/dramas and musicals. Through her work as a teaching artist she designs and implements educational programming focused on embattling prejudice and developing the creative voice.

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Katie Miller

Seattle, WA

http://www.millerkatie.com@vagabondcoyote

 

Katie Miller is an interdisplinary artist primarily working in site-specific installation. Her practice embodies research, observation and experimentation to create environments in which viewers can relate to and reconsider their surroundings. Her recent medium focus has been on hand-cut paper, glass, wood, light and shadow. In an era when the world is experiencing immeasurable transformation, Miller is drawn to investigating how the loss of landscape impacts our sense of place. Her body of work explores rapidly changing built environments and how our perception of place is informed by our surroundings. Miller’s work distills the forms revealed through the building process into cut-paper sculptures and installations. The imagery depicted as void, layered, or segmented, and then reanimated with light and shadow embodies the ever-changing, ephemeral nature of the built world.

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Dylan Neuwirth

Seattle, WA

http://www.dylanneuwirth.com@dylanneuwirth

 

Dylan Neuwirth is an artist and fabricator who works with light, space and interactive technologies. He has participated in numerous exhibitions as well as site-specific public and internet projects. His recent work can be found at the Museum of Museums’ colorful neon entry sculpture, titled “All My Friends”, in the First Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Neuwirth serves as the Executive Director of the Western Neon School of Art and lives locally in Seattle.

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Barbara Noah

Seattle, WA

http://www.barbaranoah.com@b.noah.art

 

Barbara Noah’s current body of work explores hope and transcendence in distant skies. It imagines the launch of metaphoric objects, into orbits as surrogates for the viewer, contemplating the past and future, while looking out from and back at the Earth. Airborne objects, which Noah photographs and digitally composites, are often from childhood, when all things seem magically possible. These satirical dichotomies and hyperreal, digital prints are infused with ironic humor as a lure and coping mechanism; a deadpan and absurd relative to the grandeur of the extraterrestrial contexts, a juxtaposition both ridiculous and sublime. They are inspired by a fascination with the cosmos and our place in it, but also allude to disassociation surrounding climate change. Noah explores that sense of place with new meaning in the 2020 era, when home is both lockup and sanctuary. These parodies are surrogate selfies, homages to our speculative circumstances and wryly reflective of the humor and pathos of the ordinary and extraordinary experience.

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Tyna Ontko

Seattle, WA

http://www.tynaontko.com@tyna.ontko

 

T​yna Ontko is a Seattle-based sculptor and installation artist whose practice draws upon research from a wide range of interests including autobiography, art history, queer theory, ecology, and social sciences. Her work combines carved wood forms with found materials to create unique installation environments. Ontko received her BFA from Western Washington University with a focus in 2D media/installation and contemporary art history. She has attended a residency at Black Church Print Studio in Ireland, exhibited nationally and internationally, and been the recipient of a GAP Grant through Artist Trust. In addition to her own practice, she is a member of the contemporary art space SOIL Gallery in Seattle.

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Spencer Perez

Seattle, WA

@spencerperez

 

Spencer Perez is a local freelance videographer who focuses his work on outdoor lifestyle and adventure-based documentary filmmaking. He creates narratives surrounding journeys through various landscapes and landmarks across the country, encapsulating the experience of the outdoor nomad and bringing the viewer closer to the natural world.

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Forrest Perrine

Seattle, WA

http://www.forrestperrine.com@forrrrrest

 

Forrest Perrine is a painter, set designer, and public art series producer. The documentation featured here is the making of a backdrop for a show Perrine developed titled “What’s Not to Love?”. The show explores the created world by interviewing artists, musicians, organizers and more about their creative practices. He describes the series as blending the educational spirit of “Cosmos” with the human interest narratives of “Fresh Air”.

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Sarah Prochnau

Pateros, WA

@sarah_methow

 

Sarah Prochnau is a circus arts performer and teacher. She has been a performing artist and teacher for over 10 years and founded the Aerie Circus Studio in Twisp, Washington. Since then it has grown into a thriving incubator for the next generation of circus artists, a primary contributor to Okanogan County’s art scene. Like many traditional dancers, Prochnau’s process starts with music that prompts an idea for a visual story. Her choreography develops organically, creating a narrative arc using the music, body, and apparatus. Her shows demonstrate that circus arts are as much about performance and storytelling as they are about athleticism.

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Susan Robb

Seattle, WA

http://www.susanrobb.com@susanrobb

 

Susan Robb’s work is an ongoing, process-oriented investigation of people and our emotional connection to place. It takes form as video, photography, sculpture, temporary site interventions and social practice. In 2019, Robb was an artist-in-residence for Recology King County. Where once Native people gathered materials on the banks of the Duwamish, now Recology’s Material Transfer Facility collects and processes the items placed in recycle bins. Robb endeavored to re-engage the site in a way that approximated how it may have been used before settlers arrived. She collected various items of detritus, then processed and wove these

materials into textile – transforming the cast-off goods into new domestic objects.

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Barbara Robertson

Seattle, WA

http://www.barbararobertsonart.com@bqrobertson

 

Barbara Robertson is a multimedia artist whose current practice incorporates drawings, paintings and animations. She explores questions of how imagination, geometry and structure relate to our quickly changing physical and cultural environment. Robertson develops these ideas through mixed media works on paper, relief paintings on panel and several related animated films. The works on paper and panel, are created with images from photos taken during her travels, of common materials such as wood, stone, or brick. Each photo of a material is a small portrait of the place. After printing, she draws a framework and cuts each into shapes to form the structure and character of each image.

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Henry Romano

Seattle, WA

http://www.jumpshipworkshop.com

 

Henry Romano is a local maker in Seattle who works with carpenter Jared Pedersen in a collaborative group titled Jump Ship. Located out of an old recycling depot, the Jump Ship Workshop specializes in the design and development of high-quality wood and steel products. More recently their projects explore the idea of “flat pack” furniture that can be broken down and shipped compactly.

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Joe Rudko

Seattle, WA

http://www.joerudko.com@joerudko

 

Joe Rudko cuts and reorganizes found photographs to break the illusion of the pristine image and suggest the variety of interpretations it can have. Working with analog methods in a digital era, Rudko places these snapshots in dialogue with the present moment. He has been the recipient of the Future List Award and two Art Walk Awards from CityArts Magazine as well as the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship Award and the Facebook Artist in Residence program.

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Ginny Ruffner

Seattle, WA

http://www.ginnyruffner.com@ginnyruffner

 

Ginny Ruffner is a mixed media artist known for her nature-based sculptures and meticulous talent with hand painting and glass techniques. In more recent work, she’s melded elements of augmented reality within her sculptures. Featured in this video is her current project deploying digital origin stories on a 10-foot-long tapestry of the periodic table of elements. Ruffner exhibited at MadArt back in the summer of 2018 in a show titled “Reforestation of the Imagination”, an installation that revitalized a barren landscape of glass and metal stump sculptures into otherworldly flora via augmented reality application.

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Martín Sepulveda

Seattle, WA

@saucelitooo

 

Martín Sepulveda is an artist and producer who’s been creating music for the last 7+ years. He’s been featured on KEXP live and performs DJ sets locally around venues in addition to his independent work. He can be found on all streaming platforms for a mix of hip-hop, soul, Afro-Latin and R&B style music.

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Leo Shallat

Seattle, WA

http://www.leoshallat.com@leo.shallat

 

Native to Seattle with foundations in hip-hop culture, Leo Shallat’s art practice combines the study of traditional calligraphy and lettering arts with modern, abstract elements of graffiti and street art. From murals to canvas to interior design, Shallat is developing an intuitive symbolic language inspired by dance, typography, and storytelling. His work explores the intersection of proto-word forms, fine art elements, and everyday objects.

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Bronson Shonk

Seattle, WA

http://www.bronsonshonk.com@bronson.shonk

 

Bronson Shonk’s paintings depict natural forms reaching in myriad of directions like plants reaching upward, optimizing for sunlight. Analogous to a long exposure photograph of a dancer, the layers of drawn forms are stacked on top of themselves in their consecutive stages of growth. As the paintings progress, the overlapping images move from recognizable organic forms toward abstract figures. Shonk works on canvas as well as layers of plexiglass. The latter are bonded together to become free standing three-dimensional paintings. Both the paintings and sculptures are developed through a time-intensive process of engraving and staining layers of intricate line work. He employs pottery tools and scalpels to cut into the surfaces, leaving abrasions then filled with pigment. The result is a unique riff on the sgraffito technique, a vibrant blend of drawing and painting.

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Preston Singletary

Seattle, WA

http://www.prestonsingletary.com–@prestonsingletarystudio

 

Preston Singletary’s work is informed by the confluence of many different influences, but mainly the synergy of Northwest glass and Northwest coastal native art. Singletary is an Alaskan native Tlingit tribal member, and has formed a unique personal style blending traditional native sculpture with contemporary glass techniques. There are only a handful of Native Americans that work with hot glass, and he has taken the unique opportunity to shift perceptions of Native art with this new medium. Singletary has experimented with many different types of glass forming, from etched sculpted small works to monumental castings weighing over a ton. All of his work, small or large, aims to carry on the tradition of the visual and oral narratives of the Tlingit people.

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Ellen Sollod

Seattle, WA

http://www.sollodstudio.com@visualcodex

Ellen Sollod is an artist whose work is driven by social issues. Her practice as an artist-activist is grounded in a commitment to civic, environmental and social responsibility. She works across many media including photography, print, site-specific installations, and occasional digital video projects. She often combines analog strategies with contemporary technologies to result in a hybrid form. For Sollod, art making is an iterative process of inquiry and discovery. Research and experimentation is central to her practice. Consequently, the work is driven by self-generated questions with the explicit intention of using the work to engage the viewer in a dialogue.

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Joan Stuart Ross

Seattle, WA

http://www.joanstuartross.com@ross_joanstuart

 

Joan Stuart Ross is a collage artist inspired by imagery of growth and generation. Explorations and inventions of color relationships and their dynamic arrangements are all intrinsic to her paintings, monotypes, and collages. Ross’s crossword drawings begIn as intricate patterns, elements that are paramount in her enjoyment of drawing and embedded in her painting and printmaking. The roots of all these sensitive mediums are connected. Crosswords, designed by both genius word mongers and by computers, are structures for intrinsic patterns that develop into an invented personal language. The crosswords become a bridge over an intuitive confluence of what is revealed and hidden, the known and unknown, and what is true and false.

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Moni Tep

Seattle, WA

@saffroniaa

 

Moni Tep is a local singer, songwriter and producer in the Seattle area. Her personal art practice includes her membership in the Sway and Swoon DJ Collective and the Black Constellation, which consists of a unified cross-disciplinary guild of soothsayers, makers, empaths and channels. Tep’s work often presents itself through her lived experiences as a working artist and single mother. Remembering, honoring and reverence are sacred and paramount attributes to the creation of her body of work.

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Scott Trimble

Seattle, WA

http://www.wstrimble.com@wscotttrimble

 

Scott Trimble is a local, sculptural installation artist who practices primarily with wood and steel. His work tends to straddle the worlds between architecture, art, and the surrounding environment, interfacing with the viewer in some way. The shifting interactions between the natural world, people, and our created environments and inventions have long been sources of Trimble’s inspiration. He completed an artist residency with the Amazon Expressions Lab program in the winter of 2019, where he built a series of mesmerizing, fluid wooden maquette sculptures.

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Kimisha Turner

Seattle, WA

http://www.kimishaturner.com@kimishaturner

 

Kimisha Turner is a local multimedia artist whose work blurs the lines between abstraction, surrealism and symbolism. Influenced by themes of empowerment and social awareness, her multilayered abstract work aims to engage the viewer with varied perspectives while her intricate mosaics combine beauty and process. After earning her fine arts degree with an emphasis in printmaking and photography from Cornish, she has gone on to be represented at the Seattle Art Museum, Northwest African American Museum and Seattle Theater group, to name a few.

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Markel Uriu

Seattle, WA

http://www.markeluriu.com@markeluriu

 

Markel Uriu is an interdisciplinary artist based in Seattle. Her work explores impermanence, maintenance, and the unseen. Drawing from her Japanese and Irish-American heritage, she is particularly interested in liminal spaces, and explores these concepts through research, ephemeral botanical narratives, installations, and 2-D work. Her current work explores the nature of invasive species, their environmental impacts, and their links to humanity, colonialism, and globalization. Uriu’s pictured work in progress is a weaving project on golden and rainbow trout. The rainbow trout is a popular sporting fish, introduced throughout the world for recreation and food. The golden trout, a species specific to the United States, is veering towards extinction, from interbreeding with the introduced rainbow trout. By taking images of these two species and scanning, printing, then weaving them together, she creates a depiction of the complicated ways in which our desires shape the landscape.

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Anne Wald

Seattle, WA

http://www.annemariewald.com@anne.m.wald

 

Anne Marie Wald is an artist and designer based in Seattle. Since graduating in 2016, Wald has worked with furniture designers and local artisans to study craft and material processes. Through sculpture she explores the different cultural contexts that everyday objects have in our lives, and how they can reflect the individual. She is driven by the idea that no object is designed with purely utilitarian intent, and by focusing her medium on these items viewers are able to have a fundamental understanding of the work.

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Dan Webb

Seattle, WA

http://danwebb.squarespace.com@danwebbwood

 

Dan Webb is a woodworker and sculptor who carves life-like organic figures from thick slabs of fir, manipulating the lumber until it resembles undulating draped fabric or the contoured curves of a human limb. The shapes seem to take form as if they’re growing from the wood itself, taking on new life from Webb’s intricate sleight of hand.

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Winifred Westergard

Seattle, WA

@winifredwestergardphoto

 

Winifred Westergard has been a working as a fine art photographer in Seattle since the early 1990s. While she’s worked with many tools of the trade, her artistic practice counters current technology. She is inspired by the colorful history of photography and the diverse processes that came from its inception. Recently, Westergard has been making images from the wet plate collodion process that produces the tintype. The tintype was the first affordable photograph for the people of the mid-19th century. Individual metal plates go through a series of coating and sensitizing, and while the plate is still wet it is exposed to light. The plate is then processed in the dark before being dried and sealed. Westergard enjoys the surprises produced from this process each time a new work is made.

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Gabriel Wheeler

Renton, WA

https://gabrieljwheeler.bandcamp.com@gabrieljwheeler

 

Gabriel Wheeler is a songwriter and music producer whose works are influenced by a wide breadth of genres, from classical and jazz to pop, dance and indie rock. His lyrics often have a strong focus on loss and suffering, and how people wrestle with those emotions and difficulties in life. Wheeler takes a lot of inspiration from philosophy and literature, drawing from his experience as a creative writing major.

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Anthony White

Seattle, WA

@culturalcrisis

Anthony White is a local artist whose body of work centers around still lifes and portraits meticulously spun using polylactic acid, a form of plastic, that he manipulates through heat. His technique is done all by hand and individual colors. White’s interest in material and how that relates to the content and context of imagery led him to the unconventional mode of his medium. He draws inspiration from the ways we are plugged and synced into the digital realm of social platforms, displaying our relationship and investment in technology through glamorized personal experiences. The context of pairing of artificial material and subject matter builds the figurative expressions of White’s practice. In examining domestic and digital spaces, he sees loud advertisements, arbitrary nostalgic products, and “limited edition” rarities as lavish frames to emulate in his work. These devices are used to create a mirage surrounding the figures that aim to cast a reputable portrayal of their lifestyles, habits, vices and desires.

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Allyce Wood

Seattle, WA

http://www.allycewood.com@a11yce

 

Allyce Wood uses digital and handmade processes to make installations, works on paper, and textiles with a focus on digital Jacquard tapestries. Her work begins with material definitions and how she can interpret concepts of language and softness. To her, the loom acts as a mediator between traditional and computerized technologies, offering a unique way to combine her online and offline experiences into images in cotton and wool. Wood views it as a way for our online experiences to become tangible and remade through a warm material.

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Suze Woolf

Seattle, WA

http://www.suzewoolf-fineart.com/

 

Suze Woolf is a landscape artist exploring and confronting climate change in painting, paper-casting, and pyrographic drawings. She is inspired by nature, science, and the process of iteration. Her observation of the natural world has impacted her work as a painter, moving from whole scenes of glaciers and forests to close-up studies of human impact, collaborating with wildland firefighters to further illustrate the need for action. Wildland fighters refer to fire-carved snags as totems: uniform in that they’re carbonized and eaten away, yet the fire’s physics and individual tree’s biological structure create unique sculptures. These ecological disturbances create a dichotomy of both beauty and disturbance that Woolf explores in her artistic visualizations.

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Robert Yoder

Seattle, WA

http://robertyoder.net@roberteyoder

 

Robert Yoder is a Seattle-based artist who creates paintings and collages that explore concepts of identity, cancelation, confusion and self-awareness through his evolving imagery. In 2010, he founded the Seattle gallery SEASON, a space dedicated to showcasing both local and international artists.

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Marela Zacarías

Brooklyn, NY

http://www.marelazacarias.com@marelazacarias

 

Merging sculpture with painting, Marela Zacarías molds window screen and plaster to create undulating forms that emulate billowing fabric, bodies filled with movement and expressive quality. Her practice explores the history of a place and its physical context, in which she uncovers narratives that are weaved within her work. Zacarias investigates methods of communication across time and cultures whilst finding resilience in socio-political ideas that are transmuted into color and form. Abstract patterns and geometric shapes become subvert languages that she seeks to interpret and integrate within the sculptural forms.

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