stop-loss

I use painting and ceramics as storytelling devices that explore the interconnectedness of my memories surrounding a Midwestern watershed. The works feature imagery such as fish, bobbers, nightcrawlers, and crayfish, alluding to my family’s bait shop and countless hours spent on the water. Developing this body of work has uncovered the tensions that arise in an engagement with the landscape that spans tribal, familial, commercial, and personal histories. The paintings themselves are visceral, dreamlike, nostalgic, and hard to pin down as they navigate a web of memories; they reveal what lingers below the surface.

Building upon the methods and principles of the Solarpunk movement, Attunement is a proposal. This work employs the technological practices of craft and computation towards the goals of sustainability, connectivity and interpersonal agency. It insists, by calling both forwards and backwards through time, that we have all the tools we need to create a just and verdant future. 

The pieces within Attunement reflect upon life in a warming world, pointing at things that have been hidden or forgotten and call, gently and urgently, for a renewed attention to where in which we stand. 

For more information, visit samseurynck.art.

Weeks before his diagnosis, my father gifted me a box of orange microfiber towels, offering only ​“they’re good to have around” as explanation. I’m sure he meant that, but it was a rather strange gift for a sixteen year old. 

Within six months, he’d died of pancreatic cancer, and I was left with an inexplicable box of rags. Over the years, the towel became a strange sort of background character in my life, the illegible emotions they inspired in me eventually morphing into an uncertain curiosity. Combining audio and installation, Inheritance explores the complicated and unending process of making sense of someone long gone. 

For more information, visit lauramackie.art.

In Flow is an immersive installation and performance exploring American imperialist violence through water, scent, and sound. Featuring a blood-tinged river projection, a red-water fountain, and ceramics playing survivor voices, the exhibition immerses audiences in the unseen yet persistent flow of historical trauma, memory, and trans-Pacific violence that is surging into our living area.

For more information, visit oknoh​.com.

I used to think that because I transitioned after the military that the two events had nothing to do with each other. Now I see them as intrinsically linked and I can hardly think of one without the other. This project addresses the military through the lens of queer theory. Using dress patterns, I am able to reject expectations for the heteronormativity surrounding the military. In this way, I critique the power of this institution and return the power to myself. Not only am I the builder of the ship, but I am also able to fold it up, to carry it with me.

For more information, visit char​liereynoldsstu​dio​.com.

the cut as an arc; as a haptically charged orientation stuck within, yet against; as an ephemeral spark, jolt; as a murmuring syncopation entered into hip first

the installation begins from a night in downtown Cairo, the material traces of flirtatious whispering; a guise of interlocking arms; gripped hands shrouded in a wool coat pocket; the naively indifferent gaze of the police officer we walked by; and the wake of this friend’s passing

the matter of touch to shadow and light; to the void and the particle; to the space and time of state necropolitics;

to the contaminated indeterminacy of queerness as frictional political ontology, whose abrasive affects vibrate at the wayside of the visible; the perceptible; the humanized;

For more information, visit dar​ren​spirk​.com.