In Sight II: Literature + Art
Participating Artists
Date & Location:
Summer – Fall 2017
Phoenix, Arizona
Important Dates:
Applications Open
04/03/17
Applications Close
04/23/17
Writers Announced
05/01/17
Writer & Artist Mixer
05/06/17
Writer Check In I
06/10/17
Writer Check In II
07/15/17
Workshops
08/19-20/17
Publication Deadline
09/25/17
Gallery Deadline
10/23/17
Show
11/03/17
For more information about the artists:
Cherie Buck-Hutchison & Ashley Czakowski, Artists, Project Leads
[email protected] | [email protected]
For more information about the application process:
http://fourchamberspress.com/insightii
Jake Friedman, Director, Four Chambers Press
240.593.1757 | [email protected]
To submit your application, please visit:
http://fcp.submittable.com
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1. Samantha Lyn Aasen
www.samanthalyn.com
[email protected]
Heels
Eyes
Lip Wax
Bio: Samantha Lyn Aasen is an artist adapting to the southwest, as she holds on to her Midwestern mentalities.
Her suburban upbringing has her questioning female relationships and societal standards. She uses her art as an
exploration of her ambivalence of pop culture and desire to protect young girls from facing negative attitudes
about themselves or from others. She holds a Bachelor’s of Fine Art from Herron School of Art and Design and a
Studio Art MFA in Intermedia from Arizona State University. Currently she teaches at the Maricopa Community
Colleges, and volunteers with Girls Rock! Phoenix.
Artists Statement: Countless products marketed to young girls are coated in glitter, have a shiny pink surface, or
are covered in rhinestones. These products can be wall decorations, dress-up play outfits, or birthday party favors.
These same attractive qualities of high glitz are then transported to products marketed to adults, which take the
form of vibrators, bachelorette party favors, and pubic decorations called Vajazzles.
Sparkle Baby explores gender, sexuality, and pop culture by seeking out the shifting boundary between girlhood
and womanhood. It is a manifestation of my own ambivalence towards the Princess-industrial-complex. Young
women who seek to understand their identity through mass media representations of women find conflicting
presentations: empowerment of women is shown with the guerilla art movement aimed to end cat calling: “Stop
Telling Women to Smile,” and Beyonce projecting the word “FEMINIST” in capital letters at the MTV Music
awards nearly broke Twitter. Opposing those notions, seventeen-year-old Kylie Jenner of the Kardashian clan
posed nearly naked selfies on Instagram with her 25-year-old boyfriend, and brides as young as fifteen are being
married off on the television show My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. Women are still being objectified through
degrading images while feeling a compulsion to be sexually available.
Sparkle Baby blurs the line of child and adult in a perverse way. Glitter and pink products appeal to young girls
and grown women as symbols of idealized girlhood. This packaging of girlhood aligns itself with absurd societal
expectations of the female form in beauty treatments like Brazilian waxes, acrylic nails, infantilizing clothing and
glittery cosmetics for adult women. Pink and glitter are juxtaposed with painful and sometimes grotesque attempts
to meet these expectations.
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2. Malena Barnhart
www.malenabarnhart.com
[email protected]
Sticky Traps, Flower Cage 2
Sticker Text Cloud
Mansplaining Help Desk
Bio: Malena Barnhart was born in Baltimore, Maryland and is currently based in Tempe, Arizona. She holds an
MFA degree in Photography from Arizona State University and a BA in Studio Art from the University of
Maryland. Working with a variety of found materials such as children’s stickers, temporary tattoos, YouTube
videos and boy band posters, she examines the process of enculturation through a feminist lens.
Artist’s Statement: As a group, women are not a statistical minority, yet we exist at the margins. From the time
we are children, everything we consume reinforces what is expected of us, and what we can expect from the
world.
The process of enculturation maintains and perpetuates gender norms. Children spend their early years learning
the rules and expectations of the culture they are born into. They learn through observation. They watch the
people around them to gain information about their place in the world. Increasingly, they also learn from forms of
mass media including television, consumer products and the Internet.
This learning process continues into adulthood. We learn our culture from the things we consume, regardless of
whether one is consuming princess toys, violent video games or wedding boards on Pinterest.
I take these materials and repurpose them. I create videos, installations and 2-D works out of mass culture detritus
including YouTube videos, children’s stickers, makeup and teen posters. In reconfiguring the structure of these
materials, I question their purpose and subvert the intended messaging.
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3. David Bradley
(Optional: David Bradley AND Wendy Raisanen)
www.davidbradleyart.com
[email protected]
Collaboration + Fights and Kisses
In the Grasp
Andy Pot
(David Bradley and Wendy Raisanen)
Bio: I am a ceramic artist and educator, living in Phoenix. Currently, I am professor of ceramics at Paradise Valley
Community College. I graduated from La. Tech University in 1976 with a degree in painting. After graduation, I
apprenticed in a 100 year old pottery factory for two years. I earned a Master’s degree program in Ceramics at
the University of North Texas. Since Graduate school I have made a living by teaching all levels about ceramics
and art, and by making objects both utilitarian and sculptural.
Artist’s Statement: Clay is a filter through which I discover, and explore my world. With clay I can create
objects which make real the ideas passing through my brain. I like to make images in clay of those things which I
am trying to understand, like, why are people afraid of other people? And, what are the most important things in
my world?
I started on my career as an artist when I was very young, and first found happiness in creating things. Clay
became my medium of choice in college and still, after 30 years of intense study, continues to teach and amaze
me.I graduated from La. Tech University in 1976 with a degree in Painting and many elective hours in ceramics,
and no idea where to go from there. After graduation, I visited a pottery store in a neighboring town, long known
for its old time crockery: Marshall Pottery Co. of Marshall Texas. I got a job there as a potter’s helper, and worked
hard to learn their ways of making pottery, till after nine months of practice I was started as an apprentice potter
making “dog dishes”! It was a happy day when I got to make dog dishes. But after two months of dog dishes I
was ready to move up the line, and I did. I learned how to make all the items on the list up to five gallon capacity
butter churns! At the rate of 20 per hour! I worked there for two years before deciding to move on. I became
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worried I wouldn’t be able to make anything but churns and jugs, because my hands knew how so well.
I was accepted into the Master’s degree program in Ceramics at the University of North Texas, where I learned
about the different ways of glazing, firing and appreciating the aesthetics of ceramics developed during the 20th
century. This opened my eyes to what ceramics and art itself was about: Ceramics is about more than pottery, and
Art is about more than the object which decorates our living room. Since Graduate school I have made a living by
teaching all levels about ceramics and Art, and by making objects both utilitarian and sculptural. I relearned the
lesson taught by my parents, that Art is about those things which the artist and the community think are important;
and that Art provides a way of viewing ourselves and the world in new ways.
My current body of work tries to engage the viewer through an invitation to touch the clay form in order to create
sounds. The means chosen by the viewer will vary, thus causing the sounds elicited to vary. The sounds created
become the voice of the sculpture bringing it to life. The purpose of my work is to help me discover the meaning
of life and the answer to questions of importance. I am interested in understanding the complexities of
interpersonal relationships, and why we as humans, are in conflict with each other and ourselves.
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4. Daniel Funkhouser
www.instagram.com/funkhouserfever
[email protected]
Bio: Daniel Funkhouser is an Arizona native living in downtown Phoenix. He graduated from ASU in
2007 with a BFA specializing in painting. He maintains his studio on Grand Avenue and has won
numerous awards, including “Best Selfie” from the New Times’ Best of Phoenix 2014. In 2016 he was
selected for IN FLUX Cycle 6 - his piece Hey, I Made This For You fills an entire room inside Practical
Art through - it is on view through 2016.
Artist’s Statement: My art practice involves familiar materials and techniques used in novel and
surprising ways. The painted vinyl forms scattered over the surface of this piece began as traditional
brush strokes on paper, but through digital processing became the enlarged and distorted final imagery.
Reminiscent of paint on canvas, this piece remixes the organic language of abstract painting with the
hyper precision of cut vinyl – a product mostly known for sign making. Created specifically for this
installation site, the piece can be viewed from either side and directly through, offering viewers multiple
ways to experience the piece and each other.
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5. Dani Godreau
www.danigodreau.com
[email protected]
Paper Installation
China Patterns IV
Nipple Confusion
Bio: Dani Godreau is a feminist artist who is best known for her exploration of women’s traditional crafts and
domestic duties through paper cutting. She graduated from Florida State University with a BFA in Painting and
BA in Art History in 2012. Godreau went on to receive her MFA in Drawing/Painting from Arizona State
University in 2016. In 2015 and 2016 Godreau was awarded funding from the Nathan Cumming’s Travel Grant
and Shangyuan Artist Residency to facilitate her research in Beijing and Foshan regarding Chinese folk art and
traditional paper cutting. She currently resides in Phoenix, AZ while teaching at ASU and within the Tempe
School District’s Visiting Studio Artist Program.
Artist’s Statement: My work in the studio is a strikingly solitary experience. Everything is mute except for the
hum of the AC, the slight rustling of the paper and the almost hypnotic “tink” sound as each fragile paper shape is
removed from the composition with surgical precision and dropped in a tiny glass jar. The long spans of time I
invest hunched over my paper cut pieces while making intricate repetitive motions recalls the hours my mother
dedicated to delicately sewing and crocheting clothing, bedding and other items that sustained and enriched our
lives. It is through this kinship that the meticulously handcrafted nature of my paper cuts celebrates the domestic
arts and the western tradition of women’s work in crochet, embroidery and quilting. Amidst this celebration,
however, subtle themes of violence and discontent woven throughout my visual narratives are all but obscured by
the works’ profuse decorative quality. These suggestive elements reveal my conflicting relationship with domestic
work in that I respect the history and skill, yet resent the societal expectation.
My paper cut pieces are informed by research in eastern craft traditions and recent travel to China, where paper
cutting originated as an art practice used to appraise the merit of brides. My work seeks to pay homage to the
global tradition of paper cutting as an art form while addressing the complex issue of feminine identity and
valorizing devalued women’s labor. As a result these paper pieces explore feminine identity through a lens rooted
in the liminal space between eastern/western craft and folk art and traditional/technological methodologies. Every
year through the growth of communication and transportation technologies our world grows smaller and we
become intimate with more distant and diverse cultures. My research into eastern and western craft seeks to
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explore the similarities in these practices and the symbolism of these traditions and shift our myopic focus to
include the strengths and weaknesses inherent in our global heritage.
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6. Regan Henley
www.reganhenley.com
[email protected]
Video: Visiting You
Video: Guided Grieving Session
Video: Lorem Ipsum
Bio: Regan Henley is a multimedia artist and Intermedia student at Arizona State University. She is a founding
collaborator of the snapchat-based performance art plat form SNAP UP ART. She has shown work at the Shemer
Art Center, the Icehouse in Phoenix and performed and collaborated with Sanford Biggers’ Moon Medicine at
ASU Gammage. In 2016 she debuted her first solo show C@tharsis, exploring the use of digital technologies in
the mouring and grieving process, which included several video installations as well as experimental web-based
media. Henley is primarily interested in how we use digital technology as an emotional tool and its implications
of those uses.
Artist’s Statement: I am primarily interested in the multidimensional nature of my materials and using digital
media to deconstruct and rebuild large social issues into smaller, more understandable pieces. Utilizing everyday
and emerging technologies, I recontextualize implicitly human concerns into sturdy and pragmatic digital formats
that allow the audience a new perspective on issues like the infidelity of memory, the intrusiveness of grief, and
the surrounding spirituality and mortality. With this approach, I can address things that often feel too daunting to
directly confront in the physical.
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7. Saskia Jorda
www.saskiajorda.com
[email protected]
Y
ou Are Here – Part One: Migration
Tipping Point
Karto Graphia
Bio: Saskia Jordá is an interdisciplinary artist working on site-specific installations, soft sculptures, and drawings.
Her work has referenced the relationship between body and space, cultural identity, and mapping a sense of place
since her undergraduate studies at Arizona State University and her graduate studies at the School of Visual Arts
in New York City, where she earned her MFA. She has exhibited widely within the U.S. and internationally. She
has received various awards, including the Arlene and Morton Scult Contemporary Forum Award of the Phoenix
Art Museum in 2015. Jordá is currently based in Phoenix, Arizona, where in addition to her practice, she teaches
Textiles and Drawing at the college level, and is the Director of the Taliesin Artist Residency Program for The
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
Artist’s Statement: In a world where a six-hour airplane flight can transplant a person into a completely alien
world, cultural identity is retained through rituals surrounding clothing, play, language, and food. Having
relocated from my native Venezuela to the United States as a teenager, I became aware of the layers of 'skin' that
define and separate cultures—one's own skin, the second skin of clothing, the shell of one's dwelling place—all
these protecting the vital space of one's hidden identity. As an interdisciplinary artist, my site-specific
installations, performances, and drawings map the tension between retaining one's identity and assimilating a
foreign persona. Using iconic images that repeat as multiples, I often playfully reference the body in a transitional
space and as an alternate artifact.
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8. Kim Lyle
www.kimlyle.net
[email protected]
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Chalk Tongues
Video: Lines of Communication
Text Table (work in progress)
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Bio: Kimberly Lyle is an MFA candidate in the Intermedia program at Arizona State University. She received a
BA in psychology and a BA in Art from Stetson University. Her current practice investigates our human
relationships with systems – linguistic, social, educational, housing – and how they might begin to reveal
underlying human desires, intimacies, or failures.
Artist’s Statement: I was born in the United States and raised between Panama and Japan, living on the outskirts
of military bases for my entire childhood. Though I hadn’t realized it at the time, this multicultural upbringing
affected me deeply and has driven my recent investigations around systems of language and communication. My
current practice asks questions about our use of language – addressing both it's failures and ability to express
universal human desires and intimacies. My work is comprised of sculpture, installation, video, and interactive
media. Elements of play, poetry, and subtle humor are utilized as a way of disarming the viewer and allowing for
deeper engagement with topics.
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9. Emily Matyas
http://www.emilymatyas.com/
[email protected]
Last Portrait by Northlight
Walking into the Picture
Picnic Under the Palo Verde
Bio: Emily Matyas is a photographer who embraces both editorial and fine art practices. She free-lanced for
magazines and worked in promotion for a non-profit organization in Mexico. In 2002, she received an MFA in
photography from Arizona State University. Since then, her work has been exhibited widely and collected by
individuals and organizations including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She received the Julia Margaret
Cameron Award in 2010, and has appeared on teleision twice in conjunction with her photography. She has taught
extensively as a college professor and as an instructor for children’s photo workshops. Currently, she divides her
time between her artwork, starting her own online magazine, and volunteering for Free Arts, a local non-profit
that benefits abused and homeless children.
Artist’s Statement: In my most recent work, I Am My Ancestors, I explore family roots in both Europe and the
United States. In the fall of 2013 and again in 2015, I traveled to Romania to visit the area where my grandparents
had lived and to make pictures.
While there, I felt a kinship to people I’d never met before. Their customs reminded me of experiences I’d had
with relatives in the U.S. It felt somehow like home, but it was evident that I was a foreigner. I grappled with
thoughts about identity, society and women’s roles. I was of this place but not from it -– a guest in one’s own
homeland. But I wanted a deeper encounter. So, dressed as a Romanian peasant, I immersed myself into the daily
scenes before me and into the photos themselves. Imagining myself as my grandmother, I created images from
memories of memories, and events that might have been.
As a counterpoint and continuation to the I Am My Ancestors series, I began the In America project. Again, I am
photographing myself dressed as a Romanian peasant, and imagining how things might have been for my
grandmother – but this time, the images take place after she and her daughter have come to the new world. Some
of the photos echo the stories I’ve heard about their first experiences in America. Others follow a ‘what if?’
scenario, involving contemporary situations. It’s a mash-up of time, place and incident, reflecting real and
imagined events.
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10. Cydnei Mallory
www.CydneiMallory.com
[email protected]
Untitled, Marble
Untitled, Scotch tape and video
Bio: Cydnei Mallory is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Phoenix Arizona. She received her BFA from
The Pennsylvania State University and is currently pursuing her MFA at Arizona State University. Interested in
materiality, Mallory uses everything from cast metals, rope, and basic fabrics, to hairnets, silicone, and hair.
Combining traditional and non-traditional practices in her work, Mallory uses the body as a reference to explore
issues surrounding stereotyped ideas of gender, sexuality, and class.
Artist’s Statement:
Through a series of pieces that explore my struggles with trichotillomania, a hair pulling disorder, I
allowed the overarching concept to drive my decisionmaking process. Initially, I used my body directly
to generate the work. By adhering pieces of transparent scotch tape onto my face until my identity was
completely obscured, I created suffocating and claustrophobic masks. Once removed, the skins were
combined into a sac-like transparent form comprised of these membranes. As seen in the video, the
process of creating the tape skins concealed my identity, but in the act of removal, I reveal myself and
my vulnerabilities. In turn, I used the tape skins as a mold to fill with wax and thencast in bronze,
aluminum, and iron to continue my investigation of simultaneously obscuring and exposing one’s
identity. The conceal/reveal concept is furthermore explored in my objects and installations made with
hairnets. For the past six years, I worked at the Penn State Creamery to put myself through school,
where I am required to wear a hairnet. As a material, I find the hairnets quite beautiful, especially when
illuminated. The network of threads sparkle as they catch the light and the webbing creates complex and
intricate shadows. I am also intrigued by the ignored importance of a hairnet, knowing that one minute
you are appreciative of me wearing one, but as I step outside of the workplace, you are disgusted by its
appearance. Initially, I experimented with the hairnets in arrangements on the wall, focusing on different
ways to join them together and the resulting form. After exhausting the possibilities of working on the
wall, I moved into Cydnei Mallory three-dimensional space, which allowed the netting to form into
objects that both trap and strain. When combined and stretched, the hairnets create walls of convoluted
planes that ensnare viewers in a tangled web of line and shadow. My work with rope is an outgrowth of
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my use of hairnets to explore line, space and shadow. The heavy raw rope is twisted into a loop crochet
pattern to create a plane that slices the environment of the gallery in half. A steel anchor securely fixes
the strands of hemp to the wall, while a network of thin taut thread creates a perplexing tension by
tethering the bulky rope to the ground. The excess culminates in a ball, implying the possibility of
continuance rather than termination. The immediate nautical reference is surpassed by the hangman’s
noose through a tangled, twisting system of chaos and order. And like my manipulation of hairnets, my
fascination with the line, shadow, and resulting tension stems from my fixation with the threads of hair
that I pull from my head.
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11. Ronna Nemitz
www.ronnanemitz.com
[email protected]
Homesickness and Other Endeavors
Revisions
The Pull of Gravity
Bio: Ronna Nemitz is a Phoenix-based artist whose work examines memory, notions of time, gesture, and
autobiography. She received a BFA (1995) from The University of Wyoming and an MFA (2011) from Arizona
State University. While studying art at Arizona State University, she received the prestigious Martin Wong
Foundation Painting Award. Her projects include Listen, a sculptural and sound installation in downtown
Scottsdale, commissioned by INFLUX and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Other projects include
Homesickness and Other Endeavors, an installation that renovated the Eric Fischl Gallery into a domestic
residence. And, Paper Thin Walls, a projection dominated installation about the intricate relationship of her
parent's marriage featured at Xavier College Preparatory in Phoenix, AZ. Her most recent project, Amnesia and
Other Stories, is a project about memory, which explores the accumulation of sensory memory juxtaposed with
gestural or physical memory. Nemitz teaches art at Phoenix College and Mesa Community College. Her work has
been featured on Artistaday.com and highlike.org.
Artist’s Statement: In my work I try to define my experience. I always thought memory was my subject but
more essential than insistent, specific memory, is time. It crawls forward and backward and we are forever in its
grip, suspended between our experience and our inexperience. I try to reconcile my experience with ideas of the
future and the present. It is this tension between what was/what is and what we know and don’t know that
interests me. All relationships come back to what we know and don’t know – about other cultures, other lands,
and about the person sitting across from you, even about yourself. Painting is way to get to know oneself. A great
deal of my work talks about emotional spaces – in between states. Relations fraught with tension: homesickness,
loneliness, indecision, and vulnerability. Time is constant and indifferent to us. Time is not running out, we are
running out, at once becoming large with experience and smaller with lifespan. The great pain of living is the
awareness that we will lose everything, eventually, even our own lives. As we struggle to shape it, reorder it,
shorten it, lengthen it, and, finally try to arrest it, time resists all of our attentions. But, we still try because that is
the work, to bear the unbearable. To rest, suspended between what we know and what we do not.
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12. Ryan Parra
http://www.ryanparra.com/
[email protected]
Bio: Ryan Parra is a photography-based artist and educator living in Tempe, Arizona. Originally from California,
he holds a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the University of Oregon and earned an MFA degree in photography
from Arizona State University in 2016. His work has been shown locally at the Tilt Gallery (Scottsdale), the
Northlight Gallery (Phoenix), the phICA Container Galleries (Phoenix), and internationally at the City Cultural
Center Gallery (Belgrade, Serbia). He was a recipient of the Dean's Fellowship award, the Society for
Photographic Education Travel Scholarship award, the Nathan Cummings Travel Grant award, and the Graduate
Education Completion Fellowship, among many other honors. In 2014 he was commissioned by the ASU Health
and Wellness Services permanent collection to document native medicinal plants growing in their natural Arizona
environment. He currently teaches at Arizona State University and Estrella Mountain Community College.
Artist’s Statement: I will be forever jealous of the knowledge and value that our ancestors had for their
environment's flora. Everywhere, they were surrounded by potential balms, poultices, pain relievers, euphoriants,
and entheogens, using these systems as tools for the sustenance of their bodies and edification of their spirits. As
pharmacology continues to advance, I believe it is important to have a sophisticated understanding of the plants
from where it derived and knowledge of their traditional uses. My work is influenced by the rich history and
current practices of ethno-botany (such as traditional shamanic practices), the history of still life paintings and
plant illustrations, the exploration of plants as a system of knowledge, and the organization of agriculture for the
purpose of sustaining the masses.
Urban areas continue to thrive and expand at a rapid rate, resulting in negative effects in biodiversity throughout
the lands around them. As scientists are seeing a decline in biodiversity in wilderness areas, they are often finding
the opposite trend in highly populated urban areas. This rise and fall of biodiversity is one of many reasons for my
interest in still lifes of edible, medicinal, and psychoactive plants growing in the Tempe/Phoenix valley, as well as
my focus on plants out in their natural environment. With this in mind, I hope to shed light on the rich variety and
the importance of plants growing near and far from our homes. By incorporating styles from still life paintings
throughout art history while also including descriptions of each plant's traditional uses, I want to remind viewers
of the role plants have played in the exploration of knowledge and well being for thousands of years.
The title, Vivarium, reflects this interest in our unique relationship with nature, and sets the theme of curiosity,
containment, and control. Vivarium, meaning place of life, is an enclosed space with plants or animals for
observation or research purposes. For me, this act of concealing fragments of nature expresses a sense of power
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one has over something, much like science with nature, while also expressing great affection and love towards
that same thing. It is in this binary friction that reveals fundamental characteristics at the root of our own nature,
and surfaces issues in the modern perspective of the natural world.
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13. Estrella Payton
http://www.estrellapayton.com/
[email protected]
Bio: Estrella Payton is an interdisciplinary artist based in Phoenix, Arizona. Payton is an observer of people,
especially their interactions with each other in a space. She is motivated to complicate physical spaces to reorient
a viewer’s experience and perspective in institutional and organized environments. Formally trained as a
printmaker, her artwork also typically explores the use of building materials, constructed spaces, movement,
abstracted and appropriated blueprints, collage, and place-centering experiences. She earned a Master of Fine Art
degree from Arizona State University in 2015 and a Bachelor of Fine Art from Kansas City Art Institute in 2007.
Artist’s Statement: It is believed by many Americans that all people, regardless of the conditions into which they
were born, have an equal chance to achieve success. Although stories of extraordinary achievements exist, it is
obvious that some people are born at a disadvantage before their individual attributes are even considered.
In the U.S., the physical location in which one exists affects a multitude of life circumstances, i.e. housing
opportunities, school districts, accessibility to community amenities such as grocery stores, pharmacies,
physicians, and safe recreational facilities. The invisible social constructions and stratification between people
become real, physical, and emotionally-damaging barriers.
I am interested in the way people interact with each other in a space, especially interpersonally. As social beings,
coded verbal language and expressive body language can convey messages clearer than words. Facial expressions
can greatly alter the tone and body language can reveal what is left unsaid. These invisible barriers become
socially stratifying and tend to affect the immediate environment. How we become politicized bodies in a space
both fascinates and disturbs me.
My research is based on power and privilege dynamics, cultural conditioning, and systemic inequality in
American history. The specific concepts I find myself returning to are those connected to uneven development of
cities and communities that in turn affect the way marginalized people are deemed socially acceptable (or
unacceptable) and whether they are worthy of rights.
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14. Swapna Das Singh
http://www.swapnadas-art.com/
[email protected]
Bio: Art to me has always been a journey of self-exploration and an inspiration through which my artistic intellect
has found a synergy with my inner self. My work reflects the values of Indian narrative art and has always been a
mirror image of my internal and external environment. My monochrome charcoal drawing offers spectators room
for interpretation while sanguine enhances the contrast of grayscale and holds significance to my cultural beliefs
as an Indian married woman. My spiritual practice has given a greater meaning to recognize the foundation of
making art and have me speculate why art is a significant aspect of life.
Artist’s Statement: My art encompasses profound belief that spirituality and creativity are intertwined. This
belief stems the foundation of my current research work, which is the Buddhist concept of “Ten Worlds” – ten life
states that a person experiences in his or her life. From lowest to highest, these ten worlds are hell, hunger,
animality, anger, humanity, rapture, learning, realization, bodhisattvas, and Buddhahood.
To comprehend such multifaceted concept, I constricted my palate to grayscale and sanguine. Charcoal medium
aids in articulation of the “Ten Worlds,” while sanguine enhances the contrast of grayscale and holds significance
to my cultural beliefs as an Indian married woman. Using a monochromatic medium like charcoal drawing offers
spectators room for interpretation whereas a wide spectrum of colors in painting can either limit or prejudice their
emotions. In addition, charcoal medium aids in articulation and illustration of such a complex concept of
Buddhism.
The illustration of these different aspects of ten worlds will provide an opportunity to understand human inherent
potential to transform their life condition. With my work I would like to provide the contemporary world of art a
platform to appreciate the connection between art and human development. Once we understand ourselves,
together we can bring positive change in the world.
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15. Claire Warden
http://www.claireawarden.com/
[email protected]
Bio: Claire A. Warden (b. Montreal, Quebec) is an artist working in Phoenix, Arizona. She received her BFA in
Photography and BA in Art History from Arizona State University. Claire’s work has been exhibited in the United
States and abroad. She has received support from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Creative Capacity
Fund and Contemporary Forum. She has been named LensCulture's Top 50 Emerging Talents, Photo Boite’s 30
Under 30 Women Photographers, a Critical Mass finalist and a Photobook Melbourne Photo Award finalist. Claire
was a artist resident at Art Intersection in 2015 and the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2016.
Artist’s Statement: Mimesis is grounded in issues of identity, the other and the psychology of knowledge and
power. The creation of this series comes at a time when the struggle to accept the unfamiliar is pervasive in our
culture. When looking at these images, the urge to ask “what is it?” echoes the question, “what are you?” a
question that has been directed towards me countless times and one that I find increasingly difficult to answer.
Raised in a family with a diverse ethnic heritage has led me to reflect on the fluid, abstract nature of identity,
which informs my use of photography.
I use saliva and mark-making as part of my photographic process, which steers the work away from the signifying
functions inherent to the medium of photography. I use these interventions as symbolic acts to expose the inherent
biologic and socio-cultural forces that stimulate the emergence and performance of an identity. This process
produces a series of images that reveal certain truths in identity and simultaneously the inadequacies of language
to describe oneself. Resembling systems of the natural sciences—microscopic, topographic and celestial—the
photographs allegorize the complexity of systems that make up an individual and the perception of self.
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16. Denise Yaghmourian
http://www.deniseyaghmourian.com/
[email protected]
Bio: Denise Yaghmourian was born in Bethpage, New York. She moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1976, at the
young age of 8. She enjoyed her childhood in central Phoenix, and spent lots of time in the pool, playing in vacant
lots (filled with date palms and olive trees) and enjoyed gardening with her grandparents. Denise earned her
degree in art through Arizona State University and works as a full time artist and Mommy. Her work is in public
collections including Tucson Museum of Art, ASU Museum (print collection,) Banner Desert Samaritan Hospital,
The Institute for Mental Health Research and The University of New Mexico. She is currently represented by
Bentley Gallery and Bogena Galerie in France.
Artist’s Statement: My work explores the connections between all things. I am interested in the collaborations
which occur between all forces, be they intentional or unintentional, conscious or unconscious, known or
unknown. I am inspired by experimentation and creation involving the use of materials which are new to me and
to my development as an artist. It is for this reason that I create my work from a variety of sources and materials. I
find inspiration in every aspect of life but seem to be drawn to the universal occurrence of pattern. Patterns in
nature, patterns in math and science, patterns of the brain, and patterns in life and relationships are the inspiring
and driving forces in my work. It is through the recognition and knowing of these universal patterns that I feel
closer to the knowing of myself, the universe, and the true nature of things. I seek to merge naturally occurring
and found pattern with my own pattern creation, thereby establishing a collaboration with the selected medium.
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17. Angeline Young
http://www.angelineyoungdance.com/
[email protected]
Bio: I am an artist from San Francisco, California. I make multimedia dance installations that incorporate spoken
text, live music, video, digital soundscapes, and the bodies of audience members. I want you to experience my
work rather than witness it so I perform in close proximity to you. I engage themes of labor, migration, identity,
and home. My live art integrates contemporary experiences of the Asian diaspora and other traditionally
marginalized voices, bodies, and perspectives.
Artist’s Statement: The United Nations Refugee Agency reports that there are 59.5 million displaced people
worldwide and of these, 19.5 million are refugees. Of this group, 51% are refugees. The refugee problem is
complex and iterative of global issues that encompass political sovereignty, human rights, and military and
economic interest in distressed regions of the world. As an artist, I want to better understand this problem by
exploring my family’s past as displaced people, in particular, my mother’s narrative of her migration through
China during the Chinese Civil War (c 1946-1949) through the eyes of a young child.
I work with the artistic concept that the inner landscapes of the body are affected by the experience of
displacement and that the body as a living archive, is able to transmit these experiences in performance.
Touch is a transdisciplinary collaboration in dance, telematics, and wearable technology. Working across America
and Singapore, this project explores the concept of intimacy and remote touch in multimedia dance performance
in the "3rd space." This work examines the ways in which our relationships and social interactions inform and are
affected by technology in "the 3rd space." Our research engages methodologies from the fields of dance, Asian
American dance studies, engineering, musical composition, and wearable technology, fashion design, media
studies, and digital performance. How does technology affect the way we relate to each other? What are the
ways that we can create intimacy in a technological environment? How do we culturally identify ourselves in this
environment? The final performance will be broadcast on April 20, 2016 @ 8pm MST on Youtube.
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