Madeline Walker is an interdisciplinary visual artist originally from Cincinnati, Ohio. She combines Sculpture, Ceramics, and Painting, with fabrication technologies to create wall hanging installations. Her studio practice is now based in Oneonta, New York, where she teaches at the State University of New York Oneonta.

Madeline has shown work locally, nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions of her work include Biotic, Landscape & Memory, and Bloom. Recent interviews and articles include Medium, the Mighty, La Femme Collective, and Articulate by PBS.

Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, Jonathan Stein is a potter who completed his MFA in Ceramics at Utah State University. He recently established his studio practice in Upstate New York, where he teaches design courses along with managing the Smithy Clay Studio.

Since moving to New York, Jonathan has been involved with the construction of multiple kilns in order to continue his research into atmospheric kiln firing. He enjoys the support of his partner Madeline Walker, and has a heck of a cat named Phoebe.

Inspired by maps and the natural world that surrounds her, Claiborne Colombo uses intricate lines, guttural marks, bold colors and organic forms to translate the idea of place into deconstructed landscapes. Working on both canvas and paper, transparent layers of acrylic, graphite, charcoal and pastels are applied with both spontaneity and precision. Using this technique, each piece finds its own singular balance and striking contrast. Across all her work, Colombo blurs boundaries, creating in the space between painting and drawing.

Colombo is a mixed-media abstract artist based Portland, Oregon. She received her BA in Visual Arts from Sewanee: The University of the South (2009) and MS in Creative Technology from VCU Brandcenter (2012).

Derek Cracco is Associate Professor of printmaking and computer graphics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He received an MFA from Syracuse University in 1999 and BFA degree from Louisiana State University in 1996.

Cracco has participated in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally including Digital Printmaking Now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in NY, curated by Marilyn Kushner, the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts Juried Annual, Love Ladies, New Jersey curated by Darsie Alexander, Assistant Curator Museum of Modern Art, and Printwork 99, Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY, juried by Claire Bell, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Guggenheim Museum, NY.

Cracco has been recognized for his innovative combination of traditional printmaking processes and computer graphics. His work has been purchased by several museums and by many private collections throughout the country and abroad. 

Maryann Steinert-Foley’s two- and three-dimensional work reflects her long-standing interest in capturing the female form. Working in both paint and clay, she aims to reveal the psychological state of women as they confront the challenging nature of life. The enigmatic quality of her environments suggests an approach that is at once painterly, gestural, and refined.

Maryann Steinert-Foley was born in Flushing, New York in 1950. Her interest is predominantly in life-scale ceramic sculpture but her work also includes paintings and drawings. She completed a BA in Art Studio, with honors, at the University of California, Davis in 2011 and received the Departmental Citation for Outstanding Performance from the UC Davis Art Department Faculty. She currently shows at the Pence Gallery in Davis and is represented in several private collections. Maryann lives with her artist husband in Northern California

Annette Heully, a nationally exhibited artist, earned her MFA from California State University Long Beach with an emphasis in Fiber. She received her BA from San Francisco State University with an emphasis in Textiles. She currently lives and works in the Los Angeles area.

My work is built on processes - process of executing my craft and that of natural phenomena such as erosion by the flow of water and wind. The works resemble landscape although there is no representative references but process itself.

Pastel drawing pre-directs the picture plane with movements and rhythm inspired by the natural process which drive the composition. Then thin layers of fluid paints overwrap drawing. The process is repeated to create complexity and depth.

Because of Mylar's semitransparent surface, unpainted sections on painting give airy openness. The pieces are mounted on wood panel. Its wood grains appear through Mylar where unpainted which enhances organic tone.

Deeply influenced by Carl Jung and Abstract Expressionism, I am interested in our ability to store incredible amount of perceivable data in our subconscious mind. And the ability to connect with people in subliminal level. I imagine having invisible rhizome nourished by memories dreams, images and ideas stored deep under the ground which is connecting with others to share emotion or beauty without boundaries.

Painting is for me is a journey to my rhizome, to discover how all my perception and experience have blended.

In The Iceland Project, taking a different approach from painting, I try to make interpretation of already other-worldly chaotically spectacular landscape of Iceland with simple straight lines and geometric shapes, to create imaginary space.

Jordan holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Montana State University. Currently, she works as an Artist-In-Residence through the SDAC’s Artists In Schools and Communities program, teaches art classes and assists in the art galleries at the Washington Pavilion, and works as a freelance illustrator.

Jordan is a printmaker that works primarily in woodcuts, but also utilizes collage and installation. Using imagery from the natural world and the everyday objects that surround her, the work she creates is meant comment on the times and share observations of the world she lives in.

Photo Credit: Rocky Norton

Laila Cola Weeks was born in 1986 in Berkeley, California to an American father and a German mother.  Both parents being artistically inclined, she began drawing at a young age and painted her first oil painting at 11.  In high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, her art teacher and ever-after close friend, Justin Bagley, taught her how to build canvases and encouraged her creative process.  She spent those years painting in acrylic, and won a couple of blue ribbons in an annual city-wide juried youth art exhibition.  At the University of New Mexico, Weeks was reintroduced to oil paint, and promptly fell in love with the medium.  She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from UNM in 2008.  In the past decade, Weeks has lived briefly in Queens, New York, as well as for a couple of years in Berlin, Germany, painting and drawing all along the way.  In early 2016, she began showing work regularly at Exhibit 208 in Albuquerque, where she currently resides.  "There is a beauty here in New Mexico, which is both legendary and subtle.  It is a beauty which does not present itself immediately, but which instead takes time to be appreciated.  Perhaps it is an acquired taste, one which I have learned to love."  Her current series of oil paintings focuses on humanity in the digital age.

Photo Credit: Molly J Smith/ The Oregonian

Matt Hall grew up on a small farm on the outskirts of Klamath falls Oregon. He moved to Portland Oregon in 1997 to attend the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where he majored in painting and drinking coffee.
He's had a lifelong love affair with natural history museums, taxidermy, hidden spaces, sea monsters, and scientific phenomena.

Matt's work, through the recording, preservation, and recontextualization of natural ephemera and found objects, deals with the intersection of death, memory, loss, perception and wonder. The artist commonly uses articulated skeletons, preserved organs, wet specimens and 17th and 18th century scientific modeling practice to create objects that recall natural history museums or biology labs. All the animals used in his work are roadkill or natural deaths, and are carefully processed by the artist from corpse to finished sculpture. The often damaged or destroyed aspects of the dead bodies being an integral part of the process. The reconfigured skeletons, preserved biological ephemera, and heavy weathering of the surrounding cases, seek to mirror the shadow aspect of memory. A distilled version of what happened. Still very real, but somehow different, changed irrevocably by the schism between the past and the present.

He currently lives in North Portland, where he can be found riding his bicycle, drawing trees and waving at neighborhood cats.

*no animals were harmed in the making of this work. ALL animals were found dead, already killed, due to vehicular collision or the grim reaper.

Observation and curiosity drive my studio practice. Through the investigation of and experimentation with different kinds of materials, I express discontent with the current political climate as well as reflect on my experiences growing up in the American Midwest. My work explores entropy, artifice, consumerism, and my place in the lineage of abstraction in contemporary and modern painting and its relationship with installation art.

Using found matter, fiber works, oil and acrylic painting, remnant fabrics, and photography (found, and my own), I examine the relationship of each component’s basic materiality and commercial object-hood. Exploiting the mark making and sculptural potential of these entities is central to my practice.

I compose mixed media pieces which are layered in visual dialogues. Some of the works reference the body in scale and are almost costume-like. The work evokes an intimate recollection of garments worn, skins shed, and packaging discarded. Each assemblage or installation is a partnership between the materials I work with and the sociopolitical, cultural context of our times.

Currently, I am working on a series of oil paintings on transparent acetate. For these works, my palette is inspired by the alluring sheen of oil spills on pavement and the iridescence of polluted sea foam. The intersection of the natural and the artificial is a site of challenge, conquest, and cohabitation. This work explores toxicity through artifice and decay. As light filters through the paint and acetate, ephemeral auras are projected on the walls creating an additional layer of color. When the works are rolled, they become core samples. Black holes of color with little universes enclosed inside. When the various iterations of this series are placed in proximity to each other, a visual conversation emerges between painting and sculpture, density and light, toxicity and beauty.

Mitch Greer is an intermedia artist and filmmaker living and working in Berkeley, CA. Inspired by science fiction, fairy tales, and myth, Greer explores the shared space between the mystical, imagined, and scientific aspects of the contemporary world. Working under the name International Corporation, Greer designs and produces multimedia and sound works in collaboration with Rachel Smith. The duo performed and exhibited as The Lickets at the Olympia Experimental Music Festival in 2009, at Issue Project Room in New York in 2010, Garden of Memory at the Chapel of the Chimes in 2016 and KZSU Stanford’s Day of Noise 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. In 2013, Greer exhibited at the Limner Gallery in Hudson, New York and Platform at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2016 Greer exhibited in the Diego Gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute and in Regla, Havana. Greer was born in Texas in 1977 and studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and San Francisco Art Institute.

Sayak Mitra (b.1984) is an Indian realist painter and new media artist. Mitra was born & grew up in Konnagar, a respectable suburb of Kolkata and now works in Kolkata, India. Mitra grew up listening to his grandmother's folktales, seeing the restlessness of Sociopolitical and economical situation, witnessing the crisis of security, Communist Party influenced work culture, which help in creating his visual vocabulary of art. He studied Electrical Engineering and Multimedia from WBUT and JU respectively. Mitra has been producing computer graphics influenced realistic paintings using acrylic paint, and also engaging to experiment with new media works on archival paper, flex, vinyl board etc. His assemblage of images like newspaper cuttings, icons, Bengali texts, design elements, photographs, explore the aesthetic dimensions of his practice. He is experimenting to generate the imagery of the reality he sees around him and engaging to produce more works in his single cohesive style.

Susan Melly is an award winning visual artist residing in Southern California. Over the past forty years, Melly’ work evolved - moving between painting, sculpture, and drawing - building connections between her own psyche and America’s political, social, and spiritual history of womanhood.

She was born in Michigan and moved to Los Angeles as a teen. She has Bachelors Degree in Art from University of California Santa Barbara, Masters Degree in Education from San Francisco State University, and attended Otis College of Art and Design as a post graduate. Melly began her art career at the University specializing in ceramics and lithography. She produced a variety of posters including poster art for a theatrical short film, The Juggling Movie, in 1981 and was assistant art director on the film I Do Mind Dying produced in 1984. Twenty five years ago, she focused on painting and mixed media work and recently received honors including "Public Art Choice" award from the City of Redondo Beach, blue ribbon “Best in Show” from juried exhibition sponsored by Phantom Galleries LA; “Honorable Mention” for LA Artcore Annual National Juried Exhibition. Her solo show, “Mother Machine”, at Gallery 825 in West Hollywood was well received. She studied extensively with local LA Artists Bonita Helmer and Laddie John Dill. She is currently a member of the Los Angeles Art Association / Gallery 825, California Art League, Women’s Caucus for the Arts, Women Painters West and SDAI / San Diego Art Institute. Ms. Melly’s work has been exhibited locally and nationally. Currently she works from her studio in Mar Vista, California.

I was born and raised in Thousand Oaks, CA, a suburb outside of Los Angeles, CA. I have been fortunate to have an upbringing where museum visits were frequent and art making was encouraged; both an inspiring prelude to my current art practice.

During my BA at UCLA I received a framework on how to conceptually investigate ideas in painting, and during my MFA at LCAD, I was able to better realize my concepts and fine-tune my handling on the medium itself.

I have studied under acclaimed art faculty including Lari Pittman, Catherine Opie, James Welling, F.Scott Hess, Peter Frank, and have learned to critique my work as having its own internal logic that needs not what I as the artists want to do to it, but instead what the piece itself needs to become a successful statement on its own.

Painting is an important marker in art history and a relevant aspect in a contemporary visual dialogue. It is a language that calls for an internal logic and a fully autonomous experience for a viewer.