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The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
- Albert Camus
Julitte Leone is a French photographer living in New Orleans where she documents her vivid community of costumers, drag queens, performers, activists, and multifaceted creatives.To her, the contributions of these visionaries are especially vital in this political era that is clinging to limited, binary narratives, at great cost to our humanity and sense of empathy. Leone’s work focuses on creating an alternative archive of our time, characterized by radical self-expression in defiance of a society trying to flatten our identities.
-Julitte Leone
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As a photographer, I will not say that I did not choose these photographs to look this way. Photography is about including and excluding from reality. I will say I am drawn to images in which individuals may challenge the general notion of what is expected of them. Photographing in intimate settings and in the same terrain over time has allowed me to do so, through the act of being present and waiting. I am interested in the softness that exists in roughness, and vice versa... the unexpected, which is inherent to this medium.
- Alex del Canto
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As a performer and a photographer, my aim is to create experiences that offer people the chance to question their truth and explore new possibilities.
My work aims to draw the viewer away from the comfortable and the familiar to question who they really are. Demonstrating uninhibited freedom plants a seed in the observer: that we all have the right to our freedom and should use it. Inspired by observations of neon-lit bars, drag performances, and everyday city life, my practice captures the raw humanity that these environments encourage.
-Jason Derek North
My work aims to draw the viewer away from the comfortable and the familiar to question who they really are. Demonstrating uninhibited freedom plants a seed in the observer: that we all have the right to our freedom and should use it. Inspired by observations of neon-lit bars, drag performances, and everyday city life, my practice captures the raw humanity that these environments encourage.
-Jason Derek North
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La línea de investigación que marca mi trabajo plantea cuestiones que giran en torno a la identidad y al ser social, la idea de territorio, lo esencial y el artificio desarrollados en el discurso de lo real, un modelo artístico que recoge y hace suyas estrategias que vienen de otros ámbitos de pensamiento y acción, llevándolas al campo de la creación artística.
Supuestos superficiales que afectan a la imagen corporal constatando los límites imprecisos entre originalidad y copia dejando aflorar la tendencia a la uniformidad de la cultura que anula cualquier atisbo de diferencia. En el campo de la fotografía realizo una serie de trabajos de crítica y parodia de la representación de la vida cotidiana contemporánea a través de los medios de masas, y más concretamente a través de las revista de sociedad o revistas del corazón. Apropiándome de estos formatos, planteo problemáticas sociales profundas como la que se vive en los Campos de Refugiados del Sahara Occidental, la discriminación de los afrodescendientes en Cartagena de Indias o la adaptación de la sociedad china al mundo occidental. En estas imágenes Beatriz Wang y Angie He en el mercado Antón Martín de Madrid para la firma de ficción Dulce & Galbana parodiando a la italiana Dolce & Gabbana. -Nuria Carrasco |
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I believe that the art-as everything else in society-is an inherently political space. Therefore I want to create art work to affect positive change in our society. The power of art as a way to concretise abstractions allow to illuminate, reconstruct and reinvent our world. I am an intersectional feminist and it defines the body of my work as an artist. I see feminism as a philosophy which seeks to expand freedom for all people regardless of their ethnicity, gender, age or economical background. As a feminist artist, my work actively challenges representations of gender, sexuality, race and class.
-Katriina Haikala
katriinahaikala.com/
-Katriina Haikala
katriinahaikala.com/
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This interdisciplinary art selection are inspirations of given moment/s of cultivation oneself and infiltrating imagination. The installations Body Encode with Science, Huellas sin dejar hullas, and Silence=Death appeal to the corporal, mortifications, art as spiritual exercises, and the social. The installations and drawings revealed my experience of death and rebirth within the overtones of breast cancer. It forced me to interrogate the social construction of gender, the culture of illness, the injustice of public health and unequal access to screening. I was part of the statistics shared with 46 million of uninsured Americans deprived of the right to happiness and health (2001). The series of artwork, readings, writing, art activism, and artistic practice at the subjective level taught me how to live and meditate on impermanence. The art intervention interrogates health disparities, gender, high mortality rate and lack of screening for Black and Brown bodies... In the context of illness, I imposed on myself self- advocacy within a society that historically denied access to health care as a human right.
The drawing titled Silence=Death or Convergence is an imaginary depiction of the AIDS virus (1990’s). It was the first contemporary global pandemic which forced a new formulation of knowledge and technologies by scientists, clinicians, new public health policies, and respect for human rights. AIDS activism and art interventions was a response to the threat of the virus, and the high mortality rate. This activism interrogated the deployment of standard science in the context of a novice virus. It challenged stigmas and forced the scientific establishment to integrate a patient's subjective experience (and participation) in scientific panels. From the1980’s to 1995 I had consistent physical contact with my true friend disregarding the moral panic of contamination based on physical interaction(s). This drawing was created in memory of my best friend Miguel Laclaustra.
The last two installations: Stop Human Trafficking, Stop Police Brutality (series of 4), and the performance Tracing Detention Center are my responses to the dehumanization of specific populations. The installation on human trafficking discloses experiences of a new form of slavery globally impacting diverse populations. The victims of human trafficking and detention centers are subject to enclosure; the first within civil society and the second in detention centers. Human trafficking and detention centers depend on the commodification-proffiting of human beings. In the context of police brutality and detention centers we must interrogate policies, the governmentality deployment of state violence against African Americans, immigrants, Latinos, (disproportionally African American Latino and Indigenous People) and alterity in a despairing democracy. The three groups experience PTSD, the art intervention opens a dialogue about their dehumanization and social justice. It is important to point out the global resistance demanding transformation on the structure of power connected with systemic racism.
-Sonia Baez-Hernandez
List of Artworks pictured above:
The drawing titled Silence=Death or Convergence is an imaginary depiction of the AIDS virus (1990’s). It was the first contemporary global pandemic which forced a new formulation of knowledge and technologies by scientists, clinicians, new public health policies, and respect for human rights. AIDS activism and art interventions was a response to the threat of the virus, and the high mortality rate. This activism interrogated the deployment of standard science in the context of a novice virus. It challenged stigmas and forced the scientific establishment to integrate a patient's subjective experience (and participation) in scientific panels. From the1980’s to 1995 I had consistent physical contact with my true friend disregarding the moral panic of contamination based on physical interaction(s). This drawing was created in memory of my best friend Miguel Laclaustra.
The last two installations: Stop Human Trafficking, Stop Police Brutality (series of 4), and the performance Tracing Detention Center are my responses to the dehumanization of specific populations. The installation on human trafficking discloses experiences of a new form of slavery globally impacting diverse populations. The victims of human trafficking and detention centers are subject to enclosure; the first within civil society and the second in detention centers. Human trafficking and detention centers depend on the commodification-proffiting of human beings. In the context of police brutality and detention centers we must interrogate policies, the governmentality deployment of state violence against African Americans, immigrants, Latinos, (disproportionally African American Latino and Indigenous People) and alterity in a despairing democracy. The three groups experience PTSD, the art intervention opens a dialogue about their dehumanization and social justice. It is important to point out the global resistance demanding transformation on the structure of power connected with systemic racism.
-Sonia Baez-Hernandez
List of Artworks pictured above:
- Body Encode with Science Installation by Sonia Baez-Hernandez
- Hullas sin dejar huellas, drawing in charcoal/collage on paper by Sonia Baez-Hernandez
- Silence =Death or Convergence Ink Drawing on Velum, In Memory Of Miguel Laclautra , by Sonia Baez Hernandez
- Stop Human Human Tracffiking, installation, by Sonia Baez-Hernnadez
- Stop Police Brutality, installation by Sonia Baez-Hernnadez
- Retracing Detention Center, Performance by Sonia Baez Hernandez, costume design by Evelyn Polizer
I was born in mud, made wet with the intimacy of love. This gave my dry scattered body a place to come in being, later to find a material exists outside myself for the molding. We are not yet yet solidified,,,, here choosing to observe how I//wegot shaped and my ability to shape me and me and you and your choosing to listen. My practice approaches actions of self-identification, preservation, and the success found in countering intimidation through demanding empathy. These actions take form as intentionally opaque conversations surrounding the rural queer . Through intimacy ~ both in scale and unassuming materials ~ my thoughts are fixed on the making of self & the work to expand my//our representation of the non-heterosexual as more than homoerotic. I’am pressing, rather pushing for an , open space to be a story a story heard. I search by using craft materials to rewrite traditionally stale Southern-narratives. I queer (fuck with) ways of being, social roles and ideologies through the removal of the functional ~ both objects and words ~ rather than creating objects that keep viewers observing their own intent and imposed meaning ~ rather having personal associations questioned.
I practice self-agency through rewriting Southern norms (through) reducing craft materials and traditions and rewriting an intentionally opaque translation of the colloquial + queer + feral + redneck self. These ideas find form and reference in craft materials as the literal remaking of traditions. I work with white bread as personal narrative with its associations with preservation, clay as the duality of masculine and feminine, fabric as an archive of smells and touch, and the object-hood of hoarded knick-knacks reflecting domesticity and established dusty spaces.
My practice currently looks like drawing and writing, repeating, sharing thoughts and letting them go as quickly as they come. I am working to remove the need for refined ways of being, allowing my many selves to lead my work, tied with my walking and breath, and demanding less from my thoughts.
- Wes Hart
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I started making collages in 2012 as a means for inner exploration and self-development. Through this medium I am continuously finding new methods and new messages.
My process starts with a feeling, a special energy that I sense inside myself. I become compelled to cut random pieces of paper images. As I am working I am unaware of the significance of the individual item that I select, it is only after cutting a few pieces and looking at what I have gathered, that I realize that most of these pieces match each other perfectly with no primary conscious decision on my part. Although disparate, it is as if they were meant to be together and they now form a reconstructed shape. It is only then, once they are assembled, that I find the significant information that the completed work has offered. I see how the interplay of the components has allowed my unconscious mind to express itself visually. The feelings and the energies I couldn’t verbally express previously are now transmuted into a meaningful artwork. As a result of this there is a sense of relief for finally giving birth to some long buried and unknown aspect of my being.
Thus, my practice of collage has been a creative path allowing me to practice self-analysis and to experience personal and artistic growth.
I usually build my collages on white backgrounds. They appear clean and easy to look at. A constructed form seems to float on nothingness. This dramatizes my internal processes wherein my latent psychic energies emerge from the unknown chaotic but fertile inner world and are automatically organized by my mind and through my hands. On the blank white sheet, when seen as a corollary to consciousness, these energies are singled out, and become more highly impressionable and more universally understandable.
By cutting images from various sources, I am “fishing” in the collective consciousness. I search for images from art and fashion magazines to newspapers and advertisement that fortuitously arrive in my mailbox. I am appropriating, repurposing and reinterpreting works originally belonging to other people in order to create what eventually depicts and expresses my true and unique vision.
This suite of collages is my third series and so far comprises about 60 works that vary in size.
In the light of the #metoo movement I started to probe the concept of femininity and informally begin to ask myself questions about what it means to be a woman and who I am as a woman. Tapping into my own inner world, I come to discover and understand the archetypal Woman who is at the same time suggestive and ambiguous, meek and powerful, fecund and wise, and symbolizes the stages of all universal cycles in one woman’s life as a maiden, a mother and a crone.
These collages are in fact less a construction of fiction than my own way to pierce the veil of my very existence as well as the female archetype.
-Carol Jazaar
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Photography peaked my interest as I cared for my three little sisters. I enjoyed photographing them anytime I could. I come from a family of 8; 4 brothers and 3 sisters. I am number 4 in line and the oldest of the girls. I was born 1972 in Salt Lake City, Utah and raised in Kirtland, NM. I have been married for 23 years and I have 3 girls, 2 grandchildren.
I began learning more about photography in 2013 when I went back to college. Photography, once again, made a big impact in my life. I wanted to achieve a greater understanding of myself, as an artist and as a Navajo woman. I began to photograph my people as much as I could. Now, I enjoy photographing people whether for art or portraits. When I photograph, it helps me open up artistically and emotionally. I see the beauty everywhere, in the land and in the Navajo people. I keep photographing and I am always learning. My photography helps me as I search for serenity in my life. -Meredith Lee-Mike |
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Michelle Girardello is a visual artist whose work is rooted in photographic images. Michelle’s work explores the truthfulness of her memories and the past, and is interested in how to use these elements to look forward - to create a future.
-Michelle Girardello
-Michelle Girardello
Dance-making is the one way I have to be brave. Unexpected bodies, telling unexpected stories and personal histories, in unexpected and hidden places. I am a believer in the beauty of vulnerability and humanness. I have found through choreography that willingly sharing our vulnerability is what empowers us and moves us out of the cross-hairs of someone else’s judgement. Here, we take control of ourselves in such a way that dares to be told there 'isn’t enough room for that' in the chorus of all other bodies.
Because no bodies echo as profoundly as honest ones.
So in my practice, I seek that out and hold dance up to time like a scalpel - each rehearsal, interview, collaboration, and performance is part of the process, peeled back layer by layer. I direct a dance company of allied bodies that explore with me and perform the work I devise as choreographer. Our relationship as collaborators is democratized through the understanding that we are tied to the sole objective of sharing our human experience, as completely as possible, with all audiences.
I measure time through dance.
One of my best memories is standing on the tops of my mom's feet as she danced around the living room. I remember the feeling of shifting from one foot to the other, the continuity of her movements and my role as her abiding partner, neither controlling nor directing the dance but a part of it nonetheless. When I was nearly 10, my mom passed away from Lupus complications. After she passed, I would stand in the middle of the living room, close my eyes and try to recreate our waltz. Everything I knew about dance came from her. So how could I not then begin to associate all that dance is, and has become for me, to the passage of time?
I see time radiate in the bodies of dancers whose limbs and hearts hold decades of somatic study. I see time peeking out from behind the blinds of bodies who were told too often that they should not or could not dance. And I see time sped up in those same bodies as they hold even tighter to dance in order to make up for time lost. I see time in my own body - failed relationships and successful diets, busy schedule and tight bank account ironically doing just about the same thing to keep my artistic piety on the right side of time. So I dance to be brave in the face of time.
-Pioneer Winter
Because no bodies echo as profoundly as honest ones.
So in my practice, I seek that out and hold dance up to time like a scalpel - each rehearsal, interview, collaboration, and performance is part of the process, peeled back layer by layer. I direct a dance company of allied bodies that explore with me and perform the work I devise as choreographer. Our relationship as collaborators is democratized through the understanding that we are tied to the sole objective of sharing our human experience, as completely as possible, with all audiences.
I measure time through dance.
One of my best memories is standing on the tops of my mom's feet as she danced around the living room. I remember the feeling of shifting from one foot to the other, the continuity of her movements and my role as her abiding partner, neither controlling nor directing the dance but a part of it nonetheless. When I was nearly 10, my mom passed away from Lupus complications. After she passed, I would stand in the middle of the living room, close my eyes and try to recreate our waltz. Everything I knew about dance came from her. So how could I not then begin to associate all that dance is, and has become for me, to the passage of time?
I see time radiate in the bodies of dancers whose limbs and hearts hold decades of somatic study. I see time peeking out from behind the blinds of bodies who were told too often that they should not or could not dance. And I see time sped up in those same bodies as they hold even tighter to dance in order to make up for time lost. I see time in my own body - failed relationships and successful diets, busy schedule and tight bank account ironically doing just about the same thing to keep my artistic piety on the right side of time. So I dance to be brave in the face of time.
-Pioneer Winter
I am a Nicaraguan-born photojournalist, storyteller, and filmmaker based in Southwest Florida. I work on a variety of assignments and personal projects in editorial, photo essays, public art, and long-form documentary series. My work reevaluates perspectives and representations of race and gender in connection with humanitarian, social, and ecological issues. Member of Diversify Photo, The Authority Collective, The Artful Activist, The Coalition of Women in Journalism, and Women in Focus
-Lisette Morales
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I am interested in how having multiple partners (balloons) can be an expression of choice as opposed to it being an indicator of low morality, based on societal conventions. This body of work is a journey of self discovery. Being raised by my grandmother who had stereotypical ideas of what it means to be a woman often left me feeling suffocated. I find it ironic that such ideas never worked out for her; I took photographs inside the house she received as a divorce settlement while she preached to me that time was running out for me to get married. My grandmother never understood photography so I would photograph in secret whenever she was at church or asleep. Going through my family album and seeing how curated it was, I wanted to unveil the dysfunction and speak about what really happens behind closed doors. I keep a journal regarding what I am going through internally, which is influenced by both memory and the present; how I remember the women in my family from my childhood and teenage years, and the realisation that what I took for strength at the time was actually survival. Looking back it is ridiculous that women in my grandmother’s day would sneak off to the bathroom to hide the fact that they were smoking, but it’s also funny how the smell would escape through the doors and windows. I remember that smell. Placing headscarves and a chiffon dress over my camera mimicked the feeling of film, but also allowed me to view the space differently, disrupted, which echoed what I already felt. This work is me screaming. What if we allowed girls to sit with their legs open too. |
My current body of work represents an existential exploration of presence, spatial relationships, and the origins of life. The ritual of drawing allows my unconscious thoughts to shape the imagery; through this meditative process, altered patterns and visionary compositions are formed. The drawings result from an intuitive impulse to find higher meaning through abstraction.
-Carlene Muñoz
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Alice Mann is a South African photographic artist based in London who’s intimate portraiture essays explore notions of picture making as an act of collaboration. She aims to create images that empower her subjects and creates projects over extended periods, allowing for engaged and nuanced representations.
Her award winning series Drummies exploring female drum majorette teams in South Africa, has been selected as a winner of the Lensculture emerging photographer prize (2018), the PH Museum Women’s ‘New Generation’ prize for an emerging photographer (2018). Four images from the series were awarded first place at the prestigious Taylor Wessing portraiture prize (2018). Mann was also the recipient of the Grand Prix at the 34th edition of the Hyeres International Festival of Fashion and Photography (2019).
-Alice Mann
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My art does not fit neatly into a box to be packaged, labeled, and mass-produced; it is not often something which one can own, but rather something to be experienced and contemplated. As a contemporary artist my studio practice is multi-faceted, spanning painting and installation to fiber work, audio/video, and live performance. These materials are investigated through a psycho-analytic methodology which underscores the larger thematic whole. At its core, my work traces the ever-changing relationship between internal experience and external presentation. I deconstruct everyday objects, actions, and experiences, blurring the lines between high and low brow. Comforts of ordinary life, like that of a chair or bedding have been fragmented, exposing what lies beneath the surface. This domestic imagery is a signifier of the brain, which not only forms the complex human, but at times fails in basic understanding and coping mechanisms.
In recent years, immersive installations have become a driving force of my practice. This work takes place on site, composed of found-objects discarded by residents in the surrounding area. I arrive equipped with only a color and the edge of an idea to learn from each place, situated in time, amongst its history and present day. The laborious days/weeks that follow, require a highly sensitive mental state overwrought with obsessive compulsive tendencies. At this time, object placement becomes crucial to determine the layout of the composition. The physical act of shifting, piling, moving, and then removing these items from one corner of the room to another highlights a deep need for control.
By dousing the entire space from floor to ceiling in paint, color, and light, I invite viewers to enter the artwork as if stepping into an abstract painting. This experience offers a reality separate from ordinary life and traditional art-viewing that spans time and throughout space. The saturated environment paired with familiar imagery is meant to evoke an emotional response and a heightened awareness of one’s mental activity. The resulting phenomena will vary from person to person. Feelings of nostalgia, flashes of past trauma, or even a dreamlike state of déjà vu may occur. These installations, much like life, are temporary. Their experiential nature confronts consumer culture by placing attention on the present moment. The unsettled ambiance implores viewer investigation, consciousness, and inquiry to draw one’s own conclusions.
-Brittany Watkins
List of works:
• Maladaptation Sits, thirteen removed chair legs, one solid armchair, seven partial or broken chairs, half of an ottoman, two telephones, five cushions, a refrigerator door, four wooden drawers, and various compartments, and cinderblocks on vinyl with paint, 144 x 420 x 96 in. Miami, FL, 2021.
• An Unnamed Place in Time, stacks of found books, living room rug, a typewriter, a single armchair, rolling cart, and lamps, coated in paint,120 x 144 x 240 in., Erie, PA, 2020.
• Under them-there Hills...Mama, site-specific mixed-media installation, 216 x 384 x 192 in., Atlanta, GA, 2019.
• AFFECT-ed, being, composed of found household items coated in layers of paint, video-performance, photography, digital animation, unfired earthenware, and audio composition, dimensions vary, Columbia, SC, 2018.
• Behaviors STACKED (over) / Certainty, installation detail from AFFECT-ed, Being, six altered couches stacked with ratchet straps and house paint, 120 x 96 x 120 in., Columbia, SC, 2018.
• <Accept [(self) + Elsewhere], site-specific, found-object installation with composed audio,144 x 192 x 168 in. audio (5:00 minute run time), Lake City, SC, 2017.
My art does not fit neatly into a box to be packaged, labeled, and mass-produced; it is not often something which one can own, but rather something to be experienced and contemplated. As a contemporary artist my studio practice is multi-faceted, spanning painting and installation to fiber work, audio/video, and live performance. These materials are investigated through a psycho-analytic methodology which underscores the larger thematic whole. At its core, my work traces the ever-changing relationship between internal experience and external presentation. I deconstruct everyday objects, actions, and experiences, blurring the lines between high and low brow. Comforts of ordinary life, like that of a chair or bedding have been fragmented, exposing what lies beneath the surface. This domestic imagery is a signifier of the brain, which not only forms the complex human, but at times fails in basic understanding and coping mechanisms.
In recent years, immersive installations have become a driving force of my practice. This work takes place on site, composed of found-objects discarded by residents in the surrounding area. I arrive equipped with only a color and the edge of an idea to learn from each place, situated in time, amongst its history and present day. The laborious days/weeks that follow, require a highly sensitive mental state overwrought with obsessive compulsive tendencies. At this time, object placement becomes crucial to determine the layout of the composition. The physical act of shifting, piling, moving, and then removing these items from one corner of the room to another highlights a deep need for control.
By dousing the entire space from floor to ceiling in paint, color, and light, I invite viewers to enter the artwork as if stepping into an abstract painting. This experience offers a reality separate from ordinary life and traditional art-viewing that spans time and throughout space. The saturated environment paired with familiar imagery is meant to evoke an emotional response and a heightened awareness of one’s mental activity. The resulting phenomena will vary from person to person. Feelings of nostalgia, flashes of past trauma, or even a dreamlike state of déjà vu may occur. These installations, much like life, are temporary. Their experiential nature confronts consumer culture by placing attention on the present moment. The unsettled ambiance implores viewer investigation, consciousness, and inquiry to draw one’s own conclusions.
-Brittany Watkins
List of works:
• Maladaptation Sits, thirteen removed chair legs, one solid armchair, seven partial or broken chairs, half of an ottoman, two telephones, five cushions, a refrigerator door, four wooden drawers, and various compartments, and cinderblocks on vinyl with paint, 144 x 420 x 96 in. Miami, FL, 2021.
• An Unnamed Place in Time, stacks of found books, living room rug, a typewriter, a single armchair, rolling cart, and lamps, coated in paint,120 x 144 x 240 in., Erie, PA, 2020.
• Under them-there Hills...Mama, site-specific mixed-media installation, 216 x 384 x 192 in., Atlanta, GA, 2019.
• AFFECT-ed, being, composed of found household items coated in layers of paint, video-performance, photography, digital animation, unfired earthenware, and audio composition, dimensions vary, Columbia, SC, 2018.
• Behaviors STACKED (over) / Certainty, installation detail from AFFECT-ed, Being, six altered couches stacked with ratchet straps and house paint, 120 x 96 x 120 in., Columbia, SC, 2018.
• <Accept [(self) + Elsewhere], site-specific, found-object installation with composed audio,144 x 192 x 168 in. audio (5:00 minute run time), Lake City, SC, 2017.
Perez is particularly interested in the genre of painting, as her work references the painterly but with a contemporary twist and a tendency towards abstraction. Often alluding to the color field and landscape paintings, the manifestations of her works are created through an emphasis on industrial materials such as plexiglass, wood, concrete and asphalt, resulting in physicality not common in traditional paintings. There is a revisionist desire that underlies her work in order to challenge historical mainstream canon through the use of formal elements and unorthodox materials to provide counter-narratives. In Man-Made Environment (here, there, and everywhere), Perez brings to light the dangerous origin of the picturesque paintings of the 18th century and its strategic use in concealing the violence of colonization and the effects of displacement, depicted through an enclosed artificial and barren landscape composed of asphalt, devoid of romantic ornamentation. Other concepts of interest include the architecture and environment of South Florida, the domestic sphere and the investigations of the differing spaces men and women are allocated culturally and socially.
-Devora Perez