Agathe de Bailliencourt
Berlin, Germany
@agathedebailliencourt

72 – 10.05.23 After DL, 2023
Acrylic painting on raw linen canvas
79 x 59 inches

Agathe de Bailliencourt was born in Paris and graduated from Ecole Boulle in 1998. She has exhibited internationally, including at the Shanghai Youth Biennale; the Singapore Biennale; the Mori Art Museum and the French Embassy in Tokyo; Lu Magnus Gallery New York; Blain Southern in London; the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in Singapore; and Château de Ratilly in Treigny, France. A recipient of awards and residencies from organizations in Tokyo, the Isle of Skye, New York, Marfa, and soon at Villa Medici in Rome, she has lived in Berlin since 2007.

“My practice plays with conceptual and poetic painting possibilities, specifically ideas arising while creating on canvas, paper, or in environments. Recording time is an ongoing theme, the mediums influencing each other. With an open, non-structured approach, I use spontaneity, accident, and error to overcome what I know. I approach making work as producing meaning, recording the present moment, linking time, memory, and space. My most recent work has explored ideas about change of state, particularly in serigraph screen drawings capturing real-time shifts between states, half print, half watercolor. The works featured unresolved movement between control and unpredictability, domination and fragility: a powerful yet delicate conflict zone.”

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Victoria Burge
Harrisville, NH
@v_burge

Star Data, 2023
Portfolio of 8 hand-cut prints, edition of 5
10 x 8 inches each

Victoria Burge was born in New York in 1976, and creates small-scale sculpture and works on paper. Trained as a printmaker, her two-dimensional pieces often incorporate the printed mark. Burge’s works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the British Museum, and the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, among others.

“Over the last year, I have been working with the Harvard College Observatory’s Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. My research has focused on celestial photographic prints from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These photographs are dotted with exquisite handwritten marks – letters, numbers, symbols – by the Harvard Computers (a group of women astronomers), coded inventories of the night sky. These handwritten marks are drawings and as such graphic traces of history. They are accounts of invisible labor; collective, often anonymous, notes working in cumulative unison to build networks of knowledge. I am inspired by visual languages such as these, various modes of graphic notation that organize and distribute information. My current/ongoing body of work is an homage to these unique notations; the utility of tangible data; the analog archive; the organizing principles of the grid and its function in creating an information architecture.”

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Michel Delgado
Chicago, IL
@micheldelgadoart

Face Your Shadow, 2023
Oil and mixed media on panel
32 x 20 x 2 inches

Michel Delgado was born on the West Coast of Africa, in Dakar, Senegal, and he currently lives and works in Chicago, IL and Key West, FL. Throughout his career as a primarily self-taught artist, Delgado has invested time in giving back to artists to help grow the community he came up in. Delgado currently serves as Juror and Artist Advisor for the Artist in Residence Program at the Studios of Key West and has been invited to juror other fine art exhibits throughout the western United States. Delgado’s work is included in the collections of the Plains Art Museum, the American Visionary Art Museum, the DeLand Museum of Art, and the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale. His art was featured in the 2014 television series Empire.

“My work is driven by my focused curiosity about the relationship of humanity, our purpose here, and what we come here to accomplish on a spiritual, emotional, and fantasy level. The first and most significant influence on my work was growing up in West Africa. Daily life in Dakar, Senegal was a fluid, energetic, chaotic pool of creativity for me. Every aspect of life, from finding materials for housing and clothing to cooking, was a creative endeavor often with unexpected results. Premeditated expectations were rarely useful in this environment. That daily creativity imbued me and my work with a sense of surprise and openness to experience.”

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Justin Duerr
Philadelphia, PA
@justinduerr

Secret Sisterhood of the Space Lattice Sanctum, 2023
Ink and gouache on paper
30 x 22 inches

Justin Duerr was born in 1976 and grew up in rural Pennsylvania, spending the early years of his life without the conveniences of indoor plumbing or electricity. After dropping out of high school in 1993, he spent the latter half of the 1990s working on fishing boats on the Bering Sea. In 1999, Duerr began a lifelong artistic project of interconnecting drawings based on a flash of inspiration from his time at sea. In 2011, Duerr was featured in the documentary Resurrect Dead, which premiered and won an award at the Sundance Film Festival. Justin Duerr’s work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the permanent collection of the Intuit Museum in Chicago, in addition to numerous private collections worldwide.

“My artistic work addresses concerns of global, societal, personal, and even cosmic cataclysm through a process of meditative careful patterning and storytelling/fantasy. In 1999 I began an interconnecting series of “story scroll” panels that connect to each other, left to right. The panels contain recurring characters and philosophical schemas, with the intention to someday, at the sunset of my lifetime, connect the final panel to the first, thus completing a single cycloramic artwork.”

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Christine Hiebert
Brooklyn, NY
@christinehiebert

zwischen, 2023
Black paint on blue tape, and blue tape, on wall and floor
12 x 110 feet; floor area is 271 square feet

Christine Hiebert was born in 1960 in Basel, Switzerland, and raised in the United States. Hiebert has focused on the gestural line in drawing for over thirty years. Her interest in abstract visual language is rooted in early studies in typography and letterforms. Hiebert’s work has been shown widely in galleries and museums including The Morgan Library and Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Museo del Estéban Vicente in Segovia, Spain; and the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, Germany. Since 2000, she has created site-specific wall drawings using tape and other materials. Installation sites include The Drawing Center, NY, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Germany, and the Haus der Kunst St Josef, in Solothurn, Switzerland.

“I took my first drawing course at the same time as a letterform drawing course, so the two activities have always felt linked. I learned that observations of nature and light could be absorbed into the forms and spacing of abstract marks. Studying them closely became a way to see the world, as much as life drawing did, at the time. In the 1990s, my step into gestural abstraction felt natural. What grew from those early years was a sense that each gestural mark evokes a condition of being in the world. I quickly developed a comfort with large format, which led to drawings on walls and in rooms. My way of placing individual marks on a surface holds an idea of “belonging” or “dwelling,” even as it may result in something that feels open or unfixed. I have called my drawings "my houses", because in their fragmented and active spaces I feel most at home."

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SR Mattoose
Silver City, NM
@mattoose_paintiings

Manticore, 2023
Oil on canvas
60 x 60 inches

SR Mattoose was born in a small, southwest border town in Texas. Mattoose discovered his passion for art during his first semester of college, in 1989, when he signed up for a drawing course. As one professor put it, Mattoose “took to painting as a duck takes to water.” Later, in 1998, after a transformative experience in the Chihuahuan Desert, a sense of the mystical began to pervade Mattoose’s work.

“A sense of the spiritual, transcendental, and mystical pervades all my work. This is my focus and my theme. I see the role of art as a way of knowledge, an experience based on emotional understanding with the power to reconstruct a certain fugitive sensation. Therefore, I paint symbols. That is, in my creative pursuit, I intend to construct, in veiled and ciphered form, works that point, hint, and evince. I aim for my work to transpose one’s attention, curiosity, and wonder to transcendental ideas; ideas that lie dormant in the depth of our consciousness. In the end, I aim to imbue the surfaces and images I present with the qualities by which to transmit these primordial mystical ideas. And this to me is symbol-making.”

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Felix Maxwell
Lewisburg, TN
@felixmaxwell993

At Art Fest, 2023
Watercolor
15 x 19 inches

Felix Maxwell is a photorealist painter, gallery owner, and art teacher from Middle Tennessee. Maxwell developed a lifelong passion for visual storytelling during his early years of art classes in 1968. In 1975, Maxwell established Maxwell House of Art, and from 1990 until 2022, he worked as Gallery Manager, Member, and Art Instructor for the Marshall County Art Guild. Maxwell’s work is included in various corporate and museum collections, including the Dollar General Corporation Art Collection and the Tennessee State University Van Gordon Gallery Collection. Notable exhibitions of his work include a one-man show at The Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, and the “Black Creativity” exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago.

“As an artist, my work is primarily focused on a few major themes, including capturing touching, relatable, and emotional moments that I am guided to and inspired by in everyday life through photography, observing and noting the contrasts of color, the effects of light and shadow, and facial expressions, and then translating these moments into paintings. I also emphasize using everyday people and characters I encounter as subjects for my art, capturing their life stories through interviews. This approach allows me to communicate a visual narrative that goes beyond just the photograph, reflecting the essence and experiences of the subjects through my paintings.”

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Renzo Ortega
Carrboro, NC
@renzoortegaart

Omes, 2023
Acrylic, oil, oil stick, sand on canvas
48 x 48 inches

Renzo Ortega was born in Peru in 1974 and currently lives and works in Carrboro, North Carolina. Ortega received a BFA in painting from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes del Peru in 1999, studied at the Art Students League of New York from 2000-2004, and received an MFA from Hunter College in 2014. Ortega’s work has been exhibited at the Nasher Museum of Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art SECCA, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Cameron Art Museum in North Carolina, as well as El Museo del Barrio and the Queens Museum in New York.

“My artwork reflects a varied intellectual experience and development as an artist. In Lima, Peru, where I grew up, the color of the Andes blends with the gray of urban chaos. In New York, I lived for 16 years surrounded by people of different cultures, and now I live in the small, green town of Carrboro, North Carolina. These cultural and geographical elements are part of my identity. My artwork contains that diversity, and I embody it in the variety of pictorial styles and treatments that exist in it. In a single painting, you can find influences ranging from pre-Hispanic patterns, colonial iconography, native and popular art, and expressionism to gestural abstraction. This fusion occurs in my artistic production, like a continuous and constantly evolving soundtrack for a film of life. I believe that painting is part of existence, connected to the vast universe of artistic creation. Painting, for me, is an eternal journey.”

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Pradeep Puthoor
Thiruvananthapuram, India
@puthoor.pradeep

Vertical ponds, 2023
Watercolor on paper
44 x 60 inches

Pradeep Puthoor was born in Kerala, India. Since graduating with first rank from the State University for painting in 1988, he has devoted his life to painting. He has participated in art projects in India and internationally and has received several awards and prizes, including from the Indian Ministry of Culture (1992 and 2008), the British Royal Overseas League (1997), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2003 and 2019), and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (2021).

“My artistic philosophy revolves around the idea of ‘One religion, One caste, One race, and One God for Humanity.’ This philosophy, born from my childhood experiences witnessing untouchability and poverty, serves as the backbone of my art. My journey took me to the countryside, I immersed myself in the innocent lives and struggles of the people and documented the impact of modern progress on impoverished communities, animals, and the environment. Inspired by Gauguin's existential questions, my current themes explore diverse human conditions, struggles, gender equality, climate change, and the profound interconnectedness of life. I seek to contribute to the narrative that addresses pressing issues like the arrogance of the affluent over the impoverished, environmental degradation, and the pain of slaughtered animals and birds. I utilize symbols like bones and decay to encapsulate the essence of the conditions I aim to portray, approach my canvas with a deep commitment to making a meaningful impact and fostering a sense of global unity.”

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Leslie Roberts
Brooklyn, NY
@lesliejaneroberts

Some Birds That Are Largely Blue, 2023
Acrylic, gouache, ink, pencil on panel
16 x 12 inches

Leslie Roberts was born in 1957 in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and she currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Roberts makes work driven by color, language, and self-devised rules. She has shown her work at venues that include Minus Space, Marlborough Gallery, McKenzie Fine Art, 57W57 Arts, Pierogi, PPOW, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, and the Brooklyn Museum (all in New York, NY); the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC); and the Wellin Museum (Clinton, NY). She holds a BA from Yale and an MFA from Queens College. Roberts is Professor Emerita at Pratt Institute.

“I compile words from commonplace sources like ads, signage, email, and the internet, to create artifacts of 21st century culture. I transcribe vernacular that’s ubiquitous but largely overlooked, such as acronyms we use in intimate text exchanges (TMI, BTW . . .) Lists of signs and ads seen on the subway document urban landscapes. Catalogs of headlines hint at political and social vicissitudes. Rosters of assorted instructions underscore the demands that bombard us, on and off-screen. These mismatched lexicons of ephemeral language often make sense in some non-linear, even ridiculous way. In the studio, I handwrite lists in columns, then use self-devised rules to chart letters, along X and Y axes, into grids of acrylic gouache. Painting elements include geometric shapes, constellations of dots, networks of line, and layered pools of translucent wash. The diagrammatic process leads to unexpected color, in patternlike structures that are satisfyingly askew: optical experiences I couldn’t otherwise invent.”

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Dorothy Robinson
Peekskill, NY
@dorothyrobinsonart

Words Fail, 2023
Oil on panel
40 x 48 inches

Dorothy Robinson lives and works in Peekskill, New York. She studied geography as an undergraduate and received an MFA in painting from the University of California, Berkeley. Several artist residencies have been key to the development of her work, including Caldera in central Oregon, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in NYC, Virginia Center for the Arts, and Monson Arts in Maine. Robinson has exhibited her work in New York and elsewhere on the East and West Coasts and is the recipient of financial support from the Alexander Rutsch Painting Award, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and Tree of Life.

“At its most basic level, my work is inspired by nature, the beauty of color, and the expressive possibilities of oil paint. Passages of thick impasto, scrapings of mixed-up colors, and thinned-out washes suggest the quality and feeling of landscape, if not its details. Adding and subtracting layers of paint tap into the constant motion of an interior life and evoke themes of growth, change, and instability. My approach is intuitive—I don’t plan my paintings or work on them from sketches. Compositions emerge from accumulating fragments and passages that grow, collide, shrink, and finally settle into what feels like ‘place’. They are intended to hover between abstraction and figuration, leaving room for subjectivity and multiple meanings to emerge. Rather than a single view, the landscape suggests movement and the passage of time.”

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Bahar Sabzevari
Brooklyn, NY
@bahar_sabzevarii

Untitled (“Unity” Series), 2023
Ink and acrylic on polystyrene sheet mounted on wood
24 x 24 inches

Bahar Sabzevari, an Iranian-born visual artist, began her artistic journey after earning a bachelor’s degree in her home country. Her pursuit of artistic excellence brought her to Paris, France, in 2002 and subsequently to the United States, where she earned her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and Milan, and has been reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, Aspire Magazine, and Maize Magazine, among others. She was awarded residencies from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts and Civitella Ranieri in Italy and frequently participates in discussions, panels, and collaborative projects aimed at bridging cultural divides and promoting global awareness through her art.

“Self-portraiture has been a pivotal medium for my introspection and cultural examination. Through this practice, I navigate my Iranian heritage, weaving personal narratives with broader socio-cultural themes. A key aspect of my recent work is the cheetah series, where I depict myself as an Asiatic cheetah. This choice serves as a metaphor highlighting the urgent issues of climate change and environmental neglect. Beyond environmental commentary, these pieces explore themes of vulnerability, resilience, and our interconnectedness with nature, portrayed through intricate textures and colors. This series gained additional depth with the 2022 Iranian "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, drawing parallels between the resilience of Iranian women and girls and the endangered cheetahs, both striving for survival under oppressive conditions.”

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Sheila Schwid
New York, NY
@sheilaschwid

Back and Forth, 2023
Oil on linen
35 x 28 inches

Sheila Schwid was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1932. After graduating from the University of Omaha in 1954, she attended Art Center School in Los Angeles in 1955/56. She also studied art with Milton Wolsky, and other Omaha artists before moving to New York in 1959, where she was part of the Beatniks and showed at various 10th Street Galleries. Her sculpture was the subject of a solo exhibition at Antioch College in 1962 and her animated films were exhibited in Provincetown in 1984. Her work in the 1973 "Women Choose Women" show at the New York Cultural Center was reviewed in the New York Times. Sheila Schwid frequently shows at the Carter Burden Gallery and Westbeth Gallery in New York.

“In 2012 I started my “14th Street Reflections” series. I am still working on this series. I take photos with my iPhone on the 14th Street Crosstown Bus. These photos show the most amazing shapes, textures, slices of light, and overlapping shapes, sometimes shadows, that can cut off a part of a figure's body and replace it with a pattern of leaves, or any old color or shape. This results in a picture that shows us our crowded and frustrating lives interrupted by sirens, screams, loud music, people yelling, advertising, and confusion. But the people just keep going. They amaze me. Nothing stops them. They keep walking, shopping, talking, and making it to their appointments. I paint them with awe and respect.”

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Joydip Sengupta
Kolkata, India
@joydipsengupta

Continuum, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 60 inches

Joydip Sengupta holds MFA degrees from the College of Art, University of New Delhi, India, and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, Scotland. He was awarded a UK Commonwealth Scholarship and has received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation and The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, among others. His work has been featured in exhibitions throughout India, including at Ganges Art Gallery, Kolkata; Sarala Art Centre, Chennai; Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai; and at Arushi Arts and Gallery Nature Morte, New Delhi.

“In my artistic exploration, major themes converge at the intersection of cultural alienation, identity, and socio-political concerns. In my current practice, I am absorbed in understanding the intricate complexities of our interconnected world. Here, existence is an amalgamation of layered realities, where experiences blend with memory, myth, reality, and make-believe realms. This understanding has driven me to examine the intricate interplay between the individual humanity and the vast universe all converging to create a profound and interconnected experience. Central to my creative pursuit is the belief that invisible energies weave through and unite everything, whether tangible or abstract. This conviction has enhanced my awareness of the subtle yet profound pathways that link unrelated entities. In my practice, I have explored an elaborate visual narrative that combines various elements, seamlessly blending formal components with seemingly unrelated entities.”

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Minshik Shin
Queens, NY
@minshikfineart

Writings of my artistic wishes, 2023
Indian ink, acrylic, acrylic pen, oil, collage, fiber paper, rice paper, on canvas
60 x 75 inches

Minshik Shin is an immigrant artist based in Queens, New York. Shin earned a BFA in Korean painting from Seoul National University and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Shin is currently creating socially engaged visual arts and community activities through several projects involving members of the local community, in addition to typical creative endeavors. Shin is the recipient of a number of grants and fellowships and has participated in numerous exhibitions and projects, including “Queens Seen” Queens Rising, Culture Lab LIC, NY (2023); Shared Dialogue, Shared Space, 601Artspace with Korea Art Forum (2022); the DMZ PROJECT at Heyri Art Village in South Korea; and Queens International 2004 at the Queens Museum.

“As a Korean-American immigrant artist navigating displacement, I explore the themes of family, identity, and resilience in my art. After graduate school (2003), my work began with portrait drawings and abstract expressions based on nature. My portraits focused on satirical and topical paintings, sculptures, and experiential mediums through a synthesis of society, sex, and commercial advertising. These topics began my journey into mixed media. I continued to work on portraits of myself, my family, and immigrant families within my communities. Based on the subject’s occupation, religion, and family relationships, I expressed the process of settling into life in the United States as immigrants. My oil painting works use mixed media and materials with various textures to create three-dimensional portraits.”

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Val Sivilli
Milford, NJ
@valsivilli

Dancer, 2023
Direct printing on muslin, acrylic on canvas
30 x 34 inches

Val Sivilli grew up on Long Island. After earning a BFA in Printmaking, Ceramics, and Painting, she lived in Brooklyn from 1984-1991, exhibiting at NYC galleries and working as an assistant to both Nancy Spero and Leon Golub. She earned an MFA at Mason Gross in 1990, then moved to Frenchtown, NJ, to raise a family. In the early 1990s, she spearheaded many local art projects, including The Steamroller Gallery artist collective. She held various adjunct teaching positions and exhibited at several NJ venues before taking a deliberate break from exhibiting between 2006 and 2015, when she spent three months at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM. She returned to create The Hunterdon Art Tour in 2016 and began once more to pursue exhibition and project opportunities.

“Recently, I inherited a few large dolls from my grandmother. I could not bring myself to throw them away. Body printing found itself back into my work. These dolls, combined with tools, bones, phone chords, and useless pieces of tech are fuel for my current work evoking disconnectedness by replacing the physical body with digital tools. It is at the intersection of external forces – AI, climate change, social justice – with internal struggles –identity, substance abuse, family trauma – that my current work resides. By building a 'subtext' of printed doll parts, tools, and tech onto a lightweight cotton fabric, secondary forms emerge. A selection of the printed fabric is glued down onto a stretched canvas. I then respond to this 'subtext' as a painter.”

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MiYoung Sohn
Provincetown, MA
@miyoung__s

230808 (Daily Collage Series), 2023
Painted cut paper on Fabriano
11 x 14 inches

Born in South Korea, MiYoung Sohn came to the United States alone as a child and spent her youth in foster homes in Northern Virginia. She received a BFA from Parsons School of Design and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale. Her sculptural works, installations, and collages have been exhibited widely, including at Galerie LarocheJoncas, Montreal, Canada; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; MoMA PS1, Queens, NY and Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY. The recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, Sohn lives and works in Provincetown, MA, where she creates interactive community art projects, teaches workshops, curates exhibitions, and maintains her studio practice.

"When I moved to Provincetown, MA, the colors from neighboring gardens and landscapes were so stunning that they entered into my work, defying my belief that flowers are too pretty to use as subject matter. I’m currently working on a series of daily collages started last Spring in response to living on the tip of Cape Cod. “Spring Training'' is a working title for this series and reminds me to keep nimble by going back into training or going “back to the basics” by simply using paint, paper, and glue. I look inwardly for inspiration as I navigate between isolation and solitude and continue to make work no matter the circumstance."

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Dawn Stetzel
Seaview, WA
@dawnstetzelstudio

Climate Watch Chair, 2022
mixed media
67 x 37 x 50 inches

Dawn Stetzel has contributed to innovation in the field of sculpture through her work over the past 20 years. She holds an MFA from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. She has shown in solo and group exhibitions and created public art commissions across the United States and abroad, including Grounds for Sculpture, Disjecta, and the Portland Biennial. Stetzel’s work is included in multiple publications and public collections, such as The City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and the Shiwan Ceramic Museum in the Guangdong Province of China. She has lectured in the United States, China, and Brazil.

“My sculptures are tools I use to interact with a specific environment. Often these pieces require me to physically propel, push, pull, row, or ski, challenging my strength, safety, and comfort levels. The landscapes I am compelled to navigate are usually ones in the margins of places, they might feel somehow desolate to me, vast, or lonely due to environmental neglect. These are places that I find oddly fascinating, sometimes disgusting and they pull at visceral threads in my being. Often these landscapes exhibit hints of resourcefulness and potential paths to new ways of living in a place, thus they at times feel somewhat like home to me.”

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Josephine Wood
London, United Kingdom
@josephinewoodart

Knickerbocker Glory, 2023
Acrylic, gouache on canvas
37 x 43 inches

Josephine Wood lives and works in London, UK. She graduated in 1998 from Goldsmiths College, London. Exhibitions include Kingsgate Gallery, London, 2021, Glasgow Centre of Contemporary Art, 2019, Kunst Raum Riehen, Basel, 2018, The Horse Hospital, London, 2017, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2015, Global Art Container, Tallinn, Estonia 2008 and The Royal Academy of Art, Ghent, Belgium 2007. Wood’s work is drawn from the grimmer, tragi-comedy aspects of life and the pathos of modern living. Cheap food, pound shops, dilapidated interiors and bodies, desire, and sexuality take on different forms in her work. Wood’s working-class London background, her interest in counterculture, and her punk aesthetic are prevalent throughout her work.

“The recurrent themes in my paintings rotate around ideas about the body, in particular women's bodies. Over the years I have experimented with painting bodily forms, figures, and heads with domestic objects and motifs. When I paint the body I am trying to transcribe a psychological or emotional state relating to alienation, the abject, humor, desire, and sexuality. The wider implications in my paintings point towards the socio-political in regard to social structures and class, disenfranchisement, and identity. In my recent paintings, I explore the female body and our fractious relations to consumerism and commodities. The recurring motifs such as plastic grocery bags, food, and domestic objects mutate and encroach on the body, collapsing the boundary between subject and object, reality and fantasy, comedy and horror.”

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Paul F. Yount
Venus, FL
@paulfyount

Extinction of the Individual ism, 2021
Oil on canvas
60 x 80 inches

Paul F. Yount has been painting large-scale figurative oil paintings for 45 years. He completed a BFA at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville and graduate studies at The Museum School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2020, he was awarded an Individual Support Grant from The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and previously the Ewing Scholarship from The University of Tennessee. He has exhibited widely throughout the United States.

“I am a queer artist who has experienced a vast array of ideas, thoughts, and memories in my many decades on this planet and my 45 years of painting about my life and the life around me. I see myself as an explorer of time and space traveling in a Time Machine. This Time Machine allows me to live in a universe within a universe. I can pull myself away from the ebb and flow of life’s ordinary routine and I display the sparkle, the glamour, the beauty, the ugly sincerity of humanity. Presently, I am creating paintings that are highly developed with a philosophy of time revealing that past, present, and future exist in one state of time. The paintings are a series of triptychs with myself and my husband depicting the beginnings of time and through the rise and fall of humanity to another existence far from our present ideologies.”

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