MATTHEW CHERUBINI
BIO
The imagery I create comes from a wanting to be more than we are or recreate a feeling that anything is possible. I like stories of great adventure, danger, and the fame that follows. Like a juvenile child I want to recreate these stories that adulthood has yet to provide. I use materials and techniques that are generally at hand and manageable by any layman. By working with everyday materials in a way that is considered outside the realm of high art I feel that my work carries notions of failure that speaks to inability to fulfill these stories. I want the viewer to be able to access and relate to my work without confusion. I present simple and specific images that can be experienced directly and analyzed thoughtfully.

CASEY DOYLE
BIO
For the last several years my work has explored preparation and those who help us prepare. They describe the energy as people ready themselves. I have always been interested in the event before the big event: the drills to develop necessary skills; the rituals performed to impress the opposite sex. Often times, the event before the event is just as exciting and exhilarating as the event itself as we get he opportunity to reflect and dream about what the event may bring. It also enables us to connect with those who are not only helping us prepare for the event but guide us through our entire lives.

MATTHEW DUCMANAS
BIO
Starting with a single stitch repeated and a tip of the hat to Robert Morris's felt sculptures, I am currently creating anti-form pieces made out of knitted sheets of curling ribbon. The act of making, the material, the color, the sense of time, the craft, the joining of lines, and most importantly the spaces between the stitches are of my utmost interest. The resulting form is one with infinite possibilities and the opportunity to play.

SANDHYA KOCHAR
BIO
My current artistic practice revolves around the everyday. It entails a search for significance within the insignificant. The profusion of mundane leftover items, images, activities and processes from our habitual existence stores a wealth of potential for an almost exotic re-presentation of our day-to-day lives. My highest aim is to entice another glance, provoke a second thought.

AMY KOENIG
BIO
The premise of these installations was to develop the idea that ornament is intrinsically connected to its affects, erasing the arbitrary divisions between nature, art and architecture. It becomes the structure and the aesthetic simultaneously produced through an internal order creating a sensorial experience, without a codified language. The ornament is the essence without which the installation would fall apart. Ornament is explored through the processes of construction, assembly and detail. It emerges from the material- intrinsic and inseparable from the object. It is not a mask. Rigorous attention to ornament draws it out of the narrow confines of its opposition to minimalism, a binary opposition to which it is often erroneously reduced. The desire is to create the delicate, the fragile and the subtle explored through techniques of drawing and assembly, employing select materials and investigating the affects of the resultant form (or the absence of it) as it relates to everyday living.

NICOLE LANGILLE
BIO
They will never know how I found them.
Possibly, they will never know that I found them at all.
Even more possible is that someone else has found them already.

Their information, so carelessly put into such a vulnerable position
for anyone to find.
The availability of resources to name the unknown, plot the
un-findable, trace the invisible.
The desire to know all, see all, claim everything for oneself.

The greed with which voyeurs violate privacy.
Steal glances.
Catalog their findings.

They should have known.
They will never know.

"Taken" is an exploration of privacy, voyeurism, and security. Found luggage tags were used to generate satellite images of each person's home and neighborhood on Google Earth and Google Street View. A somewhat cryptic letter was written to each individual, warning them of the dangers of discarding personal information and inviting them to come claim their tag at a nameless location (Actually the gallery where "Taken" was displayed). The artist was not made known to these people, as the letter was signed "A. Friend."

Of the twelve individuals invited, only one came to collect his belonging.

HONEY LAZAR
BIO
The interventions that I produce straddle the fields of sculpture and performance to address what Duchamp described as the infra-thin, a space where one thing becomes another. For me, that space represents a number of spaces; it is the moment where a person is touched, or where an idea collides with its implementation. It is a liminal space, a horizon framed by the actions of the material in a work.

This work is cleaved from the everyday but stands outside of it, is a counterpoint to our contemporary world. It is small and quiet, slow but fleeting. In it, time is suspended in an other-worldly state that is both idiotic and illuminating. In that space, the strangeness and distance that pervades every aspect of our daily lives is made momentarily visible.

COSBY LINDQUIST
BIO
These images are from "Keeping Track" a series of objects related to remembering. There is no simple way to define a life, but examining things that keep phone numbers, addresses, lunch dates as well as artifacts from weddings or proms tells a part of the story. Family treasures keep secrets and date books, rolodexes, high school yearbooks, or iPhones keep records. I like to examine these things and imagine or recall the memories.

ZANE PAPPAS
BIO
These photographs are formal studies of the local architecture in Columbus Ohio . I am interested in the stable and repetitive forms that are created within these boxy commonplace structures.

The windows become small stages to which people exist living out their lives. There is no one there but I could imagine people entering any number of these small windows, going about their daily rituals.

STEPHEN PARIS
BIO
How can the objects and materials of modern society be presented in a way that calls for a renewed sense of discovery and exploration? I examine the way that objects are used, why they are useful, and the limits of that utilitarianism. A Phone with a thousand feet of cord, a vacuum with an obnoxiously large bag, ideas of usefulness are accentuated while convexly and similarly subdued. My work finds its place in the disconnect between an object and its purpose, or what is thought to be that purpose.

COLIN JAMES McDONALD
BIO
These sculptures that I have made out of installation foam and mixed media integrations were created out of a humor that I have developed as a maker in these tough times of ours. I choose to make objects that make statements about areas of our culture that are perceived to be macho, touch and threatening. These objects quickly get completely changed when they are recreated out of foam. The works vary in their juxtaposition of material and concept, but all have a similar vein of humor that runs throughout my work.
I wanted to create something that makes the viewer rethink what they consider proper artistic material as well as make commentary on what the future is going to hold for art and being a maker. They challenge tradition and I feel are part of an awakening of sorts that is happening in contemporary sculpture these days, the practice of making work however and out of whatever you can get your hands on, survivalist approach. Foam is being through away everyday at construction sites all over the USA, and as far as a waste material it is really detrimental to our environment. I wish it never existed because it just ends up in some landfill and will never decompose. Through my work I am able to recycle it into an amazing sculptural medium.

NIKOS FYODOR RUTKOWSKI
BIO
I have recently begun a series of drawings which fascinate me in many ways and elude me in others. They are portraits in which I portray the subject through simple contour line and selective emphasis on certain characteristics. They are strangely contradictory in their intensity and lack of emotion; their personality and lack of individuality; their fullness and vacancy; and their level of description and lack of detail. Within the work the empty space becomes an element that would overcome the subject were it not for certain emphasized characteristics that reveal the subject's personality against the nothingness. I attempt to show something about the people I am drawing by catching them in these nondescript moments, but I am not yet sure whether the moments I am portraying display more of what these people are or more of what they are not. Inasmuch as this strange tension is displayed through expression, I feel it is emphasized through technique. Part of my objective in these drawings is to describe as much as possible with as little as possible, and consequently the subjects become stripped of everything except what I feel is necessary to reveal each seemingly anonymous individual. As I construct these pieces, I find that the subtle dynamics between subject and emotion, and personality and technique become contradictions that are of the most interest to me within these works.

KATIE SHANNON
BIO
My work is not necessarily about the subject, rather I use landscape and still life as a foundation for a visual vocabulary that reflects the physical nature of the paint surface itself. The act of creating the painting combines with the subject matter allowing each piece to resonate and manifest itself on different levels. The motifs may seem familiar, but they are often reduced or transformed beyond the purely representational.

DAVID STANIUNAS
BIO
I start my current work by painting a background and then sketching a loose and very expressive form across the surface. I fill in and cover over this drawing with pieces of colored paper cut up into simple and not so simple geometric shapes. Using a process that is a visual approximation of stream of consciousness, I layer shapes and colors until I feel satisfied that the work is completed.

When I am done making the pieces I pour several layers of clear resin over them. The resin gives them a slick finish, producing an almost manufactured look, which sort of counteracts the work's simple hand produced beginnings. Since the pieces refer to either a supernatural or spiritual realm that exists only as hypothetical, I give the pieces titles that refer to specific philosophers and modes of thought.

MEGAN TAN
BIO
My photographs explore one facet of America's inexorable relationship with the pursuit of happiness, depicting hyper-real environments where many people congregate in order to experience enjoyment. Visiting these types of places has become an American ritual, an experience associated with happy moments and memories. The presence of my camera interrupts these moments, resulting in an image of a peculiar and dramatized environment, one that is at times humorous but always a little unsettling.

ROB THOMPSON
BIO
In my paintings and drawings, I attempt to retrieve a place for political inquiry in art. Through images of labor and artifice, manufacturing and magic, the work develops a vocabulary for political realities and conjectures that lie at the boundary of speech.

The work recasts the visual economy of the 21st century in terms of 19th century industry. Like any satire, this is to invent phrasings and spaces for insufficiently-rendered current events -- datamining, for instance -- and for phenomena that are purely ideological or rhetorical -- reaction and resentment; the straw man, the paper tiger.

My aim -- in the line of Gerhard Richter, Philip Guston, Sigmar Polke and Anselm Kiefer -- is an engaged revision of political myth-making; deadpanning expressionism, and running counter to sly quotation or faux low brow recycling.

I recast tropes of pictorial illusion as gags or gaffes, hoping to show description gone awry. I take pleasure in mimicking offset printing, in drawing schematically, and in leaving evidence of my straightedges and masking tape. I think of drawing as direction, pointing out or leading from the image rather than archiving or filling it out.

The visual culture and architecture of Philadelphia (or the mythology of the rust belt) reengaged my work with a designated location and a material history. The current challenge of my painting is to merge its nascent setting (Philadelphia's green fiberglass awnings and stucco rowhouse walls) with its pre-existing, factory-lit dystopia.

I work to engage the assumed futures inherent in every archive; the effect of a cartelized media on narrative; the flaws of technophilic culture. Painting is fundamentally a critical vehicle. Its intransigent physicality and insolent fictions give the lie to ersatz perception and get the last laugh.

SHEILAH WILSON
BIO
These two works are a part of a series that take place in Mongolia, a country of purity and untouched stories that lie hidden within the environment, the people, and the richness of the culture. While traveling through the dessert and the country side every second was a journey and therefore every moment an adventure.

I took each photograph independently and decided to structure them as diptychs in order to portray the complementary unity between positive and negative images. With diptychs, the lines of the photograph roll off one image and on to the next, similar to those lines that connect the dots throughout the chapters of ones journey.

JESSIE MILLS
BIO
There's something about oil paint that calls out for the painting of flesh. I'm used to making small abstract paintings that don't depict any thing in particular. One day, however, before dinner, as the meat was thawing, and after I saw the muscle, the fat, and the blood pooling, I had to grab my brushes. The color and the flesh -- and the oil and the blood -- all lost each other in themselves as I tried to get it all down. They fought each other on the canvas, on the table and through my head, coming together, at last, in the unity of an image.

SARA BERENS
BIO
My work is an investigation of the seam that binds experience to language, story to teller and fantasy to history. I mine my own past for jumping off points that will allow me to create alternative history. I am committed to the potential for disruption, through insertion of a personal narrative voice. In this weighting there is a shift in designation of value. I am interested in the hiccup that occurs in perception as fact and event are subverted and converted to the level of myth. I use the personal voice as an entry way to this new mythology; a mythology which both creates and defies logic. I see the stories that I recount through as precariously balanced between the entropic, the absurd and the recognizable. I tell them with a fervor and a simplicity that allows in humor, pathos and poetry.

SARA BERENS
BIO
Mirror images, beauty vs. the grotesque, inner vs. outer, innocence vs. non. These are all dualities that I am interested in utilizing within my work. All of these ideas speak to the two sided nature of being human and the notion that one cannot exist without the other or good without the evil. To create this duality I draw inspiration from medical and children's book illustrations, crafting methods, human sexuality and a warped sense of humor. With an amalgamation of disproportionate body parts, exposed innards, medical oddities coupled with simplistic drawing methods and assuming innocent illustrations, I create small scale narrative works that include strange characters and situations.