Clearly Human IV Artists Artwork and Statements

Andrea Bagdon

In my recent series of work I look to the abject to talk about uncomfortable narratives of womanhood. I want my figures to operate in a state where there is a general shift in the conceptions of the real. My work examines intimate and disrupted domestic scenes of self-conflict that have been brought on by obsessive cultural programming and mass culture. By using uncomfortable representations of the domestic and the female form I intend to highlight the psychological trauma and disrupt the voyeuristic spectatorial inspection of the viewer.

Angela Burns

As a woman artist, one of three daughters myself, and now mom to three young daughters, many times I end up painting women or children. This is the world I know best. I was a middle daydreaming child, and my middle daughter happens to be the whimsical one at our house. I see echoes of myself in her faraway moments, and in the subjects I subconsciously select. 
I like to think I am representing introspection more than isolation. We all need time to think, to observe, to pull away from the crazy of life and process what it happening. These are the women and children that show up in my paintings. And this is the experience I want to create for those viewing my artwork. I want people to accept the invitation to experience the wonder and whimsy that a child does, or to experience that feeling of far-and-away as they view a distracted subject. 
My style or technique is a personal statement and could be called “realism with an impressionist bent.” I don’t believe that technique is religiously adhering to a set of rules that lead to a desired result. Rather, technique should reflect that way of painting that makes the artist happiest while doing it. This kind of painting leads to the most joy and the best, most genuine art. For me, that means balancing a high degree of realism with expressive brushwork. Careful drawing, strong sense of form, and bold strokes surrounding the figure: these elements work together to make what (I hope) are memorable images of real people that emanate pathos and light. 
Many artists feel drawn (or even a sense of calling) to depict the brokenness in the world, to explore the darkness of the human heart, or to challenge a political or social idea. I think these all extremely worthwhile, and I am glad there are many artists tackling these hard issues through their images. I feel that my 'call to action' for people is more subtle; more an invitation to slow down and savor, to experience the glory of people as they inhabit a certain time and place. I hope people will feel the soul behind the face of my subjects and will sense the incredible value that I believe is intrinsic to every human being. With each piece, I hope the work will honor the person being represented and will spark a memory or emotional response in the viewer.

Website: http://www.angelaburnsart.com

Peyton Butts

Stefani Byrd

“...we are walking the razor’s edge ~ we are in the present moment.” 

- Charlotte Joko Beck, This Very Moment 

The breath is a constant reminder of our physicality and an anchor to our embodied experience. In these video portraits performers exhale slowly against an unseen piece of glass, fogging and obscuring their faces in fleeting moments between breaths. When shown on individual vertical video monitors, it creates the illusion that the performers are breathing against the glass of the screen. This work references the use of the “breath test” in the era before modern medicine where a mirror would be placed under the nose of the dying to test for respiration. 

The illusion in the video is uncanny and the screen itself becomes the edge of the razor that separates both past from present, performer from viewer, and the living presence of the viewer from the illusion of life on the screen. An exploration in impermanence, embodiment, and the mediating presence of the screen, the work captures the breath - making it visible just long enough to be confronted by both performer and viewer.

Website: http://www.stefanibyrd.com

Teri Carson

My cross-disciplinary practice spans multiple media and forms including fiber, film, video, performance, photography, printmaking, sound and installation, while considering the role of craft, association, memory and narrative within discourses of immigrant exile, violence, feminicide and the construction of histories. In uniting my visual practice and my socially-minded impulses, I hope to find useful gestures that can be mobilized to empower individuals in underserved communities. I am concerned with ideas of accessibility and collaboration, experimenting with materials and techniques in a way that invites participants’ imaginations to discover creative paths and meaning. Through form and gesture, I emphasize transcultural-ness, interconnection, transformation, hybridization and the circulation of culture. My primary aim with material discovery is to ask, for instance, what are the materials’ different properties and how can I use them in a way that informs and enhances my conceptual concerns as a cultural producer? Additionally, what is the role of performativity, association, memory and narrative within discourses of craft, coloniality, exile, migration, and the construction of histories and new infrastructures of difference?

Website:  http://www.teresitacarsonvaldez.com

Sharon Charmley

I am intrigued by the way we portray ourselves to the outside world, and by the things we remember as we grow older. The human brain often forgets moments of great pain, and as a result we end up saying extremely unhelpful things to our fellow humans who are struggling with everyday hardships. 

This series of paintings are done of my family, my bustling household with its daily ups and downs provide an opportunity to look at and express an honest depiction of home life in our busy culture. 

The direction of my current focus is making my paintings and drawings look more interesting, and deepening the layers of meaning for the viewer.

Website: http://www.sharoncharmley.com

Meifang Chen

My work is an observation of society and the individuals that function within it. I make a visual commentary that records the interactions among those individuals, is demonstrative of their quiet dignity, and sometimes observes their foibles.

Tobi Coffee

I am a white, gender queer survivor of homelessness and sexual assault. I am an artist who lives with chronic pain. These adjectives and intersections inform and shape the work that I make. I create mixed media illustrations that juxtapose realism and stylized representations of human and non-human animal forms to create evocative and challenging images. Stark and open backgrounds push my images forward and leave room for greater viewer interpretation and increased contrast of the heavily saturated focal images. My favored mediums are ink, pen, and oil pastel on large paper. At my exhibitions, I incorporate installations based on the series theme. By combining various textures, objects and light I can produce other levels of mood, tactility and dimension. Blending between binaries, my work is raw and refined, disturbing and beautiful, distorted and precise. My work deals with themes surrounding gender and social constructivism, death, privilege, the erotic, trauma, power and oppression. It is representative of the struggles to grieve, celebrate, name, and or resist the aforementioned. 
I am intentional about displaying the fluid and even messy aspects of creation. When paired with skill and discretion the result is an artistic tension that is a hallmark of my work, one that I hope reads as defiant and accessible. I believe that beauty is ontological and exist in concert with the ugly as both are subjective and perceived through the lens of one’s experience and relationship to the power to define. It is not my intention to create something that is simply aesthetically pleasing, rather to curate spaces for reflection and dialogue. 
It is important to me to use my privileges and access to artistic space to speak to issues that are often avoided or marginalized. I want my work to subvert concepts of respectability -defined in terms of a prescribed perfection embedded within hierarchy and expertise couched in supremacy and false dichotomies. That being said, I am currently in the process of taking more responsibility for the outcome of my creativity by exercising greater discipline and applying new techniques, as well as diversifying my references and subject matter. 
I am self-taught, I create around the gaps in my knowledge and resources. My goal is to move beyond adapting to an absence, to the deliberate and selective; from the segregated to the collaborative, from the emerging to the established.

Website: instagram.com/tobic_art

Karen Cooper

I am a people watcher. I do it with intensity. And then I paint it.  

I have seen so many amazingly interesting people out in the world, and I see no other path but to share them with viewers who need to revel in these fascinating images too. 

While this longing is present, the absolute necessity of the matter, and what drives me forward, is that the painting must be a thing of substance and solidity and interest and beauty. 

The current work is oil on canvas. All are focused on people and their daily routines, and the thoughtprovoking images they make. It’s the simple stuff that we all do, but when you attach it to a person, it communicates something of each one of us, to the other of us. And then there occurs that magic moment in which the story appears, and the painting becomes. 

Website: http://karencooperpaintings.com

Kacey Cowdery

Women's desires are well known to me - I have been a woman for a very long time. 
'Wise Women Teach' is a reflection of women's role in early education of nearly all children. It asks the question, 'Why would any culture want to withhold education from girls?' 
'Adornments' illustrates the human trait to adorn ourselves with items we make. No other species does that in the same way. 
'One Size Fits: Gram Might Approve' uses my grandmothers doilies. Her crochet work was excellent into old age. Fine threads were her challenge, until she could not see them clearly enough to do her precise work.

Website: www.kaceycowdery.com

Lou Eberhard

My existence as a transgender person has been one filled with a denial of my personhood. In a culture of violence & hatred, I feel a pressure to deny my transgender identity, hiding my body and my story. My recent work brings further exploration into gender roles and my unique perspective on gender, having lived and socialized as both binary gender identities, with a focus on the norms and ideologies of toxic masculinity and how this phenomena affects those of all gender identities.

Website: http://loueberhard.com

Emily Elhoffer

My work addresses conflicts of the body and culture through sculpture. I engage 
with materials like plaster, latex, vinyl, and nylon to evoke bodily masses and 
skin-like surfaces. Fatty, flexible, and vulnerable, my art is inspired by the 
day-to-day cognitive dissonance that the individual creates within their mind, 
which separates their physical body from their projected identity. 
Process, material, and experimentation drive my studio practice. From stretching 
latex skin over rigid metal frames to pouring plaster into bulging distended elastic 
sacks, I use materials that evoke and behave like the body — flexing and 
stretching, shriveling and wrinkling elastic media like nylon and spandex to form 
abstract sculpture. These forms are calcified, or fixed in place, to exemplify the 
objecthood of the body: its mechanical process, its inescapable entropy, and its 
basic phenomenological state. 
The tone of one’s bodily experiences is given voice through cultural attitudes. As a 
woman, I ruminate on the nature of physiological change, beauty and the male 
gaze, and the value system applied to my body. The human form has become a 
material to be shaped, sculpted, and objectified. In an inverse way, I humanize 
material to discuss ideas about selfhood, augmentation, and the changing context 
of one’s bodily experience.

Website: http://emilyelhoffer.com

Vincent Fazio

My goal in my art is to capture my interpretation of the mood of the area or space at that time using light, shape and color.

Website:  https://www.paperandinkartists.com/vincent-fazio  

Justin Fitts

I enjoy the contrast that results from placing two or more different artistic styles within the same painting. My artwork aims to utilize the combination of these different modalities within portraiture to more accurately represent the subject. Naturalistic representation illustrates how the subject is viewed by the outside world. Caricature is used as a form of self-expression. Costumes are utilized for their dramatic effect and may also help bridge the gap between the lifelike depiction of the subject and the exaggerated features of the caricature. Each painting blends these features to communicate both physical and psychological perspectives, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the individual portrayed.

Ed Giganti

Ed Giganti has pursued a lifelong interest in visual art, taking classes and workshops in drawing, painting, and printmaking. He is currently enrolled in the master’s degree program in painting at Fontbonne University. He has focused on oil painting having studied with St. Louis painter Anne Burgess Rowe. 

His work reflects a discipline of direct observation and a compelling pursuit of creating believable records in two dimensions of what he sees.  

An avid traveler and museum goer, Mr. Giganti allows his work to be influenced by artists he admires, including the Old Masters.  

His still lifes and interior landscapes have been exhibited both locally in St. Louis and nationally. Several have received awards. 

Ash Hagerstrand

Ash Hagerstrand is a Bay Area born artist currently residing in St Louis, Missouri. She earned her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. Her work grapples with what constitutes a valid spiritual experience. She navigates trauma and the subsequent fear of violence and death through fantasies of martyrdom and immortality. Through continued investigation her work questions if a strict interpretation of holiness is feasible. Instead she proposes that seeming contradictions like sacred and profane, belief and doubt, reverence and criticism emphasize, redefine, mold, and elevate one another. 
She uses her body as a landscape on which to collage and scrutinize history, using dozens of fragmented historical paintings and contemporary photographs to create each image. This collapsing of time and space escapes the confounds of antiquity and linear time to create a re-mythologizing of the past. Through this physical examination of her fragmented body she searches for divinity.

Website: http://www.jesusluvsmemes.com

Dave Hanson

I am an award winning photographer who has participated in exhibits across the country and internationally. For the past 15 years I have used multiple photographic processes to uniquely capture and record my observations of life and the world. 

Website:  http://davehansonphotography.com

Bob Hartzell

Paintings informed by my experience as a serigrapher that explore my life long love of aeronautics.

Website: http://Www.bobhartzell.com

Jessica Hentoff

Circus is my medium. The circus ring is my canvas. While I have been a circus performer and remain a choreographer and director, my best work is not my own, but that of my students. I have the honor and privilege of teaching them how to make the impossible look effortless in the circus ring and beyond. I am the artistic/director of Circus Harmony, St. Louis’ only social circus --- we use circus arts to motivate social change. My students defy gravity, soar with confidence and leap over social barriers. In the process, they create their own joyful juggling, awesome acrobatic, exciting equilibristic, and amazing aerial acts. They not only defy gravity but they defy labels placed on them in response to their race, religion, neighborhood or any other outside attribute. In the ring, they create their own labels and I get to capture the moment with my camera. People usually hear “youth circus” and think of cartwheels and cotton candy; the work my students do is profound, personal, universal and exceptional art that has earned them acclaim in St. Louis and around the world. My students are my masterpieces and they are my inspiration. Through our work together, we show people how capable, creative, compassionate and courageous young people can be! They help each other stand taller, fly higher and together we change people’s perceptions of what is possible! 

Website:  http://www.circusharmony.org

Elizabeth Herman

Exploration of the human form in clay.

Philip Hitchcock

Most of my sculptural investigations constitute the representation of the human form, unabashedly directed toward the erotic, homoerotic, and mythological interpretation. 

Utilizing medical/dental casting techniques, I cast the human form and manipulate the castings through imaginative reorganization and addition of forms and elements, carefully selected segmentation, and dramatic color expression. 

Finished pieces are composites of many materials including cast gypsum, fiberglass, metal, resin, bone, and paper. 

Website:  http://HitchcockDesigns.com

Ming Ying Hong

In this continuing series, highly detailed drawings explore power through depictions of a reimagined body that is both beautiful and grotesque, masculine and feminine, vulnerable and assertive. The system in which some bodies are privileged over another is dismantled by combining the idealized with the abnormal. Masculinity no longer prevails over the feminine; strength no longer prevails over the delicate; and stability no longer prevails over the broken. The work considers a more complex spectrum of identity that refutes the idea of valuing the body in terms of our clear-cut definitions and hierarchies.

Website:  http://mingyinghong.com

Cornelius Kelly

Cornelius Kelly (1996, Los Angeles) makes paintings, sculptures and mixed media artworks. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, Kelly creates intense personal moments masterfully created by means of rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal, luring the viewer round and round in circles. 
His paintings are often about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy, space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes developed in absurd ways. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of cultural values, he often creates work using creative game tactics, but these are never permissive. Play is a serious matter: during the game, different rules apply than in everyday life and even everyday objects undergo revaluation. 
His works don’t reference recognizable form. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted. By applying abstraction, he focuses on the idea of “public space” and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting. 
His works are characterized by the use of everyday objects in an atmosphere of an observers mentality in which recognition to the current environment plays an important role. 

Website:  http://www.corneliusv.com

Danielle Kelly

Sometimes in life, we lose ourselves. Or life is the process of losing and finding a self to claim, over and over and over again. The body of work loosely grouped together under the theme of “soft skills” explores how we lose ourselves, when or why we might give ourselves away, and the physical or psychological weight of such a loss. “Drawing” as a process is applied to both soft sculpture and graphite on paper. The resulting works attempt to construct an idea or circumstance by building a set of contingent marks and shapes in 2- and 3- dimension.

Website:  https://daniellemkelly.wordpress.com/

Greg Kluempers

My work explores the relationship of forms, textures and color in the everyday world. Many of my images are extractions from an old building, a distorted reflection, an architectural detail and the juxtaposition of adjoining buildings. I use these to create abstract geometrical images.

Website:  www.greg-kluempers.artistwebsites.com

Connie Lambert

I have always been drawn to printmaking and the types of marks and layers of colors that can be achieved in the printing processes. I rarely use colors straight out of the can. Preferring instead to be mixing colors as well as mixing different printmaking processes. Monoprints with collagraph with linoleum prints adding ink to found objects and my own stencils to create a one of a kind print. 
This recent series of small work has incorporated the birds that I have enjoyed watching in my backyard garden. Yet they are more than beautiful birds; they have come to symbolize the journey and passing of my younger sister and her battle with kidney cancer. In some of the prints in this series, the bird is trapped by cages and string sitting among circles, scribbles and even a cancer cell or two. In other prints, the bird is finally free from the clutter that has be ensnaring her even appearing somewhat cheerful and whimsical. This is how I picture my sister now. 

Barbara Marshall

BARBARA MARSHALL LIVES IN CHESTERFIELD MO
I fell in love with photography in college and for years took mostly nature photos. I love the challenge of capturing a photo of an animal, insect or person in just the right lighting, at just the right time. I began taking photographs of the “pictures” that I find in the tar on streets, sidewalks and parking lots while on daily walks ten years ago. My ‘TarArt’ photography is often abstract, and surprisingly rich with texture and color. I never stage or Photoshop a photo, and have been constantly amazed and surprised by the beauty that I see in the tar. Some photographs clearly look like a picture to me while others are more abstract. What other people drive over or walk on as non-descript tar and asphalt, I photograph because it resonates with richness and often profound beauty to me.

Website:  Www.BarbaraMarshall.weebly.com

Teri Moore

My current body of work seems to be a perfect storm of all the things I have done to this point. When people ask what kind of art I do I say, I “draw”; but drawing is just the beginning. My mark making is gestural and active which makes the work I do reference feelings as much as it does a visual representation of a thing. Though I draw, I am always pulled toward building and so I have ventured into ceramic and found object sculptures. I tend to do these things as a sidebar, to break the intensity of the drawing, and explore without the pressure of making a finished work. The body of work I am currently creating combines for me the best of building and drawing. 
First, the idea of the drawing sits in my mind, rolling around different scenarios, quite as I roll off the miles on my bike. I create a background drawing, and I then build onto these drawings interchangeable components in the form of smaller drawings on plexi-glass. These smaller drawings can be attached or removed from the background drawing at will. My goal for this work is to allow an audience to feel connected through their own potential to influence the narrative by moving the pieces as they choose. 
Going forward, I hope to work out ways in which I, as an artist, can give up more and more of the narrative to the audience without overwhelming them with chaos, while still maintaining some control over the direction of the story. 

Website:  Http://www.teri.pb.online/

Eric Nauman

Room temperature 'sculptures' & 'paintings', recorded by baseball town studio artist, Eric Nauman, represent his own brand of recent advertising.

Erin ONeill

Though I have been a practicing artist for decades, becoming a mother was a transformation that ignited my artistic voice. Losing so much that was familiar about my home, my relationships, and my own body I needed art-making as a way of reclaiming myself. My arrival into motherhood awakened my need to say something and be heard. 

Working with watercolor and ballpoint pen I started with small gesture paintings and drawings of my daughter, who was my only readily available model. While she napped I found these pieces were easy to pick up, easy to clean up, and often completed within a couple sessions. I continue to enjoy how watercolor responds on different surfaces and use paper and boards primed with clay (Claybord and Aquabord). It also reminds me of my daughter. Ultimately it behaves on its own accord and has the most exciting results when not overworked or too controlled. 

These simple portraits of my daughter have evolved into an examination of maternal love. I often choose images that either distort her face or show her turning away completely as I often feel I am outside looking in on her experiences all of which conjure up memories of my own childhood. The constant duality of being in the moment and in the past at the same time is disorienting. Water, a common theme spanning my work, expresses these emotional overtones by distorting the subject and creating a setting that feels expansive and uncertain. 

In spite of these paintings and drawings feeling so intimate, they are themes that I believe are universal. We all have memories of being small in the world. Often these memories are brief snapshots rather than narratives. I hope that these pieces inspire those moments of recollection for the viewer. We all started small, and often came through it under the gaze of a maternal presence.

Website:  http://www.erinelizabetho.com

Clayton Petras

In my work, I look for ways to visualize and document degenerative mental and physical diseases such as Parkinson’s and Bi-Polar and transform them into portrayals of the diseases itself, their effects, and those they afflict. Both popular culture and my own corporal understanding (specifically an intimate relationship to Parkinson's disease and its effects) influence my interpretation and representation of these physical and mental breakdowns of the body. 

I posit the question: How do we give identity to a disease that is difficult to diagnose or view on medical technology, currently cannot be cured or put in remission, and slowly changes the identity of the patient? We give identity to one track beings like viruses, saying we’re fighting a cold, as well as to diseases that are not a foreign body, but a part of the self, like cancer. While initially regarded as an other by the patient, many eventually come to terms with the fact that it is exactly the opposite: that a disease like cancer is a part of the self. Yet viruses and cancer are known entities, and while cancer is a disease of the self, it is one that has the possibility to be put in remission with proper treatment. 

These illnesses in my work are represented as monsters that are both horrifying and beautiful; a fantastical, yet terrifying representation of the unseeable. The cultural perception and representation of the human body is fundamentally fictional in that it’s defined through external lenses such as those of medicine, cultural theory, ethics, religion, science fiction, gender and class, rather than in its visceral reality. The various lenses that define my perception and representation are traced back through my own past with the visual language of horror film, mosh pits, and a fear of the hereditary. 

In depicting the uncontrollable symptoms of these diseases (tremors, stiffness, depression, mania, etc.), and through attempting their visualization in the abstract, these imprinted marks, combined with a societal understanding of disease and the body, show the various ways in which I view chronological breakdowns of the mind and body. Parkinson’s being a disease hard to diagnose before its symptoms set in, many of our medical imaging technologies cannot picture it. My work attempts to do this, giving identity to both Parkinson’s as an entity and capturing the shifting identities of those it afflicts. 

Website:  http://www.claytonpetras.com

Scott Pondrom

I am a St. Louis resident that paints murals, signs, artworks, and portraits for a living. For fun, I enjoy painting my friends and family.

Ross Quesnell

From medical cadavers to bones found in the wild, Ross Quesnell has spent years studying fragments of the dead through a uniquely objective lens. He received his MFA from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in 2019. Over the course of his graduate studies, Quesnell focused on his ever-growing interests in biology and mortality, universal topics that have intrigued artists for millennia. To take these topics beyond convention, he developed methods of dissecting and exploring the bones of humans and other animals, capturing atmospheric imagery akin to landscape within their microscopic chasms. With the help of experts in medical imaging laboratories, 3D printing labs and natural history collections, Quesnell has developed an interdisciplinary body of work that brings visual and reflective intrigue to otherwise clinical imagery. Artworks created from this blend of art and science transcend common depictions of death, bringing the topic to viewers through perplexing drawings, paintings, and sculptures. These pieces are fragmented portraits of once-living beings, all whose weathered forms are emblematic of the material we must someday join.

Website:  http://rossquesnell.com

Nikki Raitz

Nikki Raitz is an illustrator and fine artist from Atlanta, Georgia. Her colorful works crafted mainly in mixed medias focus on legendary, historical and mythological themes with an emphasis on the human figure. Magic in art is something that Nikki has been chasing since she was a child and this theme can be seen throughout most of her works today. 

Judith Repke

The colors I choose reflect my emotional response to what I see in that moment. In my watercolors I use free mingling of colors and soft edges to allow areas to pull back from the center of interest which I paint in more detail. I give myself challenges, new parameters and new avenues of expression constantly. I paint my delight in the world God made. 

My studio is in my home. I am a member of Missouri Watercolor Society, Art Saint Louis, Northside Art Association and Artists of Grace. I graduated from the University of Missouri as an Art Education Major. 

My website is at: http://www.repkeart.com.

Becky Jane Rosen

“The Bathroom Series” explores the private space where one (hopefully) practices basic hygiene. These banal acts are seldom witnessed by others, except perhaps for one’s family, making them unconventional sights for public eyes. Since these actions are performed habitually every day, we generally do not give them our full attention, let alone know what we look like when we do them (or even consider if there is a different way of doing so); I enjoy exploring the tension between public and private spaces in my work. In highlighting these acts of cleanliness (and other things we do in the bathroom, like look at ourselves in the mirror and check our phones), I hope to promote questions about what it means literally and metaphorically to clean our bodies, the potential liberation and terror that comes from being completely alone with ourselves, and how the relationship between our body and mind transforms when we are in this space.

Website:  http://www.beckyjanerosen.com

Anne Rowe

Whether I am painting a commissioned portrait, a painting of my own choosing, drawing or sculpting, the subject matter remains the same--people. The thoughts, comments, inspirations, imaginings, memories and unconscious desires which lurk in my head and require a form of visual expression eventually take human form in one media or another. Human differences fascinate me, as do human interactions--they become the unending and continually present subject matter and inspiration. The content of my art seems to be, not my own thoughts on the human condition, but the human condition making its comments to me.

Website:  http://www.rowegallery.com

Marceline Saphian

My work is an effort to share with others feelings and responses that are difficult, if not impossible to put into words. Rather than copying nature, I use it to call on inner responses to what I observe. Subject matter is a point of departure rather than a destination. One of my interests at this time is using older work to add overlays of paint and collage. This leads me to new development as an artist, and I find it is a way of melding the past with the present and the future - a way of making time an unending continuum.

Website: https://marcelinesaphian.com/home.html

John Schnellmann

My recent ceramics focus on simple forms with painterly glazes. most of my ceramic work is figurative because I find it an endless amazement and challenge. 

Website: artbyschnellmann.com

Snail Scott

This body of work, developed over many years, presents the concept of engineering as a deeply rooted humanistic endeavor - an extension of the opposable thumb, our lever to move the world: wishful thinking made manifest. Through the processes of making, we attempt to fabricate the reality we desire. In principle, it stands as a rational approach to practical goals, yet the impulse for engineering may be driven by unexamined, intangible aspirations, in which the practice of making is merged with the process of becoming. 

Gears and sprockets suggest process; levers and knobs, a means of action, antennas and airfoils, for reaching beyond. These forms present a “self-created self”: the bootstrap creation of a higher existence built on cockeyed optimism and elbow grease, assembled at some tinkerer’s workbench of the soul. 

Scott Sherman

The freedom of abstraction may be one of the few areas of life where I do not feel enslaved and threatened as a citizen. Non-stop, I am targeted in the spheres of the digital, economic and work world. Buy this. Believe that. Still, others are targeted by police and intelligence agencies. We live in a world where the color of your skin will get you killed. We live in a world where a world class journalist, Julian Assange, has been arrested. We live in a country that verges on civil war. It seems like we cannot even begin to measure the hate in today's America. These are the issues my work attempts to discuss. 

Website:  https://www.scottshermanstudio.com

D.L. Simmons

My work contextualizes enigmatic objects, images, and icons in order to abstract narrative vignettes from life. Although my work does not directly reproduce any specific events, the imagery is made up of objects and icons that reflect and give way to narrative vignettes abstracted from my life. I use personal experiences as a lens to explore context and develop visual concepts as metaphors. The outside world should not simply be represented by the artist, but rather assimilated, and interpreted by the artist. When our shared life experiences mingle with false nuances of memory, our perception becomes rife with multiple layers of meaning from the mundane to outrage. Looking at the loss of American oral traditions and storytelling, I am motivated to preserve and to explore the fundamental experiences that create the wellspring of shared cultural experience. For myself, my work is a means for me to understand my personal emotional relationship to society’s recollecting, forgetting, and retelling of experiences. Through the transformation or re-representation of image and mark, our shared personal experience can become an emotionally tangible visual object.

Website:  http://dls-ink.com

Jim Trotter

I Am Jim Trotter a full time working photographer, operating from my studio located in Saint Louis MO. 

I use the finest Camera equipment and computer software to create my artwork. 

I use a large format printer and the Gigapan robotic camera device to make panoramas.

Website:  http://www.trotterart.com

Hailey Vague

My work is representative of our ability as human beings to masquerade in day-to-day life. The faceless portraits I create aim to make the viewer question whether they're looking at something simply playful and bright or rather a silhouette holding a more disquieting message. Soft, organic movement in the hair, paired with a bold or geometric design in the face give the first clue that all is not what it seems.

Carl Valle

Website: http://carlvalle.org

Melanie Vera

In my work I am abstracting human forms to explore where the essence of humanity lies. I am separating the physical and physiological aspects of what makes us human to ask if they are dependent upon each other or if they can stand alone. Where does the line separating the body from the psyche lie? Our bodies are easily taken for granted and overlooked as a mundane part of life. By solely looking at the physical aspects of being human, viewers will see their body as merely an object and contemplate what this means in the grand scheme of things. By creating immersive works using fabrics, video, embroidery, hair, and teeth, I am forcing viewers to confront themselves and question the connection between their body and soul. 

The purpose of my work is to make people more conscious of their physical selves and contemplate the significance of their bodies. If our soul can survive without the vessel of our body, what is our visceral place in the world? By experiencing my work and seeing the human body as solely a physical object, a door opens for self-discovery and conceptual thinking.

 Website: http://www.melanievera.com

Margaret von Kaenel

I have a passion to paint in both acrylic and oil. My oil paintings are typically painted outside en plein air in a limited time frame due to the movement of light. My acrylic paintings tend to be much larger with a trompe l'oeil and almost humorous approach.

Website:  http://www.mvk-decoart.com

Jerry Walters

Marjorie Williamson

I have been making art - or at least doing something with my hands - all my life. For the past eighteen years, I have been designing posters for local theater companies. Except for a few odd classes and workshops, however, I never really studied art until eight years ago when I retired from my day job as a computer programmer. Since then, I've taken just about every drawing, design, print-making, photography, and digital art class offered by the St. Louis Community College system. Oil painting is my first love, but I'm also deeply enamored of the nifty things that can be done with digital technology. And lately I've begun experimenting with sculpture.

Website:  http://marjoriewilliamsongraphics.com

Chelsie Wilson

Educated in the arts, but playing the practical role of a banker to pay the bills (and buy more art supplies), Wilson looks intuitively at the human condition and expression, applying these passions to her work. She doesn’t adhere to any particular process; rather, choosing to experiment and apply various media, apart and together. 

Her hope for the journey ahead is to spend less time with numbers, and more time creating. She currently resides in the Saint Louis, Mo. metropolitan area with her cat, Tuna, and her three ferrets. 

Chelsie is currently represented by Soulard Art Gallery in St. Louis, Mo. She also works at the gallery part time on weekends, curates exhibits, and regulates the gallery’s website, www.soulardartgallery.com

Website:  http://www.cawilsonart.com