Ali Kaeini

Ali Kaeini

Ali Kaeini (he/him) is an Iranian artist and earned his Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, New York, NY, in 2019. His paintings reflect a religious society in turmoil, and the ancient civilization that has shaped his upbringing. Rooted in Persian epics and childhood stories, Kaeini blends ancient Iranian tales with religious motifs. His work fuses contemporary experimentation with forms reminiscent of Persian and Islamic architecture. By blending homemade natural dyes, fabric collages, sewing, and printmaking, he reconstructs decorative elements, delving into his identity and cultural displacement. The visual tension and displacement of ancient relics and designs within his art convey his own immigration story—a fusion of belonging and non-belonging. His art has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, including being a finalist for the Trawick Contemporary Art Award in Bethesda in 2022 and at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA.

Neha Misra

Neha Misra

Neha Misra नेहा मिश्रा (she/her) is a contemporary eco-folk artist, poet, and an award-winning climate justice advocate. Misra’s feminist-Earth-wisdom-centered interdisciplinary studio embodies the transformative power of art to build bridges between private, collective, planetary healing and liberation. Misra’s creative practice centers her Global Majority lineage as a first-generation, multi-lingual immigrant woman from New Delhi, India, who calls a solar-powered community in the Washington metro region her adopted home. She has been honored as a Presidential Leadership Scholar, and as a Regenerative Artivist by the Design Science Studio—a partnership of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and habRitual for leading planet conscious artists. Misra is a 2022 fellow of the Public Voices Fellowship on the Climate Crisis, an initiative of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the OpEd Project, and Ann MacDougal, to change who writes history. She serves as the inaugural Global Ambassador for the nonprofit Remote Energy, which is dedicated to making the solar photovoltaic field more inclusive for BIPOC communities, especially women of color.

Hien Kat Nguyen

Hien Kat Nguyen

Hien Kat Nguyen (they/them) was born and raised in Saigon, Vietnam, and is currently living in Richmond, Virginia. They earned their Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2022. Nguyen communicates their experience as a queer 1.5-generation Vietnamese immigrant through sculpture. Using Vietnamese folklore and their multicultural history, they nurture the concepts that have anchored them. Through woodworking and 3D fabrication techniques, Nguyen creates installations and game-like sculptures that facilitate interaction and use humor to approach taboo subjects surrounding assimilation experiences. They earned over seven VCUarts scholarships and grants between 2020 and 2022. They have attended residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO; Peters Valley School of Craft, Sandyston, NJ; and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Richmond, VA. They were the recipient of the Windgate–Lamar Fellowship from the Center for Craft, Asheville, NC, and the Undergraduate Fellowship in Sculpture from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA. Nguyen has shown work at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond and the Anderson; Richmond, VA.

Kat Thompson

Kat Thompson

Kat Thompson (she/her) is a multidisciplinary Afro-Jamaican American artist based in Virginia, who works in photography, textile, sculptural collage, and installation. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from George Mason University and her Master of Fine Arts in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work combines these mediums to explore notions of Black selfhood within the African Diaspora. Being of Jamaican heritage, Thompson confronts her dual identity through recent projects that depict traces of her family’s journey through personal and found materials. Her focus is to uncover stories that mirror parts of ourselves back to us, including our histories, current realities, and future possibilities. Her work has been exhibited at the Fenwick Gallery and the Gillespie Gallery of Art at George Mason University, and the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, Reston, VA. She was the 2021–2022 recipient of the Young Alumni Commissioning Award from George Mason University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Christian Benefiel

Christian Benefiel

Christian Benefiel is a Maryland-based artist focusing on sculpture and installation. His work has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions both nationally and in Europe. Recent shows include Structural Tissue at BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, MD, Sea of Tranquility, Ocean of Doubt at VisArts in Rockville, MD, Indirect Effect at AREA 405 in Baltimore, MD, and the Foggy Bottom Sculpture Biennial in Washington, DC. His sculptures can be found in public parks and schools in Kentucky, Minnesota, Maryland, DC, and Finland. Internationally, Benefiel’s work has been included in exhibitions in Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and England. He is the recipient of the Hamiltonian Fellowship, MSAC Individual Artist Grant, and a US Fulbright Grant to Helsinki, Finland. He teaches sculpture at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, WV.

Artist statement

Christian Benefiel’s sculptures address the interaction of elements in systems. His work is driven by the way that a social construct is dependent on balance and tension, both physically and visually. In the end, the argument itself is the construction, the product, and the notion that an issue is more complex than opinion. Through physical structures constructed from networks of wooden and found material forced against itself, Benefiel visualizes the human desire to selectively manipulate the existing environment for purpose or comfort. The form of the works plays on a psychology of species, the connection to materials and places beyond the civilized or enlightened world, and the role and method of individual pieces that make up the larger ideas of arguments and dialogue.

Tom Block

Tom Block

Tom Block utilizes the visual arts and writing to explore the interaction between the spiritual life of humanity and our sometimes-sad shared reality. His work is hardly religious, but explores humans’ attempts to make sense of this world and our shared struggle to develop and live by a moral code. At the very best, he hopes that his art will have an activist influence, causing viewers to question their own personal roles in making the world a better place.

Anne Chan

Anne Chan

Anne Chan earned an MFA from MICA and has over a decade of experience in corporate and architectural photography. Chan thrives on communicating the right message visually. Whether it is a large scale government facility or an internal poster campaign, Anne has collaborated with marketers, designers, architects and developers to help promote some of the best talent and capture some fantastic places to live and work.

Ian MacLean Davis

Ian MacLean Davis

Ian MacLean Davis earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. His works have been exhibited throughout the United States and his artwork is collected internationally. Ian lives, works and teaches in Baltimore and its outlaying counties.

ianmacleandavis.com

Leah Frankel

Leah Frankel

Leah Frankel is a visual artist whose work deals with the relationship of human existence to its remarkable environment. Using site as impetus, Frankel’s installations employ ordinary objects to draw attention to our earth’s gravity, the passing of time, or the flatness of the horizon. Frankel’s site specific projects include Colony of Earthcubes at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C., a relief rendering of the Wissahickon Watershed made from reclaimed building materials at Germantown Academy, in Fort Washington, PA, and a series of installations in, around, and in response to a backyard shed in Columbus, Ohio. Frankel was a fellow at the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington D.C. 2008–2010, completed her MFA at The Ohio State University in 2014 and is currently Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY.

Linda Hesh

Linda Hesh

Linda Hesh combines the personal and political playing with taboos and challenging social norms in a variety of media. Born in Chicago, Illinois, she lived in New York City, Alexandria, Virginia and recently moved to the Netherlands. Text, photography and a multitude of materials comprise her public interactive artworks along with works for exhibition. Her interactive pieces have been in Saint Petersburg, Russia; Chicago, IL; Washington, DC; New York City and Haarlem, the Netherlands. "Linda Hesh's All Gay Review" was her most recent solo exhibit in Washington, DC. Her art is held in public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Kinsey Institute, and The Library of Congress. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post have featured her art.

Misha Ilin

Misha Ilin

Misha Ilin (b. 1985; Protvino, Russia) received a Master’s in Mathematics and Informatics from the National University of Science and Technology in Moscow, Russia. In 2016 he moved to the United States and received his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Ilin’s recent exhibitions include wish the past never to repeat itself, the kitchen, Berlin, Germany, inquisitive instructions, Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, China, Artist-As-Organizer, Washington Project for Arts, DC, hostipitality, Baltimore, MD, and order of things, Homme Gallery, DC.

Artist statement

My work explores the practice of instructions and situations as a medium to reveal the intimate connection between our layered identities and the contractual social interactions that exist around us. By experimenting with different forms of unities emerging between participants of his performative installations, I seek to provoke both collaborative and rival relationships with their audience to problematize our domestic rituals, social practices, and behaviors and comment on issues of labor, social roles, immigration, race, and inequality.

Madyha J. Leghari

Madyha J. Leghari

 

Madyha J. Leghari (b. 1991) is a visual artist, writer, and educator working between Lahore and Washington, DC. She earned a BFA at the National College of Arts, Lahore (2013) and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2018) on a Fulbright Scholarship. Her practice often revolves around the possibilities and limitations of language, and is often positioned in the indeterminate spaces of translation, cultural friction, and semantic lacunae.

Madyha has been the recipient of the Mansion Artist Residency; Delta Research Placement at the Flat Time House; Siena Art Institute Artist Residency and the Murree Museum residency.

She has exhibited her works internationally at platforms such as the Pera Museum, University of Colorado Boulder, Bennington College, Sea Foundation, The Institute for Experimental Arts, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Nottingham Arts Mela, 17th Athens Digital Arts Festival, Antimatter, and others across the Americas, Asia, and Europe.

Madyha has written on art for a number of publications including ArtNow Pakistan and the Dawn Newspaper. She has teaching experience at the National College of Arts, Lahore, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston and the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.

Artist statement

I am moved by the possibilities as well as the limitations of language. Growing up, I spoke Saraiki at home, Balochi with cousins, Urdu amongst peers and, later, English at school. This background attuned me to the fraught nature of language. It is one of the finest tools in the human inventory, and yet it fails us every day through its incomplete nature; its inability to accurately map the world; its (mis)translations; and its easy assimilation into communicative capitalism. I use these failures as fertile points of departure. Thus, my work is often positioned in the intermediate spaces of translation, cultural frictions, and linguistic lacunae.

Through various strategies, I attempt to negate word and describe a world without the interference of language. These strategies include plasticity, which emphasizes that language can belong to the empirical as equally as the rational. I examine physical manifestations of language as book, paper, library, and archive to emphasize its sensuous promise.

In some works, I focus on literalism, attempting the most direct possible realizations of language to both demonstrate its tenuous relationship with this world and to open up a different one. In other works, I examine the relationship of speech, voice, and the body, unpacking assumptions behind the authority, neutrality, and visibility of the narrator. Moreover, I remain interested in chance operations wherein language is severed from intention. Lastly, I lean on the ability of poetry and fiction to bend language away from description to say much more than mere ‘fact.’ I use multiple forms such as video, photography, sound, installation, printmaking, and painting, but language consistently remains important across all of them.

Edgar Reyes

Edgar Reyes

Edgar Reyes (b. Guadalajara, Mexico) is a multimedia artist and educator based in the Baltimore and Washington D.C. area. Reyes’s work invites viewers to think about the people, places, and connections they carry with them. His practice draws on the specifics of his own life, and reflections of shared experiences of resettlement and migration. Through his art making he explores his family’s Mexican and Indigenous roots.

Reyes earned his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has taught at nonprofit organizations, schools, universities, and museums. His work has been prominently featured in large scale public installations including Sueños, a monumental light box and banners displayed during Baltimore’s Light City Festival (2017), and Xochitl, vivid abstract patterns installed in shop windows in Rockville, MD as part of the VisArts Make It Visible project (2021). His work has been featured in galleries and public spaces across the United States. He has developed installations for the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, MD), where his work was exhibited in dialogue with the permanent collection, and encouraged community participation. Recent honors include Rubys Artist Grant recipient (2021), Keyholder Resident Artist at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (2021), Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize Semifinalists (2021), and Bresler Resident Artist at VisArts (2021).

Artist statement

Many of my projects are autobiographical and a reflection of my personal journey as an undocumented youth in the United States. My work focuses on the precious and difficult moments my family and community face. Overall my practice is inspired by our shared experiences and my passion to highlight connections between the art of our ancestors and the contemporary Mexican diaspora. I explore how the blending of Indigenous and European traditions is an ongoing process of conquest and resistance. My art making is centered around building compassion and understanding around the complex history of forced and volunteering resettlement throughout the Americas. I emphasize the beauty of being Mexican American, yet question my national and cultural traditions. I usually create pieces in a collaborative platform as an act of healing and as a resource to creatively engage others in our connection to the land and our narratives of survival.

Abed Elmajid Shalabi

Abed Elmajid Shalabi

Abed Elmajid Shalabi (b. 1991) is a Palestinian Israeli artist, living and working in Richmond, Virginia. Shalabi joined the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture (2022); he holds an MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University (2021) and a BFA in Fine Arts from The Berlin University of Arts and Shenkar College in Tel Aviv (2019). Shalabi was awarded the Virginia Museum Of Fine Arts Graduate Fellowship (2020-2021), The Paul F. Miller Graduate Scholarship in Sculpture (2020). He was awarded grants from Artis, United States Artist, and the Robert Weil Family Foundation. Shalabi’s work was exhibited in Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Richmond, VA.

Isabella Whitfield

Isabella Whitfield

Isabella Whitfield (b. 1998; Centreville, VA) is a multidisciplinary artist who works in collaboration with manufactured and natural environments. After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2020, she completed a year-long postgraduate program as an Aunspaugh Art Fellow. Whitfield has exhibited major works at New City Arts, Ruffin Gallery, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Museum, and InLight 2021 with 1708 Gallery. She has participated in residencies with the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, OxBow School of Art, and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center.

Artist statement

Isabella Whitfield’s artistic practice encompasses site-responsive installation, papermaking, sculpture, and landscaping. She makes meditative, performative work that considers the contradictory relationships between the environment, physical homeland, human labor, and historical object functionality. Whitfield’s projects often contain an act of collaborative generosity, inviting the viewer to become part of the work through physical immersion or participatory artistic creation.

The process of creating installations adopts motions of repetitive labor, often presenting a challenge of physical endurance through performative digging, measuring, and stitching. Incorporating both ephemeral materials and sacred geometries, her work hinges on fragile precision and is expected to formally deteriorate over time. The inevitable decomposition of materials echo notions of life cycles and renewal; examining continuous de/reconstruction of self.

Kyrae Dawaun

Kyrae Dawaun

 

Kyrae Dawaun was born on the edge of Queens, NY, transplanted from this affective mecca onto Baltimore, Maryland, then Washington, DC. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in 2013. His timely return to working in DC came soon after an achieved Master of Fine Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

He has been invited to work, reside, and exhibit in Los Angeles, Italy, Toronto, and Berlin. In 2016, Pyramid Atlantic hosted him as a Denbo Fellow and in 2017 DC Commission on Arts and Humanities awarded him an Arts and Humanities Fellowship. He has recently exhibited at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in Hampton Roads and Sculpture Center in Long Island City.

Artist statement

The human dependence on inorganic matter and nonhuman existence is the very fault I excavate from for my inspiration; geological transactions as it implicates human relationships.  As a painting based artist I began with the investigation into the origins and chemistries in applied color—thus far including the consideration of chemistries defining our extended built environment too.  What is revealed about the processing of such can connect these geological interests to human histories, behaviors, and realities.

In complaisant gesture, the sculptural work are vignettes dressing abstract figurines of casted earthen matter. Appraising finiteness, hazard and expense they are modest in size; they stand for careful indulgence.  This rehearsal of an unconditional hospitality still lies in the waking Patriarchy, globally domineering and exclusive.

My studio agenda is organized as a web of entendres.  I collect language, as it describes society, and allow it to reappear, reify, fold over and contradict itself.  In parallel my descent into alchemical meditation and practice I am minding quotidian experiences I witness personally, locally, abroad, and broadly.  Enter realist painting not devoid of abstraction.

The painted imagery I offer to an audience is edited to represent, challenge and defend a perspective more generous than my black livelihood. I am directly entangling the absent care and perverted use of this earth demonstrated by the United States hegemony to the inherent mistreatment, dismissal and neglect it has delivered to the black, and brown persons constitutional to this country today.  In accordance there are many scenes to be painted in reflection of this reality, the art and media we produce in testimony, past and present.

Cecilia Kim

Cecilia Kim

 

Cecilia Kim (b. Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in Richmond) is a video artist who received her MFA in Photography + Film at Virginia Commonwealth University, and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kim has lived in five countries, including Australia, England, Singapore, and the United States.

Kim was recently awarded Best in Show, First Place, at the 19th annual Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards. Her work has been shown in solo and group shows, including The Immigrant Artist Biennale, virtual; 0 GALLERY, Seoul, Korea; Target Gallery, Alexandria, VA; Hume Gallery and Sullivan Galleries, Chicago; and at film festivals and screenings, including the NoFlash Video Show, The Anderson Gallery, Around International Film Festival Amsterdam, and Student Experimental Film Festival Binghamton. Kim was a resident artist at the Busan International OpenArts Residence in 2020, and at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in 2021.

Artist statement

My work is shaped by immaterial exchanges and conversations with my family, community, and friends.

Interpersonal relations and domestic spaces anchor my roots as I navigate my evolving transnational identity as both an insider and outsider in Korea and the United States. As a Korean woman living outside my home country, how I speak and present myself becomes a self-aware performance of authenticity. I ask questions on what it means to uphold traditional expectations towards women and how I belong to or represent my culture. 

I exchange shared narratives in my videos, blurring the boundaries between the personal and collective, and explore the interplay between the documentary and constructed image. I document emotionally resonant moments of care and universal narratives that withstand cultural and language barriers. I hope to bridge human connections and provide space for shared intimacy and vulnerability. These nonlinear narratives capture the cyclical and repetitive nature of labor and generational time, with its symptoms of disappearance and erosion. My practice exists within the invisible spaces of labor that I turn my lens towards. I seek what it means to occupy the in-between spaces that I find myself in. In this liminal space of otherness, I examine the translation of culture and language—how language fulfills or fails as a tool and the impossibility of translation. Through my practice, I push against boundaries and hierarchical systems of power.

Ara Koh

 

Ara Koh (b. Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in Washington, DC) received her BFA in Ceramics and Glass from Hongik University, Seoul, in 2018, and was an exchange student at California State University, Long Beach, in 2016. Koh graduated with an MFA in Ceramic Art at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2020. Her works are installations claiming space across a variety of materials, particularly clay.

Koh’s work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries, including the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT; and Korea Culture Center, Washington, DC. Koh has received numerous awards, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs Honor by the Korean government. Her works have been collected by Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Daekyo Culture Foundation, Winell Corporation in Korea, and many private collections.

Artist statement

I speak Korean, English, and clay. My studio practice is a form of translation. Working with clay is a vehicle for memory, honesty, reflection. I translate the invisible and the amorphous into something visible and solid. A balance between polarities; light and heavy, dense and loose, ephemeral and concrete.

There is room for awe and even for childhood trauma, fading or reliving. My sculpture encapsulates the dialogue of internal memories and external landscapes. Making is reliving fading traumatic memory as a landscape painting.

Landscape made in clay links to geologic time and metamorphosis. Questioning how architecture and landscape hold humanity, I think about my body contained in the spaces, my body as a container, and the space contained in the larger body of humanity. Experiencing body and reasoning what that experience does is questioning self in relationship with space.

My work reclaims my position of authority, a space that is my own space. Physically imposing enough to envelop the viewer, intensity of the labor, repetitiveness, and palliative obsessiveness manifest as the understanding of the universe. It asks about my identity as an artist, a daughter, and a human most honestly and genuinely.

Samera Paz

 

Samera Paz (b. Washington, DC; lives and works in Washington, DC) is a multidisciplinary self-taught visual and performance artist, activist, educator, and community organizer. Her work is inspired by social-political issues, mental health, and her identity as a Black and Colombian woman in today’s modern world. In 2015, Paz founded Girl Power Meetups, a women’s empowerment organization that hosts monthly meetups to empower, educate, and support young women in the DC area. She is active in her community as an organizer who facilitates public meetings and events and is a member of NW4BlackJustice, an activism collective founded by DC natives in the summer of 2020.

Paz has exhibited her work and performed in art exhibitions around the United States. She has been interviewed and published in blogs and media for her art and work, including Teen Vogue, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Politico, The Washington Post, Glamour Magazine, and many more.

Artist statement

I consider my art practice to be a documentation of my life's experiences. My introduction to art came at a young age and throughout my life, I turned to art to cope and express myself through difficult times. I've always known art to be truthful, and my goal is to create work that allows me to be my most vulnerable and fearless self. The process of artmaking is just as important to me as the result. Connecting to the work and creating art that resonates with people emotionally and personally are critical to my process. 

As a photographer, I am interested in capturing everyday moments and documenting people as they are, wherever they are. Whether it be strangers, friends, family or even myself, I try to connect to subjects and adapt to my environments. My visual art, specifically when I work with menstrual blood, is visually abstract but revolves around social and political issues. The themes of womanhood, race, gender, and identity are common in my art and activism. My performance art is emotionally driven and, at times, trauma based. It involves being completely transparent with my audience to invoke an emotional response and using my body as a medium. From my visual art to performance art, there is a consistent theme of storytelling, documentation, and an expression of emotions. I lean towards creating work that involves interactiveness and intimacy meant to be felt, interpreted, and discussed. There is freedom in sharing personal parts of myself through my art, and ultimately, there is a sense of healing I experience when that artwork is shared with the world.

Matthew Russo

Matthew Russo (b. Worcester, MA; lives and works in Washington, DC) earned his BFA in Painting from Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, Old Lyme, CT, and his MFA from American University in Washington, DC. As part of his art education, he studied in Prato, Italy, where he focused on traditional forms of painting and printmaking. His work actualizes theoretical research into sculpture, painting, and drawings. He uses abstraction as a language to dissect the relationships between objects, materials, and their roles in gender, consumerism, class, and personal history.

Russo has recently exhibited his work at Dodomu Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, and But, Also in Washington, DC.

Artist statement

Rooted in the scholarship of Objects and Things, my practice explores these notions as concrete knowns and abstract unknowns. Abstraction becomes a tool I can use to dissect, transform, and juxtapose known qualities of the objects and materials I source to create my work. The forms I develop are esoteric versions of material reality and personal history. They come from scraps of broken buildings, garbage I pick up, plastic toys, rusted-out fences, cartoons, advertisements, architectural motifs, art historical images, and the odd screenshots on my phone. The abstraction of these objects allows me to participate in a discourse surrounding material relationships to gender, class, and consumerism through a lens of personal experience.

These abstractions live in the metaphysical place of my experience where they become twisted, clumsy, brightly colored, impotent, rough, soft, plastic, sensorial, and animated. In the distance created by abstraction, questions arise about how I come to know my material reality through visual and learned experience. I can ask what extraneous non-physical qualities or ideas are bundled up in this material, object, or thing and how those can be implemented, opposed, or developed further. This theoretical work is actualized in the creation of both sculptures and 2-dimensional work.

When working flatly with painting and drawing, I develop images that float between abstraction and representation. I confuse space, alter forms, and re-work the image to create a sense of a trajectory and history of the objects, things, and spaces portrayed. While working sculpturally, I use fabric, foam, resin, plastic, wood, paper pulp, and other materials with specific processes, physical traits, and extraneous qualities. I weigh these elements against each other to develop relationships that confront and confirm what I know about them. This confrontation and confirmation produce things that feel equally unknown.