David SheskinArt That Speaks: Digital images These images come from a large body of works which I refer to as Art That Speaks which involve the creative integration of art and text. My Art That Speaks images, which must be read to be fully appreciated, are atypical in that unlike most art they challenge the viewer on both a visual and cerebral level. Although some of the works in the collection are mixed media (for example, using ceramic tiles), the images presented here were created digitally using computer software. My Art That Speaks images employ the format of a Scrabble ...

Lex LuciusOf Comfort and Connection Paintings I live in the Roaring Fork Valley just north of Aspen, Colorado, tucked into the Rocky Mountains. My life is full of family, painting, and horses. My clothes smell of the stable, and on far too many days, my boots, of the pasture. Less than five minutes from my painting studio is the stable where my wife Aimée keeps her jumping horses and my daughter, her pony. When I drive over and watch them ride, which I do several times a week, I pass by a field of polo ponies. It is these ponies ...

Mario LopreteTO WHAT SURVIVED: Sculpture For my concrete sculptures, I use my personal clothing. Through my artistic process in which I use plaster, resin, and cement, I transform these articles of clothing into artworks to hang. The intended effect is that my DNA and my memory remain inside the ​concrete so that the person who looks at these sculptures is transformed into a type of postmodern archeologist, studying my works as urban artifacts. I like to think that those who look at my sculptures, created in 2020, will be able to perceive the anguish, the vulnerability, and the fear that ...

Bette RidgewayLAYERING LIGHT: Paintings Bette Ridgeway is best known for her large-scale, luminous poured canvases that push the boundaries of light, color, and design. Her youth spent in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and her extensive global travel has informed her colorful palette. For the past two decades, the high desert light of Santa Fe, NM has fueled Ridgeway’s art practice. Her three decades of mentorship by the acclaimed Abstract Expressionist Paul Jenkins set her on her lifetime journey of non-objective painting on large canvas. She explores the interrelation and change of color in various conditions and ...

Natalie ChristensenYET SOMETHING DEEPLY FAMILIAR: Photographs Photographer Natalie Christensen has an inimitable, and enchanting, focus on the exploration of the more banal peripheral landscapes that often go unnoticed by the casual observer. “I quickly became aware that these isolated moments in the suburban landscape were rich with metaphor. Closed and open doors, empty parking lots and forgotten swimming pools draw me to a scene; yet it was my reactions to these objects and spaces that elicited interpretation and projection.” Christensen had worked as a psychotherapist for over twenty-five years and was particularly influenced by the theories of depth psychologist Carl ...

Chris VaughanWEIRD, WEIRD WEST: Collages All of these works are part of an ongoing series of paper collages, collectively called Weird, Weird West. The Weird West series of collages began with a ménage à trois that I found immediately menacing and whimsical: Cowboys, Seashore and Life Patterns and a King Penguin 1947 history of the greeting card called "Compliments of the Season." The host book on cowboys was hungry for a more disparate diet: WW2 pilot manuals, Albers, Düsseldorf skylines and British executions. It was this menace and whimsy of out-of-season dolls in the desert, crustaceous-faced hangmen, Hyde Park pigeon ...

Sherry ShahanFROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES: Collages Feeling shipwrecked in 2020, I began ripping words from the heart of old magazines. My scissors were like me, rusty and dull. The glue, too thick. My collages resembled drawings found in a kindergarten classroom. I like that about them; it frees me from ideas of what art should be. Decades ago I approached photography much the same way. I rarely considered myself a professional even after my photos appeared in national magazines and newspapers. My collages seem to spill into two categories: those that pick at the scabs of humanity and ...

Joe LugaraDIGITAL PAINTINGS These works are from two distinct series of digital paintings, Framework and Dark Oddities. I enjoy the clash of the man-made and the organic, the grids contrasting with the shape-shifting blobs. The Framework series asks one of those short questions that begs a long answer: Am I inside or outside? The pictures offer seemingly objective experiences that turn uncomfortably subjective on the viewer. Does being on the “inside” mean being trapped or incarcerated, or does it mean being in the know and accepted? The drops and splotches in the Dark Oddities are likewise objectively/subjectively charged. Alluding to ...

SENSITIVE SKIN: Ceramics by Constance McBride "Everyone wants to have an illusion of themselves, that they're a bit attractive, but the older I get it seems more important to be absolutely honest and direct." - Chantal Joffe When I was a kid I discovered Seventeen Magazine and it really messed me up. I recently googled it and was shocked to see that it debuted in 1944. I always had the impression that it began in the ‘60s or ‘70s when I was a subscriber.   From Wikipedia: “It began as a publication geared toward inspiring teen girls to become model workers and ...

Morgan MotesHEAVY BREATHING IN NIGHT: Paintings  Morgan Motes’ work is a visual representation of the feeling of being alone in nature. It is an expressionistic attempt to return to a sublime and nuanced world often left out of our technologically mediated lives. His method is conversational and meditative, letting paint speak for itself, leading to compositions that are as organic and living as they are fragmented and foreign. His paintings are abstract, without temporal beginning or ending, and present a moment in its full affective force. Landscapes are not landscapes, but heavy breathing in night. [ click images to enlarge ...

Text by J'nai Gaither, Illustrated by Phoebe Funderburg-MooreREPARATIONS WINE LABEL Click on images for full-size. Full Text of Label: Blacks in Wine Matter Reparations Red Wine United Colors of America Nappy Valley 2020 401mL              16.19% by volume To be acknowledged and included in this White wine industry is all people of color have ever wanted. Though wine is as global as industries come, it has never been welcoming to people of color. Even in South Africa, on the Mother Continent, most wineries are owned by White South Africans, though there has been a push ...

Mark Danowsky and John SingletaryTERRA IN FLUX: An Ekphrastic Collaboration The word ekphrasis comes from the Greek for the description of a work of art produced as a rhetorical exercise, often used in the adjectival form ekphrastic. It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined. In ancient times, it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek ἐκ ek and φράσις phrásis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, and the verb ἐκφράζειν ekphrázein, "to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name". [tap on ...

William SulitDUMP TRUMP: Illustrated T-Shirts Many artists have the ability to verbalize their thoughts with great clarity and eloquence—sadly, I’m not one of those. This must be a great source of frustration for my wife Beth, who is an extremely accomplished writer and well versed in the art of verbal communication. But she does not complain; she smiles and lets me babble aimlessly until I get distracted by a squirrel or something. Oh well. As I used to say to my mother when she was yelling at me for something I did (or didn’t do): That’s just the way God ...

Madeline Rile SmithCONNECTED BREATH: Glass Wind Instruments for Intimacy and Vulnerability Growing up, I never imagined I would become a visual artist, let alone an artist working in hot glass. In high school, I was required to take an art class, so I signed up for a glass elective, with no idea what I was getting into. At first, I was terrified of burning my fingers, but after a few sessions, the hypnotic presence of melting glass in a flame lured me in. Hot glass is always moving; it has rhythm. The artist must respond with her own movements. You ...

Knitting transcends time, and is a dominant theme in Jan Powell’s life and work as an artist. Through her use and creative exploration of this craft, Jan has produced—over the past four decades—a tangible amalgam of heritage, feminism, and memory ...

Serge LecomteUMBRELLAS COULD HAVE BRAINS: Paintings The real world for me is a mix of images where two realities or more cross. Take two known objects and connect them in some other way. As a teen I saw the paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and was taken by the surreal world he envisioned. The world was never the same for me after that. Images were no longer meant to stagnate in their inert state. Rocks weren’t simply rocks. They could become loaves of bread. And fish could turn into young maidens. Leaves on a tree could turn into birds and vice ...

Nance Van WinckelA HISTORY OF ANYWAY: Intermedia Sad lad of the far north, you with no means and no true lassie, with no way home and no home anyway, you voyage on. And yes, as per usual, just when the key to all seems within reach, the dreaded forever descends. [click images to enlarge] Nance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Our Foreigner, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series Prize (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017), Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2016), and Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2014). She’s ...

Richard KaganSTILL AND YET: Photographs Born in Philadelphia, Richard Kagan is a photographer and former furniture maker whose artistic career took a curiously circuitous path. He began as a self-taught street photographer while a student at Temple University. However, after leaving college to practice Buddhism under a visiting Japanese Zen Master in New York, Kagan became impassioned with the silent eloquence of handmade objects and pawned his camera to buy woodworking tools. Following several years of apprenticeships, Kagan opened his own furniture workshop and founded the Richard Kagan Gallery—the first nationally recognized gallery for contemporary furniture artists. He taught at ...

Cheryl HarperPASSAGES: An Installation in Progress I am one of those artists who thinks my work has to say something. I have nothing against paintings that bring together a disparate room décor or just make one feel good, but that’s not what I want to do. If you happen to like my work for any of those reasons, that’s fine, but if you are intrigued and compelled to think about bigger issues, that is my goal. Since 2006 I’ve been making small statues of politicians, particularly of women in the national spotlight, in addition to works that address issues like ...

I was no stranger to poetry. As a child, I was a poor reader; I’m a dyslexic, a term that was barely known at that time. But my mother, who didn’t understand why I was such a poor reader, tutored me daily through my middle-school years. Books were a struggle for my tutoring sessions, but when Mom switched to poetry it was fun. She would read the poem first, and with my good memorization skills the words, rhythms and meter clicked with me, and I – for perhaps the first time—felt that I was comprehending written expression, an idea compressed ...

Giovanni CasadeiINSPIRED TO SEE: Paintings I was born and raised in Rome, Italy. Since the age of four I have been exposed to art, thanks to my Uncle Roberto, who religiously picked me up every Sunday morning to bring me to a museum to contemplate art. At the age of fourteen, I bought my first oil painting set with my savings, and I painted on my own for the next eight years. From 1978 to 1980, I studied at the Scuola Libera del Nudo (Free School for Drawing and Painting sponsored by the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome) under ...

I consider myself a painter who photographs. I had given up on painting about ten years ago since I didn’t feel I could authentically express what was mine to express. Then, about eight years ago, I fell into photographing what I came to call my “magical landscapes.” These images came almost effortlessly and opened up worlds I never imagined. I credit this experience with giving me the courage to explore the real world. During the last five years, I have traveled around the world twice for extended periods of time. I tend to perceive now that most every landscape has ...

I found hidden within the language of security in Executive Order 13780 the underpinnings of a xenophobic worldview that simultaneously aspires toward empire. In the text of the poems I sought to lay bare the underlying mechanics of power inherent such colonial impulses, and in the visuals I sought to subvert the legitimacy of claims to security from an administration compromised by foreign power. In attempting to hide the Soviet origins of the film Nebo Zovyot the American director of the retitled Battle Beyond the Sun replaced Soviet spacecraft with U.S. ones, obscured all text that appeared in Russian, and ...

Nance Van WinckelTHE BROWNIES AT WORK Welcome to Cleaver’s brand new genre, INTERMEDIA, where word and image intersect to create newly mediated spaces between the literal and the figurative—part word, part image, and deviantly part-way! And what better way to start off than with “Brownies,” those there-but-not-there creations that inhabit the virtual terrains and ordinary realms of our creative lives. —Ed. Nance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Our Foreigner, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series Prize (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017), Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2016), and Pacific ...

Frances had skipped two periods before she realized what was going on. “I’m lucky,” she bragged to Sarah over milkshakes at the corner store, “I haven’t had my period in eight weeks, no tampons for me, I beat the system.” Sarah’s mouth dropped and that’s when Frances became aware of the extent of her self-deceit. Now, just days later, she sits cross-legged on the floor in Jack’s bedroom shuffling a deck of cards while Jack moves laundry from the washer to the dryer in the basement, his parents in the city at a hospital benefit ...

Matthew CourtneyLIVING AS ART: Ceramic Works [click on images to enlarge] To be in the presence of Matt Courtney’s ceramic art is to be embraced by a feeling at once familiar and unanticipated — a sensation that comes not only by directly looking, but also sensed, unsolicited, out of the corner of the eye. It’s a kind of well-being and heightened awareness that can happen while sitting outdoors, perhaps beside a percolating stream or a mile-wide river: small wonders, big sky. It’s all good. Almost instinctively, Courtney’s ceramic pieces bring that palpable sensation indoors, where they acquire something domestic, grounded ...

Micah DangesWHAT WE SEE FEELS LIKE THE THING ITSELF: Photographs [ click any image to enlarge ] My drive to take photographs is rooted in the unpredictability of such a seemingly predictable process. I use the precision of the camera in conjunction with the limitations of its mechanics to generate a series of inspiring problems that I can solve. I know that the assumptions that I make while shooting the photograph, about how life will translate onto film, will be proven wrong after it is developed and printed. This shift compels me to slow down, study the printed image and ...

Hannah ThompsettDEFT PERCEPTION: Works of Porcelain and Paper, Plausibility and Pause [click on images to enlarge] We all accumulate knowledge of our world through experience. Unconsciously, we learn to trust our perceptions as truth. But when this truth is challenged, our trust falters. We’re suddenly aware of the malleability and subjectivity of each of our constructed realities, our beliefs and expectations. To explore and test the boundaries of that trust, I created Deft Perception: Allusions of Reality, a body of work in porcelain, paper, and photographs. When is something easily perceivable or believable? When do we need to take a ...

There is no easy way to explain who Americans are. We are a complex accumulation of beings with unique and varied cultures, traditions, and genetic histories. Perhaps this is why I feel most comfortable expressing my thoughts concerning American identity visually. My models are friends, family, and neighbors—all people with whom I have a personal connection. I have tried to capture something of their stories in my imagery ...

Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love and home of the famous LOVE statue by Robert Indiana, is taking love to new places. If you happen to be in Philly, chances are you’ll catch sight of the 47 Bus. You can’t miss its bright blocks of color or its bold, emphatic message: WE ARE ALL MIGRATING TOGETHER. This “mural on wheels” is the brainchild of Shira Walinsky, mural artist, and filmmaker Laura Deutch. It runs daily from South Philadelphia’s Whitman Plaza, on through Center City, and all the way up to 5th and Godfrey in North Philadelphia, connecting several multilingual, multiethnic ...

Thom SawyerSPRING STREET: Works on Paper Unhappy small towns are all alike—claustrophobic, gossipy, dying. —Timothy Egan I have lived and worked in such a small town as this. Quiet, nondescript streets link manicured lawns and well-kept homes; neighbors guard their privacy as they intrude on the lives around them, paying close attention to the comings and goings of others, particularly those of relative newcomers. It is a strange mixture of the private and public, with odd boundaries that seem fluid—simultaneously hiding and displaying glimpses of interior narratives, opinions, rumors and expected codes of behavior. [click any image to enlarge] My ...

I wanted to at least shift my purpose and practice. Since I was living in Japan and studying Asian art, I started by painting images of kimonos, of figures wearing kimonos; I took photos of models in kimonos, wearing geisha or kabuki makeup. These exercises soon seemed appropriated and hollow and I realized I needed to be making objects themselves, that I was no longer interested in the pictorial representations of things. At the same time, I wanted to create things that were abstractions, that is, non-objective. Does that make sense? I wanted to be creating things where the process ...

In spite of living far away, I feel always connected to Chile, a place I refer to as “my ancient land.” Several years ago, the nostalgia for my homeland made me recall the work of two Czech composers, Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana, whose music conveys their own love for their country. Dvořák’s New World Symphony and Smetana's My Fatherland became the inspiration for a new series of paintings I began, “My Ancient Land.” The sense of belonging to a place is personal and universal, and this is the reason I could and can very much identify with these musical ...

I am fairly certain that many people experience my pieces kind of like this: Judith Schaechter is an artist who makes images in stained glass of anguished women set against highly decorative backgrounds. People often see my works all at once as a group—presented in a show or reproduced in an article—but to me, each piece is vastly different and each one arose over long periods of time. But yeah, I get it: anguished women and lush, decorative backgrounds ...

A PRESENCE IN WOOD Wood Sculpture by Miriam Carpenter Throughout my life I have sought the companionship of trees and have developed an ever deepening reverence for them. Trees are intelligent, resilient, majestic and adaptable. When a tree has reached the end of its life, the shadow of what once was presents another gift in the form of a satiny, warm, sensual material. Each piece of wood has its own story—reflections of moments specific to place and time within the inherent architecture of a species. Each tree has its own experience and characteristics uniquely formed by its geographical location, the ...

WHY DRAW TREES? by Laurel Hooker Before I went to art school, before I decided to become a painter, before my work and classes carried me far away into the world of fine art, all I really wanted to do was draw. I drew the way a lot of teenagers do–carefully, self-consciously, and often. I drew unaware of the complicated realm of critical analysis, ego, sophisticated processes, and expensive materials that would soon emerge in the form of my higher education. When I was a student at the Tyler School of Art, drawing nice pictures was the farthest thing from ...

WORKS ON LOVE by Michelle Doll My work is about felt moments, both the visible ones as well as the ones that we aren't able to see. I spent many years creating work about feelings of disconnect and loss. When I'd leave the studio, those feelings and the difficult emotions surrounding them became amplified. As a result, today both my life and my work is focused on love and connection, what I see as the root of intimacy. Such moments exist as I go through my day. I find I am constantly searching for evidence of connections between people. Living ...

THE DOGS OF SAN JUAN AND THE FISH OF PHILADELPHIA Works on Paper and Beyond by Paula Rivera I started drawing when I was a baby. My first subject was an elephant, done in orange Crayola marker. My parents have the drawing to this day. I've always had a strong feeling for drawing animals. Like many children, I believed I understood animals. I'm still fascinated with animals (although I'm no longer quite as obsessed with horses as I used to be, like many young girls.) I went to Philadelphia's High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA), a magnet school ...

ART AND HEALING Pastel Landscapes by Donna Levinstone Art enhances the healing process. My work is meditative and has been used in hospital settings and other situations where healing is called for. My mother and a few of my friends, in the last stage of their lives, have used my work as a source of calm and focus during their bed-ridden illnesses. As a cancer survivor, I, too have found that artwork provides calm in my life. My pastel landscapes have often been referred to as “landscapes of the soul”. The use of wide skies in my work promotes a ...

NOW IN ELSEWHERE A Now for MENAM by Orkan Telhan The Middle East. North Africa. The Mediterranean. Asia Minor and the Levant. These refer to inexact geographies. It is hard to tell where each begins and ends. As names, they may take on different meanings when they refer to people, languages, belief systems, and politics, all of which constantly negotiate their identities with respect to one another. As places, they may bring together a series of disjointed lands unified as an imaginary cultural construct, yet whose presence lives everywhere, whose lands have produced many diasporas around the globe. Today, someone ...

Excerpts from BOOK OF NO LEDGE by Nance Van Winckel As usual it starts with love. I had my heart set on the door-to-door encyclopedia sales boy. Maybe 18 or 19, he said he was working his way through college. He winked a turquoise eye at me and asked if I was the "lady of the house." Well, I wasn't. I was 13-going-on-17 and vaguely trying to flirt. My mother came out on the porch to see who I was talking to, and NO, she said, we don't need any books. She smiled, though, and wished him luck in school ...

Tara Stella, Introduction by Raymond RorkeHIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: Instagram Photography A century ago, in 1916, American photographer Paul Strand would attach a false lens on the side of his camera so that he could photograph candid portraits of unsuspecting subjects. Later, in the 1930s, French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson painted his small Leica with dull black paint so that he could unobtrusively capture “the decisive moment.” Before the decade was out, Walker Evans was hiding his camera under his coat, the lens peeking through a buttonhole, to photograph riders on the New York City Subway just as they were. Today, ...

Several years ago I came across a story about a nor’easter that hit a small coastal town. The morning after the storm, residents of the town reported having seen something they had never experienced before or since—fleeting visions, every one. Strange sightings out at sea, like clouds of smoke rising from the horizon, orbs of light and unrecognizable objects floating on the water. Yet, as soon as they appeared, they were gone ...

OF PINHOLES & PEEPSHOWS Pinhole Photography by R.C. Barajas You can’t return to the days of Polaroids. Not really. There are modern approximations - crafty mimicry that recalls the once ubiquitous family camera. I like the app Hipstamatic, a high-end photographic fast food that can reproduce the bygone look of analogue photography with the convenience of a cell phone. Then there are the dogged geniuses of The Impossible Project who recently reinvented the defunct self-developing film. But if you grew up during the days of the first Polaroid cameras, those instant snaps became forever entwined with your childhood. Here’s one ...

INSIDE REX by Mimi Oritsky Oil on Linen I was born in a small town sixty miles northwest of Philadelphia, Pa. called Reading. It was an industrial city on the Schuylkill River, full of brown-brick factories and heavy gambling with lots of strip joints. It usually appeared dark with silvery smoke in the air. Fine art and culture were not nearly as popular as building automobiles, shooting squirrels, and drinking Olde Reading Beer. However, the town was surrounded by mountains and farmlands, and this landscape was filled with corn fields, milk cows, and small herds of sheep. It all appeared ...

Anthony CuneoTHIRTEEN MUSINGS AROUND MY CREATIVE PROCESS I I’m a big fan of uncertainty. I wish to God that the Nazis had been less certain that Jews were vermin. Not knowing you’re doing it right is a good thing. It makes you stop and think. II Finding, not executing; searching, not knowing. III I don’t know many artists who talk about their “art;” the preferred term is “work.” I’m guilty of this myself. “Work” demands respect, and suggests what you’re doing is serious. But the truth is, when I paint, I’m playing just as much as I’m working. I’m experimenting ...

Alli KatzCATS “If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.” —Mark Twain Mark Twain never met my cat. Five seconds with Albany, watching him throw his body against our kitchen cabinets early in the morning (and again in the afternoon, and at bedtime) for six ounces of “classic beef” or a scoop of prescription urinary health dry food, or watching him raise his leg to lick his crotch and then forget what he’s doing, or him leaping on a tiny table ...

Nancy AgatiNOTICING WATER: Public Art As you travel along the river—any river, stream, creek or body of water—what do you notice? Do you see the changing currents, the light that bounces and travels from wave to wave? Do you feel the rush of water at a rock’s edge? Can you hear water lapping at the shore? Do you sense the flow that ceases to part as it travels? I believe that there are times when one becomes acutely aware of the act of perceiving. There are moments when a heightened sense of awareness highlights things that might otherwise go unnoticed ...

Stephen PerloffTHE TIMES, THEY WERE A-CHANGIN' - West Philly Days: A Photo Essay When I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania as a freshman in 1966, men were required to wear jackets and neckties to dinner—and most of us wore jackets and ties to football games. The men’s dorms in The Quad were several blocks from the women’s dorms at Hill House, and you couldn’t have a woman in your room past 10 p.m., and maybe a little later on the weekend. But there were confounding juxtapositions and experiences. Who was that strange guy with the huge head of curly ...

Jay PastelakON SNAPSHOTS “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” —Susan Sontag On Easter Sundays, when we were kids, after mass and before we changed from our Easter clothes, our mother would parade my sisters and me out to the yard and pose us before the forsythia for a photo. Sorry—for a picture. We knew those things that came from a camera were photographs but we called them pictures because, well, ...

Ilana EllisPORTRAITS OF FRIENDSHIP: Oil on Canvas These past few years, my work has been fueled by two passions that tugged me between them. The first is that I want to be a painter of great skill. And the greatest skill takes years of continuous training and practice, which I still need. The second is that I want to paint life. I want my works to be so real they almost breathe, and so fluid they seem caught in motion. So when I focus on the ongoing problem of increasing my skill, I often have technical realizations that allow me to see the ...

Myra LottoFUJIKO NAKAYA, FOG ARTIST On the last Saturday morning of April, my husband and I put our two young children in the car for the hour-long drive to New Canaan, Connecticut. We were on our way to attend the opening event for my aunt Fujiko’s newest art installation, Veil, on display at architect Philip Johnson’s former residence and National Trust Historic Site, the Glass House. Fujiko Nakaya, or “Fuji” as her family calls her, is an artist working with fog as a medium. As many times as I’ve described her work, I am always surprised by what should be, ...

Anastasiya ShekhtmanTHE OLD MAN AND THE POOL Regardless of which creative field you look at, there is always talk about process. This postmodern world has rendered form and content inextricable in many ways, so when I look at work, it is always the same question that comes to mind: how does the form inform the content? Are there traces of the process in the work the artist presents? Much of the writing that I love does not humor such inquisition. Even lines related through a colloquial voice are likely to have been subjected to meticulous editing, were crafted in the ...

Laura Mecklenburger"VULNERARY" AND AN ART WITCH When I try to describe my artwork to others, I often say that I make ritual objects and installation art. But I didn’t set out to make installation art from the beginning, and I certainly didn’t expect, when I decided to make art my career, that it was going to explicitly include magic and ritual. I still blush when I tell people I am an initiated witch. I am faintly surprised at myself that I have made such an intimate part of my life so public. But the path I took to reach this ...

Donna FestaPORTRAITS OF AGE Interviewed by Anastasiya Shekhtman Where does your fascination with faces come from? When I was a young girl, I went with my mother on a regular basis to visit her sisters. She was the youngest of nine children. The three youngest sisters—my mother Betty, Cassie, and Tucker—were the core of the group, but others would join in on different occasions. You never knew who was going to be at the kitchen table when you arrived. These visits were either at my Aunt Tucker’s house (Sylvia was her birth name, but, due to her resemblance to the actress ...

Dmitry BorshchEXILED FROM TRUTH: NINE ALLEGORIES Interviewed by Anastasiya Shekhtman What made you decide on ink as a medium? Precision of the ink line. I love precise lines and was able to show that even in my first independent works. They were abstract, probably influenced by Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, and Soviet Nonconformists, many of whom were abstractionists. I saw their work at various apartment exhibitions in Dnepropetrovsk and Moscow that I participated in. The compelling mood of the images, a certain wintry bleakness, is evocative of Soviet Russia. What role, if any, does your national background play in your ...

Tish IngersollFIVE PAINTINGS Interviewed by Anastasiya Shekhtman How do you begin a painting? I often start a painting using a level and making several horizontal lines, varying distances apart. Then, using black acrylic, I use gestural lines to overlap them. Finally, I add color. I often use memories of places I have walked or otherwise experienced. The painting and content emerges over a long period of not painting. The transformation of paint, a loose substance, into rigid lines and geometric shapes in your paintings is particularly intriguing. How does the form of your work play into the content? For twenty years, I ...

Toisha TuckerINDIVIDUATION, IDENTITY, AND THE PARENTHETICAL My conceptual works provide a foundation for introspection of the self and the other. They are distillations of ideas transformed into controlled environments or objects. Through text, sound, photographs, paintings, and immersive installation, I ruminate on literary modernism, magical realism, and the notion of benign indifference. Or I offer thought propositions to the viewer—some declarative, some open-ended—that are platforms for questioning or thinking more broadly about the social constructions we have come to accept as truths. Ultimately, my works are traces of thoughts and the interplay between the accepted realities and constructions of the spaces ...

Jim O'LoughlinLEAVES OF GRASS APP UPDATE Click to view the update in higher resolution. Jim O’Loughlin teaches in the Department of Languages & Literatures at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the coordinator of the Final Thursday Reading Series and publisher of Final Thursday Press. Read more here. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Joke Issue ...

Morgan GilbreathTHE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET My artwork is a product of the ground beneath my feet. I do not own a car, so my experience of a place is created entirely through biking, walking, and the occasional use of public transportation. Because of this, I have a very intimate relationship with sidewalks, as well as the buildings and streets with which they are connected. I am endlessly curious about the things that people discard onto the streets, a no-man’s-land of both public and private space in which no one is held accountable, allowing for a strange sort of freedom ...

Filip NoterdaemeAMERICAN ARCADIA Spicing up realist landscapes with fantastic nudes and infiltrating austere family tableaux with whimsical eroticism, American Arcadia is a mixed distillation of artful irreverence and subtle mischief. Here is the story of its making. In 2005, my partner Daniel Isengart and I took a trip to Madrid, where we spent many hours at the Prado and the Reina Sofia. On the day of our return to the States, we found ourselves aimlessly browsing through the souvenir shop at the Madrid-Barajas airport, where a pocket-format deck of cards depicting famous nudes by (mostly) European masters—some of which we had seen ...

Leah KoontzBIPRODUCT: Drag, Societal Identity, and Gender Equality BiProduct is a project I embarked on which considers drag queens, art, female expectations, and the media. This series features four of my works which address gender roles, equality, and social construction. BiProduct features sculpture and performance, created from nylon, spandex, foam, digital media, and plastic. Drag Queens possess many progressive qualities. However, I feel that certain aspects of Drag should require more careful consideration. Over the past two decades, drag has transformed tremendously. What exactly is drag in 2013? A drag queen is a man, usually homosexual, creating a female illusion ...

RITHIKA MERCHANT Works on Paper: Comparative Mythology I began working on a series of paintings dealing with Comparative Mythology about two years ago. My work explores the common thread that runs through different cultures and religions. Similar versions of many myths, stories and ideas are shared by cultures all around the world. I use creatures and symbolism that are part of my personal visual vocabulary to explore these narratives. I am currently continuing in the same vein but focusing now on a branch of Comparative Mythology that deals with Joseph Campbell's theory of the Hero/Monomyth. The Monomyth refers to the ...

Ira Joel Haber WORKS ON PAPER I have always made art including drawings and works on paper. This selection is from 1972 to 2013 and is a good sample of the themes, images and mediums that have always interested me for over forty-three years as an artist. My training was in commercial art. I began working in the advertising field in 1966 upon completing a two year course at New York City Community College, as it was then known. This training was outdated. In any event, I had little trouble in finding jobs. However, these jobs depended on skills that I ...

William Sulit & Beth KephartCHICKEN DANCE, DIGITAL 3-D DESIGN A conversation between a writer wife and her artist husband, in a quest to understand Important Subject: A chicken BK: You spend hours in your garage studio (among the ghosts of a skinny car, in the shadow of night visitors, within walls yellowed by old fuels) fiddling with electronic pencils and twinned screens, and you come up with ... a chicken? Why a chicken? How did your chicken begin? WS: It began with a sphere about the size of a golf ball. I'm sure electrons are involved but what is really ...

Eleanor Leonne Bennett PHOTOGRAPHS This series of images were all taken at the Michael Allcroft Antiques shop in Disley, Cheshire. I was born on the Cheshire-Derbyshire border and have lived there all my life. I love to take photographs in museums and in cities, but as I am not often able to travel alone long distances, I have to look for subjects a lot closer to home. The red lion sign is a favourite of mine and makes me think of all the old pubs and of the social life they used to generate in local towns and villages near to me. Only ...

Blake MartinThe Rise of the Selfie in the 21st Century Click on any photo to see it at full size.  Why do we take self-portraits? As someone who has always felt the urge to take pictures of myself, I don’t have a ready answer. For the longest time I felt shame for this urge to see myself through my lens. Blame it on the Christian ethos of original sin that shaped my early life, but this habit of posing for my own camera felt like an exercise in vanity. Up until the Instagram era, I rarely, if ever, shared my ...