Artist Spotlights
Nola Parker
“What drives and inspires me is my experience of the world. I spent a lot of time outdoors growing up in Vermont and I still feel that same sense of wonder and mystery I felt as a little kid standing in the big woods and just feeling like, “I don’t know the half of what is really going on out there” and finding some calm in that.”
Alina Birkner
“I am working freely on more complex paintings. I try not to judge them as much as I used to, embracing the process and their strangeness.”
Jasmine Murrell
“I’m really drawn to the communication and collective memory of things, sites, and abstract forms. I question the hierarchy of different life forms.”
Elizabeth Shull
“I am enthralled with the natural world and being outdoors. Of course my environment provides my inspirational backbone so the ocean, night sky, and birds regularly prompt many ideas. I am fascinated by history and science, the passage of time, connections, cause and effect, and the endless trail of visual and literal information.”
Catalina Viejo Lopez de Roda
“My images re-invent themes that have interested me all of my life: reality and illusion, voyeuristic impulses, our relationship with our environment, and existential dichotomies. I often use the rainbow in my work as a symbol of inner light and connection. Visual art, poetry, literature, mythology, psychology, philosophy, nature, and daily interactions with my environment and other beings influence my art-making.”
Amy Bravo
“It’s very rare that I make a work in only one medium. I was a sketchbook kid growing up, always cutting and collaging and combining highlighter, pen, glitter, pressed flowers, anything that glue or tape could hold down. I get really attached to found textures and objects, sometimes they’re quicker to communicate something deeper about what the work means than traditional drawing or painting is.”
Alina Vinogradova
“I am inspired by ancient religions and myths. And often the narratives in my works begin there. But usually I don't come up with a plot in advance or make sketches. I fantasize by painting directly on canvas. And only then, I come up with a story and a name. This is a powerful creative flow from my soul, which I myself sometimes wonder at. “
Brittany Miller
“My paintings are very flat, and they have a rubbed-on texture that looks like woodblock prints. I cut all my brushes down and scrub on the paint, letting it dry in between layers. At the end of my time at Pratt, I was making large-scale Bible coloring book paintings--almost-black outlines filled in with saturated color--cropped pictures of angels, floods, and falling pillars. My work now has a lot to do with those paintings.“
Yuri Yuan
“Dreams are where our subconsciousness is free to wander, “the return of the repressed” as Freud would say. I am always looking for these moments of connection where the images or narratives break away from reality. I translate these moments onto paper in the form of sketches and piece them together onto canvas.”
Zachary Carlisle Davidson
“Texture and layering are intertwined in my work to help me be inventive with depiction in both pictorial and non-representative works. In a romantic sense, it gives me feelings of animism. It’s the kind of stuff that draws me in when I see it elsewhere in others’ artwork, random things I see once and items I engage with on a more routine basis.”
Joanna Cortez
“My work has always in some way dealt with ideas of economic migration and the search for shelter/stability. I reference some of the places, good and bad, that I’ve lived in. I reference Mexican blankets, nature, chainlink, and other domestic imagery that’s meaningful to me.”
Lauren Skelly Bailey
“Lately I am revisiting old pots. I am building new layers of coils, smoothing them, and incorporating more glazed forms in this new layer onto the surface of something that has already been fired. The process of firing the work starts over, and the layers keep being applied until deemed done. This second chance of being something else is important to my practice in the studio and out of it.”
Carson Fox
“The stand-alone sculptures are more improvisational as they are made, and I may work on them for months before they are resolved, cutting things off and fussing with the surfaces. Installations are more directed, as I usually have a vision for what it should be and it is a matter of making the pieces that will create it.”
Susanna Koetter
“I’d say most of my work is begins with the appropriation of images, signs, and materials that don’t have an explicit author, but belong more in a collective psyche as terms marked by an inherent ambivalence: country, race, sex, body; the way that flags both indicate where you are, and and also designate the distance to be read far away.”
Sandy Williams IV
“I think a lot of my work lately has been to participate, and to think about how I can help in the world. So I usually start with an idea, and the materials follow. Sometimes that process results in an object, but often it can be a role, or a record, or about the process itself.”
Valeria Divinorum
“A major theme in my work is the human connection with nature and the organic expressions that emerge from that relationship. In flowers, fractal patterns appear and geometric compositions become apparent. Through these geometric patterns we can witness the perfect balance of life and creation.”
Rachel Stern
“My grandfather who escaped Austria after Kristallnacht lived by his motto, ‘Life is tragic. Enjoy it.’ I try to do the same and so what could be a more urgent subject for my work than a reminder (to myself or to anyone else) that, like the cut flower, the journey from life to death has already commenced and to seize whatever opportunities for joy or productivity or curiosity or even heartbreak we might encounter.”
Kellyann Monaghan
“My paintings describe and explore through the physicality of the paint: billowing, tumultuous clouds, a plane of land gashed apart by an earthquake, a frightening wave of water, the rapid deluge of floods, the rising ephemeral smoke from a fire.”
Juan Hinojosa
“In America we are bombarded with advertisements in more ways than ever before. And thanks for the pandemic, I have been glued to my TV and my iPhone as my only source of information, entertainment, and communication. That being said, the power/cleverness of advertisements has led me to focus on the use of color when building a collage. Color can be a delicate playground for which to exist in.”