Past Exhibitions

2021

Coveted.

February 13 - April 4, 2021  

​Laura Mulvey, Scholar, and Filmmaker introduced the term "the male gaze" in her 1975 essay. The male gaze represents the perspective of a heterosexual male viewer, along with the perspective of the heterosexual male character and the heterosexual male creator of the film. The male gaze also primarily depicts women as sexual objects for the sole pleasure of the male viewer.

While representations of the male gaze can be found in abundance when exploring themes of love, relationships, and desires, Coveted features works that offer a range of perspectives that are not easily accessible in mainstream culture. Featured works by Stefani Byrd (Fayetteville, AR), Dani Clauson (Portland, OR), Leiyana Gonzales (Cleveland, OH), Sydney Kleinrock (Long Island, NY), Megan Lubey (Cleveland, OH), Olga Nazarenko (Cleveland, OH), and Rebecca Poarch (Long Island, NY).

Read DRB's review of Coveted on the CAN Blog.

CAN Blog: DRB review of 'Coveted'
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Read Artist Bios

Stefani Byrd

​Stefani Byrd’s art practice includes video, new media, and interactive technologies. Byrd’s early work addressed social justice issues in the form of interactive temporary public art installations that created role reversal, or "empathy training,” experiences for the audience. Her current work focuses on creating psychologically charged immersive media environments addressing topics such as digital feminism, gun
violence, and how technology impacts empathy in digitally mediated spaces.

Her work has been exhibited at places such as the CICA Museum (South Korea), the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego (San Diego), the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Atlanta Film Festival, and the Hunter Museum of American Art. She has received grants and support from groups such as: Creative Capital of New York, Flux Projects, Atlanta Celebrates Photography, and Idea Capital. Byrd's work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and the Columbus Museum of American Art.

​She received her BFA degree in Photography from Georgia State University. She holds a Masters Degree in Visual Art from the University of California San Diego. Byrd is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas.

Artist Statement
A visual tone poem inspired by the beautiful, but potentially tragic, mating ritual of the American Bald Eagle. The two soar up to high altitudes, lock talons, and spiral towards the earth. If they release in time and complete the courtship ritual, they become a bonded pair for life. If they don’t release from one another in time, both will crash into the ground and die. This act creates a tension between succeeding with their mate and maintaining their own survival. The score for the video comes from the infamous song “True Love Waits” by the band Radiohead. The song was written 21 years before it was recorded and released on a studio album. It began as a hopeful and proud love song at the beginning of the relationship between lead singer Thom Yorke and artist/scholar Rachel Owen. The two would later marry and have two children. The song was finally recorded and released in 2016 as a resigned and melancholy ballad after their divorce and her subsequent death from cancer. The song refers to the same relationship, but in its two stages, chronicling its aging and eventual deterioration. This piece is inspired by the notion of tragedy, abandonment, loss, and the gap between the ideals and actualities of romantic love.

Dani Clauson

​Dani Clauson is a queer trans/non-binary ceramics artist, who has been utilizing art as a mode of ‘speaking’ since they were a child. Dani utilizes their past experiences of domestic memories, trauma, and relationships to influence their work. They found clay as a freshman attending the University Of Montana, and have been touched by the materials empathy, reciprocation, and bodily metaphor ever since. Clay has been crucial to healing and expressing their struggle with bodily connection and sense of safety. From the University of Washington they have received a BA with honors in 3D4M, alongside a minor in Art History. They utilize their art history education to strengthen their art objects to speak upon the history of violence against the Feminine and its effects upon queer identity and gender.

Artist Statement
“If I were to write to you To tell you something Or create some visual you can place hands upon Some textural tactile technique How naked should I become? [do you fetishize my flesh?] These domestic recesses of my mind, Where the boundaries of body, emptiness of self Reveal themselves behind the curtain, [I seem obsessed with the perforated line that seems to divide But suggests to cut open. To be so vulnerable yet suggestive of barriers.] Do you remember what they told you, about becoming a ‘woman’? Can’t you see, I’m not one? (don’t)(touch me) I’ll keep these restless hands digging through clay To find an empty state To find acceptance / rejection Of objectification / subjectification To find my voice To find my body.” With its own sense of body, touch and memory, as well as its transformative nature from ephemeral to permanent, ceramics holds a metaphor of trauma and its lasting effects. The ceramic forms I create are reflective of the Abject Body-the traumatized body-the Queer body. They expose distortion and fragmentation that compel the viewer to meet both discomfort and familiarity. Being trans/nonbinary, I have spent my life distant from my own body. ‘Love’ within a Queer body is an abject experience, a reckoning with the body one exists in and the desires that are under the surface. Finding embodiment in physicality is a gentle process-a painful endeavor-leaving voids and a hollowing from residual trauma to try and find that sense of safety and comfort. Through use of washes and glaze, the textured surface reveals marks of erosion, scaring, discoloration, and tearing. The bodily forms are placed upon built settings that are rendered domestically familiar to reveal the origins of these physical disruptions. These ceramic renderings/ramblings understand the physical feeling of Body from the perspective of the Emotive-Self. Through this voice, validation, and vulnerability, my work aims to acknowledge trauma and bring forth a grieving space that is sensitive, healing, and Queer.

Leiyana Gonzales

Leiyana Gonzales is an interdisciplinary digital artist based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work is rooted in the details and emphasizes saturated, vibrant colors that dance across your mind. Leiyana focuses on creating pieces that effortlessly portray familiarity while embodying otherworldly elements. She has been creating on digital platforms since 2018, after spending her early life sketching and painting with graphite and acrylic mediums. Her work intends to inspire her audience to see magic in the mundane and transport them into another world. ​

Artist Statement
I intend for my art to feel like a dream you don’t want to wake up from. Shapes, colors and motifs dance across your mind just waiting to be decoded. My creativity is mine, but it exists on its own. It is up for your interpretation. I want my art to stay with my audience and speak to their soul. About the submitted collection: Being desirable and being loved are not synonymous. As young women we unknowingly conflate the two, breaking our own hearts in the process. Black women are often viewed only as objects to be desired. Our bodies are so much more than just desirable. Our bodies are portals into our minds and souls, they hold the very essence that is us. My collection invites you to look at a black body beyond desire, beyond the surface, and into the essence that is me. Hopefully inspiring others to do the same.

Sydney Kleinrock

Sydney Kleinrock is a painter and textile artist born in Long Island, New York. She received her Associates Degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology, and graduated in 2018 with a BFA from Hampshire College, studying visual arts and sustainability. In her last year at school, she exhibited a gallery show of her thesis artwork which examined the role of clothing in everyday life as well as its larger, cross-cultural impact on the global environment. Recently, she has done a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and shown work at the Untitled Space in tribeca. She currently works out of her studio in Greenfield, MA.

Artist Statement
My practice incorporates painting and drawing with textile art processes to explore themes of queerness, identity and internal landscapes in the context of greater cultural surroundings. I explore the variation of texture and dimension that is added when textile elements are combined with painting. The imagery in my work is drawn from a combination of memory, imagination, and moments captured from life. Often reflective objects are transformed into a vessel for refracting the fleeting moment that is presented before the surface. Recognizable figures are distorted through a reflective surface or the ever-shifting perspective of memory and emotion. Through the use of oversaturated colors and loosely-rendered space, everyday scenes and memories become surreal and dream-like; sometimes breaking objects and subjects away from a fixed sense of space entirely. Distanced perspectives are captured through the frame of up close objects, creating a layered effect that hints at the transitory nature of reality and the ever-fluctuating presence of internal and outer life. 

Megan Lubey

Originally from Buffalo, NY, Megan Lubey is a young artist currently studying painting and creative writing at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Her work often explores unconventional, ‘crafty’ media and how it interacts with more traditional aspects of painting. Lubey’s paintings range from observational to non-objective, repeatedly incorporating unexpected saturation of color and gestural expression. Her work considers themes such as comfort, domesticity, girlhood, shame, and sexuality. These pieces tend to reflect on personal experiences and their ability to resonate within others when stripped down to their core emotions or when evoking a visceral feeling.

Artist Statement
This series of three explores the artist's relationship with the social construct of virginity. In adolescence we are generally taught that virginity is lost when a penis enters a vagina and a hymen breaks. This definition feels incredibly far removed from the expansiveness that is the practice of sexuality and is dangerously hetero-normative. This interpretation directly caters to cis straight males and perpetuates the idea that while men are gaining something from engaging in sex, women are losing something. The loss of a boy’s virginity is something that is often congratulated or is considered a right of passage. This is almost never the case with a woman or non-binary individual. There is a pressure specifically put on young girls to stay abstinent that is often perpetuated by family, teachers, and religious organizations. At the same time, there is an equally present pressure from their male counterparts and media to become sexual and that pushes sexuality upon girls before they get the chance to decide to partake in it themselves. These notions result in feelings of shame and regret in young women and perpetuate rape culture.

​This series depicts the artist’s personal disconnect between the feelings involved with a so-called “first time” and its standard definition as well as the shame and pain that intertwines with discovering sexuality and deviating from the standard. “The First Time” represents the feeling of becoming sexually active despite not having the desire to. There is a very specific pain that is endured when the body is engaging in something that mind is against. This piece is an abstract representation of physical pain, confusion in disdain, coercion, and an attempt to adhere to expectations and social norms. The first time is forced heterosexuality, it is unwelcome. “The Second Time” is an abstract depiction of a hymenectomy. This is a medical procedure that occurs when an individual’s hymen has developed in a way in which it is unable to break naturally and results in extreme pain and discomfort when there is an attempt to penetrate. In regards to the biological definition that includes the breaking of the hymen as the loss of virginity, this is an extremely unconventional way to do so. The second time is blacked out under amnesia, it is sterile and scheduled. “The Third Time” is virginity in the way that the artist would prefer to define it. This depicts an experience that is both wanted and welcome, yet conflicted. In a hetero-normative and religious environment there is a sense of shame in being a queer woman. In a patriarchal society there is a feeling of inadequacy and anxiety in being a queer women and living in a way that does not involve nor benefit the cis male. A concept of virginity without a hypothetical man is both seldom heard and unpopular yet extremely necessary and valid. The third time does not involve standards or medicine, it is queer, messy, and spontaneous.

Olga Nazarenko

Olga Nazarenko is a Russian-American interdisciplinary mixed media artist currently based in Cleveland. Nazarenko documents the transience of experience through a sensorial and culturally-guided lens. Nazarenko uses a variety of visual, auditory, and tactile artistic mediums to shape works that comment on the narratives that shape human identity, the relationship between humans and nature, and the rituals that connect humans to the divine.

Since 2019, Nazarenko has been experimenting with mediums that liberate and engage the senses. As a filmmaker, Nazarenko uses sensory ethnography and experimental documentary styles to shape new forms of visual communication and to explore human
sense-making. In addition to analog and digital film and audio as mediums, Nazarenko uses three-dimensional materials to create physical objects that tell a story or comment on cultural customs. By using cement sculpture and ceramics, Nazarenko shapes forms that allow audiences to relate to the world as a child does, with a free and exploratory mind. By connecting the intuitive world of the three-dimensional with the visual narratives of the two-dimensional, Nazarenko suggests new ways to view our realities and the narratives we build in our own lives.

Artist Statement
​Olga Nazarenko (b. 1994) is an interdisciplinary mixed media artist documenting the transience of experience through a sensorial and culturally-guided lens. Nazarenko uses a variety of visual, auditory, and tactile artistic mediums to shape works that comment on the narratives that shape human identity, the relationship between humans and nature, and the rituals that connect humans to the divine. In the infamous 1972 article “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture”, anthropologist Sherry Ortner explored the universality of female subordination by arguing that women are identified with and are a symbol of nature; while, men are symbolized by humanity’s culture. Cacophony (2020) is a short sensory ethnographical film exploring humanity’s complex relationship to nature, and the power dynamics that shape this relationship. By analyzing the age old war between anthropocentric human superiority and to-be-tamed nature, this film seeks to illuminate the tension that exists in mainstream heterosexual desire and sexuality using sensorial experience as its language.

Rebecca Poarch

Rebecca Poarch is a 22-year-old artist from Long Island, New York. She recently graduated  from the Pennsylvania State University after pursing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art with  her concentration in Painting & Drawing. Rebecca was awarded the 2019 Margaret Giffen Schoenfelder Memorial Scholarship by Penn State School of Visual Arts to recognize her as an  exceptional forth-year painter. Rebecca has shown at Greenpoint Gallery in Brooklyn, New  York, Radiator Gallery in Queens, New York, and with the Garment District Alliance in New  York, New York. Rebecca has worked as a Curatorial Assistant at Isabella Garrucho Fine Art in Greenwich, Connecticut and as a Curatorial Assistant at the Art Alliance of Central Pennsylvania in State College, Pennsylvania.

Artist Statement
With vivid colors and dream-like scenes, my work aims to realize the blurred line between the body and its lived experiences, in conjunction with these developing ideas in the contemporary art world. My work aims to tell stories of girlhood, love, loss, sexuality, and other physical and emotional experiences, creating a personal mythology and diaristic narrative. Through painting a dreamland of hyper-femininity, I am creating a world of bright light from darkness, or a utopia from a place of vulnerability. After a surgery that caused me to think about my relationship to femininity and sensuality, my most recent works have used a process of taking photos of myself, cutting and manipulating these images in photoshop, and transferring these compositions to a painting. This bridged my thoughts on the cutting and healing process my body physically has undergone and its relation to my femininity and that which makes me feel beautiful. Through my painting process, I am able to accept and adapt to the bodily changes I have experienced, confront my constant need to make myself feel beautiful, and connect to a deeper personal sense of sensuality and femininity. Most recently, my work has contemplated how painting can act as performance in my life, particularly in my everyday ritualistic beauty routines. Sewing together my used makeup wipes as material to paint on has caused me to merge my self-care practices and my painting practices to find fulfillment in both performances simultaneously. I hope to address questions of growth and self-acceptance, coming from a place of vulnerability, to then create soft, ephemeral, and hyper-feminine works that speak to not only my personal experiences, but also political and social issues at a greater scale. I hope to find oneness, beauty, and strength in the elasticity and morphing of the physical and emotional self, particularly while living in the body of a girl who is becoming a woman.

2020

SWITCH

December 18, 2020 - February 7, 2021

Kaiser Gallery is proud to feature artists and creatives from the art and technology sectors who utilize light as their medium and source of inspiration. The evolution of art has led it to become more and more intertwined with technology and reshaping the definition of what we consider art along the way.  SWITCH features a wide variety of artists and creators who challenge art in different directions through the implementation of technology. Artists and creators alike explore different expressions of light through multidimensional studies, including but not limited to, sculptural works, printmaking, projection art, and virtual reality. The blending of different types of media through innovative practices may even provide a glimpse into the future. 

Presenting works by Laura Bigger, Emily Dzieweczynski, GIBSON + RECODER, Carol Anne McChrystal, Haumed Rahmani, Joseph Santarpia, and HR-Stamenov.

Read Artist Statements & Bios

Laura Bigger

My work explores the relationships that exist among humans, animals, and ecosystems, particularly in terms of the food chain, raw materials, and the human tendency to exert control over natural systems. It explores existential quandaries such as what it means to be a human today, how we can live in the world responsibly, and what our obligation is to do so. As a multimedia artist, I question anthropocentric viewpoints and interpret the man made environment primarily through print, drawing and installation. Celestial Bodies is a series of prints that uses symbolism to articulate the concept of a tipping point. Some works portray the point at which light approaching a black hole changes direction, having been drawn toward the black hole’s mass. Others portray light emerging carelessly from a prism with no obstacles. Components such as slices of water are either upright, indicating an expected stasis, or upside-down, hinting at an eerie world with laws of nature unfathomable to us. While this series is more abstracted than much of my recent work, it manifests an environmental concern and a visual experimentation with balance, optimism, pessimism, and escapism.

Laura Bigger 'Constellations' (2019) Monoprint: intaglio & relief with copper leaf and reflective glass beads. 10.5" x 14.5”

Laura Bigger Bio
Laura Bigger is an Assistant Professor of Art and runs the printmaking area at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO. She has previously taught at the University of Nevada, Reno and Augsburg College, in Minneapolis, MN. Originally from Boulder, CO, Bigger received a BA in Studio Art and Hispanic Studies from Colorado College in 2008 and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2013. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions nationally.

Emily Dzieweczynski

I’m curious about empathy. My portfolio moves between science, art, and technology. It questions the lengths and limitations of these fields when they intersect at the concept of empathy. This interest in empathy comes from equal parts hope, stubbornness, and cynicism. I wanted to understand what could make people do good. The research began by studying Daniel Batson’s Empathy-Altruism hypothesis. This hypothesis states that the more empathic concern we feel towards an entity, the more altruistic motivation is experienced. Empathy is facilitated by both understanding or sharing emotional remembrances and one’s ability to project and experience bodily sensations in relation to another entity. My work is interdisciplinary. Psychological literature informs art making decisions, bringing something that is analyzed into something that is felt. I conduct research through data collection and documentation. Work in two-dimensional or new media functions as empathic stimuli, questioning how we connect and experience empathy. Ultimately, your reality is vastly different than mine and I want to understand that.

Emily Dzieweczynski 'An Audio Analysis of Home' (2020) 3D Rendering, Ambisonic Sound, and VR. 3:50 min

Emily Dzieweczynski is a multimedia artist, creative researcher, designer, and educator. She is interested in the intersection of science and art, particularly where they meet at the concept of empathy. Emily is a graduate from Gustavus Adolphus College, holding Bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Psychological Science, and studied Fine Arts Media at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her work takes the form of drawing, printmaking, writing, and new media; including code, virtual reality, 3D modeling, web-based media, sound, and video.

Emily’s work has been shown at venues such as the Target Gallery, the American Swedish Institute, Rosalux Gallery, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Gustavus Adolphus College, and the Children’s Museum of Minnesota. She has received funding through the National Science Foundation, an Arts and Cultural Heritage Grant, the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council, and Gustavus Adolphus College.

GIBSON + RECODER

Coming Attraction GIBSON + RECODER In our installation work, we use projected light to articulate space and time. Film projectors and celluloid are the material base of our constructions in light and shadow, the elemental properties of cinema. These things are deeply imbued with a history of viewership in the dark of the theater. To remove it from darkness is to flood this history and cast a certain illumination upon it. A certain exposure. Light spills in the shifting of film from its native darkness in enclosed chambers (camera obscura) to the uncanny openness and defamiliarized illumination of installation. We are exploring the shift, elaborating the displacement, recasting the light mechanics of a peculiar estrangement of the medium. The art of cinema, yes. But more timely: the becoming cinema of art. That is the coming attraction for us.

Gibson + Recoder 'Solid Light Film' (2017) 16mm film projectors, acrylic cylinder, and hardware. 14" x 41" x 13"

Collaborating artists Sandra Gibson (b. 1968, Portland, OR) and Luis Recoder (b. 1971, San Francisco, CA) have been exhibiting their expanded cinema installations and projection performances since 2000. Their works are in the permanent collections of major art museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, and Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany. Artist awards and commissions include the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, National Endowment for the Art’s U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, and Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad. Sq. Art in New York. Lecturing appointments include both long and short-term teaching residencies in the media departments of the University of Colorado Boulder, Denison University in Ohio, and California Institute for the Arts. They are featured artists and research associates of RESET THE APPARATUS! A Survey of the Photographic and the Filmic in Contemporary Art, hosted by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. Gibson + Recoder live and work in New York.

Carol Anne McChrystal

My materially-driven sculptures work through chemical processes and labor-intensive hand-making to explore the legacies of colonialism and trade, as well as the ways in which the climate catastrophe has compounded these histories of inequity. Inhabiting a tension between Earth’s immense geological history and the absurd everyday experience of plastic and labor, I consolidate the painstakingly hand-made with mass-produced consumables to pry open a speculative space to resist the means-ends rationale of late capitalism.

Carol Anne McChrystal 'Media Archaeology I' (2020) Dual layer DVD-Rs, kernite, dye, and copper nails. 60" x 60"

Born into the dual diaspora of the Philippines and Ireland, Carol Anne McChrystal is a Los Angeles–based artist and designer. Her materially-driven sculpture and videos work through chemical processes and labor-intensive hand-making to explore the legacy of colonialism and trade, as well as the ways in which the climate catastrophe has compounded these histories of inequity. Inhabiting the tension between Earth’s immense history and the absurdly mundane everyday experience of plastic and labor, her practice consolidates painstakingly hand-made and mass-produced consumables in order to pry open a speculative space in which to resist the means-ends rationale of late capitalism.
 
As part of the collaborative duo Nightmare City, she has created immersive environments that have been exhibited at Alter Space in San Francisco, The Luminary in St. Louis, and Horse and Pony in Berlin, and has shown video works at Essex Flowers in New York, MASS Gallery in Austin, and ACRETV in Chicago. Her writing has been published in critical arts publications like Art Practical and Temporary, and she recently self-published a collection of poetry titled, “Entropical Latitudes.” In tandem with her art practice, she organizes within the local Filipino community in Los Angeles with GABRIELA, the anti-imperialist Filipino women’s group.

Haumed Rahmani

Just as we learn who we are through the process of self reflection, so too does this projection piece form its own  emotions, memories, and identity by seeing itself through itself.  The camera, projector, and cross-dichroic prism act as the  organs of a feedback loop of converging and diverging light,  always recreating the present as a fractalized view of the past.  In this way, the system hopes to achieve some internal meaning. 

Every word in the dictionary  
is defined by other words in the dictionary,  
like every moment in time  
is defined by other moments:  


a language of fractals,  
only ever returning to itself.

Haumed Rahmani 'Self-Reflection' (2020) digital projection and prism.

Straddling creative, scientific, and digital frameworks, Haumed Rahmani spends his time thinking about questions that lead to better questions, in hopes of finding a guiding compass through the future. His code is being used by the likes of Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and the Max Planck Institute, and he’s slated to present at the International Liquid Crystal Conference 2022. With work ranging from microscope imaging to generative weaving and short film, Haumed is foremost a toolbuilder and communicator. He is currently working toward his PhD in Chemical Physics at the Advanced Materials & Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University.

​Joseph Santarpia

My practice captures a stark contrast of darkness and luminosity, referencing both a sense of visceral interiority and expansive space in order to address curiosities regarding embodiment and release, and autopoiesis and sympoiesis. I achieve a range of abstracted and representational imagery using pigment and fluid on paper along with monotype printing and photographic processes. Through series’ of ink and watercolor paintings, collages, cyanotypes, and some 3 and 4D pieces, my work indexes the comparability of and transitory nature between interiority, flesh, bodily mechanics, and corporeal structure, to that of the expanse of space into which bodily actions extend. My materials interact through varying ratios of fluid, light, and object. The cyanotype process is fundamentally photography and printmaking—chemical exposure to UV light and transferring objects onto paper. The creative capacity of the chemicals, light, and objects on the paper surface allow this media to be treated painterly, as my "Scope" and "Range" series are. Evoking the aesthetics of medical imagery (MRI and X-ray) and using exercise equipment as the subject of the image transfer, this work is imbued with a context of medicalization and rehabilitation.

​Joseph Santarpia 'BOUND vi' (2020) Cyanotype. 45" x 33"

Joseph Santarpia's work leverages autopoiesis—the self-creative capacity of material—to explore questions of release, embodiment, and landscape. He received his MFA from Stony Brook University in 2020, and a bachelors degree in Visual Art Education from SUNY New Paltz in 2017. He's shown in galleries across the United States, including: Small Green Door, East Los Angeles, CA; Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; LIC Arts Open, Long Island City, NY; The Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition, Brooklyn, NY; Limner Gallery, Hudson NY; The Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Stony Brook, NY; Gallery North, Setauket, NY. He is the recipient of awards including The Goldberger Fellowship and the Dorothy L. Memorial Purchase Prize.  Santarpia is also an active, New York State certified art educator currently working for the Lowville Academy & Central School District and previously for the Gallery North ArtVentures Program and Stony Brook University’s Studio Art Program.

At age 18, Santarpia had a spinal fusion of his L5, S1 vertebrae, altering his bodily reality. Because of this, he has grown to be intensely attentive to his bodily sensations. The lived experience and physical consequences of this procedure have since informed his life and art practice greatly. The two main components from which Santarpia’s practice manifest are (1) material approach and process, and (2) conceptual and biographical context. Both his material approach and the spinal fusion surgery he underwent, rely on systems of collaborative creativity (autopoiesis/sympoiesis). The fusion surgery uses bone graft, which is essentially a glue that hardens or fuses into bone over time. The procedure sets a rigid ground using rods and screws along and into the vertebrae for bodily regeneration to take its course. Similarly, Santarpia’s art practice facilitates a system of interaction: the flow of liquids and sediments; gravitational forces; evaporation; crystallization; state changes of liquids, gasses, and solids; UV light; emulsification; muscle contraction; respiration; cognition.

HR Stamenov

HR-Stamenov was born in 1981 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. In 2007 he obtained his Master’s Degree in Painting from Academia di Belle Arti di Carrara, Italy in the class of professor Omar Galliani. HR-Stamenov work combines technology, new media, video, traditional oil paintings, and site-specific light Installations. 
​
HR-Stamenov exhibited in: Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy, (2009); Lu.C.C.A. Museum - Center Of Contemporary Art, Italy (2011); Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia, Bulgaria (2011); La Triennale di Milano (2009 ,2018); Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, Poland (2012); Sofia Arsenal - Museum for Contemporary Art (2012); Sofia City Art Gallery (2009,10,11,12,13,14); Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria (2015) Structura Gallery, Sofia (2017); Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Viareggio, Italy (2018); CAMeC, La Spezia, Italy (2020) Æter Haga, The Hague, Netherlands (2020).

HR Stamenov 'We need miracles' (2020) Video, loop, silent.