me/dee/ai/shuns

Joy Feasley

(b. 1966, Buffalo, NY; lives and works in Philadelphia and Boston) studied at Massachusetts College of Art, Cooper Union, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Most recently, Feasley and Paul Swenbeck presented Out, Out Phosphene Candle at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI and Will o’ the Wisp at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME. Feasley’s work has also been exhibited at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Moore College of Art, Temple Contemporary Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Vox Populi, all Philadelphia, PA; Columbia College, Chicago, IL; LUMP Gallery and Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC. Feasley’s work is included in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the West Collection. She has been in residence at the Acadia Summer Arts Program, Bar Harbor, ME, the 18th Street Arts Center Santa Monica, CA and the Arts/Industry Residency Program Kohler, WI. In 2011, she was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Feasley and Paul Swenbeck recently completed a major permanent installation for the Art Preserve of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and are currently in residence at Stelo Arts, Portland and Colton, OR. Feasley is represented by Adams and Ollman in Portland, OR and Fleisher Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia, PA.

Glenndon Hyde

“My art seeks to find the beauty in the broken, and discarded. Having been discarded by my evangelical family for being queer as a three dollar bill, and refusing to accept that it was wrong, my life became dominated by fantasy as an escape from the tyranny, and brutality. It allowed me to fight for my place because I had a safe world to escape to.
I moved to NYC in 1990 and became a regular in the night club scene under the guise of Anna Conda. My naive determination never knew fear, only the desire to meet the challenges of "fame", the trappings of excess associated even with minor "fame", and began to develop a sense of self worth. Then in 1993 I tested positive for AIDS. My diagnosis was read to me over the phone, telling me without insurance they couldn't help, and my mother sent me a get well card with a ten dollar check. This was my turning point.
I moved to San Francisco, had my third and final suicide attempt, and started making art from the tubes, and monitors, that had been attached to my body. I was poor so I collected what was around me and began making art. I was the inaugural artist of the New Black Pop Up gallery, I continued to make art randomly, as I ran a drag show called Charlie Horse, and had a career in politics after running for office, served as president of the Harvey Milk Club, and as Co-Chair of the SF Entertainment Commission, while attending City College to study anthropology. After leaving an abusive 7 year relationship I moved in with a hoarder, and began creating art as a way of cleaning the yard, and house. The making of art seemed to fit my everyday need to process the great freedom I found in the new thoughts and understandings I found in my studies. When I moved to Sacramento for my undergrad and graduate degrees in Cultural Anthropology my art practice grew, becoming a integral part of my healing daily practice. I was shown often at stores in the area and at many galleries. After a few years of this I knew my life long dream of being: "an Artist" were coming true. Moved to Pittsburgh in 2019 to make art my reality.
I moved into the Spinning Plate Artist Lofts and hit the road running. I have show at several First Friday events, had three self curated group shows with other residents and my first solo show "This is Garbage", a well received installation show where 80% of my work sold. I have recently joined the Fiber Arts Guild of Pittsburgh and am adding a stronger finish to my work. I am embracing the craft element that appears in my work, now that I have learned more about art, art history, and grown in understanding that drag was for me performance art. In other words I have always been working as an artist, and even though the mediums have changed, my voice has remained strong, clear, and boldly defiant.” [website]

Cole M. James
”I am an interdisciplinary artist navigating the African Diaspora, circling the expanse of queerness and traversing through womanhood. My work is composed of the intersections between digital production and analog collections of lived experiences. Digital media allows me the privilege of expanding or collapsing the intersections of race and gender though the lens of language and aesthetics. This type of control over my presences is not always of agency in the physical world so I collect experiences and conversations about race class and gender. I make work allowing the idea to dictate the media in which my responses to these collisions and encounters manifest.

These manifestations take many forms including activism, poetry, painting, drawing, sound and video. I use digital media to access the multiplicity of meaning between language and image. My studio practice is a reflection of the work I do as an activist and collaborator. In my public engagement work I carve space for discussion that allows people of color to express the emotional math they engage in while in predominantly white art programs. These conversations engendered the video work Manchego. In this piece I examine the intersections of race, class, and gender through imagery and language. I wrote a poem that measures the cost of buying manchego cheese in emotional math. In this work I examine the cultural implications of buying an object of escapism to balance the lack of fulfillment.

My activism allows me to engage with the public. I am interested in the role of Art within larger systems of power. As a member of the Paletas SaMo Project I carved a space for city members to express their ideas about public art. Using a model of the gift economy we gave out naturally made and sustainable popsicles in the summer months to any one who desired to share their opinions about the public art in their city. At the end of the project we presented the information to the City Council at the monthly meeting. What I learned from that experience engendered my current body of work Meditations On Rue. While engaging with the community at Woodlawn Cemetery, I met community members with bloodlines that spanned back to the incorporation of the city. They mentioned a need to maintain the history and honor the ancestors through art. Meditations on Rue explores the relationship my ancestors had with medicinal plants. I am investigating the use of African Rue in Africa and the uses of American Rue in the South before 1900. I am creating a series of botanical illustrations and digital medicinal guide to preserve ancestral knowledge for healing.

I come from a working class family who have always participated in community building activities. My work in the community is always present in my practice whether it be leading workshops in transitional housing through Liberated Arts Collective or a series of meditative drawings about the self we present to the world. I process what is experienced using visual language to pose questions. I think of my work as an offering of perception with the possibilities of the familiar and space to engender understanding.” [website]

Casey Kauffmann is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, installation, video, and a variety of digital mediums. She is a lecturer at the University of California San Diego. Kauffmann was born in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, California in 1989. She lives and works in Oceanside, California and received her MFA from The University of Southern California in 2020 and her Bachelor of Arts from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her work has been featured in publications such as Artnet, Artillery, LAWeekly, The New Yorker, I-D Vice, and Hyperallergic. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in galleries such as Transfer Gallery, Centro de Cultura Digital, the Brand Library in Glendale, Lyles and King, Coaxial, Arebyte, Cirrus, and more. Kauffmann’s collage Instagram project @uncannysfvalley, which she started in 2014, features digital collage works and GIFs created using only her iPhone. The pieces Kauffmann posts to this account are an ever-accumulating collection of material from all corners of the internet, sourced from Tumblr, Instagram, and Google. This Instagram account and body of work has been exhibited in many galleries, written about in several esteemed publications, and led to her admission to the MFA program at the University of Southern California. Kauffmann’s drawing practice functions as an inquiry into the representation of femme emotion and hysteria in both art history and popular culture. [website]

Joseph Lazaro Rodriguez is a multidisciplinary artist residing in Philadelphia. He uses his personal experiences to create paintings, drawings, sculptures, and large scale multi-channel video installations. He has exhibited his work at Wassaic Project in Wassaic, New York; Anna Zorina Gallery in New York, New York; Works on Paper Fine Arts Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and various other venues in the United States. He studied Fine Arts at Pratt Institute and attained an MFA from The Pennsylvania Academy of The Fine Arts in 2019. He has worked as a critical care nurse in large urban hospitals focusing on cardiothoracic and heart transplant surgery populations in tandem with his artistic studio practice before retiring in 2017. [website]

Dan Taulapapa McMullin
”The Healer's Wound”
This video work by Samoan fa'afafine (non-binary) artist Dan Taulapapa McMullin, is a collage of texts and images, both indigenous and colonial, on the queer history of Polynesia, where Taulapapa is from. The work seeks to contrast indigenous texts and colonial criticisms from the traditional fa'afafine (men living as women), fa'atane/whakatane (women living as men) and mahu (queer healers) of traditional Polynesian societies that continue to thrive today. The video is a new work based on Taulapapa's recent artist book The Healer's Wound: A Queer Theirstory of Polynesia, which is also on display here, and which was launched earlier this year at the 2022 Hawai'i Triennial. The book is based on more than several years of research by Taulapapa into the archives of Samoan, Tongan, Hawaiian, Tahitian, New Zealand Maori and other Polynesian language chants, as well as colonial criticisms like Captains Cook and Bligh in English, and other colonial texts in French, Spanish, and German. This work seeks to find, from an archive that was decimated by colonialism, a shared indigenous history, culture, and way of living.
Dan Taulapapa McMullin is an artist and poet from Sāmoa i Sasa'e (American Samoa). Their artist book “The Healer's Wound: A Queer Theirstory of Polynesia” (2022) was published by Pu'uhonua Society and Tropic Editions of Honolulu for the 2022 Hawai'i Triennial.Their book of poems Coconut Milk (2013) was on the American Library Association Rainbow List Top Ten Books of the Year. The Bat and other early works received a 1997 Poets&Writers Award from The Writers Loft. They co-edited Samoan Queer Lives (2018) published by Little Island Press of Aotearoa. Their art, texts and films have shown at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Metropolitan Museum, De Young Museum, Musée du quai Branly, Auckland Art Gallery, Bishop Museum, the Kathmandu Triennial and the Venice Biennale. Their film Sinalela won the 2002 Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival Best Short Film Award; and their film 100 Tikis was the opening night film selection of the 2016 Présence Autochtone in Montreal and was an Official Selection in the Fifo Tahiti Film Festival. Taulapapa's art studio and writing practice is based in Muhheaconneock lands / Hudson, New York where they live with their partner.[website]    

Chris Trueman (digital video) MakeitRad (3D design) and Eliot Lipp (sound engineering) collaborating on “Fly Through Light” “1PHW” & “3PBH” Courtesy of Winston Wachter Fine Art
Chris Trueman is an artist who has worked between painting and digital media for twenty years. He double majored in Painting and Digital media at the San Francisco Art Institute and holds an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. He has exhibited his work in galleries broadly both domestically and internationally. In 2018 he was one of the early adopters of NFT technology. Since then, Chris has been invited to launch NFTs on the curated platforms Nifty Gateway, Makers Place, Foundation App and has explored the open platforms OpenSea, Rarible and Hic et nunc. In 2021 he  was one of the first artists to bring NFTs into the gallery space with his work “WWMC5” presented at Winston Wachter Fine Art in Seattle and at the Untitled art fair in Miami. Chris is part of a small handful of artists that has been able to successfully navigate both the physical art world as well as the digital NFTs. In spring 2021 Chris helped found the NFT mobile marketplace CreatoRanch which is the first of its kind available on the Apple Store and Google play. Chris is currently a co-founder and Chief Community Lead at CreatoRanch. [website]

Eliot Lipp is a musician and sound designer living in Brooklyn, New York. For the last two decades, Lipp has been releasing various styles of electronic music and touring the US and Internationally. Since 2015 he’s been doing sound design and programming for Yamaha and various companies. Over the last two years, Lipp has been exploring generative music and AI-based sequencing for compositions. Lipp has been using generative music techniques in his work as a way of creating unique and modern sounds, often bouncing back & forth between very basic programing with analog devices and cutting-edge software. Hear my most recent music on all streaming platforms under Eliot Lipp, Minutes Unlimited, and Lipphead. More info at eliotlipp.com.

Makeitrad is a Los Angeles based artist, designer, and pixel manipulator. Their work examines the internal struggle to find organic beauty while being trapped in technology. Much of the work is created with artificial intelligence and machine learning as a tool. Other times the ideas of randomness and noise drive the final forms. Combine this with the ability to see through the lens of a child and you are left with something vibrant, fun, and innocent. Makeitrad gained notoriety for their breathtaking 3D looping animations and crystals. Their notable collections include Extraordinary Crystals, Interiors Collection, CRYST-AI-LS, Wonder Globes and Artificial Architecture. Recently, Makeitrad has dropped the generative Solitude fxhash collection centered around detailed desert monuments. Their work has been displayed on MakersPlace, Foundation, KnownOrigin, Opensea, Hic et nunc, fxhash, and CreatoRanch. A complete list of work can be found at https://solo.to/makeitrad.