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Morgan Slade

Morgan Slade received his BFA in photography in 2002 from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He has shot for several magazines including Swindle, Anthem, Juxtapoz, OUT Magazine, Western Interiors & Design and many others. Morgan has exhibited both photography and mixed media work in galleries including solo shows at Copro Gallery and Billy Shire Fine Arts. He has worked in the publishing industry, including heading US production for fine art book publisher TASCHEN.

Morgan Slade alters his digital photographs of scantily clad women wearing high school mascot heads with paint, pen and pencil. He transforms straightforward images to chaotic madness. His pieces prey on primitive natural instincts with a youthful aesthetic appeal and bright, vibrant colors. By defacing exceptionally striking people, Slade aesthetically changes his figures to appear flawed in some manner. He creates visual critiques of consumerism, advertising and technology by inventing his own symbols or by reusing familiar icons and assigning them a different purpose.

To execute these photographs, Slade begins by printing them on archival digital proofing prints. He then sands down the paper to appear aged and weathered. He builds up layers of collage, gloss gels and gold leafing. He then allows paint to move throughout the piece without control resulting in drips and splatters. His painted photographs are stylistically unique while combining preexisting methods, styles and techniques.

Billy Chuck

Billy Chuck moved to North Dakota in 1996 to teach graphic design in the art department at Minot State University. Prior to his teaching engagement he worked as a commercial artist in New York. Within the past three years he has exhibited art in Milwaukee, Detroit, New York, Minnesota, Montana and around North Dakota. His ornately framed multi-media pop-paranoid collages are often poured-on with a clear acrylic that helps hold together strange bits of ephemera ranging from old paint-by-numbers to plastic ants. He is fascinated with each individual ingredient and the infinite messages that can be expressed by combining and juxtaposing them. It is through this process that he discovers meaning and expresses thought.

St. Monci

St. Monci currently resides in Rochester, New York, where he works primarily in abstract and non-representational work. He exhibits frequently across the northeastern region as well as on a national level, most recently in a group exhibition at the Fabric8 Gallery in San Francisco, California.

This small group of paintings continues along a stream of consciousness that St. Monci has tapped into and been exploring for over a year now. Combining his formal art education with his street roots, St. Monci has developed his own personal form for documenting his emotions, thoughts and inspiration through a visual language that employs certain fundamental art elements alongside more gestural ‘graffiti’ forms of mark making.

Mona Superhero

Mona Superhero is a unique new artist based in Portland, OR. The Willamette Week has written, “Mona is a rising pop art superstar whose 15 minutes have officially commenced.” Her work is reminiscent of sixties style silk-screened pop art that is comprised entirely of tape and carved with the precise strokes of an X-acto blade. Layer upon layer of relief-cut, brightly colored duct tape is used to sculpt images that are dangerously sexy and thought provoking. Infamous working class Rock Stars populate her works and world.

Mona’s array of art includes album art for Gruesome Galore, Hillstomp and Failing Records. The Willamette Week named Hillstomp’s “The Woman That Ended The World” 2005’s best album of the year calling Mona’s cover ‘gut-wrenching’. She also has exhibited her work in fine art galleries in San Francisco, New York, Portland and Seattle.

Mona was born in Abilene, TX in 1970 and raised in Austin. Although she has no formal training she has been active in the Portland art scene as a co-founder of Danzine magazine and as the writer, director and producer of a series of acclaimed cabarets.

She has been featured and/or interviewed by CODE (Amsterdam) Willamette Week, Portland Tribune, Seattle Weekly, Barfly and the Oregonian.

Adam Wallacavage

Inspired by an obsession with the ocean and a fascination with extravagant interiors of old churches, Adam Wallacavage transformed the dining room of his South Philadelphia Victorian Brownstone into something from the pages of a Jules Verne novel. Teaching himself the ancient art of ornamental plastering, Adam evolved his new found skills into making plaster cast octopus shaped chandeliers as the final touch to his underwater themed room. Not content with leaving the chandeliers to his own home, Adam continued his experimentation by making more and more. Beyond making chandeliers, Adam Wallacavage is also an accomplished photographer, documenting artists, musicians, daredevils and all things weird and wonderful. His first book, Monster Size Monsters, was released in August of 2006 through Gingko Press and spans fifteen years of his photography.

JonPaul Smith

Smith is inspired by the complex relationships of systems and patterns that control and dictate the world in which we live. Using traditional and non-traditional printmaking techniques, he begins by creating original prints on paper. He cuts the paper into strips of various sizes, then painstakingly overlaps and weaves the strips into intricate compositions.

Jonpaul on his work: “I weave these de-constructed images into organized, open-narrative works enabling the viewers to create their own visual and narrative experience as they navigate through the juxtapositions of surface and color,” says Smith. “I choose not to provide a focal point because I want to the viewers’ eye to be constantly moving. Every visual path is unique with the eye moving slower or faster through intersections depending on the size of the strips, the colors, and the scale of the piece. When standing close to a work, minute details are revealed. But from a distance, the viewer may see simply a system of related colors in gridlock. Hence, one’s perspective shifts from ‘microcosmic to macro-cosmic.”

Niagara

JoKa

JoKa is a contemporary artist specializing in pointillism, using toothpicks as his sole form of paint application. A student of inefficiency, his personal philosophy is “it isn’t art if it doesn’t take three times longer than it’s supposed to!” Common subjects include charbroiled meat, sex, dissection, hypnosis, mammalian societal bonds, youth corruption, obesity, swashbuckling, insects, male-pattern baldness, bumps, self-loathing, candy corn and clones. Using collage, he skews and distorts, pushing familiar images into the surreal. His work has been called nostalgic, though not by him. His art has been featured nationally as well as internationally, and in national art publications. He is a carnivore.

Bradley Hoffer

Bradley Hoffer likes making things. He wants to be loved.

Denis Randall

Inspired by repurposing discarded materials and objects,
my reclaimed wood pieces are an assembly of naturally eroded
parts of common man-made structures. Crumbling painted benches,
cracked window panes, sun-scorched driftwood, and rusted metal objects
are among the many found materials that are given a new life.

Hiroshi Kumagai

Born in Tokyo, Hiroshi Kumagi is an artist currently living in Jersey City.

“I used to be the biggest comic geek. My aesthetic was highly affected by Japanese Manga. My works evolved from creating my own images to appropriating found images. My obsession towards plastic tactility remained the same though.”

Damarak the Destroyer

Born and raised in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, IL, Damara Kaminecki graduated from Pratt Institute with a BFA in Drawing. Damara currently lives in Chicago but can be found traveling back to NY frequently, working freelance as an illustrator, an artist assistant, on her own portfolio and riding red bike.

Bask

Bask is the moniker of one, Ales Bask Hostomsky, who along with his parents emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Florida and began to soak up America’s popular iconic imagery along with the sun. He quickly began to notice similarities between the communistic iconic propaganda from his youth and the consumer advertising of his teens. Bask soon discovered that they were simply, two sides of the same coin. Each vying for our short-lived attention spans, all the while selling us (or telling us?) anything and everything from Marxism to McDonalds. Seeking conspiracies -and finding them embedded in the popular iconography of the mass media, Bask began painting bold, media critical broadsides to assuage his fear of being manipulated. A fear cultivated in a repressive regime, had now returned, but to the most unlikely and safest of places- The American living room.

The artist’s richly textural work imbue his “anti-iconic,” sometimes satirical worldview with an undercurrent of dark emotion. His canvases are the city’s flotsam and jetsam of industrial and consumer decay. Combining his graphic skill with his trademark multi-layered applications, Bask builds up the surface only to break down the image. “My art is a type of deconstruction,” says Bask, “I try to focus on the imperfection of things, rather then their unachievable perfection.”