CATHY DIAMOND
In this new body of work, I am most interested in the way imagery and mark-making moves through the space.  It circulates, moving from the bottom left around and upwards toward the upper right and down and around again.   This rhythmic movement orients me into an animated place.  There is an exploration into off-patterning, that is a kind of repetition that then veers into asymmetry.  Some of the works  reference more directly the sensations and inflections  of natural environments - gardens and riverbanks.  Others, like Present Tense and Yin and Yang are like jazz riffs of the spirit of the human in nature.  And others are loosely figurative compositions:  Falling Away I and II and Earth Red I and II are part of a series I was drawn into by the middle-east crisis, so I have revisited and revamped notions of the figure.  These are suffering, struggling images that I brought into being to try to understand the world’s new reality as it unfolded.  

LAURIE FADER
Fables, or cautionary tales, with narrative elements embedded in labyrinthian corridors of color, shape and form are woven into my recent work. The early tentative painterly decisions usually include a notion of landscape that will be an expression of the precariousness of our ecosystem. The imagery will eventually be cloaked in a richly pigmented spatial dynamic to engage the viewer, and the process of layering and excavation will hopefully unveil a deeper psychological truth.No image is in itself particularly charged with meaning - but its scale and intensive collaboration with other images will combine to make a melodic unearthly world, a heater, credible but impossible.Residencies often take me to magnificent places where the atmosphere and bio-politics find their way into my paintings: the mountains in snowy Wyoming, the Pacific Northwest forests, or even the local plants from my home. They are not described as much as felt through color and temperature.Other paintings have been accumulating layers and modifications for years and are deeply surreal. Unlikely co-hosts of Hokusai, Fra Angelico, and the Brothers Grimm whisper to me subliminally while I paint, to inject magic into our actual crisis of biological survival. Folkloric parables leverage dystopia with humor to invite the viewer into a comic, macabre Bosch-like world.Ultimately, I hope to find formal resolution that may be irrational, but encapsulates the anxiety and strangeness of living today.


DENISE SFRAGA
The biology of plants, nature, and the natural order has always been and continues to be an important and integral part of my creative life. As both an inquisitive observation- oriented artist and avid gardener, I’ve always found inspiration in exploring the various stages in the life cycle of plants, from early germination and growth, to seed dispersion
and decay. This body of work anchors an inventory of organic shapes, layered textures, and earthen colors within a subtle niche of reverence and remembrance – a testament to
the artistic, cultural, and symbolic heritage of plant life throughout history. Each piece attempts to capture quiet spiritual energy that radiates a meditative presence.