Beware the Artist

Iranian, b. 1986

Ryan Syrell is a painter whose work focuses on the interrelationship between haptics, perception, and the recollection of sensory information.

Lou Ros has long approached his artistic journey with a unique hunger for experimentation and fundamental self discovery.  Each of his compositions begin with images of films, both his own and those taken from a variety of social media platforms that he appropriates, exploring,  transforming into his narrative; stories of his own from borrowed parts, people and places.

Lee Nowell-Wilson (b. Easton, MD 1989) is an American figurative artist who builds autobiographical drawings that investigate the emotional and ambivalent undertones within birth, domestic labor and human relationship. Through using the female body and maternal subject, Nowell-Wilson illuminates a detail of life that is extremely personal, yet universal. She predominantly executes this in an ironic way by using mundane objects (blankets, dishes, pillows, toys) to express complex human tendencies and emotions. Those ordinary household items create forms that become a secondary subject in-and-of themselves and interact with Nowell-Wilson’s figures on an interpersonal level. A tight turtleneck becomes a close partner in conversation. The womb of blankets upon one’s head becomes the hand that steals identity, while simultaneously creating a self-birthing place and points to a labor worth crowning.

Caleb Paul Kortokrax (b. 1987) is an American painter working in Baltimore, MD.

Dominic Chambers  Born 1993, St. Louis, MO Lives and works in New Haven, CT Chambers received BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2016 and is a 2019 MFA graduate from the Yale University School of Art.  Dominic's work is founded upon the relationship between reality and fantasy. At this illusory boundary, Dominic Chambers negotiates ideas of magical realism by presenting black figures as they delve into literature and contemplation within imagined landscapes. These subtle, leisurely moments not only celebrate each subject's visionary power but further negate pervasive and toxic clichés, instead focusing on black talent, creativity and mysticism.  The artist has exhibited his work in exhibitions in the US and Europe including a solo show at August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh, PA as well as group shows Abstraction of Black Citizenship: Art from St. Louis curated by Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud at Seattle University; Black Voices / Black Microcosm curated by Destinee Ross at CFHILL Stockholm, Sweden; Painting Is Its Own Country curated by Dexter Wimberly for the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, NC. He has participated in a number of residencies, including the Yale Norfolk summer residency and the New York Studio Residency Program in Brooklyn, NY.

Katherine is a multidisciplinary artist from Toronto, Ontario. Her fine art education began in high school where she attended Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts for Visual Arts. She completed her BFA in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University in 2014 and received a Certificate of Advanced Visual Studies at OCAD's Self-Directed Studio Program in Florence, Italy. In 2017, she furthered her creative education at CMU where she studied Special Effects Makeup Art and Design for TV and Film.

Adam Amram (b. 1994 Haifa, Israel) earned a B.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016. He has shown most recently with Mother Gallery (Beacon, New York), Harpy (Rutherford, New Jersey and Brooklyn, New York), Melanie Flood Projects, Adams and Ollman Gallery (Portland, Oregon) and Resort (Baltimore). Amram attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art Summer Fellowship in 2015, and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Vermont Studio Center, in Johnson Vermont, in 2018. Amram currently lives and works in the California Bay Area, and was recently named the 2020 YoungArts Daniel Arsham Fellow. His work has recently been published in Art Maze Magazine. He is currently exhibiting a painting at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, as part of The de Young Open, a juried exhibition celebrating the Museum's 125th anniversary, and commemorating local Bay Area artists. Rendered with vivid color and graphic symmetry, Amram’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures are best characterized by fantastical narratives which both contemplate the challenges of life and relish in the remarkability of existence.

Justin Mortimer (b.1970) is a British artist whose paintings consistently invite us to question the relationship between subject matter and content, beauty and horror, and between figuration and abstraction. While the imagery is almost exclusively pitiless, the texturing of the paint, the play between light and shade and the passages that lead from photo-realist definition to near-abstract formlessness are so sensitively handled as to make the work at least partially redemptive as well as to indicate a key philosophical dimension: the oblique relationship between evidence and interpretation.(ocula.com)  Justin Mortimer graduated from the Slade School of Art in 1992 and lives and works in London. He has won several prestigious awards including the EAST Award (2004), NatWest Art Prize (1996) and the BP National Portrait Award (1991).Recent solo exhibitions include BREED, Parafin Gallery, London (2019), HOAX, The Armory Show, New York, NY (2018), "It is Here" Parafin, London(2017), "while the worst" The Factory, London(2017), Haunch of Venison, London (2012), Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2011) and Master Piper, London (2010). Recent group exhibitions include How to Tell The Future from the Past, Haunch of Venison, New York (2013), Nightfall, MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts, Debrecen, Hungary (2012), MAC Birmingham (2011) and the 2011 Prague Biennial. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, London, the National Portrait Gallery, Canada, Royal Society for the Arts, Bank of America, NatWest Bank and the Flash Art Museum of Contemporary Art in Trevi, Italy.

Kyle J. Bauer’s mixed media sculptures lay bare devotion to seamless craftsmanship and the desire to create new meaning out of materials with humble origins. He takes cues from the silence, anticipation, and mounting tension that accompany the act of hunting, forcing the viewer to physically navigate around his sculptures. Bauer moved to Baltimore in 2011 after earning his MFA from Louisiana State University. 2011-2020, he has worked as the conservation technician of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art. As of February 2020 Kyle is now a Matting/Framing Specialist in the Department of Paper conservation at the NGA.

He is a 2016 Hamiltonian Fellowship recipient and was an Artist in Residence at Baltimore Clayworks from 2011-2014. Bauer has been honored as a 2014 Sondheim Artscape Prize finalist, a 2015 and 2017 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant recipient, and was awarded third place in the 2015 Miami University Young Sculptors Competition and a 2018 Award of Excellence for the Exhibition 280 at Huntington Museum of Art. His work has recently been featured in exhibitions at Huntington Museum of Art, Hamiltonian Gallery, Delaware Contemporary, the Walters Art Museum, The Wassaic Project, Vox Populi, Flashpoint Gallery, Loyola University, McDaniel College, Arlington Art Center, and School 33 Art Center. He has been invited to present at MAP Gallery's THIRTY speaker series, The Luce Center at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Loyola University, York College, Marymount University, and Dickinson College.