chukwumaa engages in sound installation and performance art as means of public address. Exploring how the aural element shapes and controls our environment, and also opens up possibilities for spatial reconfiguration, sound, in chukwumaa’s work, is both a method of control constantly transgressed and an inherently subversive medium.

Keenan Bennett ideated the Incubation Series with Kirsten Gill in 2015, and was instrumental in starting a productive dialogue between the Fine Arts and the Art History departments at the University of Pennsylvania. His research-based practice explores a nexus of concerns that include marginalized histories, monumentality, and youth subcultures. His immersive multimedia installations trace the cracks and silences of history and toy with the affects of absence and lack. Dense plays of light and shadow, symbolic imagery, and perceptual effects animate Bennett’s mythical, unlocatable situations.

Click here to have a look at the Q&A session in which Kirsten and Keenan illustrate the origins of the project at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

Stephanie Elden’s “hoop house” characterizes her artistic trajectory, which foregrounds both the complex relationships and the innate tensions between natural and unnatural elements. In Elden’s artwork, manufactured space highlights dialectical processes between the artificiality of manmade materials and the organic fluidity of water.

Richard Hogan’s photos interrogate canonical approaches to both the style and subject matter of photography, moving towards a transcendent critique of not only the medium itself, but also a broader history of image-making. Through his seemingly unassuming investigations, the unique abilities of photography to imitate, heighten, and subvert reality are gradually revealed.
 

Olivia Jones utilizes fabrics, wood, and steel, mining the aesthetic registers of industrial design and abstract art, to create works of art that fluidly combine architecture, sculpture, and painting. Jones’s alluringly tactile and formally rigorous objects unsettle their own visual appeal through odd contortions that evoke the uncanny.

In Doah Lee’s paintings, which are amalgams of recognizable, quasi-universal symbols and unruly yet familiar abstractions, visual signs oscillate between almost and barely recognizable. The mutability of common cultural symbols is explored and exploited through repetition in a practice that meditates on cultural translation, immigration, and otherness.

In site-specific installations and collage- and text-based pieces, Sarah Legow juxtaposes seemingly arbitrary found objects in complex visual phrases. Sarah’s assemblages investigate processes of relation – between a range of polarities such as the “you” and the “I” as well as more conceptual dichotomies – in which mirroring and reflection are metaphors for confrontation and address.
 

Combining a minimal aesthetic with a near-documentary approach, Daria McMeans blends film’s stylistic classifications and opens up new relational modes by training the camera on herself and her own family.  McMeans’s enveloping three channel installation provokes a range of emotions - from empathy to discomfort - as it mobilizes personal experiences and explores the possibility of conversations about race and lineage.
 

Yue Nakayama devises her visual literature based on her personal writings about politics, recurring ordinary or historical events, and mass media. Her images and performances are full of humor, an important trait in Nakayama's art: firstly as an iconoclastic mechanism that challenges taboos against entertainment in contemporary art, and secondly as a disavowal of excessively deadpan topics.

Kaitlin Pomerantz investigates the concept of self-location and disorientation in the interstices between urban and natural spaces.  Her digitally rendered camouflage curtains evoke the genres of trompe l’oeil, botanical illustration, and landscape painting simultaneously.

Marianna Williams makes manifest her explorations of the home and nostalgia through enquiries of physical thresholds where performances of identity are crafted in liminal spaces, affecting social practices that can be traced in both physical and digital environments.  She interrogates and abstracts dualities such as past and present, public and private, presence and absence through physical instillations of constructed spaces as well as in digital representations.