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Michael Bell
Memorial of the Forgotten
Mixed media sculpture, wire, blacklight spray paint Size variable 2022 A good memorial allows one to exit the high pace, physical world to the spiritual. That act of remembrance gives us the light to power our way through grief and loss. This memorial is dedicated to, inspired by, and meant to honor the lives of the Trans people murdered over the course of the last year. The piece consists of fourteen names hand bended using multi-purpose wire and suspended. Each name is the actual name of a victim of murder in 2021. The word “forgotten” describes Trans people in the piece because they are often forgotten in conversations about LGBT violence and often forgotten by the justice system just when they ask to be truly seen and heard. In this piece, their names may appear unreadable from one perspective, however, the piece requires the viewer to move through and around the names. The movement around the names represents the search chosen family members and friends undertake for justice. I want the viewer to have to replicate that search to find the person and name in the scribbles and clues. Once each name can be found, read, and understood, the search ends. I choose their names to represent each person because trans people take the power to decide their own names to declare who they are, when, in any other experience, they are punished for who they are. Suspended and shining, each name appears to be radiating its own light, almost appearing like a soul ascending from the ground. This reminds the audience on another level the spiritual importance of honoring the dead so that their names, their true names, be put to rest. 
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Jennifer Muirhead
Tree of Light
Photograph 2022 11 x 14 in |
Blinded with Hope Photograph 2022 11 x 14 in |
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I have been taking pictures since I was a kid. My father handed me a manual camera and said figure it out. I usually do candid portraits of people but with COVID-19 I’ve had to stick to more nature shots and self portraits as of late. Photography is my biggest passion.
Maddie McGhee
While lost in the wilderness, you stumble across an opening with a faintly glowing castle.
Do you choose to enter? >yes >no |
Castle Keep
Blacklight paint and posca marker 16x20 in 2022 
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Courtney Whitlow
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Iconoclast
Digital silver gelatin print 39 x 62 in 2022 The white wedding dress is a relatively young tradition in Western culture. The prescribed symbolism of sexual purity and idealism in relationships is, at best, fanciful - an impossible standard to which most people will fall short. Iconoclast subjects the wedding dress to the scrutiny of ultraviolet light, used in criminal investigations to reveal bloodstains, semen, etc. not visible to the naked eye. The dress itself is wrinkled and stained, unidealized and old-fashioned. The oval format simultaneously operates as a mirror and frame, reflecting self and displaying other. Upon exiting the space, the world outside the veil will temporarily seem too bright and too loud before they become acclimatized to it once again. Ultimately, the experience is meant to raise a question that viewers must answer themselves. 
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Daniel Counce
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Glowing
Oil on canvas 18 x 24 in 2022 |
Sophia Mason
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Powerstrip Inflatable
1.9 oz ripstop, embroidery floss, piping, trim, LED lights, box fan 2022 8 x 3 x 2.5 ft Powerstrip wrestles with a complicated relationship to power. The inflatable is comically large, bulging outward, except where the sockets force it to keep shape.
The whole body of it glows gently, and the fan that inflates it gives off a cooling, gentle hum. Every detail of the outlet strip has been sized up and attended to in gold thread, worked over like an heirloom quilt. Fig vines outlined in gaudy gold trim snake their way around its front and back. Many once radical communities (America itself included) harbor suspicion toward outsiders with authority. But that skepticism can backfire when the community installs its own leaders with unchecked power. The back of the inflatable displays an adapted quote from Mormonism, an American religious experiment like this. The expanded quote states, “We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion. when we undertake to cover our sins...or to exercise control or dominion or compulsion upon the souls of the children of men, in any degree of unrighteousness, behold, the heavens withdraw themselves; the Spirit of the Lord is grieved; and…Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man.” |
The front of the power strip shows common American idioms (common on 19th century American quilts), but here adapted so that the idiom warns of unchecked power.
“Bygones become Epigones.” “Bad barrels spoil more than just apples.” “Forewarn and fore get.” Mormon feminists turned to 19th century quilts to understand how their foremothers dealt with unchecked power and discovered women’s priesthood rituals and leadership that had been whitewashed in the 20th century. These were significant enough discoveries to spark another mormon feminist wave in 2013 (alongside the recent global feminist wave) and excommunications. A multi-generational exodus of LDS mormons from the church continues. |
