24-art

COVER IMAGE:  Agata Lis

David Quady

Artist Statement: My work grows out of observation as a reciprocal relationship with the world, a conversation between myself and the visible environment. Through painting, I organize and distill what I encounter to reveal something specific about my experience of the world’s vastness and complexity. I think of a painting as the crystallization of a moment, distinct from photography in that the image is inseparable from the process of its making. My point of view is woven into the work through material, gesture, color, and structure, and ideally, technique becomes an unconscious servant to lived experience rather than an end in itself.

I am interested in how direct engagement with observed reality can lead to images that are both specific and open-ended. Through simplification, selection, and arrangement, I try to illuminate moments that resist fixed interpretation while remaining grounded in the physical world. The surfaces of my paintings carry evidence of this exchange, records of sustained looking and material negotiation.

Kirsten Clay

Kirsten Clay is a full-time traveling photographer whose work has captured the essence of diverse landscapes, cultures, and moments. With a deep passion for photography, Kirsten has used her artistry not only in her self-published works but also in collaboration with literary magazines. A lifelong lover of photography, she is constantly seeking new ways to refine her craft, pushing the boundaries of her creative vision. Whether on the road or at home, Kirsten’s commitment to her art is fueled by an unending desire to learn, explore, and capture the world through her lens.

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Ellen June Wright

Artist Statement: Freedom is the spontaneity of abstract expressionism, giving myself over to the unknown of the blank page, allowing intuition to replace calculations. I approach each art practice as an exploration of my inner self, of my state of mind. The hardest part is knowing for sure when an image of value has emerged. It’s possible to ruin the image by making one too many marks. But then it’s only paper and pigment, so I start again trying to learn the language of expressionism.

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Harrison Zeiberg

Harrison Zeiberg is a photographer and writer from Massachusetts. He is a non-profit professional, and his previous creative credits include Havik, Inlandia Review, Parley Lit, Your Theater, Washington Square Review LLC, Northern New England Review, Wayne Literary Review, Journal X, and more.

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Celine Lam

To understand the world is to understand the self. My painting practice borrows concepts from physics and Eastern philosophy. I am primarily interested in raw materials and how they transform from state to state through time. In this, my paintings are snapshots of processes of fields of forces. 

One way that I think about time and forces is blurring. In my practice, “blur” is both a perceptual condition and a metaphysical method. I think of blurring as a visual and conceptual phenomenon. If one were to register all of the sensory inputs in an ordinary room, for example, one’s mind would be completely overwhelmed. Instead, our subconscious cognition filters out much of our sensory inputs—there is a sense in which these processes provide a blur-like filter on the world to ease the processing power of our eyes and mind. Our minds sacrifice details to achieve a smoothness that we can comprehend. 

Blurring could also be thought of as a general sense of being-in-between states—as when a shape drawn in ink becomes diluted by water on the fibers of paper, or a grid rendered in oil paint is wiped or brushed out into a quivering field of bowed lines.

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