Capucine Safir

ARTIST STATEMENT

Through my art, I explore Nature with her random and pure forms. Femininity in its roundness, strength, and complexity, is another significant inspiration.
I work mainly on instinct. The process of reduction plays an important role in my creation. By removing details and simplifying my shapes, I obtain the roundness, sensuality, and emotion that I seek in abstraction. This applies to my sculptures as well as to my drawings or paintings. If the physical involvement in the two media differs considerably, the gesture, the movement as well as my thoughts go in the same direction. I like the idea of installing a dialogue between my sculptures and my drawings. 

My work is elegant, pure, organic, and sensual 

BIO

Born in Paris, Capucine Safir now lives in Miami. 

After working for several years in the movie industry, she decided to change career and earn a degree in interior design in Australia where she lived for 3 years. Back in Paris, she works for her own firm. In addition, she discovered the art of direct carving in stone in a studio of the 17th district. This form of art is immediately natural. It is after her second expatriation, in Miami, in 2013, that she becomes a professional artist by extending her practice to other materials and techniques. Capucine integrates a local gallery in the first year. Since then, her sculptures have been part of numerous private collections and are regularly exhibited in contemporary art galleries and fairs throughout the United States. 

ARTIST LINKS

Website:  www.capucinesafir.com

Instagram : @capucinesafirart

PJ Mills

ARTIST STATEMENT

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

― Marcel Proust

ARTIST LINKS

Website:   www.pjmills.info     

Instagram: @pjmills101

Polen Cerci

BIO

Polen is an architect by training, worked in design industry and with developers for a long time in her professional carrier. Her architecture projects when she was a student were more expressive and conceptual than just rationally followed lines. Form used to follow function. Big sheets were regulated canvases bringing different aspects of human requirements. She studied MBA and MIS following her Architectural degree in Cyprus. She then moved back to Bodrum and Istanbul and left Istanbul for good for Miami. She had successful exhibitions at Art Basel in Miami. She worked with different artists and curators and currently working on 3D canvas paintings, sculptures and contemporary abstract acrylic paintings.

ARTIST STATEMENT

‘Form follows function’, I followed and believed in this in my architecture practices, in the past. Now I am free of function and form that makes sense. Nothing needs to make sense. It is in the eye of the beholder. I experience becoming limitless by one painting at a time, by unlearning, by forgetting, by leaving the past and future behind in that moment. What excites me is the bystanders, before they read the name tag, before they read anything about art or my art pieces, I am curious about their facial expressions, where their eyes follow on the painting, what do they think and of all the words and thoughts that crossed their mind which words go thru the preconceived filters and which words do they choose to say, can they break even the smallest of the barriers of a lower case rationalism. It is like a discovery; it is like an expensive Rorschach test without the test and without any expectations for results. Their interpretation becomes a part of my art. Maybe not all, but some, some express it in ways that I cannot even imagine. Simple, a few words or sentences but in that moment, I feel we are connecting thru my art, thru their soul and need for expression.

ARTIST LINKS

Website: polencerci.com

Instagram: @polen_cerci_art

Alex Nuñez

ARTIST STATEMENT

Resembling a large, unruly overgrowth, Alex Nuñez’s monumental abstract paintings suggest that ignorance is the ultimate existential threat. Creating large-scale canvases that obscure hidden messages with boldly colored splashes and creeping abstract figures, her paintings are hidden object games reflecting the anxiety of human impermanence. The immersive, monumental scale of her paintings swallows us whole, an ominous reminder that survival is tenuous in a culture that emphasizes materiality and instant gratification over the protection of our natural environment.

Nuñez’s work is entirely spontaneous, emphasizing intuitive meticulous mark-making and gestural splashes in bold, vibrant color. These abstract markings are layered over a series of hidden references drawn from pop culture that resonate with the artist. Internet memes, song lyrics, tabloid fodder, and celebrity scandal are subliminal messages invading our psyche, and Nuñez’s canvases alludes that these missives are actually hiding in plain sight. Through a set of personal hieroglyphics - fingers, teeth, man-eating insects, foliage and polyps recur frequently in her work - Nuñez reflects on her native Miami backdrop and her own anxiety toward its material nebulous. She typically moves across the canvas as she works, dually emulating both uncontrollable jungle spread and the all-consuming nature of 24/7 connectivity. Not a single portion of the canvas is spared, and Nuñez works rigorously until her canvas is covered in paint. Analogous of the menace of invasive environmental spread, and drawing attention to the profound shift toward material culture in our digital and analog worlds, Nuñez’s paintings are a startling dreamscape of an altered and complex reality.

BIO

Alex Nuñez is a Cuban-American mixed media painter from Miami, FL. She received her Bachelors of Arts & Sciences from Loyola University New Orleans in 2006. She completed international workshops at Firenze Arti Visive, Florence and Metafora, Barcelona. In 2009, she received her Post Baccalaureate Diploma from SMFA, Boston. She received her MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York in 2012; upon completion, she was awarded the C12 Emerging Artist Fellowship. Nuñez is the host and producer of the Sunday Painter podcast on Jolt Radio, now in the show’s fourth year of production and a recipient of Locust Project’s 2018 Wavemaker Grant. In 2019 she completed a year residency at the Deering Estate. She currently has a solo show Internal Vacation with Lobo del Mar gallery.

ARTIST LINKS

Website:  www.alexnunez.net

Instagram: @shockingly_unambitious, @the_sunday_painter

Podcast: www.sundaypainter.net

Joyce Billet

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am interested in nature, raising awareness of destruction, absence and decay through the tension that exist between the analog and the digital. While the works start out painted by hand, the final pieces are computed, digital works. There is complexity in the technical process. Through programmatic steps, I hand paint monochromatic brushstrokes on canvas, and then translate them into a computer-generated format so that they can be laser-cut and etched. Although the drawing is programmed, there is a space between the initial painting and the way it materializes itself on the chosen surface allowing each piece to be unique. Through tenacious curiosity the works lie between an essence of painting and sculpture, between wood and paper. The dialogue begins here by questioning the material, the process, and the purpose. In translating the treatment of material from traditional approaches to their digital counterparts there is tension that invites conflict.  Cutting, carving and perforating surfaces through burning with a laser cutter reveals stress and collaboration between tradition and evolution. Following a strong craft tradition, wood and its byproducts are the main materials used in my work. The disposition of a material to be etched, cut, malleable, and organic, ties to nature from beginning to end, involving my hand and tools, challenging the evolution that wood has come to have. I am interested in duality: positive and negative forms, presence and absence, darkness and light. Just as nature has textures, debris, deposits and layered materials I aim to evoke the dialogue between the natural and the digital. This piece raises awareness of destruction and evokes nature with its positive and negative forms. The brushstrokes are laser etched to create a dimensional surface that reveals stress and collaboration between tradition and evolution.

BIO

Joyce Billet is a practicing artist that merges her forward-looking technical expertise with conceptual ideas. Her background in architecture has influence on her work which plays with materials and scale to mix the sensations of painting and sculpture. She explores the tensions and relationships, between the natural and the artificial, between the unique and the mass produced, between tradition and progress. She has been selected to participate in group shows juried by curators such as Maurizio Pellegrin, Heather Darcy Bhandari and Margaret Carrigan. In 2019, she was picked by a committee of art world experts as one of 130 talented independent and emerging artists to participate in The Other Art Fair in Brooklyn. Billet graduated with a Bachelor’s in Architecture from Pratt Institute and in 2010 she received a Master of Science degree in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University. Billet worked at firms such as Norman Foster in London and Studio Daniel Libeskind in New York. She then went on to apply her artistic skills as an in-house architectural designer at Chanel. Billet is a French-American artist who currently lives and works in the US.

ARTIST LINKS

Website:   www.joycebillet.com

Instagram: @_j_b_c/  

David Rohn

BIO

David Rohn grew up in  New Jersey and Long Island, suburbs of NYC  and studied art and urbanism at Colgate University and NYU, and later Architecture at Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He worked in NYC in Architecture and Design where he  began painting in the early 1980’s, later returning to Paris in ’89 where he continued to paint and exhibit at Galerie Julien Pellat, Le Salon de Montrouge. La Masse des Beaux Arts, Paris. In 1992 he moved to Miami where he also started writing about art, exhibiting at Bianca Lanza, and later Carol Jazzar Contemporary, developing socially-reflective and interactive installation and performative art  projects, from which his  (self)-Portraiture series’ emerged in 2008. And later, street figures beginning in 2017, after his Miami gallery closed. He has exhibited and been reviewed widely in South Florida over the past 25 years, including virtually all the local / regional museums, alternative spaces and galleries, and publications. He has also exhibited occaisionally in New York, LA and Berlin. More recently his (self) portraiture has morphed into constructions using cast-off / found objects, photography, and painting, intended to reflect contemporary ’throw-away’culture and fatal consumerism. His work has been includes, and widely reviewed at many galleries and museums in S. Florida, New York and L.A.  and continues performative collaborative projects individually,and with Partner Danilo de La Torre, (and other collaborators) under the collab LaboMamo (www.labomamo.com), and his own self-portrait-based, unofficial public art projects.

ARTIST LINKS

Website:    www.davidrohn.net

Instagram: @davidrohn

Gallery:    www.cjazzart.net    

Lori Nozick

ARTIST STATEMENT

My art is tactile and deeply referential; materials of the primal earth, structures we create and discard, reclaimed and existing outside a fixed moment.  A tension and balance between security and impermanence echo, offering hidden narratives and exposed layers, examining ongoing cycles of cohesion and disintegration.  This defines the basis of much of my temporal, site-specific sculpture installations. Works seem solid yet permeable, ancient and transient, capturing the dynamics of social and environmental change, informed by archaeology, myths and scientific conditions. My wall reliefs reflect this quite literally in their raw construction.

Art historian and critic Robert C. Morgan has written, “…structure signifies an inventory of shapes and elements that pull together even as they move in different directions…”

My artwork investigates the demarcation of real and imposed boundaries.  Deeply resonant, walls provide protection, engender separation, imprisonment, or open for freedom. Utilizing nautical, geological, and historic maps underline and symbolize those boundaries, visual markers with collage and drawing to evoke a sense of place.  The archetypal images and forms of my work, the place or site, function as a repository of individual and collective moments and memory, forming a visceral bridge to experience a blending of time-frames, real and imagined.  

BIO

Lori Nozick was born in the northeast US,  and lived in New York for 25 years.  She is currently living in Miami Beach. Ms. Nozick holds a BFA from Philadelphia College of Art, and an MFA from Pratt Institute.  The artist has exhibited her work in galleries and museums, done site-specific installations, both temporary and permanent, interior and exterior,  been awarded public art commissions, and has received international, national, state, and foundation grants and fellowships for her work, including the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Emergency Grant.

Ms. Nozick was in a traumatic accident two months before the virus hit, and during this time, she has produced over 40 artworks, a series called “the Quarantine Collages”. The artist was invited to the residency, “Proyecto En Sitio 2nd Edition”, in November 2018 at La Coyotera Taller Estudio, Umecuaro, Michoacan State, Mexico, creating “Masts and Anchors”, a site-specific sculpture/earthworks with all local and natural materials.  Dirt and cement were mixed by my feet on the site and cast into earth-dug molds, along with local stone and logs. Ms. Nozick created an installation of walls at RAW/Art Basel Miami 2017, a light installation for the Bass Museum Contemporary Art In Unexpected Places in 2015 and invited to do a Featured Project at SCOPE Miami 2014, an interactive monumental sculpture with reclaimed architectural elements, colored acrylic panels, and an 8’ curved staircase. The artist’s public art commission , “Pensacola Beacons”, sponsored by the FL Art in State Buildings Programs, is a series of 3 light beacons at the UWF College of Business Plaza,  Pensacola, FL.  Ms. Nozick was honored in 2006 for “Luce Et Vita Universae”, selected as one of the Best Public Art Projects of the Year by the Americans For the Art Public Art Review, commissioned by the NYC % For Art, Public Art In Public School/SITES Program, and the School Construction Authority. A photo interview in Sculpture Magazine, "The Girl Who Liked to Smell Dirt", was published in the January-February 2012 issue.  Ms. Nozick had a solo exhibition of her drawings and sculpture at berlin art  scouts Gallery in Berlin, Germany in September 2010 and gave a lecture at the US Embassy in Berlin.  In recent exhibitions and installations, the artist has used reclaimed architectural elements and wood, solar energy and LED lighting, salt blocks, mud pigments, tar, dirt, charcoal burnt wood, sound and moving water as elements in her work, with increasing consciousness of renewable sources in art. Ms. Nozick has taught and lectured at William Patterson University, Pratt Institute, and the American University in Corciano, Italy.  She was an Adjunct Professor at MDC and an Artist in Residence with Perez Art Museum Miami, Institute of Contemporary Art/Miami, Arts4Learning Program, and done private mentoring and portfolio preparation, as well as arts workshops and lectures. She also has a design business doing decorative and unique surfaces for residential and public spaces, as well as specialized items, including unique map drawings, collages, working with business, museums, designers, and real estate developers.

ARTIST LINKS

Website: www.lorinozick.com  

Instagram: @lorinozick

Gallery links: www.berlinartscouts.de 

Hermes Berrio

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work captures the significance from my daily life, relating it with a grand scope that emphasizes both the mundane and the extraordinary. With reality as the foundation to my practice, I create a vibrant narrative and a personal reflection on the world. Finding inspiration in these unusual and yet commonplace experiences, Iexplore the complexity of such simple moments and render them on a monumental scale. I re-imagine, re-arrange, and metamorphosize visions of a cultural and personal landscape, seeking new ways to interpret one’s truth visually.

BIO

Hermes Berrio (b. 1980, Colombia), currently living and working in Miami. He received his BFA from New York, University (2005) and has since grown his artistic career in Miami. In recent years, he has participated in group and solo exhibitions around the world for galleries and institutions in the U.S. and Colombia, Spain, Germany, Mexico, Australia, and Canada. He’s also completed a number of murals, with the most recent installations throughout the city of Miami. In 2018 he was awarded a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and in 2019 from the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation. He has been a Fountainhead Studio artist resident since May 2019 and is represented by Fabien Castanier Gallery in Miami. He continues to evolve his practice, investigating new processes and mediums, while challenging contemporary expectations with his prodigious compositions.

ARTIST LINKS

Website: www.hermesberrio.com

Instagram: @hermesberrio

Gallery links: www.berlinartscouts.de 

Stephanie Hadad

ARTIST STATEMENT

Stephanie’s work continues to evolve by exploring her stance within Jewish culture. Hadad’s works represent and touch upon the physical toll incurred by a woman that has taken on the role of a traditional domestic housewife. It's the duty of creating and keeping ancient traditions alive, not by force, but because of the desire to vitalize their customs for generations to come.

Hadad’s childhood was based around being constantly conditioned in preparation for her turn as the housewife. That intense rooted process causes the works she produces to appear in the sub-conscious, her dreams. Through her responsibilities as a daughter, she witnessed firsthand through her mother, the burden to persevere, but in the end, also revel a joy. With transformation of these perpetual traditions, Stephanie acknowledges and plays with the conscious ideas her position holds within this role and is continuously being redefined by her experiences. 

Through studies, research and exploration of her individuality and culture, Hadad has taken a political and yet poetic approach to voice her works through a diverse and often unconventional range of media, including installation, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. Each piece corresponds with the other, creating a narrative for women, who especially now, are starting to get the recognition they deserve.

ARTIST LINKS

Website: http://www.stephanieeti.com

Instagram: @etishh

Doris Kloster

ARTIST STATEMENT

My artistic practice combines painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture. In my large-scale paintings, based on my black and white photographs printed on canvas, I incorporate pencil drawings and collaged elements with paint, glitter, shells, cement and other materials to evoke subconscious memories, dreams and traces of ancestral bonds.

These paintings seek to connect with a subterranean human network of memory outside of time, the past that is being carried forward within us. I am channeling the collective memory which connects all human experience on some level. Referencing feelings that are traces of a historical past, the works reflect my research in pursuit of that revelation.

BIO

Doris Kloster earned a B.A. in Art History, from Boston University, an M.A. in Fine Arts from New York University and is currently a PhD candidate at the European Graduate School, Switzerland. Her artworks have been exhibited and collected internationally. Exhibitions include 99 Degree Art Center, Taipei; Beijing Museum of Contemporary Art; Galerie Sator, Paris; Huan Tie Times Art Museum and Zero Field Projects Gallery, Beijing; Seokjang-Ri Art Museum, South Korea; Red Army Museum, Moscow; and the Neue Galerie, Graz, Austria. Four books of Kloster’s photographs have been published. Kloster developed and mounted a series of exhibitions focusing on women artists entitled She Views Herself, which featured an international roster of artists over five editions exhibited at multiple venues in Paris. Her works were included in the landmark feminist exhibition, Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art by Women, that was first exhibited at David Zwirner Gallery in New York City in 1993 and remounted at Maccarone, New York in 2016.

ARTIST LINKS

Website: http://www.doriskloster.com/

Instagram: @doriskloster

Bibiana Martinez

ARTIST STATEMENT

From a young age I was drawn to the idea of constructing figures with different elements collected in time. I’ve been pasting and gluing parts of objects; incorporating collage to my paintings and using all type of materials in disuse such as miniatures, metals, jewels, etc. The collages in my pieces have developed and gave rise to artwork that is built from mixed resources and techniques assembling dynamic pieces of art; some built on canvas and some 3D scenarios. The characters and elements meddle in dreamy scenes; assembling miniature objects and props that evolve to particular atmospheres, sentiments and themes titled by most used #hashtags. Inspiration treats arguments of our contemporary world and human behavior.

I’m currently working in a project of sea waves sculptures using plastic waste from the Ocean, and also going back to pencil drawing and acrylic painting. 2020 has been a challenge and a connection with my artwork. Feeling free of narratives, gallery shows, art-fairs, etc., and being moved by my own journey of contemporary art ambiguity, inspirational connection and experimentation; processes that are always challenging me and defining me as an artist.  

BIO

Born in Barranquilla, Colombia. 1970. Lives in Miami, Florida. Political Science graduate from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia; later attended video editing courses at New York University, NY, USA. While working on video production in Colombia, she started to get involved in exhibitions showing collage pieces worked in different periods of her life. Her interest in visual arts grew in the 90s; and attended SCAD, Savannah College of Art and Design, where she ventured in courses in digital art and sculpture, among others. She continued to connect her passion for art with history. Her narrative shows persistent observations of reality. Scenes of war at her native Colombia, sustainability, and technology’s influence on humanity, take shape and dynamism through her compositions. 

She moved to Miami in 2013. These past years have been important for Bibiana. A solo exhibition in Paris, France at Bortonne Gallerie, and being part of collective exhibits in Dallas and Miami, at Museo del Chicó in Bogotá, and in JustMad at Madrid, Spain. She was selected to exhibit at Florence Biennale in Italy representing Colombia last October 2017. She has been part of Fountainhead Studios' artists and participating in local exhibitions at Arthood56, KadoShiro Art, Art-Concept Alternative, and Pinta Miami, among others. Last year she painted a street mural at The White Pantry Gallery in Allapatah.

ARTIST LINKS

Website: www.bibianamartinez.com

Instagram: @bibianamarart

Michelle Weinberg

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ARTIST STATEMENT

Although the virtual space of painting and drawing is where all my projects begin, I frequently find myself in the realms of architecture, theater, decor and applied arts. I paint and draw vivid backdrops for human activity - arenas within which all possibilities may occur. Pastel and hothouse color, flickering pattern, stylized elements from everyday life, words that express ambivalent feelings about contemporary life - these elements conspire to create new spaces for thought, and the free exercise of my imagination.

BIO

Michelle Weinberg is a painter who creates art for surfaces, interiors, architecture and public spaces. She received her BFA from School of Visual Arts in NYC and her MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. She is the recipient of awards, fellowships and residencies including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, SouthArts Career Opportunity Award, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a Joseph Robert Foundation Award, a South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the State of Florida, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, and residencies at MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony, Studios at MASS MoCA, 100West Corsicana in TX, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, homesession and Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, and Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic. She has exhibited widely and created commissioned works for Miami International Airport, The Wolfsonian Museum-FIU, Facebook offices in Miami, Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places, the City of Tampa, Cultural Council of Jacksonville, FL, and City of Hollywood, FL. Weinberg is Creative Director of Girls’ Club in Fort Lauderdale and a consultant to museums and non-profits, developing exhibitions, education programming and more. See www.michelleweinberg.com for more info and images.

Artist Links:

Website: https://michelleweinberg.com

Instagram: @mwpinkblue

Vickie Pierre

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Multi Media

Artist Statement

My work is informed and inspired by memory, popular culture, surrealism and the decorative and ornamental arts. This inspiration has manifested itself in years of collecting a myriad of materials that suggests a sense of beauty, design and the natural world.

My practice includes various techniques and materials. Often times the materials that I employ are vintage, mass-produced objects (including Avon perfume bottles and Syroco decorative wall art) that serve as muses for my two-dimensional works such as paintings, drawings and collages or as integral elements within my assemblages and installations. With the guidance of these appropriated source materials, my continued focus is on the exploration of self-identity, with references to my Haitian culture and mythology, while concurrently considering feminine tropes and historic and contemporary cultural politics. 

The combination of these re-contextualized objects along with the titles and texts, stemming from song lyrics, constructs a narrative that continues the inner dialogue of identity and socialization. Alternately, the compositions of the assemblages and paper works allude to biological and botanical structures, while maintaining base aesthetic sentiments of femininity, beauty, romanticism and sensuality.

When my work is observed, my hope is that the public will initially be drawn in by the playful whimsy of the "characters" and design elements. However, in engaging further with the work, I would like viewers to contemplate their own experiences with culturally loaded imagery or objects and consider how that may influence their understanding of identity formation and identity politics in the broader culture.

Artist Links

www.vickiepierre.com

Stephen Arboite

After joining The Fountainhead Residency from July 17 - Aug 13, 2017, Stephen decided to call Miami home.

In partnership with N'namdi Gallery

ARTIST STATEMENT

Stephen Arboite was born in New York City in 1987 to Gaelle and Mario Arboite who ventured separately to America from Haiti in the early 1980s.

Stephen may have reaped the benefits of being born into a cultural Mecca renowned for itsworld-class galleries, museums, and institutes. Or perhaps, Arboite’s father triggered his son’s curiosity for the arts while heading an outreach organization in Brooklyn where city kids were introduced to African, Caribbean, and Latin music, art, and dance. Maybe it was quiet ambition and recognition, assumed while selling sketches to eager schoolmates. Whatever the case, the young artist was compelled.

In 2005 Arboite entered SUNY Purchase for a BFA. In that time Arboite began looking at the works of Marlene Dumas, Wangechi Mutu, Willem de Kooning. His approach to work from then on considered beauty outside of classical aesthetic paradigms and with emphasis on the “ethereal consciousness of the body.” For his desire to capture and harbor spirit, Arboite veered ever so lightly to the abstract and grotesque. As a result his work has taken on a more intuitive quality. In 2010, Arboite spontaneously moved to Miami on a personal quest towards industry and independent artistic exploration, while continuing to develop his signature style of exploring nature, matter, movement, and spirit on paper. The artist typically begins his experiments with a coffee base…layers seem to swim amongst one another in pools and drips tiered with dried pigments, while inks and otherwise diluted colors stream and explode. It’s an orchestral effect, conducted vibrantly.

In 2013, Arboite work was recognized and showcased during Miami Art Basel. The artist continues to live and work in Miami Beach, Florida.

“My work contends with the spiritual transformation and evolution of human consciousness. Bodies are eviscerated; anatomical structures splinter while fluids spatter. Form is purged and abstracted for the instinctual visualization of my subjects’ true nature. What emerges is aura, or pure spiritual essence, free of embodiment and all its limitations and conventions. I am compelled to try to capture what cannot be caught.

My staining technique provides for fluidity, harmony, and liberation, while leaving a subtle trace of my process. Grounded coffee, metallic powders, and organic pigments swirl, pool, settle, and converge to form the strokes that further delineate the subject matter. Streaks, speckles and splotches detail the molecular frenzy of such transformations while alluding to subconscious escape. They tell a story that is constantly unfolding.

Paper allows a further engagement with the process and its medium. For me, the experience is cathartic. The spontaneous and unforgiving nature of paper gives birth to anamorphic beings which vaguely arise in conception, yet are concrete in projection. As such I act as a medium or key, unlocking complex emotional and spiritual states of being.”

ARTIST LINKS

Website: https://www.stephenarboite.com

Gallery: http://nnamdicontemporary.com/portfolio/stephen-arboit/

Instagram: @seleck