Katie Koti, (b. 1979 ) grew up in Greenfield Massachusetts. [Say something very brief about a formative event or experience in your life, if you want.] Her work to date has focused on identity, desire, and embodiment, often using landscape to explore visceral connections between bodies, culture, and nature.

Koti is a member of the Yale MFA Photography class of 2012. She earned a BFA in Photography and Graphic Design (2010) at the Rhode Island School of Design. Before attending RISD, Koti graduated with Honors from Greenfield Community College, Massachusetts, where she studied Liberal and Media Arts. Koti shoots with an Ebony 4x5 field camera.

Additional work can be seen on the artist’s website, www.katiekoti.com.

Everyday we are confronted by reality. Sometimes it is harsh and sometimes wonderful. Unfortunately, we have limited control over it. What we do have control over is how we see life. The way I approach art is to take what reality gives me and bend it to what I want. In essence, fantasy becomes reality.

Initially in my sketchbooks, ideas are inspired by my everyday interactions. I have a sort of journalistic way of seeing when sketching. However, about halfway through every drawing I grow amazingly bored. Something urges me to move away from replicating life and to simply muck things around.

Additional work can be seen on the artist’s website, www.richpellegrino.com.

Ona Yopack was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has been working with textiles for most of her life, but became transfixed with the textile processes and techniques she learned during her time at the Rhode Island School of Design, which she will graduate from this spring 2010. Weaving, knitting, screen printing, spinning, sewing, as well as drawing, painting, and printing are just some of the ways she works to design textiles. She has been creating a new business called Onanoko making apparel and accessories out of felted wool.

James Lavine grew up, for the most part, in a small rural town in southern Maine. He was transformed when, after a high school career focused on science, mathematics, and athletics, he decided to shift in the direction of art and design. Relocating to Providence, RI, he attended the Rhode Island School of Design where in May of 2009, he received a BFA in Graphic Design. When it comes to media, he seems to have no boundaries, producing works in the spheres of furniture design, exhibit design, sculpture, painting, printmaking, web design, animation, poster design, etc.

He is currently living in Gloucester, MA and designing for Karhu, the legendary Finnish running shoe company. Additional work can be seen on the artist’s website, www.jameslavine.com.

Hilary Merzbacher was born and raised in the southern suburbs of Boston. For the past four years, she has been studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, recently completing her BFA in Illustration. Using a variety of media, including oil, watercolor/gouache and printmaking, Hilary explores the ubiquitous imagery of our increasingly built world.

She currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
Additional images can be seen on the artist’s website, www.hilarymerzbacher.com.

These paintings demonstrate processes where I hamstring the composing, contemplative functions of making a painting. Self-imposed, adverse conditions make translation of an idea or drawing onto canvas difficult or futile. You might notice areas of efficacy alongside garbled, wrecked passages. I’ve enabled myself a practice in which deliberation is an assembly line operation of a preliminary phase, where I do not make a last crescendo mark, step back and…Fin! A good painting! I collude with gravity, volatile media, and fortune, and create conditions where thought, planning, and material incident may deliver a painting that satisfactorily hangs or not. Artist and viewer together weigh the work. Aesthetics, taste, meaning, and virtuosity converge in a constellation synthesized around the conventions of painting.

Additional images can be seen on the artist’s website, hughzeigler.blogspot.com.

I see painting as an exercise in excavating imagery and form out of an abstract language. For me it is a means of digesting and understanding subjective ideas of beauty and the grotesque through allowing the quality of paint to move between being luminous and pure, to thick, goupy and disgusting. It is a means of playing with established ideas of taste and what is, or is thought to be, pleasurable. I find that laboring over these paintings, i.e. covering up and scraping away over and over, is a means for grounding them. In a puritanical sense, the labor at times helps to ease the unease of making abstract paintings, and is also a way for me to sift through the arbitrary until it solidifies into logic.

Additional images can be seen on the artist’s website, www.flickr.com/photos/annabethmarks.