Karl Haendel’s practice revolves around the appropriation of visual signifiers and their recontextualization through drawing. For Haendel, the act of drawing articulates both the human impulse and labor associated with draftsmanship, while offering a physical system to reconsider accepted imagery. Haendel’s drawings, often uncanny renderings, pointedly remove images from their original context—media publications, frozen food labels, medieval knights—and reconfigure them through scale, black and white tonality, and juxtaposition into a new of visual language. It is through this manipulation and repacking of pre-existing imagery that Haendel is able to present keen criticism on contemporary socio-cultural relations, demanding the viewer to draw his or her own.

Jacolby Satterwhite is celebrated for a conceptual practice addressing crucial themes of labor, consumption, carnality and fantasy through immersive installation, virtual reality and digital media. He uses a range of software to produce intricately detailed animations and live action film of real and imagined worlds populated by the avatars of artists and friends. These animations serve as the stage on which the artist synthesizes the multiple disciplines that encompass his practice, namely illustration, performance, painting, sculpture, photography and writing. Satterwhite draws from an extensive set of references, guided by queer theory, modernism and video game language to challenge conventions of Western art through a personal and political lens. An equally significant influence is that of his late mother, Patricia Satterwhite, whose ethereal vocals and diagrams for visionary household products and ethereal vocals serve as the source material within a decidedly complex structure of memory and mythology.

Brent Wadden’s woven paintings seek to entangle the traditional divisions between folk art and fine art. Composed of woven fibers, sewn and mounted on canvas, the artist’s abstract works complicate the painterly notion of surface, while reconsidering the concept of the handmade. Wadden typically uses second-hand fibers including wool, cotton, and acrylic to create his visually jagged, yet simultaneously mutable geometric constructions. Conscious of the density and tension of his materials and practice, Wadden’s focus on form seeks to physically meld the aesthetic gender and status roles associated with craft and abstraction. The resulting paintings reference both a structural life and planar presence, which further seek to rework notions of space and mark-making.

"The narratives and abstraction that happen come color by color. Although I am participating in the process of the making I don’t always feel like I’m steering the painting to where it is going. It’s a peculiar space I’m glad to have the good fortune to experience. The intention of the work I believe is to work through complications and to settle into a more peaceful and restful space. I wouldn’t presume that someone could necessarily locate that in one of these pieces. I would say that it is something that I am working toward by making the work though." — Chris Johanson

Gideon Appah is a mixed media artist who draws from personal experiences of life in the capital of Ghana. In this recent body of work, the artist presents flattened, jewel-like compositions that center around important familial figures, luscious landscapes, prevalent architecture, folklore and daily rituals from his upbringing.

Through nostalgic blues, bold crimsons, deep greens and charcoal, his dreamlike, surrealist subjects of figures and landscapes are abstracted and fragmented. With glimpses of nature and ghostly reflections, Appah focuses on the weighted presence or feeling his representations evoke in order to allude to the organic transformation of memories and recollections over time. Using thick, rough applications of acrylic to build up his compositions, Appah responds directly to his own familial stories and a country's history.

This portrait is of Appah's beloved uncle, who died in 1993 when the artist was quite young. Appah grew to know his late uncle through the retelling of stories and a jumble of recollections from his family members. Kofi, meaning born on a Friday, is a day name commonly given to boys at birth in Ghana. Paa Kofi would’ve been his uncle’s given name, although Paa originates as a title of chief status and a sign of respect.