Fifteen Years of Uprise Art

Adrian Kay Wong (b. 1991) is a Los Angeles-based artist who depicts subtle narratives and interactions from the seemingly incidental moments of the everyday. Characterized by domestic interiors, motifs from daily life, and casts of light and shadow, his paintings balance an exchange of abstraction and representation, surface and depth, and organic and geometric form. Interwoven with his own memories, story, and cultural identity, Wong's paintings embody an intimacy and familiarity encapsulated within a stillness like a bated breath. In these vignettes of extended moments, Wong examines the coexisting dualities underlying our daily experiences. Notions such as intimacy and estrangement, transience and permanence, and belonging and isolation lie in the understated tensions inherent to the day-to-day. Structured carefully in measured compositions, Wong gives space to reflect on the personal dialogues often overlooked, yet intrinsic to self-discovery, empowerment, and reflection.

Adam Frezza (b. 1977) and Terri Chiao (b. 1981) are a collaborative artist duo known as CHIAOZZA based in Brooklyn, NY. Heavily invested in the spirit of play and experimentation, Adam and Terri create fantastical works of art that incorporate unusual textures and unexpected forms. Humor, color and pattern intersect to immerse the viewer in the artists’ world of wonderment.

Damien Davis (b. 1984) is a Newark, New Jersey-based artist and writer whose work explores cultural representation, identity, and the ways meaning is constructed through form. Working in layered, laser-cut acrylic and mixed media, he builds modular “symbol lexicons” that remix iconography from history, technology, and pop culture. Damien has exhibited at institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design. His public art commissions include projects for MTA Arts & Design in New York. In addition to his studio practice, Damien is a contributing writer for Hyperallergic, where he examines the intersections of art, race, and power. He teaches at SUNY Purchase College.

Devon Reina (b. 1996) is a Brooklyn, New York-based artist and designer. Devon's cross-disciplinary background inspires his curiosity for materiality and process. His paintings celebrate a range of versatile media, from thick paint impastos, to expressive ink washes and delicate wax pastel line-work. Across his various bodies of work, Devon is interested in how marks of color can interact with each other to suggest the illusion of depth, movement, or direction.

Hayley Sheldon (b. 1984) is a West Palm Beach, Florida-based multidisciplinary sculptor and installation artist. With a focus on tactility and color, Hayley’s shaped screens explore fleeting experiences of the natural world, like the slow growth of plant life and the gentle shift of sunset to dusk. Distilled to discrete shapes and palettes, these individual pieces can be arranged and reconfigured to suit multiple installations and story-telling opportunities.

Katrine Hildebrandt-Hussey (b. 1982) is a New York-based visual artist whose work is inspired by sacred geometry and the metaphysical mapping of space and time. Katrine achieves the geometric patterns in her work by burning her paper surface, allowing for chance to influence her ordered forms. Marked with intentionality and meticulous detail, Katrine’s work investigates the correlation between chaos and order, permanence and transience, and the interconnectivity of the universe.

Laura Naples (b. 1979) is an artist based in Hudson, Ohio. Laura's work explores the energy of wonder she perceives in the natural world and objects shaped by human hands. A former graphic designer, dancer, and calligraphy artist, Laura senses the subtleties of form, rhythm, and line. She applies diluted acrylic washes to canvas and paper, allowing water to diffuse pigments into gradient textures. Contrasts unfold across stances of surrender and intention as she layers gestural marks; then, accents alignments with linework. Laura cultivates rituals of meditation, movement, and self-inquiry that are fostered, infused, and embodied in her work.

Lucía Rodríguez Pérez (b.1986) is a Brooklyn-based painter who creates surreal and dreamlike spaces where organic elements interact with architectural features such as gates, pillars, and balustrades, creating a dialogue between the natural and the man-made. In her nearly symmetrical compositions, Lucía works with a saturated palette, exploring what she describes as "the seductiveness of color". Each image depicts a new reality that is both unrealistic and believable, where light and space bend to form a unique and intriguing world.

Millee Tibbs’ (b. 1976) work derives from her interest in photography’s ubiquity in contemporary culture and the tension between its truth-value and inherent manipulation of reality. Her photographs often address the fabrication of an ideal of the American landscape. By disrupting the photographic image through physical interventions (folding, cutting, and sewing), her work responds to the miniaturization and domestication of land through photography. Tibbs resides in Detroit, MI and holds an MFA in photography from RISD. She has exhibited throughout the U.S. and abroad, participated in a fellowship at The MacDowell Colony and has held artist residencies at the Wassaic Project and the Santa Fe Art Institute.

Cologne, Germany-based Olivia Botha (b. 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, video, printmaking, poetry, and drawing. Her practice explores personal narratives, identity, and the ways in which both physical and imagined environments shape the present. Language, and how it is used and felt, remains a central thread in her work.

Sarah Sullivan Sherrod (b. 1989) is a textile artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Sarah combines her background in weaving, painting, and color theory to create work that celebrates the importance of play, as seen in both her process and aesthetic. Bound by the limits of the loom and materials, Sarah welcomes a heavy dose of improvisation in her practice. Each phase of creation is like a game itself, using the conversations between colors and shapes to complete the puzzle of the final work.

Senem Oezdogan (b. 1980) is a Brooklyn-based mixed media artist whose works meditate on the visual phenomenon of optical illusions through color and form. Smooth gradients give a sense of volume to the bold shapes depicted in Senem’s work that are subsequently flattened by her illusionistic use of spatial composition. Her color palette is equally beguiling, disrupting foreground and background and constantly forcing the viewer to reorient their sense of perspective.

Scott Sueme (b. 1986) is a Canadian artist raised in Vancouver, BC, on the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Scott attended Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2006, and has since worked in many fields including fine art, graphic design and large-scale wall paintings. Scott has exhibited throughout Canada, as well as internationally, including New York, San Francisco, Miami and Cape Town. Recent exhibitions include ‘Building Buildings’ at Mayberry Fine Art in Winnipeg (2020) and ‘Intercepting the Nature of Colour and Form’ (2020) at Gallery Jones in Vancouver.Scott’s paintings are rooted in an exploration of materiality – principally, the quality and perception of color. In his work, color manifests as an abstraction of various elements of life, interacting to recall memories, capture the passage of time or connect with the subconscious. Scott’s hard-edge painting techniques create a subtlety of depth that reveals a new resonance to color and an admission of the human hand. This “imperfect” process of making speaks to a nostalgia and authenticity – an honoring of the handmade. Through an intimacy of material interaction, Scott’s works act as small records of larger lived experiences and a conversational catalogue of human imprints.

Vicki Sher (b.1966) is a Brooklyn-based artist. In Vicki’s drawings and paintings she crafts delicately balanced towers and patterns of half-moons, squares and rectangles. Through her intuitive yet deliberate demarcation of space in vivid oil pastel and acrylic, her stacked geometries elude to map-like systems derived from a personal symbology and narratives.

Xochi Solis (b. 1981) is an Austin, Texas-based mixed media artist. Her works include collaged paintings that explore color, texture, and shape through paint, collected paper ephemera, hand-dyed and marbled paper, plastics, and found images from books and magazines. Through a practiced process of layering materials, incorporating the visual depth and illusions of photographic surfaces, Xochi reflects on the visual complexities in her environment, both natural and cultural. Her work communicates a nuanced narrative about time, place, and sensation while grappling with how to represent an environment where her heritage, body, and dreams for the future co-exist.