i can't get at the poem of this ∙

i can't get at the poem of this ∙

There’s poetry in art/making, and we often hold those poems for or within ourselves; either articulating it in a language only we know or unable to speak it because words often fall short. i can’t get at the poem of this explores the poetry that led to your piece or the story that drives our artwork, for “trying to find the words” — a familiar feeling or refrain of late. this exhibition was juried by angela zonunpari.

A note from the juror, Angela Zonunpari:

The exhibition title is from an essay by C.C. (Poetry’s So Common Hardly Anyone Can Find It), who quotes the phrase from Alice Notley’s poem C. ‘81. Here are a few excerpts to consider / inspire / carry as you think of what to share with us—

Poetry is more than a literary form. Poetry is the essence of inner feelings and thoughts as they relate to the external world. Poetry is found and observed; it is not a creation. If there was a more specific definition, it would cease to be Poetry.

…

Poem-making is like summarizing the plot of a movie, retelling a dream, or explaining an internet meme in person … It’s never the same as the real thing.

“Poetry happens before poem-making,” writes C.C. and this Midwest Nice Art open call invites you to consider the poetics that led to the making of your work or the poetry that shapes your practice. I’m just curious to know more about you :)

One more (fun) nugget of info: “[Plato] traced skill back to the root work for “making,” poiein. This is the parent word for poetry.” — writes Richard Sennett in The Craftsman, page 24. So your art/making skill is poetry in and of itself!

With gratitude & care,

Angela.

artists included are: marin abell, Tanya Beyer, Céline Browning, Danielle Callahan, Makayla Carlson, Gina Cholick, Graciela DeAnda, Rachel Debolski, Jane Waggoner Deschner, John Dickinson, Rosalyn Jewel Farney, Christy Ferrato, Aaron Hagan, Patricia L Hagen, Sophia Hatzikos, Craig Hill, Luke Jaeger, Ash Jannasch, Kristin Jones, Meena Kolli, Jessi Linton, Juliet Raven Lock, Éireann Lorsung, Catherine Lyu, Lo Mc, MiroMiro, Renata Moraes, Katie North, Elizabeth Quinn, Kirsten Rae Simonsen, Amelia St. Francis, Amber Zora

  • Regular Kid Sorrows, 2024
    oak, machine-pieced and hand-quilted cotton with appliqué, soft sculpture, naturally dyed with pomegranate, avocado, indigo, cutch, madder, logwood, onion, myrobalan

    The geometric pattern, colorful shapes, & repetitive task of cutting and sewing squares was a coping mechanism in the weeks following the loss of my 16 year old dog. It allowed me to not think about much at all. The title addresses a confusion I felt at the time and a tendency to reduce my feelings, as if the loss of a dog (an important family member and an obvious absence in the daily routine) is any less significant than a person. The soft sculpture shapes were inspired by Lucky Charms and the shape of the quilt is a subtle reference to spilled milk. In the rawness of grief, there was a return to an inner child and the simple pleasures and sorrows that come with it.

  • Breath Drawing (I Miss You) 39-40, Various drawing materials on 135 index cards, 2024

    Breath Drawing: When the temperature is below a certain degree, water vapor in your breaths condense into tiny droplets, forming a piece of white fog, which will then disperse into a larger body of water vapor.

    I Miss You: Words that became breaths will slowly take up the space I see.

    Breath Drawing (I Miss You) were made by Lake Michigan, when the temperature was below the freezing point. Each drawing is my attempt to capture the breath that comes out when I whisper “I Miss You”. Through the repeated action of whispering and drawing while also enduring the coldness, the process of drawing embodies the process of longing. Here, longing is enduring a wish.

  • On the Way Home II, graphite on embossed paper, 2026.

    This is part of the body of work titled "Outside Over There." It is a series of contour drawings I made while staring at my phone, which had news images on it. I began using this technique to document what I was seeing on my phone during the ICE raids in Minneapolis in early 2026. The results are drawings that are disproportional, abstracted, and yet eerily detailed in their focus on weapons, hands, feet, faces, all bounded by the viewing device used to see the image. While making this work, I was thinking about the way that staring at your phone and endlessly scrolling through the news can abstract the reality of what you're trying to understand.

  • Irises and Daisies, Ceramics, 2025

    This piece was created during my first art residency in a small town in Denmark, it acts as a diary of my time there and who I was at that moment in my life. I wrote this poem while creating the artwork.

    'I am made of irises and daisies

    of coffee black mange tak
    of porcelain slip at twilight
    of cracked clay under little chairs
    and embers filling the air

    I am made of church bell birds chittering in trees

    of warm bread candle wax drips
    of fox cries diluted in tonic
    of sidewalk slugs on cloudy days
    and all the light that falls between'

  • Duo (with pepitas, trimmings, and door without knob without door), cast silicone, cast silicone pepitas, inkjet prints, wood, polymer plaster, 2026

    Undertow (wet or dry),
    a continuous given, inundating.
    Contact without relation.
    Cut the wave.
    Do the scissor stroke
    or the eyeball shuffle
    down to representation’s outpost.
    Know nonsense.
    Our uniforms: bald caps,
    hats empty of rabbits.
    We cast for bait,
    angle for the fly.
    Bugs Bunny grey elusive hoop arm lure.
    No chance and release.
    Fudd’s Freud? Betterhelp, if he could only find the password.
    Caesura between transmission and resonance.
    And yet the dance proceeds.
    Comma, letter, note, family resemblance, echo, hurdy gurdy.
    Choreographing psychic gancho
    even if meaning’s cheek isn’t built for the hook.

  • The Wonder Horn, graphite on embossed paper, 2026.

    This is part of the body of work titled "Outside Over There." It is a series of contour drawings I made while staring at my phone, which had news images on it. I began using this technique to document what I was seeing on my phone during the ICE raids in Minneapolis in early 2026. The results are drawings that are disproportional, abstracted, and yet eerily detailed in their focus on weapons, hands, feet, faces, all bounded by the viewing device used to see the image. While making this work, I was thinking about the way that staring at your phone and endlessly scrolling through the news can abstract the reality of what you're trying to understand.

  • Votive 2, lumen print, 2026.

    I haven't landed on definite names yet for the lumens in this series...thus the numbers. The last few years I've played with lumen printing but only in the last month I've come to be able to feel the resultant images are truly connected to me. Small unfired clay sculptures I created in 2023-"Vulva Votives"-were used to make these prints...I allowed exposures over a span of a couple hours to 24+ hours and gently shifted each votive, and sometimes moved entire photo paper they were placed on, as time & light transformed. Fascination with lack of real control over image creation, along with the nuance my other work does not employ at all, keeps me intrigued with lumens. The pleasure of continual surprise is enticing & pretty close to poetry itself!!

  • California banner I, acrylic on fabric over wood support, 2025

    This banner names bird species on the California endangered/threatened list. I made it while living in East LA, just after the 2025 fires. It is part of a series of banners that name endangered species or landscapes, intended to be carried while walking in places where these names belong. The visual presence of the names makes the beings/landscapes present in new ways. I borrow from religious, civil rights, and labor language to evoke feelings of sacredness and solidarity. When I make banners with others, we bring them into public spaces together, writing the names of these beings onto the page of the world (performance documentation included). I think about Walt Whitman's claim that attention to social justice makes "your very flesh a great poem" when I make these processions with others.

  • Inner Monologue in Parts, oil pastel, grease pencil, and colored pencil on paper, 2024

    Inner Monologue in Parts, is a visual transcript of my internal dialogue — fragmented, raw, and often contradictory. Using oil pastel, grease pencil, and colored pencil on paper, I return to a childlike aesthetic not as regression, but as reclamation. The crude marks and spontaneous figures reflect a space before self-censorship, where emotion precedes logic and form bends to feeling.

    Each drawing captures a fleeting moment of thought: the anxious loop, the quiet doubt, the accidental joy. Words emerge not as captions, but as interruptions — sometimes confessional, sometimes nonsensical — mimicking the disjointed rhythm of modern consciousness.

  • from the memoji mori project (grim family) 2, hand-stitched, archival print digitally reproduced from original vernacular studio portrait, each unique, 2026

    This group of three endless fascinates me. How are they related? What occasion caused them to dress up and pay have a studio portrait made? Only the slightly disheveled man doesn’t look unhappy. I look back and forth for repetitions among them: the woman and girl’s collars; the pocket handkerchiefs in the girl and man; the mouths of the woman and man slant; all three staring, shoulder to shoulder with their hands in their laps. The skeleton hands reach for the adults—to console? to keep them from the girl? to help them protect the girl?

  • Return, Video, 2025

    I made Return after the intense experience of photographing my placenta, watching blood ooze from the organ that had connected my son to my body and sustained him through my pregnancy. My doula told me to take it home, that it was mine. On the intake form, under reason for taking it, I wrote "make art." It sat in my freezer for three years. When I finally brought it out to photograph, it was perfect.

    I wanted to bury it, but didn't want to draw the neighborhood coyotes to our home. Instead, I filmed liquid absorbing into soil as a symbolic burial and return to the earth. Animals eat their placentas so predators won't find their young. The impulse to bury is an impulse to protect.

    The soundtrack layers my son breastfeeding, his heartbeat in utero, water, and the ambient sounds of the moment I recorded.

  • Queen of the Night, Liquid charcoal, watercolor, gouache, and graphite on cold press paper, 2025

    The plants above the two rabbits are datura. The Datura flower, or “Devil’s Trumpet” or “Devil’s Breath,” has been used in traditional medicine, sometimes as a sacred hallucinogen. All parts of the plant are toxic and it can cause hallucinations, delirium, and disorientation that lasts for weeks. At higher doses, it can be fatal. In the Epstein files, emails to Epstein allegedly suggest that Epstein may have been growing this plant or was considering growing it. It appears to have been recommended to Epstein because it causes loss of memory & can “remove free will,” as one email says. Some victims and perpetrators have suggested that he was already intentionally growing it on the island. I included poisonous plants in these works intentionally.

  • 3 Dogs (If Then Else), digital print with acrylic on wood, 2024

    I've been fascinated by anamorphic constructions since childhood. I created the illustrations with paper, ink, and Photoshop, and laminated them to ready-made hexagonal painting panels. The custom-built beveled enclosures and the orthographic perspective in the images create the illusion of floating 3D cubes.

    I also love integrating text into images. Words and letterforms are compelling to me because they're both abstract and representational at once. My parents worked in publishing, and yes, I'm a bit of a font geek.

    The bathtub image came to me first and it led to the other two. I tried to think of as many examples of "things being split 3 ways" as I could. Is it the same dog in all three pictures? Maybe, maybe not.

    You can assemble these three little scenes into any number of narratives; pick one that floats your boat.

  • Maria's Backpack, Mixed-media sculpture (backpack with found objects and personal belongings, plywood, fabric they wore), 2026

    This backpack grew from conversations about the belongings people choose when everything must fit into a single bag. While making this piece, I was thinking about absence as much as presence: what is left behind, what survives, and how memory becomes another form of carrying. The work honors the resilience of immigrant communities while reflecting on the deeply personal decisions made in moments of uncertainty.

  • Clever Repulsion, ceramic, foam, 2025

    Squeezing the abundant lemons, I found myself with a pile of lemon rinds, which sparked a new path to follow. Inspired by the act of

    creation and replication, I began to envision combining a lemon with an urchin, the lemon rinds transformed into a symbol for ocean

    acidity.

    I was struck by the homologous forms and structures between a lemon and a sea urchin, such as the distinctive belly button indent, and

    I embarked to merge elements from both entities.

    This hybrid creation extends beyond physical properties, standing in as a key object that unlocks memory in relationship to impact on Malaki’s landscape.

    often write poems before making sculptures – usually not for public consumption but this one was written before I made Clever

    Repulsion:

    The pattern of the waves is generated by the wind

    Time feels slow hanging from a buoy

    Feeling the wrinkle patterns on my fingertips

    The sun’s direction against my face

    The weight of my body in the water

    Tell me the time - or rather the time that has passed

    When the wind determines a lemon is past its prime

    It thrusts it onto the ground

    Letting the sun, soil animals, microorganisms absorb its mass

    I aim to beat the wind

    Grasping the liquid gold and placing it in the bottom of my dress

    I collect

    Juggling the reaching with the keeping

    I find I quickly can balance no more

    The awkward lemons roll and tumble into the sink

    Just how one should brush their teeth - with a bristle brush

    I shine the rinds in a circular pattern

    A curious habit

    As rinds are disregarded

    The time spent examining them – meditative

    It transports me to shallow sea floor

    Belly skimming the below

    My feet lightly acting as a propeller

    Ankles undulating up and down up and down

    No knee motion my knees might just get poked

    It happened

    That sudden ping pin feeling

    As my skin grazed against a sea urchin needles

    Unlike a lemon that persuaded me to grasp it and pick it

    As I pluck the sea urchin needles from my knee

    I think – what a clever repulsion

    Slicing a lemon baked in the Mediterranean sun – it oozes with juice

    Slicing, turning, placing, squeezing, pouring again and again

    The form and pattern remind me of a sea urchin

    The population vast and dense

    Urchins heal - medicinal to the sea

    Like a lemon in hot water soothes a sore throat

    Their natural inkling in to soak up the bad

    A balancing act

    If you dunk a PH strip in the sea it would come back a green/blue

    The acidity in saline bodies of water is much higher

    A concern is the ever increasing acidity in the ocean

    My grip loosens

    I can feel my hand as

    Each finger releases from the buoy

    I am no longer

    Hanging, bobbing or dangling

    But rather sinking

    Eyes wide open

    Witnessing my foot stay tangled in the rope

    As my body flips

    Head deeper than my toes

    My ear following the ring

    The deep ring

    At the bottom

    The sea swallows

    It never digests

    Objects are smoothed by grains of sand when they are submerged - they do not disapear

    They rather add weight

    Some are more favorable to the sea

    Other objects ingested are simply pollutants

    If you spend a generous amount of time upside down

    What you find at the bottom of the stomach lining of the sea is hard to absorb

    Leaving behind remnants of our shelters – and existences

    The sea does not shelter in the same way

    It does not need our protection our warmth –

    It needs distance

    However, we continue to intrude

    Not hearing it scream

    Rather increasing our presence

    Hoping that by hugging harder it will love us more

    Releasing – my body naturally floats to the surface

    The right ear feels the wind first

    While the left still hears a faint ring

    Wind fully surrounds

    The ringing stops

    Treading

    My own tether in the line of buoys

    Unless you are underneath

    Listening to the lungs of the sea breath

    One can ignore the ring

  • March Winds, acrylic on canvas, 2026.

    When I started painting this, only vague ideas, my hands kept putting in crows and rabbits--not black crows, not brown rabbits, but March ones, March colors. There's a lovely sonnet by John Clare about how peaceful it would be to be a crow flying in the sky when March winds are strong enough to tear off the branches of old oak trees. He calls the crow a chimney sweep--an image I like, feathers dark from clearing out the ashes of old fires. The crows in my yard are busy in March, swooping, cawing out messages. And the rabbits are back, hopping, abundant. Wallace Stevens writes of "a rabbit-light,/In which everything is meant for you/And nothing need be explained."

  • from the memoji mori project (hang loose, siblings&wolf), hand-stitched, archival print digitally reproduced from original vernacular studio portrait, 2026

    People pay a professional photographer to take a studio portrait that memorializes something special in their life. Here, a young boy and girl (probably siblings), dressed up in matching sailor outfits with similar brown shoes, were photographed next to a taxidermied snarling, angry wolf. Both touch the animal with some ease and fondness. A definite undercurrent of mortality is shown here. The skeleton hand is signaling to all to “hang loose.” It’s a mystery!

  • Edward Hopper’s sun in an empty room, photography, 2026

    Edward Hopper’s sun in an empty room
    It’s not like me to care what men think.
    But I do care
    about
    the way sunbeams
    touch walls through windows
    What could be more seductive?
    More romantic?
    What could both draw someone outside
    And inside.

    I watch the sun move across the walls and carpet.
    I never have to leave this place.
    In a forever state of shifting light.

  • Preservation, Wooden Card Catalog on Granite Table, 40 Wool Nests, 211 Engraved Bullets, 30 mirrors, table, Looping Audio, 2018.

    Preservation began as a poem, Lessons From Lancaster County that asked to be located somewhere other than on a page in a book. The work explores the human cost of school massacres in America. Preservation is located in 2 card catalogs salvaged from Rutgers University. Beginning with the University of Texas school shooting in 1966 through the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, 30 drawers catalog these tragedies and their victims. Offered as a solemn remembrance, each drawer contains handmade wool nests that cradle bullet casings engraved with the names of the victims of each shooting. Altogether, 40 nests hold 211 bullet casings. The nests sit on mirrors that line each drawer, such that each viewer is reflected in the work.

  • Through the Sky, on the Ground, carbon transfer paper and powdered graphite on paper, 2026.

    This is part of the body of work titled "Outside Over There." It is a series of contour drawings I made while staring at my phone, which had news images on it. I began using this technique to document what I was seeing on my phone during the ICE raids in Minneapolis in early 2026. The results are drawings that are disproportional, abstracted, and yet eerily detailed in their focus on weapons, hands, feet, faces, all bounded by the viewing device used to see the image. While making this work, I was thinking about the way that staring at your phone and endlessly scrolling through the news can abstract the reality of what you're trying to understand.

  • Double Assemblage, Acrylic on canvas, 2026

    During the making of this painting I was thinking about how to convey a dichotomy of chaos and order through the use of color, line and pattern paired with random chance. My visual choices began with a simple set of shapes and color schemes that I built upon. During the making of this piece I thought about how layers of descending gradients could give way to a visual rhythm. This made it feel more like playing a game or composing a piece of music. Looking for clues or notes as to which way the piece was leading me. Finally, I thought about how to complete the piece. Using textured random paint marks and layers of hidden color that were revealed in a last act of sanding away, revealing a grounding strip of paint that I ultimately have no thought over.

  • California banner II, acrylic on fabric over wood support, 2025.

    This banner is part of a series of banners that name endangered and threatened species or landscapes. This one simply reminds passersby that we are not alone: we are always accompanied by landforms. In so doing, it also challenges assumptions about who gets to be a "who"—what kinds of things count as beings? Can mountains "be with" us, or are we just here looking at them? Layli Long Soldier's claim, in "38" that "'Real' poems do not 'really' require words" has stayed with me since I first read WHEREAS in 2017; in this work I am interested in extending the field called "poem" into actions I make in concert with other people, in the world.

  • Untitled (From the series Swallowed Parts), Charcoal and colored pencil on paper, 2026

    With this drawing I was trying to merge the image with the paper and create marks that relate to shadows. The Swallowed Parts series is a group of drawings where I let myself draw automatically, which I approach in a similar way to stream of consciousness writing. When I started a drawing for this project I moved the previous drawings in the series around each other. I would lay a new piece of paper near the edge of a drawing to continue the image in a new direction. Each of the images in this series affected how the newer ones began and ended.

  • Fleeting II, Punch needle fiber art, 2025

    A laugh from the pit of my stomach. A glimpse of the bottom of your teeth.
    A song that hits just right, at the right moment. Fools me into thinking I can sing; dance. Urges me to cry.
    A scent or a taste time machine.
    A passing of time so swift and so slow and all at once and I can't hold on.
    Reaching for the fleeting. Grasping at smoke.

  • Life After Death, medium format film photography, 2025.

    Loss transforms and becomes a dull ache, living like static in the background. We continue our day-to-day, continuing on. Death comes for us all, yet the world continues to spin.

  • Nostalgia, Mixed Media, 2025.

    Nostalgia is a mixed media piece that takes inspiration from putting together puzzles with my family every time we visited my grandparents. If you were to look in the old farmhouse window from the outside, there would always be a half finished puzzle sitting on the table, waiting for visitors to come connect with each other through stories while putting together the pieces. Our family method of putting together puzzles was to get the edge pieces of the puzzle put together while simultaneously working on the center pieces as well. This way all of the family could sit around the table and contribute to forming the completed image. “Nostalgia” contains hand sewed pieces of found paper birch bark that are contained within an old barn window pane that was painted.

  • 3 Dogs (If Then Else), digital print with acrylic on wood, 2024

    I've been fascinated by anamorphic constructions since childhood. I created the illustrations with paper, ink, and Photoshop, and laminated them to ready-made hexagonal painting panels. The custom-built beveled enclosures and the orthographic perspective in the images create the illusion of floating 3D cubes.

    I also love integrating text into images. Words and letterforms are compelling to me because they're both abstract and representational at once. My parents worked in publishing, and yes, I'm a bit of a font geek.

    The bathtub image came to me first and it led to the other two. I tried to think of as many examples of "things being split 3 ways" as I could. Is it the same dog in all three pictures? Maybe, maybe not.

    You can assemble these three little scenes into any number of narratives; pick one that floats your boat.

  • Your Head Keeps its Darkness,
Film photography, 2026.

    I was thinking about how a head just blocks light, before it does anything else — clouds behind it in one shot, woods and river texture in the other, and the head still just eats the frame either way. I wasn't going for anything profound about memory. I noticed the shape repeats, same silhouette in both, and that felt like the whole point, so I kept it.

  • Tangles, Video, 2023

    While making this piece, I was thinking about the comfort and unspoken forms of intimacy that exist within female relationships. I was interested in how closeness can be communicated through gesture, touch, repetition, and shared presence rather than dialogue or explanation. Working with fragmented, sensory-driven imagery, I wanted to emphasize the tactile and emotional textures of these bonds, and how they can feel both grounding and expansive at the same time.

    I was also thinking about structure and rhythm as a form of emotional language, where repetition and fragmentation mirror how memory and feeling move. The film became like a visual poem, focused less on narrative and more on sensation and emotional resonance. Rather than resolving into a clear story, it lingers in moments of proximity, recognition, and quiet exchange, where meaning is carried through touch and atmosphere.

  • Falling Together, Mixed media, 2024

    What was I thinking about as I was making this piece?: I was curious what it would mean to have a song made of endings? I teach sculpture in an art department, and so much of our energy goes towards trying processes, failing, making messes, and cleaning. Often, energy in class throughout the semester doesn't result in the production of a finished product, and I wanted to show there's still value to that. This plinth holds everything we didn't want, abandoned in the sculpture studio at the end of the semesters, that I'd been saving in my office over the years. Our fits and starts. Our medium promiscuousness in the studio-as-sandpit-for-emergent-behavior. These tokens of our shifts in attention, the limits of our boredom, or exhaustion, are presented here as a kind of staying with things - a closure, a lingering - of how we went mad without losing our minds.

  • A Collection of Things Misheard, Text printed on paper, ongoing

    What was I thinking about as I was making this piece? I think about this as both a poem and a text-work that can be exhibited in a gallery. Over the recent years I've made lists to track tendencies in my thoughts and behaviors. My father also makes lists around the house to assist with challenges from Alzheimer's. I'm currently in my mid-forties, when the first formations of Alzheimer's can take root, and this submission is an early attempt at speculatively mapping its development. My immediate family members, myself included, have hearing-loss - one of the big accelerators of dementia and Alzheimer's. This work is a collection of statements misheard over the last few years that have a de-stabilizing effect on time and space. This bringing of things into unexpected proximities is somewhat an attempt at producing an excitement out of an anxiousness of being trapped in one's own head and hearing things anew. It's an attempt at approaching a grim topic with a sense of play.

  • how we will gather the debris, linen, wool, found rusty bed frame, found lace, crocosima, cattail, 2025

    Linen production began the industrial revolution. Ever since, we've been twisting, turning, around the needs and desires generated by industrialization. This has led to expansive resource extraction, the degradation of landscapes and unbalanced human impact on the earth. What will be left to create from? Will our forms be raw and unskilled or do we innately create pieces of symmetry as seen over the millenia? This piece is part of a body of work titled, “ A Discernible Layer,” that looks at how the Anthropocene will look in the geologic record.

  • Shipwrecked, digital photograph, 2025.

    I took this photograph during what I would consider my "rock bottom". I had experienced a personal tragedy and had to move back in with my parents across the country from where I was living. In the time that I'd been away from my hometown, a hurricane had almost completely destroyed an island that I'd grown up visiting every summer, and during that hurricane someone's boat ended up stuck in the mangroves. My brother and sister-in-law were excited to show me this boat that had become somewhat of a new landmark after the other ones had been blown away. The boat reminded me of myself-- dropped somewhere it didn't belong due to forces outside its control.

  • Star Death, Computer Animation/Data Visualization, 2026

    Stars have been looked towards as symbols of power, authority, and reassurance throughout human history. We see stars as everlasting and mystical, even though stars go through a life cycle and end in death, just like human beings. The ephemerality of human existence whether through individuals, institutions, or whole societies, can be reflected in the star life cycle.

    This animation is a data visualization that was projected on top of UC San Diego's Mandeville Art Gallery, created from a database that contained star positioning and each star's life cycle stage. The animation displays stars near the end of their life cycle, or red giants, drifting downwards in the sky, symbolizing the ephemerality of our universe as a whole.

  • baffle, mixed media, 2026

    people can mistake bafflement and mystification for enlightenment. I thought a lot about hard work and prayer. But not someone else’s way of praying. More like a witch from a Sylvia Linsteadt story.


  • Howler Monkeys Live in These Woods, handmade paper, letterpress, 2026

    When I was little, I would climb the propane tank that sat in our yard. We had a playground my father accumulated from odd jobs that were disposing of equipment, but I was partial to the tank. I’d stand on top in my jelly sandals, slapping them against the powder-coated exterior shell and listen to the deep echoes that reverberated in the tank. I wasn’t an imaginative kid. If I was better at being a kid maybe I would’ve invented a story. That’s not why I climbed it. I climbed it because when the sun sat and my mom called me in, I’d be able to see it linger behind the corn just a little while longer. Propane gas was both a comfort and the cause of my first house fire. This imagery and the truism posted on it have complicated emotions linked to my upbringing in the rural Midwest.

  • Red-shouldered Hawk in Birch Snag, mixed media watercolor, 2026.

    The way trees, especially standing dead trees or snags, can visually evoke wild animal sentinels to our imaginations, or can help living animals disguise themselves by blending in.

  • 3 Dogs (If Then Else), digital print with acrylic on wood, 2024

    I've been fascinated by anamorphic constructions since childhood. I created the illustrations with paper, ink, and Photoshop, and laminated them to ready-made hexagonal painting panels. The custom-built beveled enclosures and the orthographic perspective in the images create the illusion of floating 3D cubes.

    I also love integrating text into images. Words and letterforms are compelling to me because they're both abstract and representational at once. My parents worked in publishing, and yes, I'm a bit of a font geek.

    The bathtub image came to me first and it led to the other two. I tried to think of as many examples of "things being split 3 ways" as I could. Is it the same dog in all three pictures? Maybe, maybe not.

    You can assemble these three little scenes into any number of narratives; pick one that floats your boat.

  • Rosa's Backpack, Mixed-media sculpture (backpack with found objects and personal belongings, plywood, fabric they wore), 2026

    Created through collaboration with an individual who crossed the U.S.–Mexico border, this backpack reflects on the quiet weight of what is carried during migration. As I assembled the work, I thought about how ordinary objects can hold extraordinary memories. The backpack becomes a portrait of endurance, asking viewers to consider how identity, hope, and loss continue to travel with us long after a journey has ended.

  • Alive Sleeping, .40, aluminum, pvc board, MDF, 2025

    When you lie down in the main cabin of the boat and look up through the porthole, you see the direction of the wind from

    outside.

    This spring, my baba (dad) sent me a video from Greece—a postcard of sorts. A live feed, a moment of weather he was

    experiencing and I was witnessing through a tool we use to determine the direction to sail.

  • Memory tree, Digital Collage, 2026

    Carnival brings memories of my place of origin. It holds a profound meaning that I cannot explain, I can only feel it.

  • Do Dreams Have Cardinal Directions?,
    machine-pieced, hand-quilted cotton with appliqué, naturally dyed with pomegranate, cutch, indigo, black walnut, lichen, myrobalan, and acorn, 2025

    I was thinking about a traditional quilt pattern, the lone star, or, morningstar, and its symbol for hope (light) in darkness. The appliqued snakes and ladders reference the children's board game. I have questions about the ideology behind this game where snakes (nature) become a symbol for trials/setbacks, while ladders (technology) aid a player in propelling them forward (and up). It’s been my experience that the opposite is true, and, as Salman Rushdie has written, “snakes can lead to triumph, just as ladders can be descended.” This composition was developed while considering my own interpretation of the misfortunes and joys of life and my gratitude for all of it because it led me to this current moment.

Previous

nice;04
Next

nice art grant ii