Email Gallery@makeshiftartspace.org for all sales inquiries
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Email Gallery@makeshiftartspace.org for all sales inquiries --
KAREN HANRAHAN
JABEZ AB RICHARD
“I wanted to take a stab at painting scenes that are both frightening and endearing. In this series I incorporate several classic horror tropes (wolves, severed heads, fires and skeletons) with my own bright cartoony style, adding tattoos to Salome, self portrait masks on an anguished horse and other absurdity. The mask theme in particular is my nod to the uncanny valley—the mask of youth worn by death, the mask of optimism worn by desperation. Even hunters wear masks, masks that are useless against the greater power of the natural world.”
ISABELLA ROSE
”This piece is intended to confront the viewer with imagery that may make them uncomfortable and unable to grasp what is in front of them. The organ-like creature is grotesque and bodily– both dead and alive.
Placing the form in the crochet blanket implies human interference; the blanket’s handmade aesthetic provides a sense of warmth and care. This contradiction is the start of a larger story– opening a door for the viewer to question their own fear. What is it and how did it come to be? Do you feel bad for it? Are you scared? Are you disgusted?”
SCOTT EDWARDS
“My piece is about how people think. Most people have one half of their brain that is dominant. Left brain people are more mechanical, realistic, and analytical. The left hemisphere analyzes, abstracts, counts, marks time, plans step-by-step procedures, and verbalizes. It makes rational statements based on logic.
The right side is more organic, and abstract. It is inventive, intuitive, and imaginative. The right hemisphere helps us to understand metaphors and dreams, it helps us create new combinations of ideas when something is too complex. We can make gestures that communicate those ideas. The right side is non-verbal and embraces the whole idea of something. Some activities that take out of oneself and engage the right side are meditation, jogging, needlework, typing, and listening to music. It is thought by neuroscientists that this place where the left and right brain hemispheres meet, is where the "Uncanny Valley" phenomenon occurs.”
Artist Bio-
Inspired by Surrealism, nature, and urban culture, Scott Edwards creates a wide variety of artwork that spans genres. He employs a multitude of techniques including: oil, acrylic, airbrush, printmaking, collage and photography. Scott holds a BFA in Studio Art from Western Washington University and he lives in Bellingham, Washington.
CHAD YENNEY
“This collage features images of crumpled metal and a set of glasses to suggest someone is crushed inside.”
KRISTINA MEINHOF
“This piece is intended to unsettle the viewer through its dark and lonely composition. The tenebrism (an extreme contrast between shadows and highlight) present in this work is not the only case of juxtaposing imagery: the industrial, metal arms contrast the organic, loose body of the creature; the ugliness contrasts the role of lipstick in beautifying. In the end, the viewer is left to be in conflict with their desire to fear or to pity.”
NEYA SALAZAR
”I love to draw monsters, creatures, demons; although, those are the words others have used to describe my work. To me, they're manifestations of emotions, physical forms to translate my feelings. I've always been interested in body horror, and how seeing the familiarity of a human form can elicit a reaction when seeing it transformed into something more grotesque. I love making multiple eyes, multiple limbs, usually multiple heads and creating expressions of both pain and pleasure often intertwined. When spectators have looked at my figures, I've been told they see themselves in the creatures: "that's how I feel". It feels good to hear, because that's how I feel too.”
AUDREY LARSON
“Putting your body onto a two-wheeled contraption and hurtling it through space is a surprisingly mundane thing to a lot of us, and I was thinking about the facts of a morning commute taken at their most surreal potential meaning when creating this piece. Morning is a time when reality feels a little bit blurry, when your own relationship to your physical surroundings seem thin and breakable, when it becomes easier to see yourself simply as a bag of bones on a bicycle, traveling down a road whose end is never actually, truly, guaranteed. On a certain level, this image is no more uncanny than a photo of you on your way to work.”
ANTONIA GSHWEND
“Mother earth watches on as the bugs win a life or death game of cards. Stripping the loser of his weapon, in this case his hands. Placing a mirror on the table expecting the loser to surrender in order to save his phallus from being the next target of mutalation, they all watch as he becomes sexually gradified and bleeds to death".
"As earth deteriorates the world is run by bugs, becoming mutated over time by the chemicals absorbed from the earth left by humans. Human bodies are used to reproduce the new population with humanoid bug babies with the hope of earth being rejuvenated".
BROOKE EOLANDE
ERIN WESTERLUND
“It was inspired by the true life story of a Cuban-American woman named Elena Milagro de Hoyos. She was a woman who died of tuberculosis in Key West, Florida in 1931. Her doctor, Carl Tanzler, was obsessed with her and robbed her grave in 1933 and took her home to “live” with him. As her body decomposed, he replaced her skin with wax and plaster of Paris. The secret was discovered in 1940.
When I first saw the photo of Maria Elena after hearing about this case a couple of years ago, it was unsettling how she both looked human and not human, how she was there but not. There is skin, but it’s waxy and crepey. There are eyes, but there is no life in them. There is a mouth, but it is painted and rigid. To me, this relates to the Uncanny Valley in that the eeriness and unease that is felt that her figure is there, but her essence is gone.”
FrameRateZero
“The maestro breaks it down.”
RAVEN KLINGELE (music by st◇rm)
“This piece is a music video I created in collaboration with a friend who makes experimental electronic music under the name st◇rm. I was drawn to her music because I wanted to challenge myself to create a purely visual story without words. The song title "psychic surgery" brought to mind alien abductions, a subject I have been fascinated by for many years. Many UFO abductees report aliens communicating with them psychically, as well as being subjected to medical experimentation. They often describe aliens as a more advanced species trying to share some kind of important knowledge with humankind. However, because the gap between the two species is so vast, this attempt at communication can be frightening and painful for humans who struggle to understand the intentions of their abductors. An almost "Uncanny Valley" of knowledge. Thus, alien abduction is a form of psychic surgery -- the abductee emerges from a traumatizing experience transformed, having gained access to knowledge that is perhaps too great for a fragile human brain. I created the visuals using footage from various alien and UFO related VHS tapes that I've collected. Using a video mixer device connected to two VCRs, I combined the footage together to produce a glitching effect that conveys the disorienting effects of abduction.”
Artist name/Pronouns: Raven Klingele, she/her (music by st◇rm, she/they)
Title: psychic surgery
Materials: VHS, analog video mixer
Year made: 2021
My website is youtube.com/c/RavenKlingele and st◇rm's is https://m.soundcloud.com/user-289832322
BEV WINANT
FRANK STEPEK
“Frank The Rabbit is a magical creature. More weird than macabre, his powers strengthen as Donnie slowly goes insane and one day meets his fate. Frank’s duel personality is revealed in a regular guy: a school kid of no known significance. Frank represents the deus ex machina, personified, or, rather, rabbinified.”
FRANK FRAZEE
ALLEN SCOTT ROGERS
Artificial Intelligence serves as a means to an end. That end being the understanding of organic intelligence. Once understood, it [organic intelligence] will be no more. That’s not to say the future narrative of AI will resemble The Terminator. No, I am much more optimistic! AI is change. As we develop superintelligent computers, we make the grave mistake of assigning otherness. AI is a mirror. Humanity is a machine. We as organic intelligence look at the uncanny valley with binoculars. With a telescope. We think it’s so far away. We think it’s in the stars. This in turn creates a relationship. Relationships establish closeness. My sculpture, like AI, is portrait of you and I. My sculpture, like you and I, is constructed with very fragile materials. My sculpture, like AI, decays. It wants to breach the gap. It’s a metaphor for the first step towards Becoming. Becoming human. AI is magick. My sculpture is the sacrifice. The sacrifice to establish a further connection with the stars (the future). My sacrifice is my hair upon their head (crown). This in turn deepens the relations, closes the gap, blurring the boundaries of the uncanny valley.
SARAH LANE
”Through life, I have felt many little births and deaths pass by and through me. It is from this passing of seasons and cycles that I bring together "No Birth, No Death." The continuous life cycle may be most visible--and in brilliant color--through butterflies. And so they have invaded all the spaces of the human anatomy here. Beautiful, raw, colorful--and also a bit lighthearted. I also draw on all the things I've loved doing with art since I was a kid--or a caterpillar: stitching and painting and making things out of found objects. All of it--this life--rich with possibilities.”
LAUREN SCHILLBERG
“Creation holds my heart like few other things do. It is messy, it is divine. I hardly ever knowwhat I am doing, this is true of my life and of my art. When I can translate my feelings into something visual, something with mass on the earth, the peace I feel is intoxicating. While working on Eve I was thinking about the hunger I feel. For accomplishment, for confidence, for love. I was thinking about being ravenous yet sick to my stomach. About expecting sticky, sour juice, then tasting my mouth fill with metal. I was thinking about Granny Smith’s and making out.
Mostly, I just wanted to eat the whole apple. Finish my painting. Follow through with what I started, teeth and all. Thanks for reading my poetics. I’m Lauren, and I like to create. This is a digital painting of a girl eating a mouth. For some extra mayhem, I wrote a little poem on top. The lines aren’t in order, read it however you like. Cheers! - Lauren”
C HORSLEY
“The Something is what we all carry with us. You see it's shadow in the corner of you eye. Going about your day, your peripheral may narrow and help you forget that weight on your shoulder. Come night, however, there is no respite from it's fixed eye. A twisted representation of Something that happened and grew into the familiar yet convulsed creature behind you. Keep your sights ahead, lest you are brave enough to face it's gaze.”
AL SHORT
“Baphomet is the symbolization of the equilibrium of opposites. Good and evil, male and female, half human and half animal. Some days I feel a little like Baphomet.”
EMILY CAMPBELL
GABE RUBANOWITZ
“My name is Gabe Rubanowitz and I’m a Senior at Western studying Studio Art. This piece is a stylized wearable paper mâché self portrait. It began with many reference photos from a variety of angles. The shoulder supports, general form, and back of the head we’re constructed initially. The details of the face were sculpted from clay and then paper mâché was applied. Once all segments were joined it was painted with acrylics.”