Statement

The world through blurred eyes.

Like many painters, I see myself as a quiet observer—a voyeur of sorts—drawn to the subtle, fleeting moments that often go unnoticed. I paint to bear witness: to emotion, to tragedy, to resilience, and to the quiet beauty in both the ordinary and the extraordinary. Through my work, I try to honor the way people assert their presence simply by living- how every breath, every gesture, is a declaration: I am here. However brief, that existence leaves a mark.

Much of my painting style reflects how I first experienced the world. I was born profoundly nearsighted, a condition that went undiagnosed until I was around five years old. Before then, the world was a soft blur unless it was just inches from my face. That early visual imprint continues to shape the way I interpret and render what I see. My paintings often mirror this—up close, they dissolve into loose strokes and color; from a distance, they snap into focus. That interplay between proximity and perception is at the heart of how I see—and how I invite others to see through my work.

Biography

Roxanne Casas is a ceramic artist based in Piru, California. A Ventura County native, she grew up in Fillmore and earned her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art with a concentration in Ceramics from California State University Channel Islands in 2020, following her studies at Ventura College.

She currently serves as the Instructional Lab Technician for Ceramics at Ventura College and leads workshops through the ceramics program at the Cole Creativity Center, part of the Santa Paula Art Museum. Her practice is rooted in a deep, ongoing exploration of the ceramic process, with an emphasis on technical refinement and artistic growth.

Statement

My artwork is inspired by those peaceful places that capture the essence of the memories that remind me of home. For me, embroidery is therapeutic. It goes deeper than simply just drawing fiber through fabric. The process of stitching is a lesson in mindfulness, which also provides a means of channeling my memories and emotions and allows their expression through layers of color. My completed works are tangible translations of my own feelings of nostalgia, places that remind me of home, and places I’ve traveled to and sometimes feel “homesick” for. And perhaps, by creating these landscape pieces, the viewers of my art will also be reminded of their own pleasant experiences in similar scenes.



Statement

Slogging through swamps, wading through weeds, and getting off the beaten path, I sketch native habitats and make environmental woodcuts. These woodcuts are portraits of plants and plant communities; some endemic, rare, and endangered.

I have held art residencies at Mojave National Preserve, Petrified Forest National Park, Big Cypress National Preserve, Everglades National Park, and Archbold Biological Station. May 2026 I will be an artist-in-residence at Joshua Tree National Park. These residencies provide access to remote and pristine areas, inspiring much of her recent work. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of many awards and grants.

Doctrow, MA, is Curator emerita, Museum of Florida Art and Culture, South Florida State College. Her studio is located at Studio Channel Islands, Camarillo, CA.



Statement

Kevin R. Frech (USA, lives/works New York City) is an award-winning artist and filmmaker whose uncompromising but humor-filled work examines the contradictions of society: interconnectivity vs. alienation, plentifulness vs. scarcity, immediacy vs. dislocation, and consumption vs. conservation. He focuses on explorations of “value,” not merely in the sense of “price,” but as a shared ideal: What do we as human beings value today? And how do we assign those values? His work thrives in the disconnect between the way we hope to see ourselves and how we actually exist.

Biography

Erin Robinson Grant is a multimedia artist currently residing in Portland, Oregon. Originally from Indiana, Grant earned her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and MFA from Indiana University. She has also attended the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia and The Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland.  Her work deals with birth, death, and our abject responses to it. She explores these themes through an amalgamation of video, animation, drawing, installation, and performance. Grant has exhibited nationally at The Kinsey Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA), SPACES Gallery, and at the Yellowstone Art Museum. Additionally, she has participated in several international residency programs such as Spark Box Studio in Canada and Arts Itoya in Japan. Grant has exhibited at a variety of venues throughout the West Coast including Gallery 114, University of Portland, the Umpqua Valley Arts Center, Blackfish Gallery, PUNCH Projects, The Arts Center, Verum Ultimum, Lower Columbia College, Central Washington University, and the Sanchez Art Center.

Statement

Mary Grisey is a textile artist based in Long Beach, California. She has exhibited her work across the United States and Canada including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto and Quebec.

Inspired by the power of spirit within us all, Mary’s weavings evoke a totemic reminder that our life is a sacred act of love and an impermanent experience of both life and death. She is endlessly inspired by her soul’s remembrance of ancient civilizations, spirit worlds and the human condition as catalysts for her work. Her work bears visible traces of the hand—bits of imperfect warp and weft—and the inexact results of hand-dyeing. Transformation is central to her practice: a metamorphosis that explores the ruin and beauty of the human form to reveal our infinite Spirit.



Statement



My paintings done on produce boxes are a testament to resilience and unseen labor that keeps this country running. I depict immigrant farm workers throughout their day working under tents; covered from head to toe to protect from the sun; on Driscoll boxes that carry the fruits of their labor. The boxes marked by dirt, labels, and time, become the foundation of their portraits, and still life symbolizing how society often treats both the workers and their sacrifices as disposable.



Immigrants risk everything to get to this country in search of a better life, only to endure hardship and take on the most grueling jobs just to survive. My work seeks to make their struggles visible, long working days, meager pay and fear of deportation are just a few struggles illegal immigrants constantly face in a society that renders them invisible. I honor their humanity in a system that often exploits them; within these portraits, there is defiance, strength, and dignity.



I depict this type of work to show “Who feeds us? At what cost?”. These people are not just workers; they are mothers, fathers, sons and daughters; people who left everything behind in search of something better. By painting them on the fragile, temporary surfaces of produce boxes, I confront the viewer with the fragility of their existence in America, while also insisting that their stories endure hardships the basis on which this country was founded under.



Statement

My art is an avenue by which I share my love and knowledge of the natural world. It is also a way for me to express my commitment to inclusivity and justice. I hope my art inspires humanity to a more careful stewardship of our planet and to recognize our responsibility to each other.

Biography

Julie Lipa, a self-taught artist from Detroit, channels her fascination with discarded objects into her art— a passion ignited by garbage picking with her parents. Her creative path was further shaped by an influential electro-kinetic teacher at Macomb County Community College, who taught her to see the world differently. Early on, Lipa repurposed 1950s portable TVs into functional art. But ultimately she needed to make the rent so she stopped making art and founded an entertainment marketing agency.

Two decades later she retired and returned to her art, using the vintage TVs she had stored to create her solo show Beneath Perfection: The Underside of America’s Mid-Century Belle Époque, a journalistic exploration of American history.

Her latest series, Pulp Fission: Classic Comics Reconstructed, deconstructs the violent, sexist comic panels of the 1950s, exposing their false moral narratives while infusing them with subversive, queer, and risqué themes that challenge America’s sanitized history.

Her work can be found at the Smithsonian Affiliate The Atomic Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada and in private collections.

Statement



Through the lens of environmental sustainability, my work reincarnates the discarded and transforms the used to explore our fraught relationship with the natural world. My creative research is often material-driven and opportunistic, with experimentation integral to the finished work. This mixed media sculpture combines recycled paper and reclaimed textiles to celebrate biological structure and acknowledge human impacts on fragile ecosystems.



Biography

Based in Galena, Illinois, and Hot Springs, Arkansas, David Orr is an author and artist who brings a structural perspective to his work, honed by careers in architectural design and corporate creative direction, to his work. Orr now explores histories—both personal and systemic—through a unique lens of comedic structure, absurdity, and lyricism. He dedicates his practice to creating novels and art books that merge photography, graphics, and poetry.

This ‘third act’ in his creative life is built on a rigorous foundation of lifelong learning. A graduate of the Low-Residency MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Orr also holds two other Master’s degrees, one in Architecture, the other in Media and Popular Culture. His path began with Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and includes formal study in comedic theory at the Second City and play-writing at Chicago Dramatists.

Raised in a small college town in the U.S. South, Orr’s voice was shaped by a culture of raconteurs steeped in the traditions of the tall tale and magical realism. This heritage informs his distinct approach, blending influences from Jorge Luis Borges to stand-up comedy—to dissect complex subjects with wit and humanity.

Statement



My artwork emerges organically, without a preconceived pattern or plan. Each piece is the result of intuitive exploration-an accumulation of experimentation with a variety of mediums. I blend original photography, paint pours, and fabrics, allowing them to interact in unexpected and harmonious ways. Thread painting unifies the work, creating a sense of cohesion and balance across the layered textures. Fabric is my primary medium-both a canvas and a sculptural element. I use it to construct original fine art compositions that draw viewers in from a distance and invite them to linger, discover, and connect more deeply with the subtle details. My work lives in the space between abstraction and landscape, memory and material, inviting personal interpretation and quiet reflection.

Biography

Silvia Wagensberg, originally from Barcelona, holds degrees in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Barcelona and studied at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts. After a brief career in local art circuits, she moved to the United States. Her exhibitions include Troy Café (1992), Back to LA at Corridor Gallery (1995), the Steinbeck Center (2012), Sola Gallery (2021), The Ebell of Los Angeles (2024), and Yours Truly at the Backman Gallery, Heller Museum, New York (2024). Her work, often rooted in memory and migration, appears regularly in Maintenant, with a 2024 illustration nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Her paintings reflect personal experience while engaging with cultural references that hold deep significance for her. Rooted in memory, her work frequently explores the female experience, focusing on the resilience women cultivate throughout their lives.

Statement

The invitation of the blank canvas and the purity of the act of painting, is what inspires me.

Having grown up in the English countryside, long stretches of rainy days put drawing, and eventually painting, foremost in my pursuits. Through decades of filling the blank canvas, constant experimentation, and pushing boundaries, I broke into my own voice.

There is something raw and beautiful in the process of painting large canvases, using my whole body to inhabit the space, with no pre-meditation for the outcome, just having a conversation with the materials in that specific moment of time. I explore the balance of order and chaos’s and the joy and pain of creating. Leaving the gestures obvious to their origination; a drip, a flow or a strike, either emotional, playful, or aggressive, laying it bare for the viewer’s observation.

Biography

James Woronow’s art is all about geometry and clean lines. His work is characterized by its strong use of basic shapes and colors. But there is more to Woronow’s art than meets the eye. His work also shows the hidden connections between things.

Woronow’s work often explores the relationship between the seen and the unseen, the material and the ethereal. His sculptures usually use different metals and exotic woods to create geometric shapes. The elements are then affixed to a non-glare sheet of acrylic. Under this acrylic sheet is another panel to which Woronow adheres handmade papers that bring life to his geometric elements. By doing this, Woronow establishes a sense of depth and dimension that in-person viewing can fully appreciate. [ Read more ]



Statement

Implications Series

This ongoing series of painted wood reliefs were prompted by my discovery of the possibilities and pleasures of a Makita angle Grinder tool. Initially bought for its ability to easily remove layers of paint and damaged wood surfaces, I soon saw its potential to shape the individual pieces of wood I use in my sculptures into forms closer to the biomorphic ones I use in my collages.

These abstract, non-objective collages, although not directly intended, have always contained suggestions of subject matter. I make no attempt to avoid this, nor is it possible, since the collage shapes and their arrangements are formed and chosen by a lifetime of focusing on images that I have remembered, responded to and enjoyed.

These sculpture’s more contemplative and deliberate process of assembly, each piece cut, shaped by grinding, sanded and carefully considered before it is doweled and glues in place, intensifies their sense of subject matter. The finished sculptures, with their implied imagery, become the recipient and container of many implications. There are 37 sculptures and reliefs in the series.