Ruby Que is a Chicago-based installation artist and experimental filmmaker who occasionally performs, carves, and weaves. In their work they open portals and create hauntings. They engage with celluloid film both as a medium and as a material, with a specific interest in the vulnerability of film as a metaphor for the cycle of life. They’ve attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, and No Nation Art Lab amongst others. Their works have been exhibited at Kavi Gupta, Comfort Station, Mana Contemporary, and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. They hold a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Image: A Movie is a Thing Alive

Armando Román is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in the Midwest. He received his BFA in Studio Arts from Denison University and his MFA in Visual Arts from The Ohio State University. His drawings traverse themes of religion, homosexuality, community, and the self. The Mexican landscape, both cultural and literal, is of particular interest to him. He creates work to better understand his own relationship with Mexico, which is simultaneously familiar and foreign to him. Familiar, in that countless stories have been retold to him of this place, where his mother and father were born. Foreign, in that he has no permanent relationship with it. Hybridization, juxtaposition, and integration are used in his practice as tools of resistance.

Crawling Through Glass, 2023. Inkjet and Pastel on Canvas. 44'' x 60''

V, a.k.a Vincent Phan, et al. (Valienese, b. 1992 A.D.) is an earthly-alien collective. Their works are systems-oriented investigations of chaos in nature and the nature in the chaos. V et al. adopts furniture and composts organic materials to create a hybridized existence of humans and nature. These creations are then traded for soil in human-occupied territories in order to create a new terra of possibility. Hybridizing objects and materials, V et al. re-naturalizes the man-made back into a natural ecology that once was its birthplace but has now become foreign.

V et al. trades earthly-alien creations for the soil of colonized territory. This accumulated soil then builds Valien, a new continent that exists within colonized continents. As long as V et al. lives, this terra expands as the soils are added. As long as Valien exists, V et al.’s reality exists as do the earthly-alien creatures that constitute Valien.

Nicole Leung approaches their practice with a fascination for adaptation, particularly in how we (consciously or unconsciously) choose to internalize, process, and interact with our surroundings. Through their process of collecting, accumulating, and arranging neglected objects, Leung takes an interest in the habits we adopt and the delusions we construct to feel safe amidst irrepressible fear and uncertainty.

Healing Fantasy, scissors case and objects that cut sourced from location of installation, 2022

Shonna Pryor is a conceptual artist, art programs producer, and an educator at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her interdisciplinary art practice is inspired by references to food theory and its peripheral objects and concepts as a lens through which to critically engage the politics of identity, memory, power, and play. Afrofuturist aesthetics underscore the visual language of these expressions via reclaimed objects, installation, painting and public programming. Pryor's work has been exhibited in major cities such as Chicago, Detroit and New York, with esteemed artist residencies at Hyde Park Art Center; High Concept Labs; and Chicago Council on Science and Technology, respectively.

WallPAPER of Respect--Cocoa

Sungho Bae (b. Seoul, Korea 1988) is an artist working primarily in sculpture, video, and installation. He focuses on re-rendering the visual domain, considering images as mediators, consumption as a strategy, and humans as mutants. This is to navigate the mechanism of the image-making system and how an individual processes such images as superficial data. The symbiotic but dissonant relationship between the visual status of collected images and their context has been the driving force behind an act of repurposing. He received a BFA from Seoul National University and an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Above all, he is an avid toy collector.

Acupuncture Anatomy_How to be Unnamed, but Loved, 2022, Anatomical model produced from repurposed plush toys of various Frankenstein's monsters, product tags of plush toys, panel with plush toy fragments, RGB map tacks indicating which plush toys were used, anatomy kit, medical cart, 78in. x 35in. x 18in. / 25in. x 17in. x 33in.

Michelle Chun (b. 1993) is a painter and visual maker. Born and raised in Southern California, she is shaped by experiences of cross-cultural realities and interdisciplinary practices. With a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MAR in Visual and Material Culture from Yale Divinity School, she approaches her practice both as embodied meditation on the sacred ordinary, acute emotions, migration and home while also a theological practice of incarnation, redemption, and liturgy. In 2022, she was a resident at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist’s Residency receiving the Longform Scholarship and participated in the Black Arts Movement School Modality taught and facilitated by artists and scholars such as Fred Moten, Sonia Sanchez, and Romi Crawford. She has shown at Helen J Gallery in Los Angeles, The Yard: Williamsburg in New York, and Gelman Gallery in Rhode Island among other exhibitions. She also makes music with the collective Miso Peanut Butter.

Molly Blumberg is an artist based in Chicago, IL.  Her sculptural practice sits in the spaces between our human bodies and the materiality of lived environments, imagining their potential permeabilities.  Trained as a sculptor and a papermaker, her work is grounded in an extreme engagement with materiality.  Through a playfully physical studio practice and a dedication to process based exploration, she explores how it feels to be a body.

She earned her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in fiber & material studies in 2020 and her BFA from the Washington University in St. Louis Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts in sculpture in 2012.

Sophia Karina English (they/them) is a latinx crafts person, sculptor, and performance artist from San Francisco,CA and based in Chicago,IL. Presented with a series of eradicated cultural and personal histories due to colonization, poor record keeping, and family secrets, English uses their work to ask questions and keep track of what feels important at the time. Working from their home studio English uses beadwork as reference to the Latin American tradition of storytelling through beaded textiles.

If Then How Long, glass beads, adhesive, wooden board, thread, ready made shelf  15"x18"x4"  2018

bARBER (b. 1982, US) lives and works in Midwest America. He is a non-representative figurative painter relying on elements of abstraction to personify the invisible nature of the individuals he paints. Heavily influenced by the music and makeshift bred from the underserved quadrant of Black American culture, he repurposes everyday materials, such as junk mail, packaging, and found objects, to construct artworks from a cultural perspective.

Please learn more at www.PropelledAnimals.org and @BarberPaintsPeople.

Kathryn, 90” x 42”, mixed media on paper