Art is inherently investigative. It empowers us to critically examine our world, our culture, and above all ourselves. In 2012 I began researching domestic violence in Missouri and was astonished by the lack of data. The police and media treated both abuse and murder as isolated events without addressing any larger issue of violence against women.

In response I sought to create empathic memorials for women which could also serve as legitimate data sets. These works have included antique cross-stitches, re-embroidered with dates of murder in a given year, as well as interactive displays which allow women to share their own stories of abuse in a safe and empowering manner. Combining domestic craft traditions with contemporary technologies enables this work to tread simultaneously into public policy, collective memory, social engagement, and outreach. As an artist, I am incredibly excited about the potential for new tools and technologies to address a continued culture of indifference.

"Reversing Tides" is part of a series: Altered Histories, and refers to shifting landscapes, possible destruction, other wordily landscapes (reminiscing of new planetary explorations and our searching for a new home should we destroy this one), the sky falling in on us, yet there is a calm beneath the storm and evidence of life. Ultimately it is the viewer who chooses where to focus their attention, although the duality continues to exist regardless. The intention is haunting and beautiful at the same time. It is a single channel FHD video looped with stereo sound. It plays on a vertically mounted monitor with the sound played through headphones. 2015 "And the rivers are Full of You" is also part of the series, played on two, vertically mounted monitors with the sound played through headphones. 2016

In 2014, a flash flood destroyed my home studio and ruined many valued items. During the process of throwing out what was lost and cleaning what remained, I sometimes recognized a sad beauty in the debris. Throughout 2015, I created a number of books in response to the event. Among these, Too Much Rain incorporates digital copies of eight images among many from my early childhood that were only marginally salvaged. Deluge incorporates twelve similarly degraded images along with twelve translucent overlays that emulate residue left behind once the water receded.

In 2003, shortly after moving back to the Philadelphia area, I brought a group of my photography students from Mercer Community College to the Eastern State Penitentiary on a field trip. It was a great photographic site. The reports I had heard about the architecture of the facility were definitely true, and the light and feeling of abandonment really gave off a sense that the Penitentiary might still be inhabited by ghosts or spirits. But there are a lot of abandoned spaces like that, so my first trip to the site would probably have been my last if I didn't return to Philadelphia on a completely different class trip a few weeks later - this time, as a student.

The Warden's entries brought the Penitentiary to life for me. Through his words, the space now felt inhabited and connected to deep emotions - infused with new meaning. The logs include details about prisoners' families, whether they could read or write, whether they felt guilty about their crimes, whether they were penitent.

The series A History of Toil is an ongoing body of work that explores the connections between women, work and textiles. Inspired by a deconstructed sleeve, stained with sweat, from the turn of the 20th century and a wellworn apron from the depression era, these works are a visual history of the lives of women. I enjoy using materials that have passed through other hands, imagining the stories that these repurposed garments and domestic textiles tell. These fiber artworks reference traditional quilt structures as well as social structures that connected and supported women,and at the same time confined them.

Since my parents estrangement, my perspective shifted into a realm of bitter contemplation, analysis, and critique. Their separation after 25 years of marriage has unsettled the foundation of our household and with divorce procedures just underway, I'm noticing that the effects of this event are altering everything: I look at places, people, and objects with different eyes, questioning their purpose, truth and actuality. Using edited home videos and photographs, childhood memories are re-created and transformed into tangible layers of selfreflection. These layers transport the viewers into the past, mine and perhaps theirs. As the video flickers between birthday parties, analog static, and cigarette smokers, the audience may recall moments from their own family history. The video serves as a connector between past and present, personal and universal. The elements that make up the assemblage of my childhood mimic the way that memories are recalled, questioned, confused, and replayed.

While I paint with urgency, it also is something I consider at a distance, as a practice, with a clear voice and a place in the contemporary painting conversation.

I engage only the intuition of my eyes and hand, intent only to tell a story. It is partly always the story of myself, and because of the way I palimpsestically reuse and repurpose previous canvases, it is also the story of each painting's own making.

I think of my works as memories, built-up over time, compressed and comingled, their preciousness waxing and waning, inscrutable and elusive until called forth at unexpected moments, transformed by later events in unanticipated ways. I paint ambiguous accretions of accumulated emotions about, and arising from, the sparks and shadows of the human mind.

An empathetic rhythm moves the brush and shapes my titles, which feed each other. That poetic interaction invites you to reconcile the title and image, and find resonance -personal and universal - with the melody.

Unfinished Masonite is an unforgiving painting surface. Like fresco, there's no going back, which can create a challenge. I call my recent body of work "landscapes of disasters." It started with re-reading In Cold Blood and painting sinister night scenes of desolate Aroostook farms. But as recent weather extremes began to dominate the news, the focus of my paintings has evolved: tornados rip through farms, hurricanes threaten oil rigs, and wildfires creep towards McMansions. War is another theme that crops up in my painting. I have always worked with a colorful palette. I paint small and with color to achieve a more jewel-like quality designed to offset the flatness of the matte panel surface as well as play on the confluence of pretty and scary.

News media and politicians require us to answer who and what are we fighting for? Who are we against? Who is with and like "us"? What defines "them"? Prejudice, bigotry and stereotyping have always been part of American society but new "others" have emerged.

Definitions of the nation-state and patriotism, the consumption and influence of mainstream media images and the consequences of effortlessly compartmentalizing and stereotyping groups in contemporary culture are some of the main themes driving my current work.

I create sculptural landscapes that evoke a tradition based in the bucolic and infuse it with contemporary fears and anxieties - genetically modified foods, immigration, pollution, climate change, Ebola, war, ISIS, and technology.

By depopulating the landscape I create a void, a space where only the activity is occurring or has occurred - a storm or tornado, a raft on the ocean, a bomb blast crater, a smoke stack. The viewer can populate it with the latest bogeyman.

My work, determined by place, responds to which ever environment I find myself in. I try to reflect upon rather than react to my environment. By this I mean providing a poetic space, such as a puddle to gaze into. Puddles shrink and disappear, just like liner time.This grouping of work spans several years of investigation into the lyrical possibilities and embedded memories I find in the physical landscape. One of the central questions my work addresses is whether memory or human presence is located in places or do we bring memories and presence to place? Within our culture of uprootedness and displacement, I believe this is a crucial question that drives my work. One of the ways my work attempts to answer this question is to locate itself in the situated and the transcendent. The situated is the literal place where the images are grounded - the landscape - and the transcendent happens through the material, form, space, and surface choices I make.

Using the traditional methods of weaving and felting, combined with modern materials, I produce cloth to create sculptural garments and environments. These garments appear to be a distant reminder of a world that is not our own, but still feels familiar, like the hazy recollections of our dreams or the ever shifting shadows of memory. The created environments mirror elements found in nature yet are blurred and reimagined to become new and strange formations. Drawing inspiration from nature, historical clothing, and the space between fantasy and reality, I strive to create a sense of discovery and wonder that transports the viewer to a different time, place and world

Hand stitching isn't fast work. It's a quiet skill that feels tenuous, lost in a contemporary context, slipping away like childhood, like domesticity, like safety beneath the weight of something handmade. I sew because I don't know what it is to not sew, despite the connotation of "minor art" or "women's work" and it's this expectation of what the hand-sewn form is - protective, warm, decorative ... the definition of the domestic role - that compels me to push against it. I use the traditional, beautiful handwork I was taught as a girl, then later as a professional seamstress and couch it within the painful, uncomfortable or frightening. My intent is to create thoughtful, arresting work, reliant on layers of narrative within the pieces themselves and within the history each viewer brings.

This is time-based work, using old skills. An act of cutting apart, then piecing oneself back together.

I am a custodian at a university. Most of my coworkers are refugees from Laos. This particular image is of my coworker, Somkith, who spoke of her life in the Thailand refugee camps, where she lived for several years after she escaped Laos and the Communists. She spent her days in the camps caring for the sick and dying. I used my darkroom photography course to try to create a visual representation of a refugee story. I hoped that the image would create dialog among the students in class that would shine a light into the shadows of people working on campus and to create a frame of reference that would allow for a more respectful engagement. Custodians - and I suspect refugees in general - are often only valued for their potential service to a broader community. I hope to create images that give people room to pause, to see a person where there was once just a theory, and to value someone for their potential contribution to diverse perspectives and life experiences.

I am the photography instructor at Earlham College. I was born in Lakeland, Florida, in 1950, and attended Emory University in Atlanta on a National Merit Scholarship, where I majored in English literature.

I went to law school at Boston University and practiced corporate finance law for 25 years -- first on Wall Street, then in Dallas and Houston, where I was twice voted a "Texas Super Lawyer."

In 2001, I entered graduate school at the University of Houston, received my Master of Fine Arts degree in 2004, and joined the Earlham faculty later that year.

My photography deals often with how humanity deals with the inescapable fact of death through religion, monuments and other memorials.

My photographs are in approximately 300 public, corporate and private collections, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Richmond Art Museum, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Indiana University East, Ivy Tech Community College, The Wayne County Foundation and Reid Memorial Hospital.

These pieces are part of a series inspired by the two-term election of Barack Obama. Some respond to the backlash against his presidency that went as far as public burnings in effigy and slanders on his birth and character. Others express my personal critique of some of his more centrist positions and policies. These works also mark the beginning of a shift in my practice from primarily abstract to more figurative work.

The work titled Screen Captures is combined from a photo archive of images taken by my mother, who passed away due to a blunt force trauma incident in April. Since this incident, I had scanned over 4000 photos. I noticed something...I only had about 200 pictures of mom. One of the keywords I used in archiving the photos was "mom's camera flash"...because that was a picture where you couldn't see mom unless you looked in a window in the back of the image for a reflection of her and/or her camera flash. I had as many of those "ghostly" images as I had images of her. As a continued to sort and apply keywords to these photos, I also made inventories of other visual cues, such as pictures of my dad standing in the frame by himself, pictures of 1970/80's motel rooms and rest stops on vacation, and others.

Glenn Richardson is a sculptor living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He primarily reduces large pieces of native wood with chainsaws to achieve the desired effect. He uses redneck technology for progressive purposes. His background in landscape architecture and horticture focuses his work on politics as building the palimpsest of the landscape we borrow for our brief moment.

In the past 12 months he has carved over 200 live portraits with a chainsaw in his guise of Ziggy Sawdust and the Chainsawsecond from Mars, appearing from Miami to Washington DC, Darlington, Maryland and Burning Man, Black Rock City, Nevada.

As Ziggy he challenges the traditional role of artist and audience with the final portrait as an artifact of the shared group experience.

My "Mountain's Memory" series investigates the ways that the landscape of the American West has been surveyed and altered. During the middle 19th Century extensive geological surveys were conducted by the newly formed USGS. The vast new western territories were mapped and combed for mineral resources. Topographic maps were created from these surveys, which are still referenced today. Google Earth uses this topographic data to drape their aerial photography of the surface of the earth.

In the years since the original surveys, the surface of the earth has been altered by accumulative and reductive human activity, changing the landforms. The 10,000 ft peaks near Cripple Creek, CO are one of many sites of change- where the Google image data and the USGS topographic data do not align. The result is my current site of investigation: a mysterious terraced crater draped over the ghost mass of former mountains. The landscape is surreal, and can be navigated in street view.

As humans we often emphasize our uniqueness and individuality. Beneath these independent identities, however, all humans harbor a deep, intrinsic need to be part of a group. A group provides security and comfort, but it is also susceptible to manipulative leadership and the loss of individuality. Using repetitive, slightly surreal imagery my work examines the enduring effects of our collective behavior, inevitable hierarchical social systems and resulting cultural homogeneity.

Through trauma and loss, there are also moments of beauty that can be found. I use the medium of video to recreate a suspended state of mental contemplation about these moments, which are represented by brilliant environments, clouded by the trauma of the past. By viewing the beauty in mortality, I have come to terms with the shortness of my own existence and the fragility of life. All traumas have a silver lining and can enable us to become more in touch with our own state of being. Through memory we can explore these traumas of our past, no matter how difficult it may be to revisit these times.

My work is posited in the notion that visual cues were used on the Underground Railroad, and other undocumented by-ways and backwater routes. The conceptual framework suggests that the presentation, style, and content of the work were rooted in an African aesthetic and sensibility. To the initiated, the symbols, signs and codes in the work were valuable information, warnings, hope and determination were seen and read. Historian Jason Young states that the cultures of West and West-Central Africa are related to the cultures of plantation slaves throughout and across the African Atlantic, and, "one can observe these similarities in many realms of slave life, including material and artistic expression, lexical traditions, religious practices and the material culture of enslaved African and African-Americans. Robert Farris Thompson states that, under the noses of tyrants they carved out a world of aesthetic autonomy.

The artifacts of my family's past were not objects or places, but stories. Constantly fluctuating and passed down from person to person until finally those pieced together histories became truths. My work resides in a space where nostalgia is intertwined with the misremembered instances embedded within a persons' history. By exploring the parallels between phenomenologically based lapses in memory, perception and object association, I question how an individual's history impacts their ability to partake in a consistent present. Creating semblances of a whole through physical alteration and reparations that mimic flawed projections of protection within a crumbling facade; representative of emotions with the ability to internally inundate a person and their perspective. The residual effect of objects and their associations scatter names and incidents as time passes and impressions fade.

Completed in the year 1972, Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower is one of the few visionary proposals realized by an influential postwar architectural movement in Japan called Metabolism. An experimental apartment complex designed with 140 removable capsules, this building in Tokyo embodies the future of urban living as envisioned by Kurokawa at that moment in postwar Japan. More importantly, it is a reminder of a future that was never realized in society at large and exists as an architectural anachronism within the city. In recent years, the building has faced the threat of demolition to make way for a more conventional structure. In this project titled "1972", I use photography to document the current state of individual capsules as a response to their potential disappearance. The photographs examine what became of a building that first opened as a radical prototype for a new mode of living in post-industrial society and how this vision of the future appears in retrospect.

Physical and cultural impermanence are themes that are central to my work. Drawing upon the dimly illuminated past, material culture, and literature, shades of original context are echoed within the pieces through an array of visual clues. Through three dimensional work and collage, the pieces manifest an emotional tactility of the ephemeral, mysterious nature of the material world and reality.

Themes of transformation, unease, and illusion within the written work of Robert Walser, Gogol, and Kafka are emotional and aesthetic touch-points that generate my responses to materials and visual interpretation. My family's history of displacement: relocation from Russia, Germany and finally to America is referenced throughout the work.

The collage/assemblages are pieces tenuously held together with tape, clothespins, and cord, serving dual purposes in content and construction. Family photographic images, ephemera, and resurrected detritus evoke vanished time, place, and domestic culture.

As a child, my Father and I would regularly walk the nearby railroad tracks. Collecting animal skulls and railroad spikes to take home and put in a box.

Railroad tracks are interesting places. Desolate, dangerous and exposed to the elements. The Skulls possess beauty and aesthetic qualities, but are primarily a reminder of mans impermanence.

These photographs are a meditation on my home state of Mississippi's cultural landscape, its racially violent past, and its uncertain future.

These images are from a Souvenir Doll, NY series which started out by celebrating the diversity in this great city, but ended up with more troubling questions about gentrification, industrialization, the loss of nature, of community, of cultural traditions, and wondering what it is we consider progress. The Israeli couple in the vacant lot by the UN headquarters has a more political context, but likewise touches on issues of land, deep historical traditions and injustices, and the many contradictions and paradoxes that they raise in today's world. The memories symbolized by these sentimental figurines lead to deep longings beyond nostalgia.