ART AT THE LINE

Born in Southern California, Adde Russell has called many places home. After graduating from Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts, she spent several years exhibiting her work in the Northwest, New York and Italy before making the move to Austin.

Adde has also enjoyed a career in design and has been fortunate to work with talented musicians and authors creating cover and packaging art. Along with her love of painting, she has played drums for different bands and was a Texas Rollergirl for a couple of seasons.

Her diverse interests and background has informed the work she does today. Although, focused on traditional painting techniques, her work is far from conventional. She experiments with her process and examines the use of materials making her work unique and vital.

She is currently represented in Austin by Commerce Gallery.

Chantal Lesley (she/her) is a conceptual photographer living and working in Austin, TX. Lesley is a multicultural, first-generation American born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley, located along the U.S./Mexico border. Being the daughter of immigrants from both Germany and Peru has brought upon a feeling of being stretched between four cultures and has led her to confront ideas that focus on identity and contemporary social and political issues in her work.

Lesley acquired her BFA in Fine Art Photography from Texas State University in 2021, and since then her work has been exhibited throughout Texas and the U.S. Selected shows include Houston Center for Photography (Houston, TX); Craighead Green Gallery (Dallas, TX); Touchstone Gallery, (Washington D.C); and Humble Arts Foundation, (New York City, NY).

Diego Mireles Duran is a first-gen interdisciplinary artist with roots in Northern Mexico and the Rio Grande border.

Their creative practice explores liminal identity and ways to root in something recognizable while in diaspora. Through a variation of self taught media such as painting/ sculpture, sound and digital collage, DMD borrows references from ancestral culture as well as current and childhood memories. Their optical language is a playful expression; chaotically conglomerating motifs such as 90’s Mexican pop and Noreño Music, Mexican candy, traditional artisan practices, and even home cleaning products of their youth such as “Fabuluso”.. ” I want my output to represent what liminality feels like to me. I want it to feel like a long lost word landing at the tip of the tongue.

Molly Margaret Sydnor (b. 1993) is a Dallas-based multidisciplinary fine artist with an eye for bright colors and textiles. Molly creates interactive work through storytelling and the layering of imagery. Utilizing a maximalist approach, Sydnor pulls from memory, experiences and body functionality. Experimentation, innovation, and play ground Sydnor’s work in her exploration of the complexities of gender, race, and sexuality. Sydnor is a biracial, neurodivergent, queer identifying, woman whose self identity heavily influences her work. Molly works as the Marketing and Digital Engagement Manager at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Additionally she teaches Artivism to under privileged youth in South Dallas, advocates for the arts as the Strategic Communications and Marketing Manager with Texans for the Arts, and runs Local Queer. You can find her work currently up at Sweet Tooth Hotel in Dallas for the next year.

Rian (raven) Crane (he/they) is a post-disciplinary performance artist interested in Black diasporic rebellion as an anti-thesis to borders, gender, and prisons. Their work explores the paradox of hypervisibility for Black +/ Trans folks as well as the ongoing genocidal settler project of Anti-Blackness, displacement, colonial-made borders and severed ties from the land. Their work posits Black fugitivity as a refusal to the colonial imagination; they imagine Blackness in relation to land, water, and nonhuman kindred. He collaborates with other artists and communities to counter isolation, individualism, and the hyper-productivity of end-capitalism.

Farangiz Yusupova is an artist whose work explores ideas of cultural dissonance, home, and space through painting. Born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Farangiz immigrated to the U.S. in 2014. She holds a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. In the summer of 2018, Farangiz was awarded a scholarship to attend a workshop at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, Colorado. Her work was exhibited in numerous group shows such as at M. David & Co (Brooklyn, NY), Dodomu Gallery, Liminality Art Space (Long Island City, NY), New York Live Arts (New York, NY), and ChaShaMa (New York, NY). Farangiz is a participant in NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentorship Program. In 2022, her work was published in Khôra Magazine, Issues 13 – 16. Most recently, she participated in CICA Art Festival in South Korea. Farangiz currently lives and works in Austin, TX.

Kevin Muñoz is a self-taught artist who works in a folk realm of warm colors and loose textures to explore concepts of identity, longing and growth. His design background informs his practice as does his upbringing in Southern California to Guatemalan parents. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Amanda Fay is an artist based in Austin, Texas, raised in Alexandria, Virginia. Her work is grounded in her BFA focus in Fiber Arts, which she received from The Savannah College of Art and Design. Drawing inspiration through the language of traditional world textiles, their making processes, and historical context, Amanda elicits abstractions and objects of beauty with deeper underlying meaning.

Alexis Hunter is an identity-based, multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Austin, TX. She earned a BFA from Texas State University in Studio Art with a concentration in painting, graduating summa cum laude (2022). Recent solo and group exhibitions include BINARY (Who Do You Belong To?); ICOSA Gallery, Austin (2021); Own it, examine it, and confront it head-on, DORF Gallery, Austin (2021); Signs of Life, Texas State Galleries, San Marcos (2022); Alexis Hunter, Blue Star Arts Complex, San Antonio (2021) and Resurfacing, The George Washington Carver Museum, Austin (2021). She has also been selected for the third edition of Big Medium’s LINE Residency (2022). Alexis is the founder of Others, an ongoing publication project documenting the faces and stories of biracial individuals in central Texas. Her work explores self-image through racial identity, mental health, the female body, and the male gaze.

Charles Benjamin Russell is an artist/illustrator musician b. 1986 in Linden-Kildare, Tx. He has been a practicing visual artist and for over 10+ yrs, with his main focus being ink and watercolor illustrations on paper and wood.

Charles is self taught. He has developed his original style of uniquely whimsical, dark, and humorous worlds of interconnected characters by way of trial, error, and time. He currently lives in Austin, tx and maintains a studio at the Museum of Human Achievement.

Xavier Hamel is an emergent film director from Montréal, Quebec. He has directed films for an assortment of independent & commercial projects, including Visage Musique, Missy Industry, Lisbon Lux Records and many more. His work has also been included in numerous national & international festivals in Montréal, Brussels, Glasgow, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Sydney and more. View more of Xavier’s work, here.

Hannah Lee was born and raised in Louisiana. She received her BFA in Painting from Baylor University in 2012 and her MFA in Painting from The New York Academy of Art in 2020. Hannah recently had a solo show at Cloud Tree gallery in Austin, and her work has been in numerous group exhibitions including local galleries Martha’s Contemporary and Canvas ATX. This year her work has been featured in New American Paintings #153 and Create Magazine #27.

VLM is a multi-media artist. She received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2016. Working across video, performance, sound, and sculpture, her artwork explores atomic consciousness from a metaphysical feminist POV through investigations of labor. Her artwork is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. It blends together mysticism, science, and autobiography. View more of VLM’s work, here.

Ata Mojlish is a multimedia artist who splits his existence between Dhaka, Bangladesh and Austin, Texas. Working with a variety of digital mediums such as photography, digital manipulation, video, motion graphics, audio and 3D; he researches questions on self exploration, displacement, political systems, identity and the perceptions of home. View more of Ata’s work, here.

Kel Brown is a multi-disciplinary artist with 8 years of professional experience, as well as a portfolio of varied accomplishments including gallery exhibitions, private commissions, public murals, and municipal projects for the City of Austin.

Renee is an artist who works in painting and drawing who graduated with her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020. She holds an undergraduate degree in English and Studio Art with honors from Dartmouth College, and she also studied painting at the New York Studio School. Lai’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has work in the permanent collection of Dartmouth College. She most recently was an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center. View more of Renee’s work, here.

Moyo Oyelola is a photographer, multimedia artist and activist. He creates intimate, real interactions with his subjects and communities and synthesizes that into deep, universal activations expressed in multimedia, photography, environmental installations and public arts projects. Born in Nigeria, Moyo moved to Austin when he was seven. Having grown up as the “product of two worlds” has shaped his thinking and work, reflecting perspectives of pan-African and modern western worlds. Moyo’s work has been featured in brand films, advertising, editorial, music videos, environmental installations, personal projects, and an evolving number of public arts projects. View more of Moyo’s work, here.

Manik is a 36-year-old artist living, working and eating late night Thai food in Austin, Texas, USA. The paintings, drawings, and installations of Manik Raj Nakra take on the possibility of addressing the ancient world as his own. A world where four headed leopards perch on old world ruins and silver teethed monkeys pray for our salvation. Nakra’s work applies a contemporary lens onto post-colonial anachronisms, Indian iconography, artifacts from early civilizations, and religious myths and folklore in order to explore themes such as egoism, lust, and self-doubt. View more of Manik’s work, here.

Alie Jackson is a multimedia artist born and raised in Austin, TX. She received her BFA from Stephen F. Austin in 2010 for design and photography. Her work examines how the digital landscape is shaping the perception and behavior of ourselves, others, and objects around us through augmented reality, installation, video, animation, and painting. Her most recent work experiments with augmented reality and questions how people interact and interpret work when it’s attached to their face or viewed in an uncontrolled environment. View more of Ali’s work, here.

Natalia Rocafuerte is a xicanx experimental video and sound artist exploring dreams as narratives of self. Her current project explores symbols in our dreams by animating recorded calls through her dream hotline (888) 573-2186. Rocafuerte has exhibited at the 2018 Young Latinx Artists at Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, TX as well as being featured in Remezcla for “Top 40 Latinx Texas Artists to Know in 2020.” View more of Natalia’s work, here.

Brooke Burnside was born and raised in Nassau, Bahamas. She earned her BA in Film from Vassar College, her MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and just graduated from the Masters of Architecture program at the University of Texas at Austin. Through drawing and collage, Burnside’s work explores geography, position, memory, and the transgressive potential in abstract documentation. View more of Brooke’s work, here.

Chelsea Hernandez is a Mexican-American filmmaker based in Austin, Texas, recently named as one of Texas Monthly’s 10 Filmmakers on the Rise. She is an 8-time Lone Star Emmy winning director, producer, and editor. Chelsea started her career in media at the ripe age of nine, hosting and co-producing a local children’s educational TV program with her mother. View more of Chelsea’s work, here.

Adrian Armstrong is a multidisciplinary creative from Omaha, NE now living and working out of Austin, TX. Through portrait and figurative practices, Armstrong’s work explores identity and what it means to be a black person living in modern America. His work touches on topics such as depression within the black community, systematic oppression, and police brutality; but on the other side of the spectrum explores fashion, love, success, and growth. View more of Adrian’s work, here.

Saul Jerome E. San Juan is an artist working primarily with oil painting, watercolors, and cyanotypes. Born in the Philippines, San Juan moved to the USA at age fourteen, studying art as an undergraduate at Loyola in Chicago before coming to Austin in 2007 to complete a graduate degree in architecture at the University of Texas. Through choices of technique, medium, and subject matter, San Juan wishes to disarm his own preconceptions and others’ presumed preconceptions about self-identity and otherness. View more of San Juan’s work, here.