Aliza Lelah is a painter that works with recycled fabrics in order to create a more physical connection to the depicted memories. Her painterly technique is visible even though the material is cut and layered instead of applied with a brush. Her unique, emotive portraits are in dialogue with three different histories of storytelling: the painted portrait, the photographic snapshot, and the folk tradition of quilting. Though she now works with textiles, her portraits evoke an equally strong painterly and photography presence. While she relies on black and white photographs for inspiration, all of the color is her own invention. Her pieces are a stunning combination of material history, painterly gesture, textile crafting, and haunting photographic aesthetics. When hung on the blank white wall, the portraits become animated, transforming the flat plane into an environment.

Hao Ni presents a form of narrative that is both circular and structural in nature. In contrast to the common form of the human narrative as a linear path, Ni represents storylines as cycles, as they are in nature. He relies on an aesthetic of ruination to conjure an emotional response from the viewer, often evoking nostalgia and loss with his time-worn landscapes. His haunting structures tell stories of invented memories that inhabit the spaces like ghosts. In their state of abandonment and isolation, the landscapes and structures communicate imaginary past narratives with imprinted physical traces of time and wear. The absence of the actors only makes the landscape’s longing for their presence all the more visible. Ni’s practice is in direct dialogue with the history of the descriptive narrative form of the diorama. Using these materials as sculpture, Ni is able to construct these scenes along with the imaginary past they remember.

Karissa Lang is a writer, photographer, and conceptual artist. Her series of manipulated photographs I was here represents snap-shots of hazy memories from her own childhood in which she is the absent protagonist. Lang replaces the index of her physical body with some of the classic obscuring aesthetics of the photographic medium, namely, over-exposure and darkness. The eerie glow emanating from her face represents an inward movement associated with time-travel, as pieces of memories are reconstructed with her true sense of identity missing at the core. In other areas, her body is blacked out into a type of flattened silhouette, another indication of the gap that separates these family records from her physical body and memory.

Nathan Vernau’s florescent yet grotesque self-portraits illustrate both the transparency and multiplicity of the self. These colorful scenes are saturated with emotion, to the point where it oozes out of the figures into puddles on the ground. In some pieces, the multiple forms of the artist depicted violently struggle with the clothing that constrains them, attempting to hold the manifestations together into one contained entity. In others, the figures seem to be struggling against forces that drag them apart. These scenes of brutal brawling are enclosed within pastel-colored, circus-like environments created within a comic-book aesthetic, where the seriousness of the figures’ drama is mocked by light pink and baby blue surroundings. The figures labor to free themselves from the court-gesture patterns that adorn their boxer shorts, and express an extreme frustration, contempt, and disgust that is so powerful, it penetrates their grotesque carnival masks and anonymous brown paper bags.

Steven Frost represents male tropes appropriated from pop culture within a textile-based rhetoric, bringing together a deceivingly playful lightness and a sharp awareness of these tropes’ embodied violence. His brilliant abstracting of violent movement and energy with materials like colorful pom-pom balls, string, rhinestones, and other craft materials creates an extremely emotive tension that is immediately registered by the viewer. The seemingly simple compositions pack a strong and disturbing punch with a complexity only fully realized when one becomes aware of the strange quality the craft materials take on in this context. Bullets are represented by rhinestones in the depiction of Davey Crockett, and a tangled mess of string instantly comes to represent the mutilation of flesh when considered in the context of a boxing match, standing in for the boxer’s destroyed face.

Tiphanie Spencer uses delicate penmanship and painstaking attention to detail to create intricate webs of connecting figures that undulate between inevitable entropy and firm balance and control. The work ignores the most fundamental tenants of historical drawing practice such as perspective and depth, privileging a linear vocabulary that references the flat, decorated spaces of ancient Roman painting, later appropriated by the arabesque. While these contoured forms designate their own physical boundaries, the outreaching arms of the massive entities seem to hold the geometric forms and linear figures in place, keeping them from floating outwards as if in a zero-gravity environment.

These paintings are ritual objects of a secular humanism, created at war with and for defense against strong evidence of smallness and insignificance. Old rules are replaced by the codes of American neo-liberalism, that wealth is the defining goal and measure of man’s being. His pieces are at once the site of resistance and its artifacts. Painting is always in the present tense, and in figuration we stare into the possibility of a sentient consciousness with the long eye contact of lovers.

The pieces selected for Robert Bills Contemporary’s exhibition Interior Conspiracy are simultaneously visual and tactile. They create or propose space, transforming inert materials, earth and mineral, vegetable and animal in origin, into the embodiment of other objects. In these images we encounter unfolding time. In their limitations they demand attention, imagination, energy, and offer a field for experience and interpretative creativity.

Painting searches for authenticity in the means of its creation; technique and application must remain open as the piece evolves. The cerulean, cobalt, and manganese-clad players strive for integrity and balance. Like their own antiquated medium, they are always struggling and always falling just short. They are ruled by humors. They lash out, paranoid and unreasonable. They bully and argue, betray, and, most of all, hold fast. They participate, unwarned, in a geometry of scale, their pathetic forms providing the center – an anchor for the painter’s work and the viewer’s attention.

Veronica Bruce’s contemporary paintings examine traditional aspects of the medium of painting within an untraditional framework of every-day material aesthetics. Using a variety of found materials such as cardboard, plaster, hinges, screws, Styrofoam, and wood, Bruce constructs pieces that have a profound physical presence as well as a rich painterly technique. Featuring a range of image types from inkjet photos to gestural strokes allows Bruce to juxtapose material aesthetics in endless combinations that simultaneously reinforce and deconstruct media boundaries.

Dan Giordan crafts paintings with many carefully considered layers of material. As opposed to the more direct side-by-side juxtaposition of media that takes place in Bruce’s work, Giordan relies heavily on layering to create paintings that seem to take on a more hybrid media form. Within his paintings photographic and painterly visual syntax do not just coexist, they mingle on the surface and coalesce in depth to create diverse textures and visual planes. Each work becomes a conversation between the communicating visual entities.

Joe Baldwin interprets the theme of communication more literally, as he relies on technological filtering to construct images from digital material. His photographs radically reinterpret the concept of digital manipulation by using photographic data as a material as easily molded by the artist’s hand as paint or graphite.

Not only does Cabrera work from his own memory, his unique artistic process and use of materials reflects the building up and slow scraping away of the memories themselves. One of the most unique and noticeable features of his pieces is the large variety of surfaces he constructs and deconstructs. Some areas of his paintings read more as relief sculptures because of their dramatic departure from the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Yet in others, the painted surface becomes nothing more than a fine veil, exposing the raw texture of the linen underneath. Cabrera’s painterly techniques construct and reconstruct his memories physically in the same structure they exist in metaphorically. His paintings are elaborate and ornamental yet raw, dense and vibrant yet delicate.

In order to create these rich surfaces, Cabrera uses a variety of materials to alter the physical structure of the picture plane. He mixes sand, glass, aluminum powder and even sugar into the paint to enhance texture, create relief, and thicken the impasto. This technique is what allows him to build the surface of the canvas up, as well as augment the luminosity of his vibrant color palettes.