Past Artist

Colin Chudyk creates ceramic bodies that serve as habitat for nonhuman species (insects, birds, fungi, plants). Billions of beings live on and inside us – in the microbiome. We are indivisible from these inhabitants, and from the toxic environments we together occupy. My work collapses biological and terrestrial into a single landscape of toxicity, expressed as swollen skin, oozing lesions, bursting tailing ponds, or dribbling feedlots. These landscape-bodies record the grotesque beauty of ecological collapse.

Colin Chudyk is a Montreal-based artist and architect. His work explores extraction, toxicity, and bodily landscapes through the language of industrial structures and expressions of the grotesque. Colin has a Master of Architecture from Yale University. In a past career he worked in the mineral exploration industry, searching for gold and other minerals. Clay, a mined substance, is his new medium.

Jake Boggs makes work that is a fusion of surface and form. He draws inspiration from the vast well of ceramic history and interprets how past potters approached the vessel as a pictorial substrate. While engaging in mark making he draws from a plethora of observed compositions found in the spaces he inhabits.

Jake Boggs earned an MFA from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and a BFA from Eastern Kentucky University, both in ceramics. He is currently the Ceramics Studio Coordinator at the Donkey Mill Art Center in Holualoa, Hawai’i, and serves on the board of Hawai’i Craftsmen, a statewide non-profit that works to enrich the community through contemporary craft.

Erika NJ Allen’s work visualizes her consumption of tropical fruits since childhood and how that diet functions as a vehicle to study the intersection of world history, economics, politics, mental and physical health, and art. Using ceramics, fresh produce, and analog photography as vehicles, Allen seeks to engage life and death. As she continues to find ways in which clay and fruit can live together – just like a body lives with an implanted object – her journey to improve the human condition through art will go on. Each work of art visualizes Allen’s diet which plays a key role in her healing, both mentally and physically, while attempting to convey a feeling of resilience. The process of the ‘making’ has become therapeutic, allowing for vulnerabilities to become known and easy to share with the goal to encourage others to open to their own challenges and resilience.

Erika NJ Allen is a Guatemalan-born artist who earned her BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.