My work depicts a fictional rural society. Sometimes its members are discombobulated urbanites on an infinite camping trip, sometimes they are modern pilgrims with common ideals for a new way of life, and often they are transients and criminals. They take the form of powerful ladies, beastly specters, vaporous presences, and various animals and human/animal hybrids. My paintings are intimate and unsentimental images of their day-to-day existence. Their world is an insulated and strange place with experimental and ill-defined social norms. I draw on my experiences growing up in rural Wisconsin as the daughter of the most recent American back-to-the-land movement. The fictional society I paint exists in a similar state of instability and compromise between idealism and reality that my parents experienced as back-to-the-landers in the 1970's and 1980's. sofia.arnold@gmail.com

My drawings are self-portraits. I use graphite, embroidered thread and beading on primed linen to portray repeated images of myself, returned to an age of innocence and possibility. I place them in a world devoid of any reference to time or location, as in a partially recalled dream or memory. The girls are joined and intertwined into extraordinary configurations. Their replication emphasizes stagnancy, or a sort of glitch in time. Movement is suggested, but never seems to occur. Yet their hair keeps growing, weaving around them, binding them, overpowering them, becoming something new on its own. Becoming and Un-becoming. I am exploring identity through the fragmentation, restructuring and rebirth. www.monicazeringue.com

I’m interested in images of objects which have meanings previously thought to be closed. Robert Storr speaks of the estrangement of the photograph, the medium’s capability to depict persons and objects in such a way that obliterates whatever context may have been attached to them. When photography is operating at the highest level, context as suggested by the photographer is ambiguous, allowing the viewer to re-contextualize as dictated by his or her experiences, intuition and knowledge. In using my environment as the raw materials for creating art, I reinterpret and alter the intentionality of found objects. The residues of human experience, the overlooked physical phenomena, can impart a wealth of information about individuals and attitudes. My photographs maintain the physicality of ordinary, everyday things while opening up their potential imaginative and conceptual meanings. Maury Gortemiller is a Lecturer of Photography at The University of North Carolina-Asheville. He holds an MFA in Photography from The University of Georgia and an MA in Southern Studies from The University of Mississippi. www.maurygortemiller.com