Martyna Alexander is a Detroit-based artist and designer working in a diverse range of projects in painting and other 2D media, to explore the subconscious world stemming from our innate biological and cultural pasts. As an artist-designer, Alexander has used her longtime design career as a way to explore more subjective forms of understanding through painting. In painting she allows her design skills to inform her visual vocabulary and channel that very analytical process into creating abstract, solutionless artworks. Her pieces live somewhere in the space between rational thought and some sense of fantasy for who we are and where we’ve come from as individuals and as a community. Exploring how these ancient connections to ourselves and the contemporary frameworks we apply to our lives, environments, and culturally-created containers, reminds us that the many man-made systems that make up our lives, and can be unmade and changed with collective will.
Meg White (she/they) is an artist and educator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2023, where she was awarded the Merton R. and Peggy E. Fellowship. Originally from East Tennessee, she received her BFA from the University of Tennessee–Knoxville in 2016. White makes observational paintings and films that reframe everyday moments, seeking patterns and meaning within imagery that is often overlooked. Recent work features rocks, fossils, and minerals found along Great Lake shores. Some may be billions of years old - geologic time capsules composed of accumulated minerals, bearing traces of everything that is or was on this planet. Shaped by water, pressure, and erosion, they are continually altered by weathering and chance, transformed into something new. Removed from their original context, the rocks take on new life. Colors, textures, and forms - products of random geologic events - become abstractions. By depicting these small wonders, Meg hopes to share her initial moment of awe and invite viewers to begin the act of observation anew.
Tony Conrad received his MFA degree in painting and drawing from the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2009. Conrad’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States in various solo, group, and invitational exhibitions and has won several awards including the Lawrence Rathsack Scholarship and the Frederick R. Layton Fellowship. Conrad is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Lawrence University where he has taught painting and drawing since 2012. Conrad's work is influenced by various cultural and historical disciplines including Persian textiles, Zen Buddhism, and Jazz Music. The artist is particularly drawn to the improvisation and repetitive elements central to these disciplines. In these works, layers of information form a palimpsest of color, pattern, balance, and rhythm. Compositional complexity develops as color is reactively woven in layers. This puzzle-like “construction zone” develops a quiet history where chaos and harmony coexist.
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