REGINALD BAYLOR The artist's paintings feature a utopian world wholy his own - he supplants drab suburbia with candy-colored neighborhoods, transforms the common flower garden into a hard-edged terrain of idealized specimens and renders the quintessential 1950's family in high-key neon.
JOHN BISSONETTE Conflating the techniques and imagery of overtly sentimental, lowbrow fine art reproduction with decidedly high-end techniques of painting and ink-jet printing on canvas, Bemis Center resident John Bissonette juxtaposes the very notion of “high” and “low.” In an homage to the glossy and the programmatic, Bissonette invites the viewer to search for deeper meaning in the common language of culture in art that transcends mere cliché and iconography. Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Bissonette earned his MFA in 2006 from the University of Tennessee. When not exhibiting his work nationally, he is a lecturer at his alma mater.
DAVID BOWEN The whimsy of the mechanical meets the mechanics of whimsy in the work of Bemis Center resident David Bowen. All manner of gizmos and gadgets use light-sensitive cells, dancing do-dads, wind-powered pencils and other wacky wizardry in animating ghosts in the machine. Bowen’s work breathes life into the inanimate and confers sentient status on the otherwise spiritless. His ingeniously engineered kinetic and robotic contraptions become eerie automatons that act as interactive drawing devices. Bowen earned an MFA from the University of Minnesota, where he works as an assistant professor at its Duluth campus. His BFA came from the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, IN.
ADAM FRELIN Whether naturally occurring or staged, Bemis Center resident Adam Frelin’s videos and photography use compelling narrative imagery to speak to the intersection of the man-made and the natural. His fictional constructs, often involving sculptural pieces that may become nothing more than props to fuel a larger story, have poetic qualities that expose the stark realities of a mundane, yet oddly incendiary environment. His works become arresting mementos of momentary collisions between the artificial and the natural. Frelin earned a BFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, PA and a MFA from the University of California. His works have been viewed widely throughout the United States, Asia and Europe.
JANELLE IGLESIAS Bemis Center resident Janelle Iglesias describes her work as “deep play,” an excuse to be intimately involved in an everyday quest for the poetry and possibilities in all things. She creates contradictions that range from the serious to the ridiculous and from the common to the magical. Iglesias, who also collaborates with her sister in an effort they call Las Hermanas Iglesias, earned a BA in cultural anthropology from Emory University in Atlanta Georgia before pursuing her MFA in sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth in Richmond, Virginia.
ANDREA LOEFKE The German-born Bemis Center resident is an installation artist and sculptor who creates dream worlds in spaces where the familiar and the fantastic are anchored to the real and the temporal. Assemblages of varied scale and made of a complex conglomeration of materials, so often vibrant and candy-colored, evoke fairy tale worlds where whimsy and playfulness invites new levels of discovery into the realm of environments, hierarchies and interactions as objects compete for your attention. Loefke lives and works in both Brooklyn, New York and Leipzig, Germany and her work has been shown in both countries as well as in Canada. She was awarded a fine arts scholarship at Kent State University before going on to complete her MFA work at Ohio State University.
JOEY LYNCH A co-founder of Tugboat Presents, a non-commission gallery that exhibits high-quality, cutting-edge artwork, Joey Lynch brings his own uniquely irreverent style to his vibrant and often provocative screen-printings. Lynch was selected to design much of the merchandise available at Bemis08. Originally from South Dakota, Lynch now lives and works in Omaha, NE. Tugboat Presents is an offshoot of the Lincoln-based sister space, Tugboat Gallery, which he co-founded with fellow artists Peggy Gomez and Jake Gillespie.
CECIL MCDONALD, JR. The photographs of Cecil McDonald, Jr. depict everyday moments of life in domestic spaces. McDonald carefully stages scenarios with his wife and children that convey the power of photography to capture life's emotional rhythms, from the dramatic to the mundane.
NATHALIE MIEBACH Focusing on the intersection of art and science, Bemis Center resident Nathalie Miebach employs the visual articulation of scientific observations or theories. Using the methodologies and processes of both art and science, she translates data related to physics, astronomy or natural phenomena into three-dimensional structures. Exploring the role that visual aesthetics play in the translation of scientific information is central to her work, which blurs the line between the vocabularies of art and science. She earned both an MS and MFA from the Massachusetts College of Arts in Boston, MA and a BA from Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH. Her work has been reviewed in the Boston Globe and in Sculpture Magazine.
OCTOPUSES GARDEN ART ALLIANCE The Octopuses Garden Art Alliance’s goal is to provide opportunities for new, creative experiences that offer therapeutic benefits while bringing diverse groups of people together as peers, thus helping to eliminate negative prejudices and stereotypes. They are also working to build the local community through art. They provides art classes, workshops, and special projects for everyone in our community, specializing in the inclusion of people with mental illness and developmental disabilities as well as affordable projects to include people of low income. Every surface is a canvas to The Octopuses Garden Art Alliance and festival visitors are invited to pick up some chalk and leave their own mark on Bemis08.
TOMIKO PILSON Informed by classical figure painting, creates work rooted in the grand narrative tradition. As a woman of mixed racial and ethnic heritage, she also draws from her many experiences as an "other," generating a synthesis of the two. Her paintings transport viewers to imagined places, such as lush jungles of distant lands, which explore "dangerous territory."
AILI SCHMELTZ Sculptor, installation artist and painter Aili Schmeltz, a current Bemis Center resident, is a product of the vinyl-clad, shag-carpeted, wood-paneled, polyester-plastered and Styrofoam-packaged tract home suburbia of the 1970’s. What better materials could there be for works that address the triumph of the artificial, the antiseptic and the arcane as the anthropological totems of our times? The common and the comfortable give way to the hideous and humorous when seen from the vantage point of a “stranger in a strange land.” The Los Angeles-based artist has shown her work extensively across the United States. She earned an MFA in sculpture from the University of Arizona after a BFA in printmaking and painting at the Kansas City Art Institute.
ARTUR SILVA The artist works with a host of digital media to create outsized "productless" ads that explore the ways commercial products are packaged, advertised and distributed. By incorporating elements from advertising, his installations suggest the fragmentation of the contemporary visual world and the manner in which diverse cultures reflect that imagery.
BRYCE SPEED A former resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, NE, Bryce Speed earned a BFA in painting and drawing at the University of Mississippi and a MFA in the same disciplines at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He currently teaches at both the University of Nebraska at Omaha and at Metropolitan Community College, also in Omaha.
THERMAN STATOM Therman Statom is one of the world’s leading artists in reinventing glass as an artistic medium. He has exhibited internationally at venues such as the Cleveland Museum of Art (OH), the Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), the Denver Art Museum (CO), the Kulturhuset (Stockholm, Sweden), the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art (Sapporo, Japan) and the Centro Cultural de la Raza (Ensenada, Mexico). Statom’s work is featured in numerous private and public collections world-wide, including the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts (MI), the Afro-American Museum (CA), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, (Washington D.C.) among others.
BRIAN TAIT Long-time graffiti artist Brian Tait understands the power of attention-grabbing designs and he leveraged those skills into a successful sign company. His latest venture, b.tait studios, broadens the scope of his work in a multidisciplinary enterprise that includes a wide range of painting, design, sculpture, and contemporary furnishings efforts.
THU TRAN Thu Tran is a self-confessed food-ophile on a perpetual quest for the ultimate "visual MSG." Her vibrant works, spanning diverse media and ranging from drawings of whimsical worlds to decadent social experiments, are characterized by an engaging sense of glee and willful experimentation with form and the role of the viewer.
