art

Ali Liebegott is a painter and writer. She most recently had an online show called "Thank You," through Ochi Projects LA. Among many things, her paintings explore queerness, food, domestic spaces, urban landscapes, literary traditions and animals. She has also published four books: The Beautifully Worthless, The IHOP Papers, Cha-Ching! and The Summer of Dead Birds. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Cat Babbie is a fiber artist through and through. A collector of crafts, she pulls from various techniques to explore themes of mapping, patterns and color through textiles. Her interests range from machine tufting, sewing, weaving and wet felting, including dyeing custom colors in wool and silk. A naturalized Charlottean, Cat put down deep roots in North Carolina over a decade ago. She works in her studio at Hart-Witzen Gallery and the cozy old bungalow she shares with her husband and cats. She studied studio art and art history at James Madison University in Virginia.

Carolina Dutca was born in 1995 in Bender (Moldova, Transnistria). Works with photography, video, installation and text. Carolina likes to experiment and is open to new practices. Her art projects are connected with the theme of relationships, home, nature and memory. Also, in collaboration with Valentin Sidorenko, she plays with time. They are reminiscing about fairy tales, growing up, and being naughty. Together they live and work in Bender (Moldova, Transnistria). They are on Instagram @dutca_sidor and on Twitter @AndDutca.

Valentin Sidorenko was born in 1995 in Gornyak (Russia). Except photography and animation, Sidorenko works with documentary films using an observation method. Sidorenko basically approaches the theme of time. He is especially inspired by the past: that located at a depth, but that turns out to be multifaceted and ambiguous in the light. Valentin and Carolina are on Instagram @dutca_sidor and on Twitter @AndDutca.

Kelly McQuain is a painter and poet. He is the author of the chapbook Velvet Rodeo, which was selected by poet C. Dale Young for the Bloom chapbook poetry prize, and he is the winner of the 2021 Glitter Bomb Poetry Award. His work has appeared in The Pinch, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Kestrel, and Cleaver, as well as such anthologies as Best New Poets 2020. McQuain’s series of writer portraits appear as cover illustrations on Fjords Review. He has been a Sewanee Fellow and a Lambda Literary Fellow.

Karwowska is an interdisciplinary artist. As an artist-nomad, she investigates the interaction of culture and identification, referring both existential philosophers and her life experience. Her fascination with painting technique is centered on her use of color and shape. She pushes the casual observer to enter the world of her work where they will experience the contradictions Karwowska identifies. In 2019, Karwowska earned an MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her work has been featured in individual exhibitions in Poland and the USA and in numerous group exhibitions. She is currently living and creating in Francestown, NH.

Takashi Arai (1978-) is a Kawasaki / Tono based visual artist and filmmaker. Since the beginning in 2010, Arai has used the daguerreotype technique to create individual records—micro-monuments— touch upon the fragmented reality of events in the past. His encounters with surviving crew members, and the salvaged hull, of the fallout-contaminated Daigo Fukuryūmaru fishing boat, led him to photograph the deeply interconnected subjects of Fukushima, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. In 2016, Arai received the 41st Kimura Ihei Photography Award. His recent short film, “Oshira Kagami” won the category prize at the 72nd Salerno International Film Festival in 2018.