In other pieces, she uses limestone, talc, and polystyrene to create forms on the wall that look like tectonic plates or heavy, hard stone. However, these forms are actually as light as Styrofoam, and are further abstracted by the artist’s use of unnatural colors. What may look like natural earth and stone becomes alien by Mullen’s use of neon greens and blues. Complicating her use of materials further, Mullen also uses encaustic on the surface of her work.

In 2018, artists Julia Holter and Olivia Block came together to write and compose a new piece titled Whenever the Breeze, creating immersive sound by combining voice, instruments, bells, and recording of wind and water. The making of this piece culminated in an album recording and a live performance at the May Chapel in Rosehill Cemetery. This dynamic, collaborative piece was created during Experimental Sound Studio’s Outer Ear Residency.

Dissatisfied by traditional methods of putting brush to canvas, Yvette Mayorga creates paintings that push into a third dimension by building thick, icing-like layers that are literally caked onto the surface of the canvas. Impossibly ornate and almost sickeningly sweet, her work channels the extravagant excess of the Rococo era to critique our state of American excess and consumption.

The artwork of Jacqueline Surdell is the result of an evolution, of revolution, of revelation. She creates her beautifully monstrous forms through an amalgam of woven rope, paint, metal, and the seamlessly imposed, unlikely material of exercise equipment. Jacqueline’s piece “Lacoon” struck me like a bolt when I viewed it in person, with its deep black rope knotted and wound so tightly that it pushed out of the frame that held it, coming out towards me not unlike the work of Lee Bontecou, before falling down to the floor.

These photographs appear throughout Beaubien’s work. Her installation Hold Sway has a combination of her own photography and the photographs taken by Inger, fusing them together and creating a space for a conversation within the work, one that can never happen in person. The artist manipulates the photographs by altering their scale and color, and by printing them on metallic or translucent paper. Hyper saturated greens, magentas, and violets dominate her work.

If you are an artist, chances are, you are sharing your work over social media—and if you are sharing images of your work, I can bet you’ve shared an image or two of a work in progress. And if you aren’t sharing these photos, it is hard to avoid this behind-the-scenes look into an artist’s creative process. (Perhaps the more fitting word here would be creative progress.) The pressure to physically produce and create and to then show and share your progress and output is something Create! Magazine often discusses. The guilt of not producing can be overwhelming. We often forget about the labour that goes unseen.

In the face of a rising cost of living, it is becoming more and more difficult for artists across the US to find an affordable space to create their artwork. Like many other places, rent is on the rise in the place that I live (Chicago), and so having a studio space outside of my apartment is pretty much out of the question. Interestingly enough, Chicago being the third largest city in the U.S., it is not even in the top ten most expensive cities to live. So how is it that the two main artistic hubs in the country, NYC and L.A., have such a high cost of living? Artists often flock to these coasts, but with Brooklyn quickly becoming the hot spot in NYC for creatives, and L.A. art communities becoming increasingly gentrified, how can this really be sustainable for artists?

Catherine Losing and Robert Graves-Morris reveal a side of flowers you have never seen before in their sensual series cleverly titled Pornosynthesis. The project is a visual journey into the sexuality of plants, giving us a close-up view of the inside parts of flowers.

In her project I am Waldviertel, Dutch photographer Carla Kogelman travels to the Austrian region of Waldviertel to the small village of Merkenbrechts, population less than 200. Here, Kogelman transports us into an eternal moment of fleeting childhood summers, a moment where time eclipses in that it is both fast with outdoor adventure, and slow with restless boredom—imagination and play often being its only respite.

Todros Geller, (1889-1949), was a Jewish-American artist born in Ukraine, immigrating to Canada and later Chicago in 1906, where he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He became a prominent artist during his time, having a hand in many organizations in Chicago and working with such artists as Charles White. The exhibition Todros Geller: Strange Worlds showcases the diverse work—in style, subject matter, and medium—that Geller created throughout his lifetime.

Whether it’s to text a friend or binge watch a series, sitting in front of a screen has become a comfortable familiarity, one that is an integral part of our daily lives. Through technological advances, video is now accessed and used in endless capacities. As a medium, it has become as complex as its most common point of access: the internet. How does one curate video in an age of infinite screens, with endless videos at our fingertips?

To democratize art is to make it inclusive, to allow a wider audience to have access and participate.  Art is often a field that causes many feel excluded from, that they are outsiders who do not belong to this otherwise unreachable and untouchable world that is controlled by the elite few.

The title of “curator” has become increasingly present both in and out of an art world context and, perhaps in response, there has been a rise in popularity of curatorial programs in higher education. As public access to art and modes of viewing change, what it means to “curate” has been repeatedly confronted and challenged.