Artist Biographies:
Jamison Chās Banks is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates films, paintings, performances, and installations whose works have mined military history, blood memory, and the politics of exile. He usually begins with an area of investigation that spawns a series of interrelated artworks in different media. Banks appropriates and alters symbols employed in propaganda and popular culture and redeploys them in contexts that subvert their original meanings. He is currently a Visiting Instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe (Banks is also an alum of the institution.)
Find more of his work online at chasbanks.blogspot.com.
John Rasimus‘ practice ranges from large-scale installations, small drawings, woodcuts printed on large canvases, and animated films. He frequently exhibits his entire process, from drawings to paintings and sculptures made of MDF board. One characteristic expression for John is his folded print work, folded paper or cardboard referencing real objects around him, and then adds visualities combining his dry Swedish wit and his obsession with American Old-West popular culture (cowboys, guitars). The artist resides in Falun, Sweden, where Rasimus’ runs his studio and exhibition space, Best Friends Showroom.
Find more of his work online at rasimus.se.
Melissa Schulenberg is an artist/printmaker who currently resides in Canton, New York where she is professor of art and holds the L.M. and G.L. Flint Professorship in Fine Arts at St. Lawrence University.
Schulenberg’s work takes inspiration from observed organic forms, the natural landscape, and her immediate surroundings. At times her work offers the viewer two options simultaneously, presenting images as broad vistas and as microscopic investigations. These “scapes,” as the artist calls them, may contain a horizon yet offer a view into a smaller, contained environment.
Find more of her work online at melissaschulenberg.com.
Curator Biography:
Jason Lujan is originally from Marfa, Texas. As a practicing artist, Lujan’s current work is about cultural leveling; the process by which different cultures approach each other as a result of travel and communication and can also refer to the process by which culture is exported and diffused into other nations and communities, and later homogenized. Largely utilizing cultural, commercial, and political design rooted in Asia and North America, the work focuses on the exchange of ideas, meanings, and values, and questioning the concepts of authorship and authenticity.