Colin Brant makes oil paintings on canvas, in a range of sizes from handheld to the scale of his outstretched arms. Beginning with thin washes of color, the pigment deposits in the grooves of the weave and emphasizes the texture of the fabric. Using reference materials such as linen postcards and 19 th century colorized stereoscope images, the layered colors are reminiscent of these old printing methods. Overlapping tones of dusty pinks and violets tinged with orange suggest things seen through grainy atmospheric distance as well as across the distance of time. Scumbled marks of thicker paint over these thinner layers coalesce into images. Brant isinspired by artists who use representation as a starting point for the imagination to wander, including Post Impressionists like Pierre Bonnard, early American self-taught artists, and Chinese landscape painters.

Although landscape is a recuring motif, there are a variety of subjects that he paints including animals, minerals, and celestial phenomenon. A certain range in the Canadian Rockies has been the subject of a series of paintings. Using a variety of vintage postcards which show the range from slightly different angles with different light and color situations, the paintings become a study of mutability and subjectivity. No matter the subject, things are constantly in flux or shifting between one state and another. Mountains fracture and dissolve in light, animals appear then vanish, reflections turn a landscape upside down, everything is in transformation and slipping between the recognizable and fantastical. Whether the subject is plankton or a vast fjord, the painting becomes a meditative exploration of how he sees and understands the natural world.

Kevin McNamee-Tweed lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Recent solo exhibitions include Tatjana Pieters (Ghent, Belgium), The Institute of Contemporary Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee, The Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC, Steve Turner (Los Angeles), Cob Gallery (London), L21 Gallery (Mallorca), and Dutton (New York). He has participated in group shows in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Iceland, Greece, the UK, and Australia. Reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artnet, Glasstire, Le Monde, and Hyperallgeric, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Ella Fountain Pratt Award, the Mildred Pelzer Grant, the Willhelm and Jane Bodine Fellowship, The Iowa Arts Fellowship, and the Montello Foundation Fellowship. His work is held in numerous permanent collections nationally and internationally. McNamee-Tweed has published extensively, including monographs, collaborative projects, and artist books.

Ted Diamond made gouache works on paper of intense portraits, dense crowd scenes, and patients in the psych ward, and at art school. Exceptionally raw, emitting crackling energy and deeply affecting – Diamond, through keen draughtsmanship and superb color sensibility – evokes James Ensor and Francis Bacon with reverberating power beyond the intimate scale of his work. In 1966, art dealer Stuart Denenberg was sitting in his Boston gallery on Newbury Street at the age of 22 – and Ted Diamond who was 27, elusive, a bit “pixelated”, walked in with his drawings. Denenberg knew what his eyes told him – paintings were special – he immediately purchased two self-portraits that to this day he lives with and admires.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar, Diamond spent most of his adult life under care in the psychiatric ward of the Charles River Hospital in Boston, where he made work in a fecund twenty-year period between 1966 and 1986. Although he studied off and on at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Diamond did not graduate or developed a professional career. Eventually he took his own life at forty-eight years of age, and a few hundred works mounted in notebooks and kept in his room at the hospital were rescued by his only heir, a friend of Denenberg’s who kept them safe for decades. Apart from a small selection of Diamond's work that was shown prepandemic in California in 2018 – many of these drawings have never been shown.

Robert Rapson was a self-taught artist who begun making ceramics in his 40s after working as a baker. Densely patterned ships are imprinted with his fingers leaving choppy, impasto imprints in the sculptures which become one and the same with swirling seas the ships cut across. Rapson’s fascination with passenger ships came from an early age as he watched the fanfare and bands that accompanied their arrival and departures from Wellington harbor and visited his father who worked on the wharf. As a teenager he sailed to Europe on the Italian liner “Angelina Lauro”. Storied vessels of cultural and historical significance and the romantic idea of the long voyage become charged monuments which, as Rapson explained bears “witness to history and change.” Rapson's ships come from the Collection of Donald Baechler, and a private collection in California.

Lauriston Avery lives and works in New York, having studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, he received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1990. Avery’s selected solo exhibitions include Outer Ones, Dutton, New York; Full Moon, Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY; Deaf Bats Blind Shepards, Wildpalms, Düsseldorf, Germany; and To be Continued, The Hogar Collection, Brooklyn, NY. Recent group exhibitions include Embers, Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY; Magical Operations, Wildpalms, Düsseldorf, Germany; Zip City, Left Field Gallery, Los Osos, CA; Walk the Line, Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY; Big Ringer, Andrew Edlin Gallery, NY; Come a Little Closer, DC Moore, NY; and After the End, NADA. Avery's work has been featured at the Bridge Art Fair, Miami; NEXT Art Fair, Chicago; Untitled Art Fair, Miami; and NADA, New York.

Avery's new sculptures Sleepless One With Spirit Orbs and Sleepless One with Moon Mirror are earthy anthropomorphic forms conjured and excavated out of ritualistic sand mounds, concrete, debris and oxidized metals. Projections of inner bio-luminosity, hollow moons, telepathic shadows, brain waves and vibratory nerve clusters of acute awareness weave through work with childlike innocence and fascinating connectedness. The physicality of the works evoke the mysterious forces of subterranean worlds where forms magically bind into beings and dissolve into ghostly personages. Playing on the duality of the ethereal and the bodily they express the bewildering mythology of our inner worlds against a fantastical view of nature, where a vital unseen cosmology reveals itself as an expressive consciousness that mirrors our own.

Alamn Constable makes singular sculptures of cameras, telescopes, projectors, and binoculars imbued with a heightened tactility and inner life. Legally blind, deaf, and non-verbal, Constable began constructing replicas of cameras from cereal cartons and glue at the age of eight which lead to a life-long fascination with photographic, film and astronomy devices. Constable has been working at the Arts Project Australia, an artist-supported studio since 1991. Selected solo exhibitions include Alan Constable, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Brick vase clay cup jug, (curated by Glenn Barkley), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Who Are You: Australian Portraiture, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and National Portrait Gallery Canberra, Australia; Eyes that see: the collection of Norman Rosenblatt, Bayside Gallery, Melbourne; Alan Constable (Ten Cameras), South Willard (curated by Ricky Swallow), Los Angeles. Participation in group exhibitions is extensive and includes The Museum of Everything, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania, 2017; Spring1883, Sydney, 2017; Let’s dance (curated by Charlotte Day), Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2017; ACTION, CAMERA!, The Gallery of Everything, London, 2017; 'Semiotic Terrain: Art from Australia and New Zealand at Salon 94 with Dutton, Outsider Art Fair; and NADA New York, Dutton. Constable's work is held in collections such as the the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, The Museum of Everything, London, Queensland Art Gallery /GOMA, Brisbane, Deakin University, Melbourne, Orange Regional Gallery; The Arsenal, Montreal, as well as private collections internationally.