Kirsten Leenaars "travelogue of a staionary dreamer"

and

"cooking boogaloo" by Angel Otero

Kirsten Leenaars writes of her work,"My own practice is driven by my endless fascination with people. I am a collector of personal stories - those of others and my own. I use these to pose questions in my work about longing and belonging. In my photo, video and installation work I create imaginary worlds based on these personal stories. I stage portraits - of myself and of friends and members of a given community that address private and cultural desires, projections and fears. Through these portrayals I bring my subjects’ interior worlds out into the social sphere where they are offered as alternatives to the drab, ready-made reality that threatens to streamline subjective hope and desire. As such they can be described as acts of resistance. I create sets or situations that aim to be both strange and convincing. These invite the viewer to infer the private interior spaces of my subjects - spaces that resist a less flexible and prosaic space that we inhabit when the imagination is absent. In this sense, my images formally embody a subjective point of view that invites the viewer to feel empathic for the imaginative and the inconclusive. Through the imaginary I aim to re-contextualize notions of identity and place and explore how imagination shapes the way we relate to each other and shapes the way we relate to the world we live in."

Kirsten Leenaars is a 2007 MFA graduate from University of Illinois at Chicago. She received a MA Fine Arts in 2003 from Piet Zwart Institute, Post Grad Studies, Rotterdam/Plymouth University, Plymouth and a BFA in 2000 from Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.

Kirsten Leenaars: Articles/Reviews: New City. "Eye Exam: Screening" by David Mark Wise, April 15, 2008. http://www.newcitychicago.com/chicago/7650.html

Angel Otero states, "My paintings are a balance between the painterly and the anecdotal. I work from memories of my childhood in Puerto Rico--such as my experiences climbing about the shantytown "barriadas" (also known as Ghettos or Favelas) with my friends and watching this type of community grow with ambition, courage and best of all the creativity to live overcoming their limitations of poorness. These picturesque themes are dealt with as an excuse to lay paint down in a richly colorful, highly textural, abstract manner, allowing just enough cues, provoking the viewer to find the narrative in the puzzle of paint. I create paint structures that balance the subject of these places and my ambition to paint as a medium its self, overlaying with abundance, unbalance, ambition, courage and persistence within form, color and texture in every painting."

Angel Otero is a MFA candidate 2009 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received his BFA in 2007 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.