Mikey Mosher – Chicago, IL/Cape Cod, MA.
All of my work and my approach to it is rooted in collage. From 2018 to 2020 my practice
primarily consisted of large-scale hand-cut collages, which were conceptually influenced by my
background in religious studies at Hampshire College, as well as my views of American politics
and media culture. During this time, I was primarily using the framework of religion to depict and
satirize life under American capitalism. Since beginning an MFA program at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago, I have explored a number of different approaches to and applications of
the collage discipline in the form of video, animation, projection, sculpture, and photography.
These projects and experiments have allowed me to project the constant elements of my
practice through a variety of different formal lenses. These constant elements include an interest
in exploring the significance of religion and spirituality in contemporary culture, as well as the
ways in which seemingly secular elements of that culture can be understood as religious or
spiritual in nature. Much of my interest in these concepts come from my understanding that the
Western notion of “religion”, while it is tied to the concept of spirituality, is also deeply rooted in
structures of societal power and collective self-perception. I am interested in understanding,
critiquing, and interacting with these power structures with my work. mikeymosher.com
Lydia Gravis – Ogden, Utah.
Lydia earned her B.A. in painting and drawing from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C. in 2003 and her MFA in visual art from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in 2013. She’s worked as Gallery Director of the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery within the Department of Visual Art and Design at Weber State University since 2014.
Mark-making is an empathic activity for me, a way to connect to the world around and within. It’s also a radical act of sanity, imperative as I navigate the overwhelming nature of our contemporary world. I create colonies of marks and lines, and in my mind, they become personified and assume individual behaviors. Can I re-write troubling human narratives with them? Can I make them cooperate? As I try to sort out reality, I create a new reality on paper. I eventually relinquish my initial intention of control, and it’s with this surrender that I get lost in an intuitive process that leads me into imagined realms and I come to realize that after all, a drawing inspired by the world doesn’t have to resemble it. This realization seems liberating, and the responsive marks begin forming a new language to communicate with a universe in which I feel absolute smallness, yet undeniable belonging. Ultimately driven by a desire for engagement, and sustained by the meditative act of making, I hope to pass on a sense of wonder and resonance to those who view my work. http://lydiagravis.com
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