Anja Salonen’s body of work is inspired by Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as symbolic form, and Masahiro Mori’s “concept of the ‘uncanny valley’, in which he hypothesized what humanity’s reaction would be to robots that look almost like people, but not quite — on the border of empathy and revulsion, closeness and othering,” the artist explains. “My paintings are objects, flat planes, that hold the illusion of a somatic reality, and that reality’s location on the spectrum of familiarity and alienation also potentially affects the elicited emotional response in the viewer.”

Vaughn Spann belongs to a lineage of artists for whom applying paint to canvas represents a small fragment of the possibilities of painterly investigation. Though countless artists have painted on alternative surfaces, there is still a primacy assigned to the significance of paint on canvas.  It is here that Spann’s work begins. Formal curiosity and a fascination with texture and color leads his approach to painting while political concerns influence his uneasy relationship to mainstream painting practices. Combining a non-traditional approach with unconventional materials, Spann investigates painting as a way of exploring formalism and social issues.

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