RED: Madeleine Rhondeau-Rhodes (she/her) is a Charlottesville-based painter exploring memory as it slips between the real and the imagined with bright, bold paintings. Deeply rooted in her own life experience, her practice is also heavily influenced by memory, observations, imagination, and self-identified unconscious behaviors. Her work imagines human beings intersecting with a universe where our memories, imagination, and worries spring to life alongside beautiful and grotesque creatures.

Rhondeau-Rhodes participated in an Artists in Conversation virtual event with fellow artist, Paul Brainard, on June 9th, 2021 from 6-7PM. Watch the Artists in Conversation here.

ORANGE: MK Bailey (she/her) is a Washington, D.C.- based artist building layered, hyperfeminine worlds within her paintings. Using a variety of imagery, her work explores a combination of dreams and memories, making space for the weird and whimsical alongside the dark and unsettling. Bailey’s narrative paintings tell dramatized stories of mundane or nostalgic experiences, often using figures from the classical art canon as stand-ins for specific subjects.

YELLOW: Aaron Eichorst (he/him) is a Charlottesville-based painter exploring the wonder of looking. Inspired by the ornamental style known as Grotesque, his work pulls the viewer into complex, kaleidoscopic worlds of human and animal figures. Eichorst uses symmetry as a tool for establishing order, yet embraces the tension created when he breaks that structure in subtle visual ways.

GREEN: Heather Owens (she/her) is a Charlottesville-based artist capturing snapshots of her inner landscape. Inspired by her childhood spent poring over books and exploring the forest, Owens paints fantastic stories, lush physical landscapes, and imagined interior worlds. Her recent body of work explores the oppositional emotions that accompany life changes and the grief inherent in the things we won’t have.

BLUE: Sarah Kahle (she/her) is a Washington, D.C.-based painter depicting the LGBTQ+ community through the lesbian gaze. Her watercolor paintings expand how we understand femininity, represent the diversity of womxn, and allow the audience to experience the fluidity of LGBTQ+ sexuality. Each painting involves an intimate discussion and collaboration with her subject, specifically meant to negate stigmas and sexual regression and create a space of sexual belonging in art-making.

Kahle participated in a live painting exhibition outside out of Second Street Gallery on June 5th, 2021 from 11-1PM. Read more about the past event here.

INDIGO: Katie Aki Holloway (she/her) is a Virginia-based artist working to counter harmful mainstream queer narratives with intricately crafted post-apocalyptic worlds. Her gouache and mixed media work, though fantastical, is also filled with real world desires and memories. Sexy and sensual without ascribing to a patriarchal, heterosexual lens, Holloway’s paintings focus on love, community, emotional honesty, and accountability.

Holloway participated in a Create and Critique, two-part workshop series on creating your own shrines around imagined worlds on July 14 & 28 at 6PM. Read more about the workshop here.

VIOLET: Sam Gray (she/her) is a Richmond-based artist and designer creating surreal allegorical works that navigate the subconscious as well as mystical natural worlds. Serving to untether her ego from the ideologies of our capitalist patriarchy, Gray celebrates the natural, the feminine, and the untamed psyche. Her drawings and paintings are inspired by nature, herbalism, floriography, mythologies, Victorian illustrations, magick, tarot, alchemy, and religious iconography.

Gray participated in a Create and Critique, two-part workshop series exploring the use of symbolism and allegory in art on June 16 & 23 at 6PM. Read more about the workshop here.