Onward with our open studio sneak preview series!

I am lucky to share my studio with four other artists . They are uniformly smart, talented and all around great studio mates! I already featured Laurel's work so below are Mila Kagan, Noah Armstrong and  Elena Patino.

Mila Kagan is a mixed media artist working in a variety of media such as glass, rubber, porcelain and reclaimed materials.

In my journey as an artist I have moved from mark making as a painter to exploration of ceramic vessel forms and to sculptural investigations with glass. I utilize soft black rubber penetrated by elongated strands of white glass, icy white transparent porcelain, and metal structures. I am interested in the juxtaposed relationships between these mediums which allows me to examine issues of  transparency, opacity, tensile strength, gravity, brittleness and flexibility.

Noah Armstrong is a painter who creates sculptural paintings on reclaimed wood panels. They are often gouged, etched and scraped back to reveal multiple layers of pigment. These pieces have a massive presence and are imbued with quietude.

I refer to my work interchangeably as paintings and as constructions as they have begun to straddle the two- and three-dimensional plane. My objective is to explore what can happen when a stage is created that allows for limited and semi-intentional control in its manipulation. I want to plan and build and to react and deconstruct. I find great beauty in the balance of the two.

Elena Patino is our newest addition to the studio. Born and raised in Peru, her recent work consists of labor intensive installations of colored tapes.

For the past 2 years my work dealt mainly with different aspects of identity. Gender and race have been examined through materials and questioned through analogies and processes such as my still ongoing work around skin tones "Me by Others, Others By Me". While still interested in this never-ending investigation, I have re-discovered my passion for detail-oriented, painstakingly labor intensive processes. 

My current body of work takes from my previous engagement in the construction of organic structures based on repetition with a strong connection to fiber arts. While not necessarily made with fiber materials, my work borrows from the pliable quality of textiles.