Harper National Juried Exhibition: Small Works 2025

Crestline Queen, 2023

archival pigment print, 15" x 20"

My photographic practice engages with themes of Black identity, historical memory, and visual representation. Grounded in portraiture, my work examines the intersections of Black identity, beauty, and cultural narrative, with an emphasis on reclaiming agency in the depiction of Black subjects. Through the use of soft lighting, controlled composition, and symbolic elements, I construct images that function as both personal documents and broader cultural statements. My photos become a space for reimagining Black presence—outside of trauma and stereotype—foregrounding softness, dignity, and interiority. Informed by both research and lived experience, my work aims to contribute to a visual discourse that honors complexity while resisting erasure. Each image contributes to a visual language and creates a proposition for new ways of seeing.

elijahmbarnes.com

August 17, 2022, 2022-2023

charcoal on manually typed diary entries on Kitikata paper, 8" x 8"

My Permission Slips series of drawings contain my most private thoughts and obsessions. I start a drawing by typing stream-of-consciousness diary entries in the style of Surrealist automatic writing on Japanese paper using old typewriters. I type over the same page several times, documenting my reflections, dreams, to-do lists, current events, and overheard conversations, as well as my worries, anxieties, and epiphanies, over and in between my original typed lines of text. These layers of typing form patterns, creating tension between legibility and illegibility, blurring the line between representation and abstraction. Next, I draw bold shapes in charcoal and graphite on this layered text, further obfuscating it. The black circular forms are a nod to redactions commonly used in official documents to protect privacy but also bring other things to mind. These shapes are a quiet stillness within the cacophony of my thoughts.

www.juliabloom.net

IG: @juliasbloom

Memento Morididdle Movement #725, 2024

hand cut paper and found frame, 19" x 24"

My work stems from the loss of both my mother and father due to smoking related cancers in February of 2013. Their passing left a deep void in my life that led to my interest in Memento Mori, or the act of coming to terms with one’s own mortality. Through this investigation I came to terms with the trauma of my childhood and the lack of memories I actually have. Picture frames are usually reserved for those most cherished memories: a family outing, birthdays, weddings, or holiday get togethers. They rarely encapsulate the most important events: a death in the family, trauma, or abuse. My work seeks to investigate these moments as they force us to make decisions, decisions that lead to life changing events. We either rise to the occasion or sink into despair.

charlesclary.com

IG: @charlesclary

Tender Red, 2025

digital photography/archival print, 12" x 12"

Before I can invite anyone else in, I have to feel it myself. A pull, a pause, a sense that something in the scene is asking to be noticed. That first spark—whether it’s a slant of light, a quiet notion, or an unexpected detail—is what drives me to pick up the camera.

I try to create images that hold space, not just visually but emotionally. I try to leave room for the viewer to step in, to feel something familiar or surprising, to maybe laugh or linger. While I tend to prefer a minimal scene, sometimes I compose within a busy environment, with a small or subtle something asking to be noticed.

What matters most to me is connection: between me and the subject. If I can find my passion in the finished work, then can I have the hope that my viewer will connect as well.

janeerlandson.com

Elizabethan Collar, 2025

celluclay, aluminum, oil paint, 15" x 20" x 8"

A year ago, I started a new series of figurative sculptures created with paper-based modeling compounds, armatures, and oil paint. Elizabethan Collar is one of the first pieces in the series.  The figures are an ambiguous mixture of animal, human, and structural forms that obliquely reference our world, though they exist in their own absurd reality. 

matthewfeuer.com

Invisible, 2025

photography, 8" x 10"

The Birth of Solitude is a personal project about what it feels like to leave home. It follows the emotional journey of immigration, how memories stay with you, but also how they begin to fade. In the beginning, the images are full of color and warmth: shadows of my body, photos of my family, small signs of connection. It shows that feeling of being in between, missing the past but not fully inside the future.

As the series goes on, the color disappears. Things become quieter. There are blurred self-portraits, empty frames, and more silence. It’s about that lonely space you enter when you’re far from home, trying to remember who you are. This project is my way of holding onto the past while trying to make sense of a new life. It’s about loss, change, and the quiet strength it takes to keep going when everything feels far away.

behance.net/maryamghasemp

Satellite, 2024

casein, oil pastel on Gatorboard, 13" x 9" x 1.5-1.25-1-.75-.5"

The basis of my work, as an abstract artist, has been a dialogue between polygonal “shaped” constructs and the use of “painterliness” in regard to the interaction of color. The hexagon or parts of it, have been the foundation of most of my work throughout my career.  The hexagon is inspired by the benzene ring.  It is the building block of life, connected to all the diversity of life on a fundamental level.   My work uses color as a connection to light, which is a human experience that relates us to the universes beyond. In the construct Satellite, the oil pastel defining the lines is the same color on all the individual pieces but changes with the underling color.

blinnjacobs.com

Day Walk_Small, 2022

oil on linen,12" x 16"

I create oil paintings depicting everyday flora I encounter on daily walks. These marginalized greeneries – trees, vines, and domesticated plants – are composited into dense paintings. What begins as a photographic encounter quickly turns into a digitally archived collection of interesting subject matter. Formal elements such as color, texture, light, shape, and form are selected and often digitally altered to communicate my visual attraction while evoking a sense of longing. The longing for an unattainable moment in the past and the sadness of being away from home pervade my day-to-day life as an expatriate. Nature not only has a way of allowing me to drift into a poignant moment but also provides a space of healing.

miheenahm.com

By The Dumpster, 2024

oil on paper mounted on panel, 12" x 9"

While By the Dumpster does not neatly fit into either of my larger bodies of work it happily resides in between and connected to both. On one hand my work explores the consumption of goods and their ever-present part of all our lives as well as the enormous personal effect they have on us and our surroundings. Exposing the ubiquity of detritus, specifically the multifaceted nature of litter and its direct connection to the production and consumption of daily and single use materials. On the other hand, Blue Collar Machismo and the Neo Camp is a body of work that explores the personal emotional resonance and nostalgic connections to 1980s, and 1990s television characters, and their relationships to a blue-collar working-class upbringing. By the Dumpster is a moment in time, a humorous look at life, offering a bit of levity while also reminding us that we are not that different from one another.

jnewthimages.weebly.com

IG: @thatvegansemoartprofessor

Ramsey House - Knoxville, TN, 2024

archival pigment print - photography, 13" x 20"

The portfolio ‘Flowers For the Dead’ is an ongoing project that examines historical sites, homes and institutions in the United States that are open to the public. Acting on William Faulkner’s quote ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’, I undertook a project where ‘real life’, past or present, should be made to seem real- for it is not believable solely for the fact that it happened. This idea is manifest in my interest in how once private or historically important homes have been preserved for current public consumption, the roll objects and spaces play in presenting a particular history and its context to greater social narratives, how physical alterations to original places project themselves experientially, and the effect the public plays on defining the engagement of a preserved space. The photographs are also intended to explore notions of Public vs. Private and how Presence vs. Absence affects the photographic space. 

lakenewton.com

HOME MINE, 2022

acrylic paint, beads, and embroidery, 11" x 18"

Art Switching Code Switching

My practice focuses on a perceptual switching of reading images and visualizing text by using figure-ground relationship. Combined with images, I’m interested in highly abstracting texts to the point of near illegibility, hiding phrases, and presenting them as ambiguous visual puzzles. Since the answer to each puzzle is provided in the title of each piece, the works aim to reorient the viewer toward issues beyond mere appreciation of surface elements. It is an opportunity to navigate toward deeper dimensions through the mode and code switching of visual and verbal perception.

altimablossom.net

I See Red Where There Should Be Green, 2025

oil on panel, 14" x 11"

My current work has a focus in two areas. Nature great and small. I photograph small patches of landscape and paint from the photograph in an accurate but loose manner. The natural image is surrounded by abstract color bars. These color bars intensify the color of the natural image. The painting is then finessed and pushed beyond the intensified color that was initially established to a place greater than the sum of its parts. An intensity is reached beyond color theory and technique to an experiential realm where a small moment in nature is expanded to represent the wonder of the forces of nature itself.

IG: @reningerdavid

Morning News, 2025

oil on canvas, 24" x 24"

This piece is part of a visual set of diary entries written about the experience of fluctuating mental health and how that transforms into resiliency. By sharing the collections of repetitive tasks to maintain assurance, this work digs into the distinctions of obsession, ritual, and habit, describing how these manifest physically.

emkaro.com

Machines don't do well with soft and squishy, 2024 

cyanotype on cotton rag, 11" x 14"

For some time, my photographic ritual followed an established method of image capture: consider a subject, choose a point of view, aim the camera, and press the shutter. That is a simplified description of a complex process but was once a trusted working method. Feeling limited by this routine, I began using 3D graphic software to develop a virtual catalog of components that were used to construct larger scenes. The components draw from real-life marginal spaces where industrial decay and environmental change have blurred the boundaries between natural and constructed.

Virtual assemblies are brought into a tangible realm using nineteenth-century printing methods. Each piece is skewed by fickle chemistry, atmospheric conditions, and user error. Stains, spots, scratches, brush marks, dust, and ghost markings are inevitable and mirror unpredictable real-world situations. Having been removed from a pristine digital realm, each print becomes a unique version of itself. Virtual reality shattered by alchemic magic. 

travisroozee.com

Worry Stone, 2023 

paper pulp (recycled failed drawings and other papers),10" x 8" x 6.5"

Using paper as a means of exploring the delicate, mutable nature of our thinking processes, I cut into, shred, and convert drawings and other papers into pulp. Parts and elements are exchanged between works with some evolving over a number of years. The images that result are moments within a stream of thinking and forgetting—records of memories lost, found and transforming.

markrospenda.com
IG: @markrospenda

Morning Glory, 2025

wall sculpture, shattered and reassembled cast concrete with acrylic paint, 
6.5" x 6.5" x 2"

I’m a contemporary sculptor working in concrete and stone, embellished with paint and pigment. My work explores process, the immediacy of cast concrete, and transforming common materials into monumental forms. My pieces disrupt geometric shapes with organic lines to subvert form and viewer expectations.  The cracks that suffuse my work are both ornamental and symbolic. Influenced by geology, I draw on the layered, fractured beauty of the natural world—from canyons to dried mud. My sculptures preserve personal encounters with nature, even as erosion, climate change, and our obsession with innovation efface them. They offer a commentary on the fragility of our environment and the consequences—both ecological and psychological—of constant development. Through monolithic yet cracked forms, I explore the tension between stability and transformation, celebrating the raw beauty of the imperfect while encouraging reflection on our journey through an evolving world.

joshurso.com

Falls, 2024

acrylic on canvas, 14" x 11"

Emily Walley’s work explores the intersection of place, memory, and time. It reflects on how images are collected and curated, blurring the boundaries between a lived experience and a digital narrative. The atmospheric paintings realize as hovering, transient forms amid flat fields of color. These ambiguous spaces, both familiar and mysterious, navigate the tension between representation and abstraction and appear on the threshold of slipping away.

emilywalley.com

Forgetting and Remembering, 2023

graphite on porcelain, 14" x 9" x 6"

Balancing experimentation with skilled craft I create sculptures that challenge expectation of function and notions of stability. 

Clay is an essential material in my work. Press your finger into its cool softness and it will give way, recording the trace of the interaction, an indication of the hand-made. Coils of clay are a primal mark, the first thing humans make in clay. My repetition of this shape echoes the experience of daily practice. The hours and marks accumulate into a structure more complex than the single simple gesture. With fire, the clay ossifies irreversibly into an unchanging and fragile artifact. These delicate sculptures investigate physical and psychological space, fragility and resilience, time and impermanence.

christywittmer.com

Amish Farm, 2023

photography, 8.75" x 11.75"

Rainy Zhou is a New York–based photographer, born in Asia and shaped by a life of constant movement. Her series Amish Farm, photographed in rural Pennsylvania shortly after the pandemic, explores themes of solitude, memory, and rootedness. Drawn to the quiet rhythms of a community living without modern technology, Zhou captures everyday moments—clotheslines swaying, animals resting—with a soft, observant lens. For an artist who has never had a forever home, the stillness of this world felt both foreign and familiar. Her images reflect not just cultural distance, but emotional parallels—echoes of a global stillness, and a deep longing for connection through place and time.