Ross Caliendo's landscapes depict a surrealistic world via vibrant, textured paintings. He uses a rich color palette and thick impasto, using a stick—rather than a brush—to apply oil paints atop acrylic backgrounds. The artist sources his reference images from friends and their Instagram accounts. Caliendo isn’t interested in the initial photographs or the specific sites they depict, but in how those images allow him to experiment with the principles of painting. Nasim Hantehzadeh's paintings draw on both personal and collective memory, with particular focus on liminal states of being. Raised in Iran until early adulthood, they later returned to the US, where they were born. Their diasporic experience created a sense of cultural duality that is visible in the hybrid forms of their painting and drawing. They bring together freewheeling figurative elements in compositions that allude to Paleolithic cave paintings, indigenous art from Mexico, and ancient Persian rug patterns. LaRissa Roger's multimedia work looks at the intersections of culture, identity, and embedded forms of colonization expressed through perception and psyche. Combining aspects of memory, history, and personal experience, she expands and complicates the capaciousness of blackness by challenging the politics of hybridity, authenticity, and visibility as an Afro-Asian woman. By using materials that reference colonial histories, Rogers re-contextualizes them to grapple with the entanglements of belonging and fugitivity, beauty and horror, life and death, opacity and transparency, care and resistance. Image: Ross Caliendo, California, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas with artist painted frame, 82 3/4 x 119 in (210.3 x 302.3 cm)