Homiens Fall 2025
Kwun Lan Wong, I packed you with me (detail), 2025, Hot-sculpted glass, artificial moss, 6″ x 9″ x 9″ (152 mm x 228 mm x 228 mm).
It’s an incredible joy to showcase the following artworks, which represent a rare synthesis of artisanal precision and emotional resonance. Our Fall 2025 artists demonstrate that profound insight is found in the courage to look closer, and in distilling the extraordinary from the mundane through a lens of disciplined curiosity.
This exhibition highlights a striking interplay between vulnerability and strength, featuring artworks that capture both the raw vitality of gestural marks and the silent perfection of still life. United by an inquisitive spirit, these artists invite us to reconsider the physical and metaphysical boundaries of our daily lives. Ultimately, this exhibition is a celebration of transition and discovery. It’s our hope that these works catalyze a lingering dialogue and inform how you navigate and interpret the delicate minutiae of your own surroundings.
The Homiens Art Prize is Now Open
Rob Connolly
Crystal Eggs 2025
Glass beads, Merino wool, gold plated pewter
14″ x 5″ x 14″ (355 mm x 127 mm x 355 mm)
Artist’s Statement: Crystal Eggs is from Dolls for Mountain Men, a series of soft sculptures that reimagine fly-fishing lures at a human scale. These large, flamboyant forms combine elements from fly-tying, drag culture, fashion and textile craft to examine coded expressions of masculinity and queerness in rural spaces. Fly-fishing lures are meticulously crafted objects, traditionally tied by hand with feathers, hair, chenille, and fine thread. They are designed to mimic insects and appeal to fish, but much of their artistry is for the fishermen themselves since fish will often strike any breadcrumb or shiny candy wrapper. This project explores that hidden performativity—how a hyper-masculine outdoor tradition holds space for flamboyant craft, aesthetic obsession, and personal expression—if only on the tiniest of scales. The sculptures exaggerate the color, texture, and gesture of fly-tying materials through techniques like crochet, knitting, basketmaking and weaving (using yarn and natural fibers). The forms are at once masculine and feminine, alluring and threatening—ornamental objects wrapped around sharp, dangerous hooks. These “dolls” invert the logic of function and utility, transforming tools of hunting into symbols of vulnerability, artifice, and coded identity.
Rob Connolly is a Los Angeles–based visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice bridges sculpture, textile, and cinematic form to explore identity, memory, and transformation. His work investigates the tension between concealment and expression—how materials, light, and gesture can carry emotional and cultural histories. Originally trained in industrial design, Connolly earned his MFA in Film Production from the University of Southern California, where he focused on directing, screenwriting, and cinematography. His early career as a filmmaker shaped a visual language grounded in rhythm, atmosphere, and narrative precision—elements that now inform his sculptural and fiber-based works. Connolly’s recent practice reimagines objects from his upbringing in rural North Carolina, particularly fly-fishing lures, as metaphors for queerness, performance, and the coded expression of identity. Through crochet, weaving, beadwork, and other tactile processes, he transforms these symbols of masculinity and artifice into large-scale, textural forms that blur distinctions between craft, sculpture, and storytelling. Across disciplines, Connolly’s work reflects a continued search for meaning through form—examining how the physical act of making can reveal hidden emotional structures and reframe the desire for self-expression as collective experience.
Nicole Cooper
Rise 2020
Oil on canvas (diptych)
66″ x 41″ (1676 mm x 1041 mm)
Artist’s Statement: My figurative oil paintings investigate the complex emotions surrounding climate change to create pathways toward connection, understanding, and action. Through vibrant colors, energetic brushwork, and the human form, I explore the interwoven, evolving force of our humanity across time.
At its heart, my work is about feeling—the full spectrum of emotions that arise when we face our environmental crisis. In a moment when awareness of climate change is widespread yet collective action often remains elusive, my paintings engage the human dimension that data alone cannot reach. Rather than looking away, I honor anxiety, grief, anger, love, and hope as valid responses, giving them form through the body to create space to process emotions and form authentic connection—the foundation from which transformation can emerge.
My compositions weave together human figures and elemental landscapes—rippling water, flaming terrains, swirling air—breaking down barriers between bodies to emphasize our profound interdependence across generations and with the natural world. These “feeling bodies” become vivid manifestations of the life force glowing from within.
Rise embodies this approach. An intense, blazing red light bathes interconnected figures as a central form struggles forward, burdened by sleeping figures and a piling mountain of excess ascending skyward. This mass mirrors a global temperature rise chart, reflecting the weight of our collective impact and the urgency of our fragile moment. The work explores what writer Rebecca Solnit calls Active Hope—the recognition that “hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope”—creating a vision where our collective actions today ripple forward, shaping possible futures.
Nicole Cooper (American, 1983) is a New York-based artist whose work investigates the complex emotions surrounding climate change to create pathways toward connection and action. Cooper holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute (Kansas City, MO) and has completed the Yale Norfolk School of Art Summer Residency with Yale University (Norfolk, CT).
Cooper’s work won the People’s Choice Award at the 2025 Creative Climate Awards. Her art and interview were featured in USA Today’s 2023 article, “All talk and, yes, action. Could conversations about climate change be a solution?”
A trained Climate Café facilitator and curator with Climate Imaginarium (NYC), Cooper is also a New York Artists Circle member. Her work is held in private collections in the U.S. and Italy.
Recent solo exhibitions include “The Mothers in Me Will Meet You There” at Centerpoint Gallery (NYC), “Pivotal” at Fontbonne University Gallery (St. Louis, MO), and “Interwoven” at the Schmidt Art Center (Belleville, IL). She’s shown in group exhibitions in New York venues Field Projects, Hudson Guild Gallery, and Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, and St. Louis, MO, venues Duane Reed Gallery, COCA Millstone Gallery, and Art St. Louis, and participated in the Contemporary Art Museum’s Open Studios STL.
Layana Laifa
Gun Girl 2025
Oil, texture paste, acrylic on canvas
20″ x 40″ (508 mm x 1016 mm)
Artist’s Statement: Gun Girl is a painting I competed after a piece I did called Bubble Girl in order to explore how some children around the world do not get the same childhood freedom that others have the privilege to experience. My reference photo is actually a picture I took of my younger sister at a funfair in the south of France as she was actively participating in a game. When planning to paint this piece, I thought it would be a good idea to paint it on an extra long canvas, as well as only painting the main figures instead of including the background, as I wanted the viewers’ sole attention directly on what was happening and its connotations. The work physically represents how the child is not given an option, and accordingly, the viewer also doesn’t have any option but to pay direct attention to what is being portrayed. This allows the gun to have a more impending presence, as well as allowing viewers’ eyes to travel along the canvas. The older woman sitting in an army uniform represents the power imbalance between her and the child, as most of her face has been obstructed, along with her being positioned higher up on the canvas as well as in front of the child. I decided to conceal the face of the soldier in order to promote anonymity, which I learnt about through my studies in Psychology on social influence. In Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Study, the “guards” wore sunglasses for the purpose of hiding their eyes so the “prisoners” did not see any moments of hesitation, fear, or emotion which might discredit their “power”. Accordingly, these guards appeared more intimidating, and I wanted to illustrate my soldier in a similar way. The guard is holding the little girl’s toy rabbit to symbolize the passing over of their childhood, with the toy being replaced in the child’s hands by a gun.
My fascination with art has mainly stemmed from my childhood through these fun little creative activities me and my mum used to do together, and this love for art has continuously bloomed into my obsession with it today. Childhood has had a major influence on my work and can be seen as a continuous theme throughout many of my paintings. I think this is due to the pure joy, freedom, and happiness I gain from reminiscing about these memories as well as a longing to revisit those times. My aim is to capture and share these feelings with those that interact with my art. I primarily work with oils, embracing their versatility along with their depth and richness of color; however, I also adore working in gouache, as well as in acrylic, depending on the specific effect that I want the overall painting to convey. I work a lot with color as I believe there is something so beautiful in the subtle tones and shifts of pigment that the naked eye may not always be able to pick up or notice, which is why I seek to emphasize these forgotten colors within my work.
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Manuel Dampeyroux
The Kingdom of Absences 2024
Oil on canvas
23″ x 47″ (584 mm x 1194 mm)
Artist’s Statement: This painting is structured around a setting: an empty swimming pool. Deprived of its content, it loses its primary function and becomes a metaphor for absence. Facing it stands a woman wrapped in an emergency blanket, a symbol of her desire to shield herself from her own inner void.
As often in my work, the painting stages a quest for identity—a confrontation with oneself. Here, absence is not a negation but a paradoxical presence that fills the entire space. The viewer is invited to immerse themselves in this silent realm where emptiness becomes a poetic substance.
Click here to watch Manuel paint The Kingdom of Absences on YouTube
Manuel Dampeyroux (born in 1991 in Minas Gerais, Brazil) is a Franco-Brazilian artist-author and painter based in Montpellier, France. He holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Artistic Practices from the University Paul-Valéry and develops a neo-classical pictorial practice infused with metaphsychology, symbolism, and art history.
His work explores the human psyche, inner silence, and contemporary archetypes. He is the founder of Felinology, an artistic concept centered on feline feminine figures — mystical panthers inspired by Mediterranean and Middle Eastern imaginaries — envisioned as metaphysical icons of power, mystery, and transformation.
Influenced by Vermeer, Poussin, Van Eyck, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio, his painting is marked by technical precision, narrative stillness, and symbolic depth. His work has been exhibited and awarded internationally in New York, Paris, Geneva, Zurich, Rome, London, Venice, and Riyadh.
Through his practice, Manuel seeks to reinvent the place of figurative imagery today and to create a dialogue between tradition, introspection, and contemporary mythology.
Mia Dudek
Fruiting Body XV 2023
Giclée print on Hahnemühle Archival Paper (Edition of 1 + 1AP), wooden artist frame with museum glass
55.1″ x 43.3″ (1400 mm x 1100 mm)
Artist’s Statement: Fruiting Bodies is a significant and timely development within Dudek’s work, in which her creative engagement with organic life steps out of the anthropocentric into the vast realms of the more-than-human. The last decade has, of course, seen a desperate deepening of cultural interest in more-than-human life, a sad corollary to the intensification of anthropogenic climate change, habitat loss and collapse in biodiversity across the world.
They are shot in the simple, slick and promotional style of product photography. Each subject is presented for our inspection, up-close and alone, against a neutral studio background, as if they were the latest smartphone or sneaker. The mushrooms richly repay this VIP treatment. They are voluptuous, alien and profoundly present. Their tumescent fans shade from white and tan browns into pink, fleshy tones, striking a subtle and disturbing note of the erotic. Disturbing, but mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi, part of the sexual phase of the fungal life cycle, the place where spores are produced. As such they are, for the broader fungal body of which each one is a part, zones of intense interaction with the more-than-fungal world.
Within Dudek’s latest, constellation of works, Fruiting Bodies are of fundamental significance. They are her symbols and examples par excellence of dynamic, organic actors able to transcend and breach the thresholds, barriers and constraints that structure the physical world.
Born in Sosnowiec, an industrial town in the south of Poland, Mia Dudek spent her teenage years in Warsaw, before she moved to London to pursue her studies in photography. She completed her BA at London College of Communications (2012) and her MA at The Royal College of Art (2016).
Moving across media and changing home countries – from Poland to England to Portugal – Dudek developed a singular language of expression related to depictions of the domestic and urban spheres. She continuously probes the relationship between the body and the architectural fabric, while exploring notions of intimacy, identity in displacement and inhabiting.
Dudek has been featured in a number of exhibitions around Europe as well as in publications, including ArtForum, E-flux, LYNX Contemporary and “24 Artists to Watch” by Modern Painters. In 2018 she has received the Special Jury Anamorphosis Prize for her book MDAM, which is now in MoMA Library Collection in New York. She exhibited at art fairs like Arco Lisboa, Contemporary Istanbul, Artissima, NADA Villa Warsaw and Photo London, where her works has been featured by The Guardian “Best of Photo London 2022”. In 2023 she exhibited her works during National Photo Festival in Darmstadt, Germany. 2025 brought Mia Dudek her first institutional exposure in Museum Sinclair-Haus in Germany.
Ayana Gordon
La Grande Odalisque 2023
Archival Luster Print from 120 mm film
30″ x 40″ (762 mm x 1016 mm)
Artist’s Statement: I am a Baltimore-based photographer and multimedia artist whose work is rooted in the exploration of identity, shaped by my Antiguan and Haitian heritage and American upbringing. My practice is a continuous journey of self-discovery, cultural reflection, and spiritual reconnection—grounded in honoring the complexity and beauty of Black life.
Through film photography, set design, and storytelling, I create immersive visual narratives that center ancestral memory, celebrate Caribbean identity, and affirm the power of representation. My current work explores how environment, spirit, and personal history intersect to shape who we are. I use intentional composition and stylization to uplift the voices of people of color, inviting viewers to see themselves more fully.
My process doesn’t end with the image—it continues in the darkroom, where I hand-print each photograph. That space of isolation is sacred. It’s where I connect with the work in its rawest form. There are no teams—just me, the image, and the slow ritual of bringing it to life. It becomes a dance: intuitive, tactile, and deeply personal. Navigating the dark with confidence, even with eyes closed, has become a metaphor for my practice—trusting instinct, surrendering to process, and listening closely to what the work wants to become.
My work functions as an altar to my lineage and a living archive of cultural experience. Every image I create is part of a larger narrative that asks audiences to reflect on their own stories, identities, and relationships to place. Whether documenting ceremony, staging portraits, or building interactive experiences, I aim to create work that honors the past, speaks to the present, and inspires future connections.
Ayana Gordon (b. 1998) is a self-taught Antiguan-Haitian photographer and multimedia artist based in Baltimore, MD. Working primarily with analog film and darkroom printing, she creates textured, immersive images that explore identity, heritage, and the spiritual connections between people and their environments. Rooted in Caribbean and Haitian lineages, her work honors ancestry through portraiture, landscape, and image-making, weaving personal experience into collective remembrance.
Her visual storytelling has been recognized internationally, including as a finalist in the 2024 LensCulture Portrait Awards, with features in Vogue Italia: Global Photovogue, Artsy, and The Guardian. Her work has been exhibited at the 2024 LA Art Show and publicly presented through LEDBaltimore’s citywide art initiative. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence in Baltimore and has participated in exhibitions, including Untethered Familars, Creative Alliance, Baltimore, MD, 2026; Heard You Say, Tribe, Baltimore, MD, 2026; Return to Roots, Full Circle Fine Art, Baltimore, MD, 2024; Greyscale, Santa Fe, NM, 2023; #ASLONGASITSDOPE, Flatform, Baltimore, MD, 2021. Recent awards include: Maryland State Arts Council Creativity Grant.
Ayana’s practice functions as a living altar, celebrating Black identity, feminine strength, and the intimacy of place, memory, and legacy. Her images honor the relationships that shape us: between family and homeland, between ritual and daily life, between who we are and who we come from. By blending personal narrative with broader cultural histories, she creates space for reflection, connection, and a fuller telling of Caribbean and Haitian experience.
Joanna Hu
Language Barrier 2024
Acrylic on canvas
15″ (381 mm) diameter round panel
Joanna Hu is a 15-year-old high schooler and lives in Arizona. In 2026, she won a National Scholastic Art & Writing Silver Medal, three regional Gold Keys, and five regional Silver Keys. In 2025, she won a National Scholastic Art & Writing Gold Medal and two regional Gold Keys. She began making art at a young age and won several of Wildlife Forever’s Art of Conservation competitions in primary school. Besides making art, Joanna enjoys music, reading books, and playing tennis. Her favorite mediums to work with are colored pencils, acrylic paints, and digital art.
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Sheryl Ruth Kolitsopoulos
Serenity / Monemvasia 2024
from Exploration series
Lithographic crayon on matte drafting film
48″ x 34.5″ (1200 mm x 876 mm)
Artist’s Statement: This drawing is part of my Exploration series where I revisited previous subject matters and explored pushing the boundaries of positive and negative spaces. I specifically chose to work on matte drafting film as it allowed me to incorporate the texture of the sheet rock as I drew on the wall enhancing the texture of line and shape. This subject matter was inspired by my immersion in Greek culture during my time residing in Greece during the year.
Sheryl Ruth Kolitsopoulos is a New York native, born in Brooklyn. After attending Art And Design High School in Manhattan, she received a BFA from Parsons School Of Design in New York City. Upon graduating, Ms Kolitsopoulos enrolled at The Art Students League to further her education. She is a fine artist whose love of drawing becomes an important element in her lithographs, drawings, and paintings. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Hammond Museum, The Bradbury Art Museum, The New York Public Library, The Newark Public Library and The Art Students League.
Ms Kolitsopoulos first visited Greece in 1982 where it forever impacted and influenced her creative journey as an artist. Being in a Greek family, she has organically immersed herself in Greek culture, allowing her to appreciate the nuances of the country’s beauty, history, tradition and extraordinary character of its people. Ms Kolitsopoulos resides with her family in both New York and southern Greece.
Sinead Malone
Seal 2024
Digital photograph
11″ x 14″ (279 mm x 356 mm)
Artist’s Statement: Howth is a seaside village in Dublin, Ireland. Oftentimes, when walking along the pier and looking into the water, you will see grey blob-like creatures curiously poking their heads out. I have visited Ireland multiple times, and while each trip has been different, the seals are always there. Seal captures this experience and catapults the viewer into the mystery of the Howth seals; their grey, almost glowing eyes, and their big, round bodies. They look inquisitive, and I like to wonder what exactly is going through their minds.
Raised in New Jersey, Sinead Malone is a multimedia artist who creates art through writing, photography, and film. Her art explores a variety of mediums and themes, most notably self-portraiture.
While always being a creative person, the seed of art was planted in her head during her first photography class in high school; from there, she has grown to cherish many different forms of art. To her, creating is a way of making intangible feelings and emotions into audible and visual representations.
Demarco Mosby
Strong enough 2023
Oil on canvas
48″ x 60″ (1219 mm x 1524 mm)
Demarco Mosby (b.1991) in Kansas City, Missouri, is a New York City based African-American oil painter. He studied at the School of Visual Arts as a cartooning major in 2010 and graduated in 2014. Starting in 2017, he became self taught as an oil painter and continued his graduate education in the Hunter MFA program in 2019, graduating from Hunter in 2021. Taking from his roots in storytelling, he paints narrative-based works with heavy use of symbolic vocabulary, often making works that evoke deep and complex human feelings as well as drawing inspiration from artistic favorites such as Francisco Goya, to illustrate the human experience of tragedies, triumphs, and desperation.
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Adelle Rawluk
Remembering (Blue Eyes) 2025
Oil on canvas, salvaged window frame
32″ x 26″ (813 mm x 660 mm)
Artist’s Statement: A memory: a grasp of an image, an instant in flux. Remembering (Blue Eyes) is a portrait of a young goat named Blue Eyes. A life only brief yet preserved by those who gaze upon her. Housed in a salvaged window frame from an old prairie farm house, remembering is presented as an act of looking; looking in, looking through, or looking out.
Adelle Rawluk is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Combining oil painting, textiles, and sculpture with locally found and shared objects, her work explores ideas of memory, longing, and mourning. Blending a tangible and physical reality with the distortions of the uncanny, remembrance and the placement of personal meaning are explored in dream-like compositions. Her work challenges the boundaries between the two-dimensional image and the sculptural, enshrining the told and untold stories of places, people, and things.
Adelle holds a BFA (Hons.) from the University of Manitoba. Her work has been exhibited in various institutions within Canada, including Graffiti Gallery, Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA), and C2 Centre for Craft. Adelle’s work can be found in numerous private collections across Canada and the United States.
Rachel Weiswasser
Through Glass, Waiting (Paris, Texas II) 2024
Oil paint, oil pastel, and crepe paper on cotton
60″ x 42″ (1524 mm x 1066 mm)
Artist’s Statement: Through Glass, Waiting (Paris, Texas II) creates a room where watching becomes a form of control. The man’s stare is fixed and deliberate, carrying a passive judgment that never breaks. The air feels clinical and stripped of warmth, flooded with artificial green light that mimics institutional interiors and monitored spaces. Figures dissolve into flat planes of color, as though filtered through glass, screens, or distant memory.
The work follows the slow violence of trying to understand what cannot be confirmed. Thought becomes a private interrogation. Every silence feels forensic. Every glance becomes evidence. The body learns to stay still. Surveillance no longer belongs to the room but to the mind itself. Meaning is built and rebuilt in isolation, where being seen is not recognition but exposure, and knowing becomes a quiet form of harm.
Rachel Weiswasser is a New York–based painter whose work explores memory, mediation, and the psychological charge of seeing through technological and architectural filters. Her paintings combine oil paint with mixed media, often using pixel-like mark-making, artificial color systems, and spatial distortion to examine how intimacy is altered by screens, glass, and surveillance aesthetics. She holds a B.A. in Art History from NYU and an M.A. in Art History and Cultural Heritage from University College London.
Her work has been exhibited in New York, Miami, and London, and is held in private collections internationally. Weiswasser’s practice investigates how the mind reconstructs emotional experience through visual noise, compression, and artificial light—creating figures that feel both hyper-present and unreachable.
Kwun Lan Wong
I packed you with me 2025
Hot-sculpted glass, artificial moss
6″ x 9″ x 9″ (152 mm x 228 mm x 228 mm)
Artist’s Statement: I weave my story around Lo Ting, a mystical being who is half-fish and half-man, born from the waters surrounding Hong Kong. Lo Ting embodies my longing and unresolved search for a place to belong. Hong Kong identity slips through the grasp of both British and Chinese rule. According to the story of Lo Ting, it is gentle, shy, and often overwhelmed by the world of humans, to the extent that its tears, born from sorrow and yearning, transform into pearls. This metamorphosis, where heartbreak becomes a lasting treasure, inspired this work.
Leaving home to begin a new journey in the United States is an exciting adventure I have long dreamed of. I left behind many cherished connections and relationships to pursue this path. This work serves as a gentle reminder to myself that every moment and every goodbye is a meaningful part of the adventure, making the journey all the more worthwhile.
Kwun Lan Wong, a glass blower from Hong Kong, discovered her passion for this art form while finishing her Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University. After graduation, she worked as a studio assistant at the same university, where she took on various responsibilities such as teaching, studio management, teaching material management, and equipment repair. She later pursued a Master’s degree in glass at Southern Illinois University, where she honed her skills in hot sculpting. Wong has since been actively developing her craft in glass studios worldwide. Wong has also been selected as an artist in residence at Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Pittsburgh Glass Center and GlazenHuis in Belgium, and has participated in exhibitions across Asia, the United States, Belgium, Italy, Norway, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic. Wong is an enthusiastic individual who is dedicated to her craft and pursuing a career in the world of glass.