Kyle Larson is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt). Originally from Sacramento, California, he received an MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2012. After graduating Larson continued to live and work as an artist in Boston while teaching in New Hampshire. He relocated to Oklahoma in 2015 upon accepting the position of Director of Visual Arts at Northwestern Oklahoma State University where he taught painting and drawing courses and served as Director of the NWOSU Artist-in-Residence (AiR) Program. Larson then served as Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at Southern Oregon University from 2022 to 2025.

His current work explores notions of temporality, cycles of decay and transformation through painting and drawing in which he constructs spaces where rhythmic, atmospheric phenomenon and transitory forces disrupt, push, and embed bodies and objects into layered narratives.

Larson has exhibited nationally and internationally, and he has completed residencies at Mass MoCA and the Vermont Studio Center. His work was recently featured on Hyperallergic.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Through painting and drawing I attempt to establish spaces where rhythmic atmospheric phenomenon and transitory forces push against, disrupt, trap, and flow fluidly through the body, landscape, and objects. Time and space collapse and compress, with multiple actions occurring and recurring. Clouds, air, earth, and the mundane fold in on themselves, merge and collapse until they lose their identity or disappear completely. Imagery is both imagined and from my immediate environment, current events, the landscape, and from searching within the work itself — new avenues that present themselves during the process of painting and drawing. The picture plane is dense, active and filled with action, creating a deep history of paint, mood, and surface.

The imagery in my work often subverts itself; clouds don’t act the way clouds do, stones aren’t stone-like, and objects and forms dissipate and lose their perceived functions. I find painting and drawing to be the most versatile and immediate modes for me to traverse these contradictory fields of visual experiences. I seek to make “slow read” paintings, for the viewer to not only become intertwined in the layers and veils of compressed and vast spaces, but for forms and narrative to emerge slowly and gradually with time and through the act of looking.

Drawing is essential to my painting process. I paint, step away, create multiple drawings of the possibilities I see in the painting, paint from the drawing, paint from objects around me, from memory, landscape, draw again, and so on. It is a constant back-and-forth as multiple paintings and drawings develop and evolve alongside each other.

Susan Li O’Connor was born in Taipei, Taiwan. For the past 25 years, she has been navigating themes surrounding identity, consumerism, and consumption within American culture through the accumulation of everyday objects and the transformation of them into drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations. As a first generation immigrant and naturalized citizen, she attempts to create direct and indirect connections with her themes to her own identity. Her most recent works investigate how place and space connect to her main themes of identity, consumerism, and consumption. Working primarily in mixed media (collage, acrylic, oil pastels) for her latest series serves as a way for her to untangle the daily barrage of news that fill our airways.

O’Connor holds a BFA degree from the Columbus College of Art and Design and an MFA degree from the Ohio State University. She is a recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Council 2013 Dresden, Germany Artist in Residency program, Highlights Foundation In-Person Artist Workshop and Retreat program, Cleveland Institute of Art Summer Teacher Residency program, and has served in various juror roles for the Ohio Arts Council. She recently completed a solo artist residency at the Kolaj Institute, in New Orleans, LA. Her work has been exhibited nationally in Ohio, Colorado, California, North Carolina, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania. O’Connor is an artist and educator based in Columbus, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and son.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Brain Dump and Other Meandering Thoughts- New Works
My studio practice is based on themes surrounding identity, consumerism, and consumption within our culture through the accumulation of everyday objects, whether it be a physical manifestation of a place or an imagined one. While I have been navigating these themes for the past 25 years, often with direct and indirect connections to my own identity and voice to the world at large, in the last 5 to 8 years, I have started to feel a different sense of urgency, a feeling not too dissimilar to the ground shifting from under one’s feet.

While the big picture problems of the world continue to manifest in new ways for a new generation (global warming, sustainability, women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, wealth gap, ageism, racism- the list goes on and on), in our present-day existence, every piece of news is breaking news. As such, with each news cycle, another bit of breaking news pops up only to drown out the last. As a full time, high school art teacher, I struggle with how to create a safe space in my classroom for all, with the hope that I am helping to mentor and guide our next generation of artists to finding their voices, while maintaining a studio practice and continuing to find my own voice. While personal studio creation time might happen here and there during the school year, the only time to truly and fully commit to the creative process comes during the summer months. This new body of work, created during the summer of 2025 after a small hiatus, can be best described as my attempt at finding an outlet for this seemingly never-ending news cycle reservoir of material. The change in leadership in our country over the last eight years has made me even more aware of this, that the speed in which one could shift from one extreme to another can be drastic, and can have shattering effects on our equilibrium.

The first piece I created to address all the news cycles and its ever shifting landscape is the largest in the series, and serves as a way for me to untangle the daily barrage of news filling our airways. Titled Brain Dump, the piece consists of three wood panels, each measuring 28” wide by 41 ½” tall. Placed side by side, the triptych creates a visual cacophony that can be viewed either left to right or right to left. Throughout the entire composition, there are varying colors of off white-yellow-ochre-tan stripes that weave in and out of this imagined landscape. Viewed from one perspective, it can be seen as a pathway, meandering in and out of sight, connecting one area of a community to another. Viewed through another lens, these stripes become fences, intended to either keep in or keep out something or someone. When viewing the piece as a whole, I intentionally wanted to create shifting view points; the viewer should feel like they are seeing a topography where they are all at once in the fore-, middle-, and background in addition to seeing views from above, at their own eye level, and from below. It is a gentle nod to the worlds of the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland all at once; more specifically, the world that I’ve created could be seen as either a wonderful dreamscape or a horrifying nightmare.

The big picture stuff is overwhelming to say the least. As an artist, I am interested in a sense of place and space, and the connections linking my themes of identity, consumerism, and consumption to a physically imagined world. One aspect that comes out in this new series in which each of these themes play a role explores the link between who is affected by the popping of the real estate bubble to how we are defined by what we purchase on a daily basis. The pieces titled Beachside Paradise, Midcentury Modern Storefront, Oasis, Skyscraping, and The Bank of Nowhere all play on this concept. Are homes purchased out of necessity or is property a luxury status symbol? Is the home we live in merely providing shelter, or a statement of status and wealth, or a combination of both? What happens when that bubble is burst and we find we can no longer define ourselves in the way we were used to?

In many of the pieces, colorful, straight lines zigzagging over the surface of each composition are meant to elicit the idea of a structure obstructing the full view of the scene, oftentimes an architectural structure or two. The seemingly random crisscrossing of the lines suggests scaffolding at times, inviting the idea that something is being renovated, constructed, or reconstructed. In other pieces, the lines tend towards chaos, a falling or breaking down of order and sense of control. All are merely a mirage, and give a false sense of structure where none truly exist.

In the 19th century our relationship with time underwent a profound shift. Standardized time was brought on by the railroad companies and industry. It became rooted to specific sites and borders, regions pressured into compliance. Local times were effectively erased. The movement of the sun, night skies, and environmental shifts disregarded.

The experience of time is central to my work. In particular, the space that forms between what might be referred to as natural, unmeasured time and our attempts to measure, shape, and mold it to our advantage, often in the interest of business and efficiency as the 19th century railroads did. As time is not readily tangible as a material I look to the places it appears such as geological formations, the environment, pollutants, historical events, and ephemeral materials. These traces and artifacts bearing the imprint of time become the basis of imagery within my work. Through an expanded drawing practice I explore these instances and the dissonance within our experience.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Nicholas Warndorf is an artist and educator based in Columbus, OH. His work explores the experience of time, environment, and abstraction through an expanded drawing practice that incorporates aspects of printmaking, photography, painting, and installation. He has exhibited nationally and internationally with organizations such as Collar Works (Troy, NY), ROYGBIV Gallery (Columbus, OH), Maebashi Art Practice (Japan), Cambridge Stem Cell Institute (Cambridge, U.K.), and Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH). He currently works as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Kenyon College.