Digital photography, no longer a fringe medium of fine art, has found a purveyor who understands its full expressive potential. Marisa Atha is photography’s cosmopolitan troubadour, capturing the people and places that she experiences along her pathway. Paris, San Francisco, and New York are among the vibrant cities that have become backdrops for Atha’s fascinating tableaus. Each image is manipulated to achieve a range of effects, capturing the spirit of a locale with her distinctive flair for color and composition. Her use of color is especially interesting, employing expressive Fauvist sensibilities or using a limited palette to achieve subtle dramatic qualities within the composition.

The artistic journey begins with sharing her experience and in turn, her worldview. "I am an artist because I want to use myself to reflect my world, my knowledge, my perspective, and my life. I am an artist not only because I want to do all of this, but because I want to share all of this with you." Atha lives and works in Sacramento, California.

Observation propels Aviva Baharav’s rhythmic photographs. Through her lens, ordinary forms and objects become seas of moving shapes, giving daily life a dimension of mystery and changing the way we perceive our surroundings. Baharav also probes reality’s subjectivity. Context changes our perception and seemingly insignificant objects become alluring when Baharav imbues their nuances with a cadenced beauty. Born in Romania, Aviva Baharav was raised in Israel.  She studied at the Kalisher School of Painting in Tel Aviv and has exhibited internationally.

Owing her background to both African and French heritage, Djiboutian-born Magda Dini now lives and works in Paris.

Israeli artist Rei Dishon inspects the world through the frame of his ever-present camera lens. He uses photography to share his life, vision, and perspective with his viewer by capturing rather than creating or manipulating visual images. He comments: "the light is a great friend of mine, the moment a continuous chase, the frame a constant reminder of my boundaries." The result is a portfolio of photographs which bear the integrity of keen observation, nuanced lighting, and soulful resonance.

A musician from a musical family, Savannah, Georgia-based Maggie Evans portrays the unsettled emptiness of quiet bars in charcoal and pastel works on paper. Simultaneously evocative and expressive, her smoky, gridded interiors recall the musky static of loud and busy bars, and the thick rhythmic pulse of live music. A mist of grey and ochre-tinged fumes haunts each work, creating dreamy impressions of a bustling scene half-remembered, long gone in Evans's deserted barroom scenery of throbbing lines and murky lighting.

Josep Francés Anaya’s sleek oil paintings are not only about architecture; they are architectural in both composition and aura. Francés paints cityscapes, emphasizing the exhilarating structural diversity of buildings and urban environments. His nuanced, adept renderings give ample attention to value, perspective, and spatial depth. He reveals the inner workings of architectural spaces in order to accentuate the unified identities of cities as wholes. Occasionally, he leaves skeletal outlines of buildings visible, allowing viewers a glimpse of geometric blueprints. At the edges of Francés paintings, the carefully orchestrated confluence of towers, homes, and businesses deconstructs into abstracted geometric and linear shapes, gesturing toward the infrastructure of urban architecture. Ultimately, Francés paintings explore two contrasting but interdependent themes: the patterned, planned nature of environments and the magical harmony that carefully calculated cities evoke.

Josep Francés Anaya studied art at Galatea Academy and Interior Architecture at the Applied Art School in Valencia. He has exhibited internationally and has won numerous awards for his work. He lives and works in Alzira in Valencia, Spain.

KX2’s collection showcases two artists and two disciplines perfectly in sync. Combining traditional metalwork with painting techniques, the duo crafts stunning multi-paneled installations that evoke a sense of harmony and profound order. Painstakingly perfect patterns and shapes, each with its own unique texture, are constructed to create pure genius.

The KX2 duo is comprised of sisters Ruth Avra and Dana Lynn Kleinman. They will represent the U.S. at the Beijing Biennale 2008 in conjunction with the Summer Olympics.

Adrienne Lesperance’s art explores the theme of the personal quest to find acceptance.  Her intricately detailed works deal with such issues as religion, sexuality, identity, and good versus evil.  Lesperance’s art has a surrealist bent.  She skews literal reality to impart a higher meaning on her subject matter.  Some of her pieces are a study of contrasts in black and white, done in Sumi ink; while others explore color with acrylic paint, crayon, and ink. 

The powerfully candid images of The Love Movement, a Los Angeles based collaborative, contest warfare, poverty and oppression. The group's acrylic and ink paintings are deftly rendered in a style that recalls Leon Golub's large scale political works of the 1980s. The straightforward figures in the paintings, often severed from their environments, invoke an impassioned awareness of injustice, stressing an international need for change and compassion. Proceeds from The Love Movement's work go to support the Peace Corps and the International Humanity Foundation.

The emotionally charged works of Estonian painter Maarit Murka are a subterranean look into one artist’s conception of the world. Completed in oil on canvas with a stark palette, Murka peers into the void and comes forth with resonating perspectives illustrated by masked protagonists, symbols of political obstruction and the individual’s awareness of mortality. The paintings are beautifully executed, predominantly in grayscale with areas of muted color that convey a specific meaning, or focus the viewer’s attention to a particular idea. The depravation of color only heightens one’s awareness in a harsh world and the need to explore the truth behind appearances in order to grasp any semblance of reality. Gradations of light and dark add to the dramatic feel of her work and the subjects are so intense that it is hard to look away.

Murka’s paintings have been featured in several solo exhibitions, including an exceptional show in Paris that highlighted the artist’s post-Soviet roots.  She works out of several studios in Iceland, Germany and France.

The work of Caterina Pacialeo is a fascinating blend of cerebral questioning, social observation, and defined parameters-both physical and emotional. Her photographic prints demand reflection on the mental conditioning of reality, dreams, interactions and conformity.  With the omnipresent awareness that there is always someone watching, she strives to inspire through representational conflicts between life and innate human needs. With a Masters of Art in Photomedia, Caterina Pacialeo currently teaches photography in her native country of Sydney, Australia.

Suhee Wooh fills space in an amazing way; the resulting imagery reflects universal concepts in an abstract, yet obvious manner.  In placement of form, determination of shape size, and selections of line and color positioning, Suhee Wooh's oil paintings achieve a dynamic underlying conversation between structure and improvisation. Creative tension finds solutions, and unpredictable possibilities allow her works to decide when they have achieved life. 

Korean-born, but currently based in New York, Suhee Wooh holds two MFA degrees and exhibits internationally.

Juxtaposition speaks loudly in the work of Ulrika Andersson.  Her silkscreened collages recontextualize disparate images, prompting us to question imagistic intentions of old.  “I often like to combine a beautiful, silent, and calm environment with something that disturbs/subverts the beautiful picture,” she says.  Compositionally, her seamless intermixing of grainy mid-20th-century pictures and text with vibrant pop-art shadings births a new world from the womb of the past.

Andersson’s work has been featured in a variety of group and solo exhibitions throughout her native Sweden and Europe.

Anna Druzcz focuses on "capturing nature as reconstructed by the human hand, where the line between the ‘natural’ and artificial is hard to distinguish or ceases to matter." She achieves this by combining her sure eye for compelling landscapes shot at unique angles with prowess at digitally processing and juxtaposing her imagery so that it is transformed enough to appear otherworldly, yet seamless and subtle enough to suggest a common reality. These are snapshots of an alien realm that is in fact all around us.