David Agee has always explored the secret inner structures of things, opening up computers or other machinery when he was younger to expose their insides or re-designing them to his unique vision. His provocative, cutting-edge photographs take that curiosity into the realm of art-making. His works are extreme close-ups of the objects of his obsessions, and his use of a macro lens allows him to blur the visual distinctions behind the shapes of mass-produced products and the organic. He gets up close to his subjects and in doing so, reveals universal shapes and the universal way all things decay--they bubble, they drip, they glow and bend light on their journey of transformation and mutation.

Thematically, David's focus is the ecstasy of self-destruction and emotional extremes. In creating these stunning visual records, we are shown that destruction and creation resemble each other when frozen in process by the camera lens. David Agee's work forces us to question the surface matter of all we take for granted.

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.

Montserrat Benito Segura's political concerns achieve powerful and poetic expression in her visually lush photographs of real-world objects which she transforms into powerful commentaries. Her work plunges us into color-rich, often surreal scenarios involving such innocuous items as dinner plates, world maps, marbles, books, and shoes and converts them into potent social critiques on the world and its perpetuation of injustice, suffering and war. When she shows us an actual handgun, the deep brown of the weapon on a pale background is a stark testimonial. The human foot also carries an especially strong presence in Montserrat Benito's work: a footprint or an empty shoe serves as remembrance of an absent one, children forgotten by society or those of lost identities and displaced homes.

Whether the loss conveyed in her work is personal or political is left unsaid. That is where Montserrat Benito's art touches us, where we are unable to (and need not) make such distinctions, and we feel the pain of the world's political woes as deeply as our own.

Dafna Grossman's photography is at once melancholic and romantic, exploring themes of solitude and detachment in fantasy settings through a hyper real lens . Staging her images as one woman productions by carefully staking out locations, subjects, costume, etc, Grossman creates intimate portraits of beguiling characters suspended in allegorical explorations of her favorite themes: "I mostly deal with the conflict between absolute power verses absolute solitude—and their consequences. The characters in my work project feelings of great strength and yet great despair ." Her subjects arrest the camera—and the viewer—with their gaze, often strikingly youthful yet knowing. As Eitan Shuker observed, the stare of Grossman's subjects hints at an "optimistic possibility of acceptance and a [potentially] rectifiable way of life, which might lead the figures from a world of fantasy to the real world ."

Dafna Grossman was born in Israel and currently resides in Berlin, Germany. She has studied Fine Art at Avni Institute in Tel Aviv and Photography at Musrara in Jerusalem. Her works have been exhibited in galleries around Israel, as well as in New York .

Malka Inbal's inspiration is her concern with real-life issues such as aging, intimacy and parenthood; she uses these themes as raw material to create her distinctive photographs. Her work takes a revolutionary look at the possibilities of contemporary photography as well as our assumptions towards the medium. Objects disintegrate, shimmer and reappear; the saturated colors embrace and play with light, as if in a dream state. There is a tension in these images - our eye catches sight of something within the rolling shapes that we might identify, and indeed the pictures rely on our personal involvement and interpretation for their consummation.

Malka's photographs not only force us to question our bias towards photography as a purely realistic documentation, they also invite us to question the meaning of reality itself. To Malka Inbal, as is evident in her stunning works, reality goes beyond the material visual surface, including all that we can imagine and dare to experience.

Massimiliano Lattanzi possesses an intellectual and spiritual approach to making art, the foundation of which is an innocent wonder at the vast, inescapable solitude of the night skies. His photographs reconnect us to the natural world with a style that is sharp, pensive, and inspiring. As an artist his visionary photography is the means through which he connects with personal meditation and, in turn, the world at large. His work takes two distinct paths. Natural forms, vivid hues, and earthy textures are one, while the other delights in fragile, ethereal images that are reduced to stark structures and contrasts. Lattanzi pours himself into each work but his artistic intent is to inspire a unique, metaphysical experience within each witness. “This is actually my vision and my hope at once: being able to disappear and let the silence speak to everyone,” he states.

Clecio Lira uses contemporary digital technology to create traditionally beautiful images, as in his enchanting Copos de Leite, or Calla Lilies. He digitally sculpts his original black and white photographs of flowers by adding luminous colors, backgrounds, shadows and the suggestion of motion. By enhancing his images, he removes these blooms from their natural environment, and invites us to focus on the basics of their curves and lines. In the process, the flowers achieve an added dimension -they are naturally living entities adopting abstract shapes - and we are led to observe the grace of nature's forms in a bold, refreshing and innovative way.
 
Clecio Lira was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and has been influenced by the colors and revelry of the Carnival. He was also a modern dancer for fifteen years, which gives him insight into movement and the aesthetic use of space. His art certainly uses cutting-edge technology, but by focusing on such themes as the loveliness and refinement of natural forms, he is at heart an artist in the most classic sense of the word.

Mary Mansey’s beautifully abstract photographs examine the interplay of light and color as they reflect against the rippling surface of water.  These reflections poetically mirror the artist’s own emotions experienced at the time at which each photograph was captured.  Mansey’s photographs portray the tenuous stillness of water, a delicate peace easily disturbed and altered, underscoring the fragility of nature as a whole. Mansey’s images of a natural landscape element possess an otherworldly quality, echoing the artist’s desire to portray the “double mirror” aspect of the water.  Her photographs encourage the imagination to flow, envisioning for a quiet moment another world just beneath the surface.

Mary Mansey’s fascination with color, light, and water began as a child, when she was profoundly struck by the beauty of the Mediterranean Sea.  Today, the award-winning photographer lives and works in France and has exhibited her work in Italy, Germany, New York, and Los Angeles.

Photographer Angelina McCormick captures the fleeting beauty of the world around her through the lens of the camera. Transfering these images from reality to film, she negotiates her inner emotions, conflicts, and thoughts. Although her photographs always portray external subjects, they originate within her spirit, existing as concrete representations of her interior thoughts.  Working from the concept that art is dependant on contradictions: light and dark, hard and soft, still and moving, McCormick's photographs possess a sophisticated sense of balance, illustrated in her masterful use of negative space.  Each subject, be it a human figure or a single flower, gracefully intertwines with empty spatial fields, creating visually stunning and graphic shapes imbued with an almost spiritual organic quality.

With their powerfully evocative images, Beth Parin's photographs immerse the viewer into a realm of enigmatic tableaus that straddle the line between the fantastical and the eerily familiar. Tapping into subconscious anxieties and fantasies, Beth offers archetypal scenarios about home, childhood, gender and sexual issues and isolation. Incorporating a collage technique into her work, she pieces together incongruent images to create a mood of fragmentation, as well as the suggestion of disparate stories colliding and conjoining to generate unique narratives.

Nature is a major presence in Beth's photos, and she often juxtaposes indoor domestic scenes with untamed nature as a background. But this is nature perceived from an ironic distance, a presence which her subjects are oblivious to or cut off from. The individuals in her photographs are searching hungrily for meaning and appear unaccustomed to the landscapes in which she's placed them. The startling subject matter of her photographs, coupled with the provocative issues that her work addresses, make Beth Parin's photography a unique source of enduring, cutting-edge art.

Sydney-based artist Sylvia Schwenk fuses photography with performance art in her complex and socially conscious works.  Gathering large groups of participants, Schwenk organizes conceptual performance pieces within urban settings. Each performance, normally set in an international city, is intended to highlight a particular contemporary social issue.  Just as her chosen locations are centers for public interaction, Schwenk’s pieces intend to engage the general public, bringing the realm of fine art to the masses, and thus encouraging meaningful civic discourse.  Schwenk documents each performance with photographs and the resulting images serve not only as visual records, but instead become stunning graphic images with an almost surreal clarity.

Born in Germany, Sylvia Schwenk has spent the majority of her life in Australia.  The acclaimed artist is the recipient of the prestigious University of Sydney Post-Graduate award and has exhibited her work internationally; with shows in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United States, and Vietnam.

Honing in on details of intense color and geometric form, Bulgarian photographer and art therapist Radostina Valchanova isolates practically abstract compositions in everyday scenes. Working in color and black-and-white, she highlights geometrically pure shapes and juxtaposes contrasting textures and forms. Where smooth surfaces overlap with roughly hewn objects and sequential patterns give way to blinding monochrome, Valchanova matter of fact-ly presents aesthetic discontinuities with terrific visual style and humor.

Valchanova captures the playful poetics of happenstance when polished neon blues roll across grooved wooden surfaces or shimmering reflections float over deep greens. Her accidental incongruities testify to the variety of wonderful visual re-combinations to be witnessed by such observant eyes. She balances this crisp focus on texture and tone with a delicate sense of composition that guides viewers’ eyes through the arrangement of colors and strong diagonals. Valchanova’s photographs effectively take stock of the rich visual vocabulary of minor details, sparking viewers to seek out quietly creative arrangements in the forgotten moments of everyday life.

As a child Shelley Vouga would spend her free afternoons admiring the paintings and sculptures housed in the museums of her native Switzerland, finding herself drawn more to the pure abstractions of shape and color than more literal representationalist works.  Later she found a similar appeal in the designs she encountered working in a jeweler's shop.  It is no surprise, then, that Shelley felt herself blooming in her own artistic life when she was exposed to the possibilities inherent in digital art.  Here she combines the geometric angles of gemology with iterations accessible by computer to create realms within which the viewer is immersed in Shelley's expressionistic representation of her inner world, which often takes shape as expanses of sheet metal or filigree with washes of dramatic, solid color floating in the blackness of the void.  

"My screen is my painting," she states, "where I weave my feelings, my enjoyments, and my fears."  Shelley Vouga's imagery of self allows us to come into contact with one woman's idealistic reality.

Leslie Weil's photographic work varies among a wide range of styles, including the abstract, erotica, as well as staged tableaus and portraiture. Revealing an individual within her natural environment, however, remains a consistent concern in her work. Leslie has said that her work has evolved from a study of light and texture to an intense focus on the female. These are women in an ambiguous relationship with power -sometimes it is theirs to display before the viewer, at others Leslie's personas have lost or relinquished power and control either to a man or to the throes of ecstasy. It is in the latter that Leslie's images venture into the experimental and abstract, suggesting this could be the only form to inhabit such a heightened state.

The human body is Leslie Weil's primary concern, but it is her portrayal of the human form as a vibrant life- force in a constantly changing relationship to the world which makes her work beautiful as well as challenging. Leslie divides her time between her residence in Wisconsin, USA, and traveling abroad.

People often say of talented representationalist painters that their works are photorealistic.  An inverse of that complement can be deservedly paid to Byra Zimmerman:  her photographs seem like paintings.  This has nothing to do with digital effects or filters—none of which she employs; rather, it all has to do with her framing choices, the natural light she captures and the way it illumines her subjects.  Zimmerman has mastered the ability to bring texture—wood grain, whorls of glass, the lay and fall of fabric—out of the picture, so much so that her images seem possessed of an impossible stillness, seemingly too steady and self-revealing to be "merely" pictures.  Her photos seem like paintings because they seem to show us something of the object that we would not see were the object itself literally in front of our eyes.

Byra Zimmerman's love of classic Dutch painters helped shape her approach to photographic imagery.  She is based in Virginia, where she has been an award-winner at the Alexandria Festival of the Arts.