Meet the PRISMA Collective

In honor of our show Heavy Metal Lover, here is a chance to get familiar with the artists. All are members of The PRISMA Collective which is a hand selected group of 30 international artists led by painter and curator, Kaspian Shore. Since the group formed in 2011, they have been regularly showing work at various galleries and exhibition spaces around the world. We are proud to welcome the artists of PRISMA at Modern Eden this April 2017.

 All artwork shown is representative of the artist's work in general. Different works are on display for the show.

Kaspian Shore

(Founder of PRISMA Collective and Curator of Heavy Metal Lover)

Kaspian Shore is a self-taught artist born in 1983. He has been painting and drawing in various mediums, such as gouache, ink, oil, acrylic washes, coloured pencil, watercolour, graphite, and charcoal powder. His work is concerned with themes of gender identity, androgyny, youth, and decay. His recurring characters of gentle, melancholy boys tell stories of longing and loss for a past that could have been but never was. In November 2011, Kaspian founded thePRISMA Collective, a large group of international artists that he has been curating a great number of shows for. His own work has been exhibited at galleries across the United States, the UK, and Australia.

 

Audrey Pongracz

Audrey was born in Detroit, Michigan in the summer of 1979 and was raised in the Mexicantown area of southwest Detroit. A self taught painter, Audrey is constantly working to hone and refine her craft. "I believe art should be attainable to everyone, visually or mentally.  This is something I strive for in my work.  Art should be a viewing experience.  I love when I can look at a painting and be entranced by it, in awe of its application or just the wonder of it."

 

Kelly McKernan

Kelly McKernan is a fine artist and illustrator currently based in Nashville, Tennessee. Kelly obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kennesaw State University, with a concentration in drawing and painting. At its core, Kelly’s work always revolves around two forces: A woman and a world. Whether in harmony or posed against one another, the two are always clearly delineated. Her subjects are often found staring into all that exists outside themselves—rights and wrongs, friends and foes, full and empty spaces—seeing them distilled into a single essence to contend with as she may. Kelly strives to create through exploration, leaving a trail which anyone might follow with the very same sense of discovery. She has been exhibiting her work with numerous galleries since 2009.

 

Kelsey J. Beckett

Kelsey Beckett is a Michigan native and an Illustration graduate of College for Creative Studies. She is a freelance illustrator and fine artist who has shown work in numerous galleries across the country. She Works mainly in acrylic and oil. Her work has been featured by Juxtapoz and Supersonic Art, as well as published in “Spectrum #20” and "Women of Wonder: Celebrating Women Creators of Fantastic Art."

 

Caitlin Hackett

Caitlin grew up on the northern coast of California, between the cold Pacific ocean and the redwood forests. She received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn NY, with a specialty in Drawing in 2009. Her work is primarily done in ballpoint pen, colored pencil, and watercolor. "Mirroring ancient myths of transformation in often grotesque ways, we find in contemporary times that animals are being transformed biologically due to interactions with human pollutants; there are frogs with triplicate legs and blind eyes, cows with shriveled sets of legs growing out of their backs, two faced piglets being born on factory farms and radioactive fish rotting from the inside in poisoned seas, the list goes on. I am interested in the power of these mutations both for their mythological allusions as well as their dire environmental implications. I hope to remind those who view my artwork that we too are animals, embedded in this fragile world even as we poison it."

 

N.C. Winters

N.C. Winters works as an artist constantly drawing, painting, or creating something daily. Winters creates art exploring the subconscious both as method for creation, and subject of his various works which often have a strong emphasis on the figure and identity in general. He works from his home studio in sunny San Diego, California.

Ling Ly

Ling Ly is a Los Angeles-based artist with a BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. Ling mostly focuses on oil painting and graphite drawing, with a focus on portraits and nature. Her painterly style blends elements of graphic realism to showcase her impeccable technical skills.

 

Kelly Vivanco

Kelly Vivanco was born and raised in front of a sketchpad and a box of colors in Southern California where she later received her BFA with honors from LCAD. Kelly enjoys setting whimsy to work in many mediums and pulls inspiration from the natural and imagined world, vintage photographs, children's literature and the oddness of her dreams. In 2004 Kelly opened a space in the Distinction building in Escondido, California, and currently maintains a working studio there. Her work is held in collections across the U.S. and abroad.

 

Sarah Joncas

Sarah Joncas was born in 1986 and grew up in both Hamilton and Niagara Falls, Ontario. Her interest in the visual arts developed at an early age, starting with the dedicated drawings of dinosaurs and lizards. Eventually the study and enjoyment of working from existing images stirred up the need in Sarah to create images of her own; ones that could reflect the world, yet also appease the personal feelings/ideas that she maintained. With this, her direction changed gradually from the world of animation, towards a path in fine art. Sarah graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design’s BFA program. She currently resides and works out of Toronto, Canada.

 

Alex Louisa

Alex Louisa is a Brisbane-based artist who worked as a graphic artist for eight years. She has been exhibiting within Australia since 2007, and internationally since 2012. Endlessly inspired by nature, she loves to pair highly detailed subjects next to unexpected backgrounds, such as splashy abstracts, experimental textures, crisp geometric patterns, or the sheer beauty of untouched woodgrain. Often experimenting with mixed media, Alex mainly works with oils, acrylic, PanPastel and charcoal, currently with a shift towards larger works. She focuses on elements of the natural world that grab her attention - discovering the intricacies of a leaf or flower, or trying to capture an animal's individual personality, especially those of the avian kind.

 

Bec Winnel

Bec Winnel enjoys creating beautiful and detailed portraits of imaginary women in imaginary worlds that celebrate the feminine spirit. Her 'girls' are often accompanied by elements of nature, fantasy and items from bygone eras. The colour palette is mostly soft, subdued pastels, and mediums include pencil, pastel, watercolour and acrylic. To further enhance the mystery, her girls are often fading into or out of the background,  as if they are nearly there, speaking to you from a distant place. Whilst she loves creating these girls, she also enjoying experimenting in all creative forms including abstract painting, exploring color, texture, pattern and various subject matters.

 

Henrietta Harris

Since graduating in 2006 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Auckland University of Technology, Henrietta has steadily built up a name for herself as a solid New Zealand artist. She has skillfully hand-drawn hands, faces, brains, glaciers and more which have appeared in shows all over New Zealand, Australia, London and New York, on t-shirts, on record covers and in fine print publications. Her paintings often involved portraiture with a departure into the surreal with faces skillfully obscured and misplaced by the clean sweep of a brushstroke. She primarily works with watercolor paint on paper.

 

Nom Kinnear King

Nom, originally from the Norfolk countryside, studied Fine Art at Norwich School of Art and Design, going on to be based in Melbourne, Brighton, London, and Varese, Italy. Nom now paints from her studio back in the flatlands of Norfolk in the fine city of Norwich. Gathering inspiration from found objects and her surroundings, she works in oils and pastels to create imaginary female portraits. The subjects are girls who roam from town to town in a patchwork old fashioned never-world, where rusty melodies trail their steps and their curious behavior is shadowed by sweet melancholy. She has been influenced, from a young age, by her father's love of the impressionists, magical realism in literature, film, and folklore from around the world. Nom has been filling her notebooks throughout the years with her solitary wanderers.

 

Nicole Gustafsson

Nicole Gustafsson is the creator behind NIMASPROUT. Nicole works as a full time illustrator, specializing in traditional media paintings featuring everything from woodland characters and environments, to pop culture based projects for Gallery 1988, Gallery Nucleus and more. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and pet kids. Nicole's artwork is available at select galleries around the country and online.

 

Christina Mrozik

Christina Mrozik has spent the majority of her life observing the natural world and the types of relationships that form within it. Having grown up on the Grand River in Michigan, she was inspired by it’s habitats at an early age. Blending the external world with her own understanding of the human condition has led to her distinct style, in which flora and fauna stand in, representing the simultaneous and often opposing matters of the human heart. She often draws with ink and marker on paper, adding bursts of color with watercolor and high pigmented acrylics. She enjoys working with arts education nonprofit groups, working collaboratively and reading other peoples favorite books. She is currently based in Portland, Oregon, though always midwestern at heart.

 

Lilly Piri

Lilly Piri was born on the east coast of Australia in 1985 and lived their her entire life until recently moving to Germany to be with her new husband and fellow artist Heiko Windisch this past fall ’07. Piri studied with the Arts Academy in Brisbane. Piri draws and paints with acrylics, oils and watercolor, but her favorite and most employed medium is color pencil. Her work has been published in DPI, Black + White, Empty, Frankie, Hotpress, Marmalade, Voiceworks, Harper’s Bazaar, Semi-Permanent books, Curvy books, Faest and Ruby Mag and her list of illustration clients include the Yes Men and Saatchi & Saatchi.

 

Helice Wen

Helice Wen was born in Shenzhen, China where her interest in art began at the age of 5 when she first started copying children’s book illustrations. After graduating from the Academy of Art University San Francisco in 2009, she began working as a children’s book illustrator. After leaving her illustration job a few years ago, Wen is now focused on creating gallery works. She has exhibited in New York, Florida, Melbourne, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She currently resides in San Francisco, working as a full time artist.

 

(other PRISMA collective members not featured in this show: Ana Bagayan • Tom Bagshaw • Lindsey Carr • Chrystal Chan • Hsiao-Ron Cheng • JAW Cooper • Daria Hlazatova • Jeremy Hush • Kit Lane • Edith Lebeau • Jen Mann • Soey Milk • Zach Montoya • Michael Shapcott • Allison Sommers • Vahge • Casey Weldon)