HEATHER STEVENS
Artist Statement & Bio
"We have no control. This dynamic dance between the human desire to control and the reality of the power of the natural world and it's processes is not only reflected in my choices of mediums but the visual deconstruction in my work. My work is an exploration of this dance and this journey within my own being and the tension that it creates."
Born of a scientist turned artist mother and a microbiologist father, Denver based artist Heather Stevens has gravitated towards traditional mediums that reflect an inward process that mimics the chaotic journey of life itself. Heather's work utilizes this marriage of a controlled application of mediums that can be rendered in a very precise manner and those that lend towards a certain wildness in nature. Graphite, pen and ink and then watercolor perfectly reflect her own duality and journey. Throughout her artistic career, Heather's work has been a series of subtle metaphors exploring her own inward emotional landscape through images of a fantastical human and natural world. These themes evolved to become a dreamscape of textures and shapes, the process becoming an inherent voice to her subconscious.
VALA THE ARTIST
Artist Statement
Vala the Artist is an up and coming self-trained Iranian artist from Colorado. Vala’s art is mostly influenced by her lifelong struggle with Major Depressive Disorder and the high and low emotional extremes that come tied to it. Because of this, she also took a 10 year hiatus from making art and began to create consistently again in 2022. She aims to express the deep and profound emotions she experiences through typically colorful, psychedelic, yet gloomy pathological portraits and other subject matter.
Her portraits come from a desire to be felt. For others to feel or experience something emotional themselves as she explores the deeper and moody aspects of her perspective. The desire to have someone see the world from her view and possibly understand a bit of her screwiness. Her art she has been told is wildly odd, bizarre, and for some a feeling that something is out of kilter. Her favorite question about her art so far has been “What in the world possessed you to make… that?”
