Mairin Amdal (b.1998) is a ceramic artist currently living and working in Seattle, Washington. Primarily focused on sculpture, Amdal creates what she would like to see and hold. Her sculptures are endearingly reminiscent of things you see in real life but never realistic. She integrates memories and sensations into solid objects, making them relics of the time spent. Amdal’s usual object of choice is the donkey; a creature who is sentimental and craves emotional stability - not just a stubborn ass.

Moving from shed to floor to garage, Amdal finds clarity in using her hands and doesn’t mind tedious work. In fact she needs it, and sometimes that gets in the way. In Reins, Amdal attempts to create identically mirrored beings, knowing she never could organically. The beauty is in the time, the attempt, the diversions from what she thought it should be before she even started. These works were an exercise in good faith, repetition, failed replication, and intention; the things you do for love.

Milan Bobinac is a first-generation college student born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. Throughout her academic career, she has explored her past and present experiences navigating life in Maryvale. Substance abuse, coupled with a low-income standing and lack of resources, shaped her as a person, witnessing both the plight and subsequent resilience of her community. Her work aims to highlight the juxtaposition of her environment, where beauty, pride, and communion exist amongst violence, crime, and oppression. Translating these shared cultural experiences that come with growing Southwest is crucial in perpetuating a forward-thinking outlook Southwest, instilling a different perspective and an ability to see through the shambles and find strength, inspiration, and hope.

“Having navigated a tumultuous upbringing surrounded by crime, substance abuse, and financial instability, I became acutely aware of the circumstances that perpetuated underlying tensions and strained connections within my family. I grappled with the inherent duality of our relationships, finding love, compassion, and beauty amidst the chaos of our environment, both outside and within our home, while often carrying the burden of my family’s instability. Much of my immediate family does not exist in the larger scope of our history as they lived on the fringes of society, invested in countercultures and lifestyles deemed unfit for the traditional familial dynamic.

I hope to showcase with these works our reality through vulnerability, relieving tensions with empathy. I now cherish the present juxtaposition between nurture and neglect, and good and bad. I aim to document the complexity of these relationships by obtaining imagery of cousins, siblings, aunts, and uncles through various means. This includes disguising myself to befriend those within their circles and infiltrating the friend groups that have enabled their destructive actions for decades.

While using deception rooted in respect and self-preservation, I maintain a genuine intent to retrace the steps of those I love and uphold their memory. For the past two years, I have carefully gathered imagery that reflects our shared interactions, emotions, and personalities. Through this research, I discovered resolutions imbued with humility and forgiveness, as the tensions between us eased when we acknowledged our shared humanity. My intention for this installation is to transcend regional boundaries and serve as an enigmatic figure within the ongoing flow of life—one that has been observed before yet often goes unnoticed.

Sarah Deppe earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Northern Iowa. Sarah has shown in many juried shows throughout the nation including Chicago, IL, Des Moines, IA, Chattanooga, TN, and Laramie, WY. She also has permanent installations at Texas A&M University and Waterloo, IA to name a few. She is currently creating in Seattle, WA.

Deppe’s work investigates the relationship between nature, the built environment, and the connections between these two realms. Deppe is drawn to structures for their functionality and purpose—they are built to endure, to support, and to remain. However, she enjoys exploring how these forms can be altered, destabilized, or reimagined. Deppe questions this stability, shifting these forms from their expected purpose. Each structure has its own distinct identity, expressed through its posture, presence, and interactions with others. These relationships between forms communicate a dynamic exchange, revealing both tension and harmony. Deppe’s creative process is rooted in intuition, spontaneity, and risk. I embrace the unknown, allowing chance and unpredictability to guide the development of each piece, creating room for discovery and surprise along the way.

Ronan Houston B.1999 is not an artist living and working in Seattle Washington. He loves making things with his friends and laughing and having fun. His work is primarily focused on the temporal nature of longing and the possibility/impossibility of human connections in a transient world. Instead of seeking answers he is interested in asking questions. His work is a love letter to memories and the longing that reminds us we're alive. While working on this project the artist attempts to use images and audio that reflect the passing of time in effect creating a dream or memory and to share an experience that is often kept secret.

“I want to pull it from the bones of my thighs

All to you

But it is held in the privacy of my breath suspended in 4am air

With only the desire to dig my bare feet down

Under the sky that offers a lifetime in one day”

Kaya Nieves is a multimedia artist whose work explores human connection, embodiment, play, and the Self. Working within and inspired by the realm of the imagined, they’re interested in the melding of people and their inhabited surroundings. In their photographs, they seek to convey this relationship as a bridge between waking life and dream; a reminder that our tangible reality reverberates within the metaphysical.

"When I Look To You I Remember My Childhood Hands" is a meditation on the mutable nature of intimate connection—the manner in which bonds transform and reassemble over time. At its heart, this work reflects the ongoing process of enmeshment and unraveling within these ties—the necessary refiguring that allows this tenderness to persist in new forms. Love, not as a static force but rather a continuous dance, where egos soften and inner worlds become widened. These pieces ruminate on the delicate balance of attachment, surrender, and release—the methodology of our inherent adaptation and reimagining within relation. Here, we sit with the sensory languages formed and intuitive worlds constructed—those that tether us in union, even as perceptions shift. When approached with openness to fluidity and play, endings can become rewoven into beginnings. Elementally we can hold love as: Mutual enduring commitment that transforms us as it persists.

Samuel Platten, alternatively known as c75525, is a multidisciplinary visual + sound collage artist from Phoenix, Arizona.

Platten’s work for “Reins” entitled “Fingertrap” (2025) is a triptych that follows the inevitable transmutation of identity in the hands of love. Embracing a prescribed fire, you squirm and writhe through. Upending vestiges of habits, relationships, and shade in favor of a beating sun. Layers damaged, peeled and frayed to foster new flesh.

To be changed is to first be wounded and then to be loved.

Linnea Ross is a visual artist and graphic novelist. Her style is dark and contrastive, featuring stylized chiaroscuro and value technical precision.

This pair of pieces are similar in form but disparate in function. In First time, volatility is intoxication; the illusion of being protected from the blast, the near-manic rush of trespassing together on a summer night, bulb-flashes burnt onto retinas. In Last time, an overexposed depiction of delicateness; something born to die, balanced in the hand that can nurture or destroy. This is a testament to vulnerability and abandon in love.

rocki swiderski (b. 1994, California) is an artist based in Tucson, Arizona. Their practice spans across discipline, which is loosened by attention deficit and is grounded by desert dog walks. Their work has been exhibited most recently at Stellarhighway (Brooklyn, NY) and Rivalry Projects (Buffalo, NY).

a vessel which is cracked and precariously, decoratively formed back together, a vessel which is sturdy but tiny, a vessel which is big and lidded but porous and temporary, a vessel with no bottom composed of tiny shards held together by industrial adhesive. for a container to contain it must have a boundary, it is the edges which allow a vessel to have an inside. sometimes the container itself doesn’t have structural integrity, sometimes the size is insufficient to take on the big stuff, sometimes it’ll hold but not for long or not forever. the creation of a container (for water, time, love, willingness) can feel restrictive, parameters can be harsh. containers are a tool for holding, assessing capacity, offering within limits. a vessel in the desert– a place where the plants and animals teach us infinitely about protection and boundaries, where water is scarce and precious and comes in droves then is quick to disappear, where walls are a symbol of violence yet containment is a protocol for survival. one vessel for each season, an examination of abundance, capacity, dryness, cachement, limits.

rockiswiderski.com

precious-cargo.net

Lillie Walsh is a multimedia research artist whose work utilizes found materials to respatialize the archive. Living within the realms of sculpture, collage, assemblage, and bookmaking, she is interested in the ways these different mediums expose the throughlines of history keeping. Using her work as both a mode of knowledge production towards alternative archival practices and as a container for renegotiating embodied encounters with memory; the work's intention becomes one of generating experiences and dialogues which interrogate dominant modes of historic preservation and dream into futures of more laterally collaborative strategies.

When material environments collide, personhood is quick to become blurred. The act of translating repeatedly held objects within your mundanity becomes at once a self definition and a devotional offering. Interested in the kinds of weaving required to create shared vernacular, Maybe A | Lucky Accident makes manifest the idea of ‘language objects’. Constructed through devised textile and found objects, the process of this piece thinks through the material world providing the underpinnings of communication within intimacy. The work composes an environmental conversation of tension and reciprocity while experimenting with points of contact. Do we ask enough of our crossover? Plucking through the detritus of the delicate maneuvers a relational melding requires, a boat is found to be what we are building in the end.

Noelle Whitaker (b.1998) is a Found Object Artist from Phoenix, Arizona now living and working in Seattle, Washington. Both an artist and a curator, Whitaker upholds a DIY ethos in venue and commitment to outsider artists. Whitaker maintains a constructivist approach to materials in her creative practice, rendering her uninterested in transforming an object from its original form. Instead, Whitaker prefers to employ objects and made images as conceptual tools, building relationships between objects, images, and text. This mixed media approach nurtures a "widely seen but rarely understood" exploration of material. Digital cues, boldface text, made images, found matter, and mirrors gain new meaning in Whitaker's world. Through printmaking and sculpture techniques, heartbreak, loss, value, flex and internet culture, decay, and outsider mentality are all explored through the meticulous combination of image and matrix. This exploration results in brute works that speak to their generation's experience in a world rapidly shifting. Whitaker debuted in 2024, holding two solo exhibitions, "Pile Up" at Georgetown Steamplant and "Seen" at Slip Gallery, Belltown. "Reins" is Whitaker's most recent undertaking, a cross-cultural exchange in the form of a 12-person group show.

The works in "Reins" reflects on manic obsession, romance as a space of worship, fear, sacrifice, and absultion through devotion. Whitaker employs the pelican as a symbol of self. Breaking skin to feed those she loves. For them, she would do it again and again.