Chimeras

Biography
Alexander Rouse is an artist, designer, curator, and writer from South Carolina. His work was influenced from an early age by the natural world, religious iconography, and a deep curiosity for any art around him. After receiving a degree in graphic design, Alexander has pivoted to a more studio-focused practice, working on building stability as a fine artist and expanding his work to new dimensions. As a designer, he has received awards from the American Advertising Federation, and as an artist Alexander has exhibited in a number of galleries, received publication, and created client work across multiple applications.

Alexander bears a hereditary link to Southern culture and natural identity. His art is shaped by this history and the complex systems and personalities that come with it. In tandem with the agrarian lives of his ancestors, Alexander’s art takes a naturalistic focus, centering subjects of the natural world and objectifying those subjects in a narrative context. His work invites questions of selfhood, inheritance, and metanarrative, and cornerstone of his practice is a deep rooting in classical references, religious aesthetics, and semiotic materialism. His focus is water-based painting, with strong emphasis on illustration and draftsmanship. Additional mediums include cyanotype, assemblage, and pyrography. He takes special interest in combining familiar methodology with unusual materials—wood-burning into bone, cyanotype on wood, paintings as assemblage.

Biography
Griffin Cordell is a full time artist and gallery owner living in Greenville, SC. Griffin works out of his studio, which is located in the oldest, and most established arts collective in West Greenville, The Artbomb Company. His work is represented by 906 Art Gallery in Greenville, SC, and he exhibits both locally and nationally. 

He is an alum of the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities and earned his BFA in Fine Arts with a concentration in sculpture from Winthrop University. 

Artist Statement
The creative process has led me into researching many subjects, but dreams, our relationship to memory, and an investigation of the past have always been consistent in my work . I work in many mediums, but recently drawing and painting have been at the forefront of my practice. Living in the process of making art and letting go of any expectations that would restrict my creativity is important to me. Through following my creative intuitions, I can continue exploring and understanding the importance of life and sharing my experiences with people around me. My paintings are not defined by a story or a narrative because they cannot be understood as linear. Instead they exist somewhere more ambiguous like emotion.

THE ARCHIVAL MEMORY SERIES (2023- 2026) 

The Archival Memory Series is an investigation into digitally archived photographs.  These photographs have been stripped of their modern context and when it comes to asking who, what, when, where, and why questions about the photograph, the answer is almost always a mystery. Through painting I am able to uncover nuanced details that clue me into the photograph’s buried history. Through interpreting convoluted situations, unearthing past locations, and identifying forgotten people, my work is not only a resurrection of seemingly insignificant moments but a transformation of the moment itself. Immortalized by art, these moments are now re-contextualised by a greater meaning that exists in the past, present and future.

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THE KNIGHTHOOD SERIES (2026- PRESENT)

The Knighthood Series explore the brilliance of women in a society geared for men’s success. Historically suits of armor were not designed for women. Despite this, several female figures have donned a suit of armor made to a man’s measure. These female warriors achieved feats of great strength and courage without the advantage of consideration. Joan of Arc, who wore full plate armor as she led her forces during the Hundred Year’s War, is just one example of this. In this series, the knights don’t conquer outright with violence, but pursue great knowledge through the channels of nature. A strong light source represents the dawn of knowledge. These knights are understudies in a sense. They carry the burden of unfit armor, but persevere and conquer the expectations set upon them.

Biography
Based in Charlotte, NC, I'm an interdisciplinary artist working with analog and digital media. I bounce back and forth between paint, pencil, pen, ink, collage, scanning, as well as working in design programs like Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. I love combining the tactility of the physical with the precision of computer programs to create work that's imbued with some uniqueness and depth.

For personal & commision work, I’m interested in various types of subject matter from the human form and cosmos to networks, diagrams, and dreamscapes. I'm influenced by comics, science, religion, abstraction and all in all storytelling. I like imagery that is capable of being whimsical and funny, but still retains something at its core.

Biography
Tyson Gentry is a current MFA candidate at Clemson University. He received his undergraduate degree in K-12 Art Education at Anderson University in 2024. During his time at Anderson University, he was a South Carolina Teaching Fellow, and received the Anne Gray Bishop Award of Excellence in Art Education upon his graduation. He also received the Rookie Teacher of the Year Award at T.L. Hanna High School for the 2024-2025 school year. His work has been displayed in multiple galleries across his native state of South Carolina, and has been included in national and international art publications

gentry works in a variety of mediums including drawing, painting, scanography, video, sound, and collage. His work views how humans relate to and draw connections between physical, digital, and psychological landscapes.

Artist Statement
The lines between our physical, psychological, and digital landscapes perpetually disintegrate as our lives become ever more integrated with technology. Within this new hybrid realm that encompasses material and immaterial states, I explore the connections between the psyche, the body, and digital media.   

My drawing process relies on using traditional drawing materials to visually recreate digital manipulation of media. This method of working allows me to use the visual aesthetics of digital corruption as an analogy to document psychological experiences. Text rendered in a mix of readable script and pure pixelization creates narrative ambiguity, mimicking jpeg compression with graphite pencils in self portraits poses questions of identity and loss of self, and variations within the blending of charcoal powder creates forms where the line between pixel and skin is blurred. I find meaning in drawing as a tool of remembering and reflection. As I render text, the pixelization of letters reflects clarity of memory as well as privatization of vulnerable thoughts. Rendering portraits of my younger self provides me with a refreshed perspective of life at times where I find my memory lacking. I process the complex experience of online sexual predation I faced as an adolescent through a matured lens. The paper gives me a space to analyze the psychological states of both past and present selves through the meditative act of drawing. 

Through the medium of collage I reconstruct, weather, and glitch digital and print images to challenge the viewer to consider how the trove of media they ingest each day affects the body, mind, and environment. As I scan dozens of social media videos with a handheld scanner, the result is a jarring, glitchy, abstracted image filled with snippets of text and bodies that reflect the nauseating and hazy feeling one often encounters after hours of media intake. In scanning myself behind a scratched and chipped acrylic screen, I create distortions of the body that are collaged together to represent the fractured and monstrous sense of self that can result as a by-product of the disconnect between the digital and physical bodies we simultaneously inhabit. When using print images, I transfer found A.I. generated content onto a physical substrate such as paper or canvas. The transformation of overly glossy and smooth digital renders into worn, decayed, and unrecognizable paper abstractions reflects the highly disposable and cheap quality nature of A.I. generated content. Through large scale and repetition, this work aims to bring a visceral portrayal of how “digital trash” can amount to environmental damage in the physical realm. 

My practice within all mediums is centered in unconventionality. Drawing or painting pixels is an unusual and unnatural occurrence, as is using a scanner on screens and imperfect surfaces. In a world where humans are trained to operate more like machines, and machines are trained to operate more like humans, my work and process continue to blur the lines between synthetic and organic.

Biography
Syd Greene is a visual artist from Greenville, South Carolina working primarily through mixed-media drawing. Her work tackles themes surrounding the natural world and internal strife, emphasized through delicate, detailed rendering. She received her BFA from Clemson University in 2023 after transferring from Greenville Technical College with her AA. Greene has been awarded multiple workshop scholarships to attend both Arrowmont School of Arts and Craft and Penland School of Crafts, as well as receiving a residency stay at Elf School of the Arts. Greene’s work has been featured in the nationally and internationally recognized Manifest 15th International Drawing Annual (INDA 15) publication in 2024.

Artist Statement
My current body of work is informed by my upbringing in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains where the organic and inorganic decay, infrastructure, and wildlife that pock-mark the landscape make their way into my compositions. Frequently, I employ animals or animal parts as totemic stand-ins for my lived experiences. These experiences often revolve around the rapid urbanization, socio-economic disparities, environmental concerns, and the underlying absurdities indicative of the region which are unearthed during the cathartic state I experience while drawing. I explore my subject matter through direct observation, photographic references, digital collage, and memory recall. This constant feedback loop of visual information as it passes from physical perception, the mind’s eye, and to my drawing hand allows me to transform my source material into new visual amalgams. This process allows for the unseen, absurd, or otherwise limbo states within my drawings to be born through material resonance and multiple lenses of observation.

Biography
Anna Huff is a multimedia artist who seeks pathways between physical and digital realities. Her sculptural and installation work using projectors, glass, and other ephemeral materials to create introspective experiences. Anna holds a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and began her career as a furniture maker. Her work has been exhibited primarily in the Southeast, with notable showings at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, ArtFields, the Greenville Center for Creative Arts, Artisphere, and Rattlesnake Art Magazine. She has also studied at Penland and Arrowmont Craft Schools, and is a current member of Zero Space Art Collective.

Anna serves as the curator for the Dolly F. Pardi Gallery at the Metropolitan Arts Council and a guest curator at The Bascom in North Carolina. She currently lives and works in Greenville, SC, with her cat, Popcorn.

Artist Statement
Memories, dreams, myths, and utopias do not need to exist to be real because they are already awarded significance. The closer these concepts come to reality, the less power they hold. Modern mindsets see these as ideas of the past but even so, how can beauty be resurrected from broken illusions? Personal ideology, cultural identity, and our beliefs of the future are built from these myths. Within them hold the greatest visions of ourselves and our darkest fears. A collective memory simultaneously ancient and brand new. To make work that speaks to both the past and present, I combine techniques of emerging technology and traditional craft to re-present the illusions we live with today.

Biography
Mada Jones is an illustrator currently based in Georgia. Jones attended the Savannah College of Art and Design and graduated with a BFA in Illustration as well as a minor in Printmaking. Mada works with both digital and traditional illustration, and nature and animals are my main sources of inspiration.

Biography
Nicole Salazar is a queer, Latinx artist and educator born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, to Catholic Ecuadorian immigrant parents. Her creative journey began as a deeply personal outlet during middle school, when she turned to art as a way to process emotions while coming to terms with her identity. Art soon became a lifelong tool for expression, healing, and critical inquiry.

She attended the Fine Arts Center throughout high school, where she found mentors who encouraged her to pursue higher education. With their support, she became a QuestBridge Scholar and committed to Macalester College, where she earned a BFA in Art History and American Studies with a minor in Education (2018–2022). While in college, Nicole worked extensively with K-12 students in the Minneapolis public school system as a Breakthrough Teaching Fellow and AmeriCorps Reading Tutor, balancing her academic and artistic growth with community service.

During her junior and senior years, she joined Education for Liberation, a selective two-year cohort focused on dismantling oppressive educational systems and reimagining curriculum through critical pedagogy. Her work in this space—combining radical dreaming, critical questioning, and community action—remains central to her personal philosophy.

Since graduating, Nicole has continued to explore the intersections of art, education, and activism through residencies at the Northern Clay Center and Hollowed Earth, while also teaching bilingual writing at YouthBASE, a Greenville-based nonprofit. Her return to the South has been eye-opening as she witnesses the city's rapid gentrification, but she remains rooted in her mission: to reflect, question, and reimagine systems through creative practice.

Nicole currently lives in the Berea area with her family and continues to engage deeply with her community through art and education.

Artist Statement
As a queer Latina artist and trained art historian, my practice draws on ancestral storytelling, radical dreaming, and a critical awareness of systemic violence. I create work that speaks both to personal experience and broader socio-political realities, exploring questions of identity, resilience, and love.

My influences are vast and intersectional—Coco Fusco’s writing and Ana Mendieta’s performance work have shaped how I respond to violence, history, and the silencing of marginalized voices, especially within art spaces still dominated by white male narratives. My work seeks to challenge those structures while building something new: a space where tenderness and critique coexist.

Currently, I’m developing a body of work centered on the theme “loving despite,” inspired by Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Surrealist modes of thinking. These works explore the complexities of love—especially within strained or imperfect conditions—through my shifting identities and my relationship with my mother. Whether reflecting on the love I hold for my ancestry, the environment, or past relationships, this project honors the fragility and endurance of love.

Much of my creative output is interdisciplinary and responsive—I work with ceramics, performance, installation, painting, and writing. The ongoing bean motif in my work represents care, sustenance, and inherited knowledge, and I plan to further explore this symbol during my time in the studio.

Creation, for me, is not just an aesthetic act—it is pedagogical, political, and deeply personal.