Meet the Artists
Thaddeus Echeverria of Rhizome Creative
Crystals + Face
Specializing in sculpture, fabrication, motion graphics, and large scale projection mapping installations, Thaddeus of Rhizome Creative is a multidisciplinary arts and technology group. Like our namesake, we seek to grow new creative roots with like-minded individuals around the world.
Darrell Thorne
Creatures
Darrell Thorne is a Brooklyn based, multi-disciplinary artist working in the areas of design, makeup, and performance art. Darrell specializes in creating otherworldly, highly detailed characters, performances, and elements for stage and screen. His work has been featured in Numero, VMagazine, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, King Kong Magaine, Bust Magazine and Paper. Darrell was named one of the OUT 100 in 2015, and works out of his studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
As a performer, Darrell works regularly in nightlife, theatrical, and private events in New York City, nationally, and internationally. He was a featured artist at the Park Avenue Armory Gala in 2016, 2017, and 2019, with a residency leading up to the event, and he and his company are regular performers at galas throughout the city for institutions like Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Chashama, New York Academy of Art, and multiple private foundations. Previous live performances include Ageha (Tokyo), the Social Star Awards (Singapore), Selfridges (London), Funkhaus (Berlin), The Life Ball (Vienna), Avant Garde (Munich), the Mexico City Cabaret Festival, and as the opening act on “RuPaul's Drag Race” Premiere Tour.
Paolo Montiel-Coppa
Paolo Montiel
Magical Animals and More
Born in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, Paolo Montiel-Coppa is a visual artist working mainly with light. He studied Physics, Art History, Music and Audio and worked as a music composer, audio engineer and digital lighting systems programmer. Self-taught most of his life, has created and collaborated in art and architecture projects in Mexico, USA, and Latin America. He is currently living in Mexico City, where he works at his studio and collaborates with Cocolab and Mayan Warrior as a lighting designer.
Robert Montenegro
Chrysalsis
Roberto Montenegro is a queer Los Angeles born, NYC based digital artist who uses video as his medium. Starting his career as an aerospace engineer for the US government, Roberto now creates and animates original video content specifically designed to inspire and awe audiences for live events and concerts. His expertise ranges from 2D and 3D animation and visualization, stage design, and creative direction in multimedia. For the past 15 years Roberto has worked all over the world on shows for Gay Pride New York, Art Basel, and Ultra Music Festival. He has been the creative director for The Pines Party for the past seven years. Roberto cofounded the Free Radical Design Group with his partner, Guy J Smith
Nico Cabalquinto
Within The River Within
Nico Cabalquinto is a queer non-binary first generation Filipinx-American, born and raised in New York City, currently residing in Bushwick, Brooklyn. They use digital fabrication tools, audiovisual equipment and interactive technologies for their light sculptures and installations to transform public spaces, blur material boundaries and enhance live performances.
Nico is currently a postdoctoral artist in residence at NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where they recently earned their Masters of Professional Studies in May 2021. They earned their Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts from Rutgers University, with their studies primarily focusing on photography. Inspired by architectural subjects beyond the lens, they found their love for light, structure, and illusions of materiality.
Testu Collective
Second Skin
Testu Collective are an NYC-based intermedia art group founded by Dan Tesene and Serena Stucke in 2017. Testu create experimental videos, concept soundtracks, and audiovisual installations/performances. Testu Collective’s work reimagines visual systems and sonic environments through a combination of custom-made videos, electronic sound, architectural elements, optical material, and performative movement. Testu aims to challenge traditional modes of A/V work, dance and audience experience through augmenting reality between the digital and physical landscape. Testu transforms environments for the audience to navigate and position themselves within to experience multi dimensional ecosystems that utilize ever shifting images, electronic soundscapes, architectural material, and performance. In collaboration with dancers, Testu uses movement to modulate their video projections in live performances as an interpretation of “projection mapping” but with the human form. The performances evoke and work within a wide lineage of art, film and performance.
Aidan Lincoln
Infinite Reflections
Aidan Lincoln is a multi-disciplinary artist based out of Brooklyn, NY who uses a wide array of new media technology, digital fabrication tools, and machine learning to create light sculptures, illusions, generative art, neural network art. Generally, he creates physical sculptures that look like renders and renders that look like real world artifacts. Aidan is currently a post-doc artist in residence at NYU TISCH School Of The Arts Interactive Telecommunication Program where he completed his MPS in 2021.
Doug Shire
Sparky the Unicorn
Doug 'Nataraj' Shire is a co-lead artist of the BEYOND Collective, and an Ithaca, NY based mixed media artist creating large scale works for municipal public art experiences, festivals, and private events. His work often incorporates delightful interactive, immersive lighting elements. An iconic work, co-created with Laurence Clarkberg, is 'Sparky the Unicorn'
Laurence Clarkberg
Sparky the Unicorn
Laurence Clarkberg enjoys working with steel, pixels, electrons, people, ideas and most recently polystyrene foam boards cut with a hot knife to resemble large iconic clouds. He is a semi-professional artistic catalyst, often working silently and stealthily in the background to help Beyond artists realize their creative potential.He is generous to a fault with his time, money and tools and so the Goddess does favor him, and speaks to you through his hands, to remind you of important things that you may have forgotten.
Janelle Roswell
Molluscs
Janelle Roswell is a creative technologist based in New York City. Taking inspiration from fluid movements found in nature, she works to combine robotics, code, and light, to design installations that foster a sense of wonder within a space. Her work focuses on how the integration of creativity and technology can increase empathy, enhance human understanding, and completely redefine the lives we live by transforming spaces through innovative, fun, tech-based art. She holds a B.F.A in New Media from Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, and is currently attending NYU's School of Engineering for her MSc in Integrated Design and Media.
Louise Lessél & Sid Chou
The Armillaries
Louise Lessél is a light artist from Denmark. Her work exposes hidden properties of the natural world and blind spots in human perception through the use of light and electronics. She juxtaposes the beauty of invention and technocentric values with the at times invisible tolls on the biosphere, with the aim to raise ecological awareness through a renewed sense of wonder. Every artwork is made using real-time data and sensors as input to feed fully interactive systems. Lessél is a graduate from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and has two Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science and programming from Denmark.
Her work has been exhibited in London, Copenhagen, Athens, New York, and Miami.
Sid Chou is an industrial designer from Taiwan working with the production of interactive installations and designer toys. He engineers custom hardware and electronics to create unexpected experiences for the audience. He is a graduate from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and has a Bachelor of Industrial design degree from Pratt institute.
The Armillaries are a series of interactive light sculptures tracking live satellite orbits and realtime space debris passing by above. The amount of debris affects the installation and the sound emanating from each Armillary, creating a beautiful and at times cacophonous data soundscape.
The sculptures are inspired by the ancient Ptolemaic armillary spheres invented by the Greek and Chinese to track celestial objects in the sky, documenting a worldview which placed Earth as the center of the universe, with all other planets orbiting it, even if the math didn’t logically add up. Positing that humankind has not strayed far from this worldview, The Armillaries similarly center a smoke engulfed polluting earth at their core. The modern Armillaries in the installation track satellites, the very web that support human culture from communication and GPS navigation to research, entertainment and finance. The incessant hunger for new technologies cause ever more satellites to be launched and humankind is steadily sealing itself inside a shield of shrieking metal moving at 18,000 miles/hour.
As of September 2021, 23,516 satellites are orbiting the Earth. 13,382 of these are classified as debris. On average one of these burn up in the atmosphere a day, as gravity draws it back down towards Earth.
Every day at 2100 hours, this moment is commemorated with a roaring sound from The Armillaries. With this installation the artists remind us that information isn’t free, storage doesn’t live in the ‘cloud’, and all technology is manufactured using precious earth resources, which must eventually turn to trash and burn up in our atmosphere.
Atchareeya (Name) Jattuporn
Hometown Sun | ตะวันเดียว | 乡
Atchareeya is a Thai-born and New York-based creative technologist and multidisciplinary artist with a MPS in Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP) from NYU. Before coming to New York, she worked as art director and event designer for an advertising agency focusing on social change by collaborating with Greenpeace Thailand, WWF Thailand, and local non-profit organizations. Most of her work focus on a physical interaction between humans and machines with a consequential story about culture and social issues. She uses physical computing techniques, computational media, and digital fabrication to create an experimental sculpture, playful interaction, and meaningful storytelling.
Atchareeya is one of 3,000 New York City-based artists to receive a grant through the City Artist Corps Grants program, presented by The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), with support from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) as well as Queens Theatre.
Tianxu Zhou
Hometown Sun | ตะวันเดียว | 乡
Tianxu is a creative technologist who was born and raised in China and is now based in New York. Most of her work focus on exploring human emotions and behavior in order to create delightful experiences. She has always been seeking novel and playful approaches to break the boundaries between the physical space and the digital world. She graduated from NYU interactive telecommunication program and is currently experimenting with new possibilities in the extended reality.
Tianxu is one of 3,000 New York City-based artists to receive a grant through the City Artist Corps Grants program, presented by The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), with support from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) as well as Queens Theatre.
JEVPIC
The Fault Line Meditation
Palm Springs based artist, Everette Solomon known as JEVPIC, has been a professional art photographer since 1999 but originally started making sculptures at age seven out of found objects. Today he recreates them and other shared traumas through public art and what he calls sculpture paintings, where he draws, etches and paints on his photography, then collages and resins on top of it in layers, then embellishes with found objects. He studied fashion at FIDM and fine art at Art Center College of Design and has been an editor for a number of publications including Paper Magazine. Palm Springs Art Museum and the City of Palm Springs has collected his work as well as some celebs like Leonardo DiCaprio and Ed Sheeran. He has held creative positions for Coachella Music and Arts Festival, Desert X and most recently Pride. His current work like The Fault Line Meditation, Dirty Laundry Labyrinth and his modernism series ReRighting History embraces kitsch and hopes to give society new tools to heal and to have more empathy for themselves and other.
Ksenia Salion
If corals had eyes they would look very sad
“Everything is Connected”
We live in the time of great change. We need to rethink our ways of living. By healing the Earth we'll heal ourselves. There is no other way around! We need a strong Art movement to drive the change.
Ksenia is a visual artist living in Brooklyn, New York. With her installations and digital collages she is creating a new platform for discussing climate change & sustainability. To create her Eco installations she uses recent internet articles about climate change. She combines collages of the article's headlines, images of flowers, corals & female faces combined with messages. She incorporates projection mapping during her art installations. The message of these installations - We are one with nature! Choose Planet, We are not living on Earth, we are Earth, Manifest Love, It’s in my Nature to Love. We have to stop destroying our planet, because when we are destroying the planet we are destroying ourselves. Manifest love for the planet and yourself. In the end, Love is the answer!
Love (heal) your Planet, your body and your soul!
Ksenia’s newest art concept is: If corals had eyes they would look very sad. Ksenia experiments with live digital painting on people. She projects images of fluorescent corals, flowers and other videos of nature on model’s faces. Digital painting is the most sustainable kind of painting, there is no pigment or canvas being used. Light is being used as a paint medium and the model's face/body is a canvas. She projects Images of corals layered on the human face to create a surreal effect. In a way it looks that corals are part of the model's face, and at the same time the coral looks like it has human eyes, and it looks directly at you, making an eye connection with you. It depends on how you look at it.