UID (Unique Identifier :: Utopian Inspirational Daemon)

Ian Breidenbach (b. 1984)  is a conceptual artist, curator, and educator based in Findlay, Ohio.  In 2012, he founded The Neon Heater Art Gallery, an artist-run space servicing the community of Findlay, Ohio and surroundings, providing access to contemporary art in a rural setting.  His artistic practice explores the connective quality of narrative in the creation of worlds and possible futures.  He holds a BFA from Wright State University in Selected Studies: Video Art (2009) and an MFA in Studio Art from Texas Tech University (2022).  He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University at Lima, OH teaching Studio Art and curating The Farmer Family Gallery. 

In 2018, he received the Palmer Scholarship from the Toledo Art Museum to conduct national research into Artist-Run Galleries and community engagement. In 2022, alongside members of The Blue House Gallery, he organized Futures: A National Artist-Run Symposium in Dayton, Ohio to bring together gallerists from around the country to explore the issues, difficulties, and imagine possible futures of the Artist-Run gallery community.  This symposium follows years of research into the way that art can be a catalyst for community engagement, and how the Artist-Run model of curation is specifically suited to thinking about collaboration between artists and non-artists alike. He is currently focused on gathering together artists, writers, and thinkers who share this hope for better futures, in an attempt to collectively envision an equitable Global Utopia and ultimately take steps towards its creation. 

Caroline Turner-Anderson is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator based in Cincinnati, OH where she is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Electronic Art at the University of Cincinnati. Her work and research explore technology, deep time, and speculation about the near-future through a wide variety of media and materials. She has shown her work in numerous venues both nationally and internationally. In addition to her studio practice, Turner-Anderson co-founded IRL Gallery in 2016 with Ian Anderson, an exhibition space that blurred the line between seeing art in real life and viewing documentation online.

Ian Anderson is a professional 3D modeler and developer, most often working collaboratively with physicians in his role at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. He creates virtual games designed to mitigate pain in children, educate nurses, and conduct VR research. His own research explores the visual, sonic, and worldbuilding possibilities of virtual space through a broad selection of digital toolsets and software programs.

Jacob Riddle is an interdisciplinary artist and educator with a passion for foraging connections between technology and the natural world. Drawing inspiration from his background in construction and labor industries, as well as his upbringing wading through the limestone creeks of the Appalachian foothills, Jacob has embarked on a creative journey to bridge the gap between these seemingly disparate realms.

Having honed his ingenuity and cultivated experiential learning through the challenges of rural Appalachian life, Jacob now channels this unique perspective into the realms of art, technology, and academia. His work serves as a testament to the power of resilience, resourcefulness, and the harmonious coexistence of the digital age and the natural world.

Marina Sachs–working under the name SHADE since 2021–uses anything they can get their hands on to make work. Scrappy, science fictional, and directly informed by their lived experiences through addiction and sobriety, SHADE’s work is just as much here to stay as it is willing to fade into shadows.

Marina’s work consistently includes analog photography, painted works, and installation, and has always included collaborative, and co-created production with communities. Marina is the Professor of Analog and Digital Photography at Santa Fe College.

Jacklyn Brickman is a visual artist and educator whose work entangles science fact with fiction to address social and environmental concerns by employing natural entities, processes, and technology. Her work spans installation, video, and performance, with a special interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration and social engagement. Fellowships include The National Academy of Sciences, Chaire arts et sciences, Jentel Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Erb Family Foundation. She has exhibited her work internationally. Brickman resides in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Council of the Three Fires – the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. Indigenous nations of the Great Lakes region are also known as the Anishinaabe. Brickman is Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Western Michigan University.

John O’Donnell is a multidisciplinary artist who uses a variety of mediums to convey different messages. At times, his work is guided by a cultural topic, but often, the work avoids pointing at anything specific. He directs the viewer’s awareness to vague conclusions through the arrangement of objects. This approach guides an investigation of topics pertaining to absurdity, illusion, construction, failure, and nostalgia. This work utilizes appropriated images and objects relating to American history, art history, popular media, and consumer culture to create rough-hewn assemblages.  This collage sensibility reflects temporary solutions and failed ambitions within a culture saturated with irony and perpetual innuendo.

The popular media of his youth guides his aesthetic: Nintendo, MTV, Saturday cartoons, Blockbuster films, and action figures. Interested in commenting on the contradictions and folly in American culture, he sees America as an entity that needs to be entertained. He shares this view through an art practice that walks a line between Entertainment and Art.  He strives to make work that contributes to the conversation of contemporary art while still being accessible to non-art audiences. Ultimately, he is a studio artist compelled to create experiences with ambiguous degrees of resolution through applied awareness of content and form.

Leah Sandler (born 1992) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator based in Orlando, Florida. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Rollins College in 2014 and a Master of Fine Arts from University of the Arts in 2017. Recent exhibitions include the Corridor Project Billboard Exhibition, the 2020 Florida Biennial, Interstice at MOTOR (curated by the Residency Project) Los Angeles, CA, Utopian/Vermilion, a solo exhibition at ParkHaus15 in Orlando, FL, and CPCH Staging Area, a solo exhibition at Laundromat Art Space in Miami. Sandler’s writing and projects have been featured in publications including Textur Magazine, Salat Magazin, SPECS Journal, and Mapping Meaning Journal. She is the author of The Center For Post-Capitalist History’s Field Guide to Embodied Archiving, published by Burrow Press, and teaches at Stetson University in Deland, Florida.

Observing the decline of the Capitalocene from the sand pine scrub and urban sprawl of Orlando Florida, Sandler constructs parafictional worlds through mediums including video, text, drawing, and collaborative interdisciplinary projects. These parafictions flesh out imagined post-capitalist institutions, rituals, histories, manifestos, and landscapes. Traversing these worlds, the viewer is encouraged, through a visual language of repeated symbols and colors present throughout discrete works, to consider the inconsistencies of the invisible ideologies that uphold and subtend our current system, and to visualize the precarity of our contemporary moment.

Solar Noon is the name of the collaborative artist-duo of Caroline Turner-Anderson and Ian Anderson, taking inspiration from the fleeting instant where the sun is positioned directly above a geographic location on any given day. Solar noon differs from our modern conception of “clock noon” and occurs an infinite number of times every day as the Earth rotates on its axis; shifting the point of consideration from East to West. The duo’s work explores speculative worldbuilding that merges narratives between our deep past as humans and the near-future through multimedia installations, digitally-fabricated sculptures, 3D animated videos, and AR/VR. 

Ann Trondson is a Toledo, Ohio-based multidisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, including Neon Heater, Findlay, OH (2023), Wiregrass Museum of Art, Dothan, AL (2023), C for Courtside, Knoxville, TN (2019); Salon 94, New York, NY (2014); Louis B. James Gallery, New York, NY (2014); College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI (2013); MAK Center of Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, CA (2012); and Palm Spring Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA (2010). She has participated in artist residencies at Banff Arts Centre, Banff, Canada; Terra Summer Residency, Giverny, France; and the Guesthaus Residency, Los Angeles, CA. She received her MFA from the University of Southern California and currently is the Co-Director of Vinegar, an artist-run, women-led nonprofit in Birmingham, AL that champions and exhibits artists who work in emerging and experimental art forms that push the boundaries of its medium. Vinegar opened its first permanent exhibition space, Vinegar Contemporary, in 2020.

Ella Medicus is an Ohio based artist who studied sculpture and expanded media at Alfred university in NewYork. Her approach to making is based in the opinion that artists exist in the liminal outskirts of society; always contemplating and reflecting on what they observe. She looks at the human body as a tool or lens of perception, finding the imperfections of its functionality and comparing observations from multiple schools of thought. She researches physics, mythology, spirits, angels, AI intelligence, the beginning of creation, time- all these aspects of the reality that we find ourselves in, allowing for fractals of insanity to unfold.

Caleb Lightfoot is an architectural designer and visual artist.  His practice is rooted in the dual disciplines of architecture and archaeology and exists through both fieldwork and studio practice.  He is interested in critical theory, media studies, and historical materialism, and these inform his work.  Monuments and revolutions are a primary focus of investigations through both digital and print media, and he is interested in using both traditional and experimental modes of representation and their subversive capacities.  He holds a M.Arch from Texas Tech University where he participated in the 2015 Land Arts of the American West program, and has been involved in several ongoing archaeological projects in Sardinia, Samothrace, the Peloponnese, and North Carolina.  He currently works as an architectural designer in Washington, DC. 

Stephen Nachtigall (b. 1986, Calgary, Canada) is a visual artist working in Arcata, California. He has exhibited throughout Canada, the United States, Scotland and Germany. He received a BFA in Sculpture from the Alberta University of the Arts and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Oregon. His work considers the way in which human and non-human relations occur through a mediated perspective. His practice utilizes video, animation, sculptural installation and 2D formats. Nachtigall currently serves as Assistant Professor of Digital Media at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt.

Andy DiLallo aims to continually experiment with ways of being and seeing in the digital era. He is a media artist working at the crossroads of tech, art, and human interaction. His work explores the emerging cultural phenomena resulting from increasingly widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual infrastructure. Andy's work has been featured at SIGGRAPH 2020, the 2021 Athens Digital Arts Festival, IndieCade 2022, and COP26 Glasgow.