Beware the Artist Jeremy Jirsa

Iranian, b. 1986
Lives and works in Baltimore, MD

Taha Heydari’s striking, large-scale canvases examine the power of images—and the role of the spectator—in politics, propaganda, and the shaping of culture and identity. Particularly of interest to Heydari are the ways in which the seductive power of media imagery is being used to shape perceptions and outcomes in the the United States and the Middle East.

Heydari begins each new painting by culling from his growing archive of source material, news and media artefacts gleaned from research in libraries and on the Internet. His paintings are painstakingly executed with minutely detailed brushwork, but appear pixelated and fragmented, approximating the digital image in the moment of a glitch, when an error occurs in transmission. The beauty of Heydari’s paintings invites closer inspection, which yields an array of ominous associations. 

In his most recent series of works, Heydari draws from covers of the Iranian women’s magazine Zan-e Rooz (Woman of Today) published just before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, examining the ways in which cultural ruptures produce shifts in ideology and identity.

Heydari received his BFA from the Art University of Tehran and an MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute of College of Art in Baltimore. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions in Iran, New York, San Francisco, and Baltimore, including Taha Heydari: Subliminal, his first institutional solo at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC in 2017. He has additionally been included in group exhibitions in Baltimore, Amsterdam, Dubai, London, Antwerp and Berlin, most recently Make Good Trouble: Marching for Change at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, Baltimore, MD (2020-2021) and Performance Anxiety at the Allegheny College Art Galleries in Meadville, PA (2021). He has been nominated for the prestigious Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize (2017), and the Bethesda Painting Awards (2019).

(Courtesy of Haines Gallery)


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Ryan Syrell is a painter whose work focuses on the interrelationship between haptics, perception, and the recollection of sensory information.

Ryan Syrell at the time of our interview was living in Baltimore, he has since relocated to New York. The New York based painter who also teaches and writes about art. He received his BFA from SUNY Purchase in Painting and Drawing, 2006, and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, 2017. Solo exhibitions include numerous shows at Page Bond Gallery (Richmond, VA), the Bromo Seltzer Tower (Baltimore), and Guest Spot at the ReInstitute (Baltimore). Group exhibitions include but are not limited to: To Find Home, curated by Zach Wampler, HappyluckyNo.1 (Brooklyn), Sondheim Semi-finalist exhibition (Baltimore), Whateverbeing, curated by Owen Duffy, Present Co. (Brooklyn) and the Sondheim Finalist exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art.


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Lou Ros has long approached his artistic journey with a unique hunger for experimentation and fundamental self discovery.  Each of his compositions begin with images of films, both his own and those taken from a variety of social media platforms that he appropriates, exploring,  transforming into his narrative; stories of his own from borrowed parts, people and places.

The faces and their bodies are among his key subjects of predilection. Thus, the current series of portraits represent characters, personalities,  taken or captured on the spot, in action, in poses, frozen in time. The faces and their bodies, often cut up, changed, edited, fragmented;  exist across many layers of various matter, as if to better reach and unveil the individual. The painted subjects found in his paintings offer a wink to the viewer as if to inform the onlooker they are apart of the story too.

A witness to his own time, Lou Ros represents the world as he perceives it in the now, with  borrowed images of the past and present. Through bright colors, flashes of light his paintings are poetic and emotionally rich. The finished work, is a sensitive and keenly human representation, delivered in often soft and hazy compositions, like that of ones remembered dreams.

Born in 1984, Lou Ros lives and works in Paris.


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Lee Nowell-Wilson (b. Easton, MD 1989) is an American figurative artist who builds autobiographical drawings that investigate the emotional and ambivalent undertones within birth, domestic labor and human relationship. Through using the female body and maternal subject, Nowell-Wilson illuminates a detail of life that is extremely personal, yet universal. She predominantly executes this in an ironic way by using mundane objects (blankets, dishes, pillows, toys) to express complex human tendencies and emotions. Those ordinary household items create forms that become a secondary subject in-and-of themselves and interact with Nowell-Wilson’s figures on an interpersonal level. A tight turtleneck becomes a close partner in conversation. The womb of blankets upon one’s head becomes the hand that steals identity, while simultaneously creating a self-birthing place and points to a labor worth crowning.

Nowell-Wilson’s work investigates that tipping point — the line where the maternalistic state of being tips from something sensitive to aggressive, from a tearing tension to close connection — and she invites her viewer into that vulnerable walk. While also combining high realism, abstract marks and empty contours, Nowell-Wilson speaks metaphorically to elements of weight, physicality, mental health and veneration.

Nowell-Wilson earned her BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011. She has participated in artist residencies with Stay Home Gallery in Paris, TN, Creative Paradox in Annapolis, MD and the Street Art School in Lyon, France. Her work has exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably New York City and Scotland, and she has also completed urban art pieces in Norway, France, Northern Ireland and Chile. In 2019, she founded MILKED, a new arts publication featuring visual art, photography and the written word by female artists investigating the maternal figure and form.


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Caleb Paul Kortokrax (b. 1987) is an American painter working in Baltimore, MD.
A 2014 Maryland Institute College of Art; LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting MFA Grad and 2011 BSFA Valparaiso University majoring in Fine Art and Education.

In the artists words:

"My paintings are an exercise in unlearning and relearning how to see.

My current work is an investigation into human perception and context, and my studio practice is rooted in the interdisciplinary spirit. The recent work builds bridges between disparate painting traditions and time periods. In the process of making a painting, I resample quality material traditions of the past into the current omnidimensional state of imagery. Through combining past and present visual signals in my studio process, I reanimate the painted image––similar to a DJ giving renewed vigor to an old sound sample by placing it in a fresh context. I use the image and the physical surface of the paintings to navigate a way that offers more possibilities and more cross-pollination, not particularly favoring any one style or dogma."


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Dominic Chambers  Born 1993, St. Louis, MO Lives and works in New Haven, CT Chambers received BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2016 and is a 2019 MFA graduate from the Yale University School of Art.  Dominic's work is founded upon the relationship between reality and fantasy. At this illusory boundary, Dominic Chambers negotiates ideas of magical realism by presenting black figures as they delve into literature and contemplation within imagined landscapes. These subtle, leisurely moments not only celebrate each subject's visionary power but further negate pervasive and toxic clichés, instead focusing on black talent, creativity and mysticism.  The artist has exhibited his work in exhibitions in the US and Europe including a solo show at August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh, PA as well as group shows Abstraction of Black Citizenship: Art from St. Louis curated by Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud at Seattle University; Black Voices / Black Microcosm curated by Destinee Ross at CFHILL Stockholm, Sweden; Painting Is Its Own Country curated by Dexter Wimberly for the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, NC. He has participated in a number of residencies, including the Yale Norfolk summer residency and the New York Studio Residency Program in Brooklyn, NY.


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