2024-2025 Distillery Program
THE ARTISTS:
Alli Lemon is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Pittsburgh, PA. She holds an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder and a BFA from the University of Memphis. In 2015, she was an Ellen Battelle Stoeckel Fellow at the Yale School of Art at Norfolk. In her work, Lemon explores the space between being asleep and awake. Her drawings “seek to capture the feeling of falling asleep. With a focus on transparency, they illustrate the ephemeral moments just before the veil of sleep descends.”
Karen Lue is a Chinese American artist whose work uses photography, text, and installation to explore aspects of identity in relation to concepts of grief, loss, and isolation. Through self-portraiture, she works to discover her physical body as it is shaped by race, familial values, sexualization, and her chronic illness, and how these intersecting impressions can affect her body’s performance both internally and for an audience. Karen received a Bachelor of Arts in History of Art & Architecture and Economics from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently based in Pittsburgh, PA.
Shyann Maragh is a Caribbean-American multimedia artist from New York. She recently graduated with bachelor’s degree in Studio Arts and Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Working in the mediums of painting, print making, and collaging, her work directly and indirectly explores the memories, emotions, and nuances associated with having a Black body in America. Shyann also enjoys listening to music, drinking tea, thrifting, and doing elaborate makeup looks in her free time.
Mathias Rushin is a multidisciplinary visual artist currently focused on film photography, collage, and interactive digital works. Rushin’s experiences as a Black, multiracial queer youth navigating white suburbia and multiple learning disorders empowered him to honor and hone his own ways of seeing through his artwork. Rushin’s recent work prioritizes corporeal sensations, visually teasing polarities like anonymity and surrender; numbness and euphoria. Through such visuals, Rushin investigates gender and sexuality by drawing on aspects of gay culture and internet cultures, both of which undergird his identities.
Lisa Toboz is a self-taught, Pittsburgh-based artist with a background in writing and literature. Her work explores self-portraiture and creativity as a form of healing using various Polaroid cameras and film. She is inspired by vernacular photography, Victorian spirit photography, and ‘70s supernatural movies, as well as reading fiction. Her photo books include Dwell and The Long Way Home. An editor by trade, she has exhibited internationally, and her Polaroid photography can be found in various publications including Lenscratch, Reed Magazine, SHOTS Magazine, and Polaroid Now.
Ajunie Virk is an artist investigating the relationship between time, comfort, and paranoia in a diasporic middle-America through the use of 3D animation, humor, and collage. Virk is a recent graduate from Carnegie Mellon University and was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2023) and the Yale Norfolk School of Art (2022). She has recently presented works at the Coaxial Art Foundation, Brew House Arts, and Light Matters Festival.
London Williams Originally from Milwaukee, WI, London Williams has a BFA in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. “I create images informed by my identity that speak to a desire to build my Queer Black utopia. The images use the domestic interior as a portal into a metaphysical documentation of a history not yet lived. Through my home’s reflection, I am having a conversation with Gay Black men… Cinematic moments found within my compositions aim to establish a connection with my brothers. In the tableau they express a dramatic storytelling encompassing ideas of sexuality, Blackness, brotherhood, and not limited to critiques on masculinity.”
THE EXHIBITION:
The 2024-2025 Distillery Residency Exhibition will be on view April 17 – June 7, 2025