2024-2025 Distillery Program
THE ARTISTS:
Alli Lemon is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator, and curator. Originally from Memphis, TN, she received a BFA from the University of Memphis. In 2022 she earned an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 2015 she was a Yale Norfolk Summer Fellow. Spanning sculpture, ceramics, collage, drawing and painting, Lemon’s work explores the mysteries of our sleeping worlds. Lemon is a passionate teacher and has worked in higher-education for the last three years.
Through layering remembered landscapes, I construct scenes that evoke nightmares and theatre sets. In sleep, I feel the same as I do watching a play—my belief is suspended and I have no control over what is happening in front of me. As someone with sleep paralysis, this can be a deeply discomforting feeling. Instead of a place for rest, sleep often feels like a time when I surrender to my subconscious and am left vulnerable to outside forces. Because these works are layered and improvisational, the finished images are often a mystery to me. As in a dream—as in an audience—I am pulled along and through them, searching.
Karen Lue is a self-taught, image-based artist whose work explores aspects of identity and the physical body in relation to grief, ritual, and performance. She has exhibited at Silver Eye Center for Photography, Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, SPACE Gallery, and the Olin Fine Arts Center at Washington & Jefferson College. She is the recipient of the Keystone Award Honorable Mention (2023) through Silver Eye and attended Cornell’s Image Text Residency in 2023. Her work has been featured online and in print in SLANT’D Media, DER GREIF, Float Magazine, and Fraction Magazine. Karen received a BA in History of Art & Architecture and Economics from the University of Pittsburgh.
Utilizing analog photography as a starting point, I explore how my identities as a queer, second-generation Chinese American woman function through a chronically ill body, particularly in relation to environment and performance. How are identities performed or hidden through the body? How is one’s body performed when it is not physically there? I seek to guide the way the viewer sees and interacts with my body, while also attempting to regain agency and control over how it is performed and perceived. My image-making process is a continual negotiation between my body as its own actor and as something indistinguishable from myself.
Shyann Maragh is a first generation Caribbean-American artist, originally from New York and currently based in Pittsburgh. In 2024 she received a BA in Sociology and Studio Art from the University of Pittsburgh. She makes work that humorously critiques popular culture by using interventions like mixed-media collage. Shyann has exhibited in Pittsburgh at Wick Monet and at Pitt’s University Art Gallery.
I often replicate the chaos of my childhood in my work. Whether that is through surrealist elements, collaging, or an intense color palette, I love depicting overwhelming and oversaturated scenes. Heavily inspired by music, text, and pop culture, my art references social systems and relationships. Along with portraits, I paint recognizable spaces such as hair salons, nail salons, and inside my fridge. My active use of world-building evokes the collective consciousness and memory of other black femmes. My work utilizes humor, distortion, and exaggeration as tools of resistance, and explores themes such as class, substance use, consumption, memory, blackness, and the body.
Mathias Rushin is a multidisciplinary visual artist who works with photography, collage, digital media, and sculpture. He explores themes of time, identity, tension, and the uncanny, drawing inspiration from sci-fi and horror films to create artworks that feel both familiar and unsettling. As a queer artist, Rushin uses his work to challenge stereotypes and resist labels. He has shown his work in Chicago and in Pittsburgh, at 707 Gallery and Brew House Arts.
I’m drawn to juxtapositions—visibility and anonymity, control and disorder, conscious and unconscious—because they reflect my experiences as a multiracial, queer individual navigating a world that often tries to define me. I challenge stereotypes by combining rigid, masculine shapes with delicate, traditionally feminine materials to explore the fluidity and complexity of identity. In my work, I often transform ordinary objects into symbols of power and vulnerability. In Disarmed, I see fragments of myself—militaristic shells that conceal something fragile and vulnerable. In Pathogen, resistance and confinement symbolize struggles for autonomy within limitations. Through these works, I create moments of discomfort and curiosity, challenging assumptions about identity, power, and time. My art embraces ambiguity, inviting viewers to question what they see and feel.
Lisa Toboz is a self-taught, lens-based artist with an MFA in Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. She combines photography and collage, using family archives and found objects to explore autobiography, mortality, and storytelling. Her photo books include Dwell and The Long Way Home. She has exhibited internationally, and shown work in Silver Eye Center for Photography’s Radial Survey biennial. Her photography can be found in various publications including Lenscratch, Reed Magazine, Fisheye Magazine, Uppercase, SHOTS Magazine, and Polaroid Now.
My mother always wanted to disappear. When she unexpectedly died, I inherited all of her possessions, including a box filled with journals and letters that I’d never seen before, which remained unopened for 10 years before I finally had the courage to examine her items—her life. Through photography, collage, and found objects, Palimpsest: A Memoir in Fragments is a meditation on grief, aiming to reconcile the complicated woman I knew as an adult with the spirited woman who brought me into this world. Engaging with her archive has been a way for me to understand her brokenness along with her vibrancy and strength, showing how a relationship continues with the dead long after they are gone. Working with my mother’s archive in conversation with personal imagery, I consider notions of transparency and secrecy, as well as ownership of memory—how her story becomes our story in creative collaboration.
Ajunie Virk is an Indian-American 3D artist, filmmaker, and writer. She recently graduated from Carnegie Mellon University. She was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023 and the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in 2022. Raised in Illinois and now based in Pittsburgh, she has most recently shown works at the Coaxial Arts Foundation, Roski Mateo Gallery, Sassafras Saloon in LA, and Pittsburgh Center For Creative Reuse.
Ever since I could remember, I have been uncomfortable retrieving items from the bottom of my couch. It is there, with my senses restricted, that once familiar objects morph into unrecognizable horrors. Pushing my hand beyond the cushions and skimming its lining feels as if I’m entering a void containing a dismantled time capsule of my past. My work examines the contradiction between what I remember and the manifestations of these distant memories that are still leftover to navigate. It uses absurdity, a condition that only exists within the presence of contradiction, to study the inconsistencies of middle-America: of identity within assimilation, seedlings within destruction, and self within the collective. With the use of 3D modeling, animation, and collage, I conjure up environments that resemble the void within my couch: forcing viewers to face truths, memories, and secrets made apparent when these objects of nostalgia are stripped of their familiar contexts.
London Williams earned a BFA in painting from the Kansas City Art institute in 2021 and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2024. In 2019 he was selected as Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in photography at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. In 2023 he was featured in Crusading The Specter at Yossi Milo gallery, with one work later being featured in Oxford American Magazine. He is a part of the 1Hood Media 2024-25 Artivist Academy cohort and is a recipient of an Advancing Black Arts grant from the Pittsburgh foundation.
These paintings are a love letter to a fantasy of liberation through the lens of my Black Queer Utopia. I create images from desire, fabulating a multidimensional fictional world, which emerges through photography, collage, drawing, and painting. These large-scale figurative tableaus are cinematic, dreamlike, and theatrical spaces where I can imagine my Butch Queen. Staging characters in scenes that portray intimate moments, I am not painting “models”; instead, they are guests in my home. In these scenes figures are repeated, providing ambiguous markers of time. In the paintings, Black Queer interiority is fragmented and collaged back together, creating a reality in search of freedom. Through installation, the paintings become a portal for viewers to enter.
THE EXHIBITION:
On the Edge Of, the 2025 Distillery Residency Exhibition will be on view April 17 – June 7, 2025.