DREAMWEAVERS

Julia Arredondo (she/they) is originally from Corpus Christi, Texas. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from Columbia College Chicago. Julia is formally trained in printmaking and specializes in artistic forms of independent publishing and product development, having founded Vice Versa Press and Curandera Press as her entrepreneurial debuts. Julia launched QTVC Live!, a DIY home shopping channel, in 2020 and is currently launching a third season of programming featuring Maine-based artists. Julia recently concluded a Residential Fellowship at the Lunder Institute for American Art and is a 2022 recipient of the DCASE Individual Artist Grant. Julia’s practice explores alternative empowerment and reimagines business structures and spiritual philosophies as platforms for play and experimentation.

Calethia DeConto was born in 1980 in Enid, Oklahoma where she only lived for six brief months before the adventure began. In 1988, she picked up her first camera and was raised in about 15 different places across the US and abroad traveling often with her military father. In 1999, after years of teaching herself photography and filmmaking with photo books and shooting local hip hop shows, DeConto found an outlet for her creativity in the darkrooms at Mira Costa College, Palomar College and North Coast Photographic Services where she learned in the classroom as a student but worked as a lab tech printing and developing film in high volume. Connections made during this time led to various assisting jobs for many local skate, wedding and portrait photographers and gave her the confidence to pursue her first long term gig as the on staff photographer for a local modeling school.

Today, DeConto calls Los Angeles home and has been creating work consistently always staying true to her roots as an analog photographer, no matter what materials or wild ideas come to her hands and my mind. Over the past 15 years, she has worked with licensing agencies, sold originals to directors, set decorators, interior designers, curators, collectors and participated in a plethora of exhibits. Currently, she is creating more digital art in the same way she works with paper, but allowing herself to bring in more color and abstract elements while also filming and editing to create short films and non-narrative video art.

Mary Hart received her BA from Dartmouth College, then studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London as a Reynolds Scholar. In 1994 she earned my MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College where she was the recipient of the Elaine de Kooning scholarship in painting. She has been a resident at Yaddo, Monson Arts and the Vermont Studio Center and has received grants from the Maine Arts Commission and the Artist's Resource Trust. Her work has been exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art, Simmons College, UNE, and the University of Maine Museum of Art, as well as numerous venues throughout New England. She has taught art in Maine for 30 years from kindergarten through college and is currently a visiting professor of Printmaking at Bowdoin College. Her home and studio are in Portland, Maine.

Sara Khan was born in Birmingham, England in 1984 and raised in Lahore, Pakistan. She holds a BFA (with honours) from National College of Arts, Lahore (2008). She was 1 of 13 international artists selected for the Bag Art camp, an international art residency in Bergen, Norway (2012). She was also 1 of 23 artists selected for the Vancouver Mural Festival (2018). Her works have been featured in several national and international group exhibitions. In addition to her first solo show “Suraj Kinare” in Canada at the Surrey Art Gallery in 2019, recent group shows include “Terrestrial Beings”, Esplanade Arts and Heritage Centre, Medicine Hat, Canada in 2019, and “What is Seen and Not Seen, With or Without Seeing”, Gandhara Art Space, Karachi, Pakistan in 2017. Her work has also been featured in the book “A Big Important Artist: A Womanual” by Danielle Kryza.

Anna Lataille resides in Portland, Maine and is a multidisciplinary artist focusing on analogue photography primarily in 35mm format. As a self taught artist, she spent years developing her creative practice while living throughout Europe and the United States. Experimentation has always played a significant role in her creative development, her love of experimental photography permeating her art as well as her work of creative portraits. Inspired by early photographs, silent films, and the bizarre, she creates ethereal and often surreal images in-camera through multiple exposure and film manipulation techniques. Her work evokes certain feelings of being caught between this reality and the imagined.