Photo by Shelby Lee Adams

Alessandro Bavari

Alessandro Bavari was born in Latina, a coastal town south of Rome, Italy, on april 1963.

Grown up in an italo-french family, he was early attracted by artistic matters and decided to attend art college, where he began making photomontages at the age of 15.

Then, he studied scenography, photography, history of art and various other topics at the Academy of Fine Arts, in Rome, where he developped strong grounding in the techniques of oil, watercolours and engraving, while experimenting at the same time methods mixing tar, glue, industrial paint and exploring photographic printing techniques.

During these years, he took the habit of making numerous photographs everywhere he goes : human and animal matters, objects and architecture, pictures and landscapes, fossils and materials, which join his mental museum, also strongly influenced by indo-european cultural myths and allegories as well as 14th and 15th century artists.

Since 1993, he adds digital manipulation to his art, developping a personal artistic language using industrial and organic products from nature before incorporating photographic process, then computer digitalization, which leads to "a kind of contamination among the arts dissolving the boundaries which distinguish them".

Alessandro Bavari lives and works in Italy.

Catherine Mainguy

Jonathan Knowles

MONICA COOK

Born in Dalton, Georgia in 1974, Monica Cook moved to Savannah, Georgia to pursue a bachelor's degree in painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Since graduating in 1996. Cook recently completed a residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she currently resides, continuing to work as an artist.

“Over a decade ago I began painting self portraits out of convenience of using myself as a model. Although the paintings are somewhat autobiographical I have rarely considered my "self portraits" a portrait of me. I try to allow the character to evolve on its own and not become trapped by expectations or likeness.”

“After many years of feeling confined to painting self portraits I would catch myself trying to memorize others features, like the shape of some ones hands or the color around their eyes to bring back to my portrait in the studio. Over time I had grown tired of solely painting myself and of the limited pose I had from painting from life through the mirror, so I began to use photographs as reference. Like many artists I enjoy working alone, becoming comfortable with use of a photographic reference made it possible to paint others without the distractions of having a model in the studio.”

“Painting has always been a source of self exploration for me. Now that I am painting other people I think it is even more so. I thought it took a lot of courage to expose myself in a painting but realized it takes even more to expose someone else. Having my friends as models was extremely nerve racking at first, with self portraits you really only have yourself to answer to, painting others you have their physical concerns.”

Monica Cook ( ART AND DESIGN)