In the dog days of a sweltering summer, only art (and maybe iced tea) can save us from hell. Today, we’re excited to debut our August exhibition featuring the six recipients of NOT REAL ART’s 2024 grant cycle: Alison Hiltner, Casey Fletcher, Danielle O’Malley, Jessie Rodriguez, Jordan Vinyard, and Nastassja Swift. Their award-winning work demonstrates material expertise, artistic vision, and conceptual maturity across a range of media, including stop-motion animation, kinetic sculpture, and needle-felted portraits.
We’re thrilled to welcome this new class of grant recipients into our community of working artists and creative entrepreneurs. Along with financial support, each winner receives publicity, including an interview on our podcast, a full-length feature in our journal, and inclusion in this exhibition. Help us celebrate their accomplishments by kicking back with a cold beverage, scrolling through this feature, and visiting the NOT REAL ART 2024 Grant Winners exhibition via the button below.
Casey Fletcher
“Bridge-building is central to my practice,” Wisconsin-based artist Casey Fletcher says. “Trying to reconcile the mind and the body is the biggest bridge.” Influenced by the politics of race, machine/human interaction, Christian mysticism, and the pathophysiology of autoimmune diseases, Casey creates sculptural work that subverts the emptiness of modern American life. “Making work in physical space is—in part—an attempt to create moments of embodiment in an age of disembodying advertisements, interfaces, and social circumstances,” he says.
Using everything from found clothes and steel to Crayola Crayons and sharpened pine logs, Casey explores racial identity in America through a distinctly personal lens. Works like “Red Man” challenge widely held assumptions about working-class Black men in public spaces, while “Ulysses” addresses police violence against children of color. “The role of my practice and my work is to create moments that foster inquiry and reflection for the sake of human connection,” says Casey.
Casey’s grant-winning work includes “Henry Smith (Paris, Texas),” a striking sculpture that exposes the stark brutality behind high-profile, often mythologized lynchings; “Who Do You Say That I Am?” a pine bust that explores trans-masculinity and acceptance through the life of Jesus and the words of his disciple Mark; and the above-mentioned “Ulysses” and “Red Man.”
Alison Hiltner
“As long as I can remember, I have lived with a complex anxiety disorder,” says Minneapolis-based artist Alison Hiltner, who finds “comfort in imagined worlds where the things that terrify me are transformed and neutralized.” Drawing from sci-fi cinema, Alison creates interactive multimedia installations that invite participants to explore the evolving nature of science, technology, fantasy, and the future.
“I view myself as an archeologist of science fiction, exploring its terrain in films, television, and video games, then intertwining these concepts with current scientific inquiry,” she continues. “My visual touchstones combine all those subjects to create ever-expanding worlds.” Alison’s interactive installation “We Have Merely Been Detected” interprets brain activity in real-time, creating “connective moments of vulnerability and empathy through the inner mechanisms of our daily thoughts.”
Alison’s grant-winning work includes four interactive installations: “It Is Yesterday,” where participants exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen created by cyanobacteria; “Tethers,” where sensors and silicone transmit the thump of participants’ heartbeats, creating a visceral experience of the body’s rhythm; “Survival Tactics—Body Heat,” which uses heat sensors to detect the presence of the viewer; and “We Have Merely Been Detected,” mentioned above.
Danielle O’Malley
[Image: Headshot, Danielle O’Malley]
Combining upcycled materials with industrial surplus, Montana-based ceramic artist Danielle O’Malley creates large-scale, site-specific sculptural installations that explore the ecological impact of industrialization. “My work is rooted in an environmental consciousness that derives from my concern for the Earth’s rapidly declining health,” says Danielle. “I use it to highlight the misuse and abuse that we (humans from Western industrialization through present day) inflict on local and global natural ecologies.”
Growing up in a rural location, Danielle learned to garden, preserve food, and care for livestock. “As an adult, reflecting on these experiences that influenced my values and heightened my sensitivity to local environments, I am especially perceptive of our hazardous climate,” she says. Works like “Materials in Motion 1” offer a warped vision of the American landscape, coal carts forever rumbling across the vast, rusty expanse. This piece and its sister sculpture, “Materials in Motion 2,” offer a glimpse into the iconography of our industrialized Western landscape. “My large-scale work offers my viewers a space to reflect on our hazardous environmental situation,” says Danielle. “I hope that my passion for making, my love for the earth, and my delight in observing the world around me, in combination with my work, will encourage people to join me in reconsidering our daily routines.”
Danielle’s grant-winning work includes the sculptural installations “An Unstable Foundation” and “A Precarious Situation,” which highlight the instability of plastic bags and the precarity of our global ecosystem, respectively; “Caged,” a sculpture that comments on destructive fishing traps; and the above-mentioned “Materials in Motion 1” and “Materials in Motion 2.”
Jessie Rodriguez
“Film has always been my gateway to a larger world,” says “official film nerd” Jessie Rodriguez, who crafts every detail of her stop-motion films by hand, right down to the hidden pull tabs that facilitate the movement of beating paper hearts and wriggling mermaid tails.
“It is indeed a very laborious process to make a [stop-motion] film,” says the Denver artist, who calls her shorts “hand-printed movies” because of the stamp-and-print—or linocut—method she uses to create the skeletons, birds, and sea creatures that scuttle freely across her work. “The amount of time it takes, from conception to completion, could be days, weeks, or months, depending on the piece,” Jessie continues, explaining that her ideas undergo extensive storyboarding sessions before either the knife or the camera appear. “Through my animations, I have confronted personal experiences of loss, death, and violence,” she adds when asked to share the catalyst behind her chimerical shorts. “It can be a very profound process to work through my thoughts and feelings around an event, as I cannot hide from my art; however, other pieces can be pure joy to create as I tap into playful absurdism.”
Jessie’s grant-winning work includes five hand-printed movies: “The Satellite,” a robot–starring music video set in space; “Mermaid’s Dressing Room,” a fishy, peep-show-inspired strip tease; “Abrupt Knife,” where Jessie processes a traumatic event; “Siempre en mi Corazon,” a moving tribute to a friend who passed during the pandemic; and “Crane Builds a Nest,” a nod to pandemic-era panic buying.
Nastassja Swift
Virginia-based textile artist Nastassja Swift uses dyed wool to create striking soft sculptures that explore womanhood, spirituality, community, and geographical histories. “Inspired by West African masks and Yoruba ritual practices, these needle-felted and fiber-based portraits morph into a form of storytelling that re-interpret who can be worshiped, challenge archived histories, and narrate Black stories, experiences, and memories,” says Nastassja.
Her work spotlights the often unseen labors, rituals, and rights of passage that Black women and girls experience across eras and geographies. “My work has and will always involve a visual, coded language that translates to and is inspired by African diasporic communities,” says Nastassja, who pulls “from the culture and history of specific spaces where we exist/existed,” including West Africa and the American South.
Nastassja’s grant-winning work includes five needle-felted sculptures: “so I filled my nest with flowers from your garden,” informed by Yoruba spiritual practices; “Passage, when momma lets my braids flow down my back,” which acknowledges hair braiding as a rite of passage for young Black girls; “Turning Seeds,” a performance mask inspired by the shared lineage of populations in West Africa and the American South; “Indigo Mask 4,” one of six performance masks included in Nastassja’s youth-led Cleveland Parade Project; and “Your Banks Are Red Honey Where the Moon Wanders,” a bewitching self-portrait tribute to Ntozake Shange’s novel “Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo” (1982).
Jordan Vinyard
“My work is about re-establishing the virtue of the physical body,” says Jordan Vinyard, whose machine-like sculptures satirize our contemporary romance with technology. “Mutilated by tiny cameras, filters, and split screens, and segmented by data, we have ironically become posthuman and subhuman,” she continues.
Working with kinetic steel parts, LEDs, and reactionary sensors, Jordan creates installations and performance pieces that explore gender, sexuality, linguistics, and social media through a technological lens. “I believe technology can be utilized to re-humanize by prompting an audience to begin asking not ‘What is this thing doing?’ but rather ‘What am I doing that makes that thing do what it’s doing?’” she says. “This engagement is central to the work and acts as an alarm for societal reboot, where viewers are asked to recognize the deep need for humanistic responsibility and presence within a technological and numerically driven culture.”
Jordan’s grant-winning work includes five kinetic sculptures: “Modern Relationships,” which examines interpersonal connections through a social media lens; “All the King's Horses,” a set of silicone sculptures that explore the idea of aftermath; “Kissing Booth,” an unsettling technological interpretation of intimacy; “Hood Ornament,” a Cadillac-door construction that addresses gender discrepancies in machinery; and “Influencer,” a clever repudiation of social media stars and their bleating fans.
All photos published with permission of the artist(s); featured graphics for NOT REAL ART 2024 Grant Winners by David Schwartz.
Want to be featured on NOT REAL ART? Email editor@notrealart.com with a short introduction and a link to your online portfolio or three images of your work.
