Aja'ib

Earth Ængel (they/them) creates from their own fluid experience, navigating a fantastical queer ecology through the dysphoria of hetero-centric late capitalism. Earth does not attempt to shame and scold these man-made values into submission but instead ingests them. They launder their consumption, laying by its deathbed—grieving, consoling the outcome—its funeral—and then resurrect it into the archive of predetermined aesthetics, bringing it into the queer afterlife. By examining the roots of aesthetics and material use in their empirical value, Earth Ængel uses heat-related practices to melt it all down.

Heat plays a pivotal role in Earth Ængel’s practice, acting as both a literal and symbolic force for transformation. Heat doesn’t just melt materials; it disintegrates rigid structures—whether societal expectations, cultural systems, or personal identity—and creates the possibility for new forms to emerge. Just as materials are softened,

restructured, and remade, so too are the binaries of gender, identity, culture, and even economic or political systems reformed into something more fluid, open, and expansive. This process of melting and remaking allows for the regeneration of new possibilities for existence, where identities, systems, and ideas can be seen as dynamic, evolving, and resistant to fixed categories.

The totchkey, surface, or decorative elements, play an essential role in this vision. These often intricate embellishments go beyond ornamentation; they are markers of human complexity, resistance, and identity. The totchkey directly challenges the minimalist, modernist values often celebrated in contemporary design, which tend to erase or simplify identity and experience into a uniform, isolated form. Instead, Earth Ængel embraces decoration as a form of storytelling, a means of reclaiming space for the complexities and nuances of being. This decorative act speaks to a rejection of the exclusionary tendencies found in Modernism and Contemporary Art, and instead celebrates the fullness of human experience in a more Activated Art movement.

Earth Ængel is a recent MFA graduate of Goldsmiths University in London, having completed their undergraduate BFA at Parsons School of Design. They have received awards from The Arts Council of England, Cerf+, Goldsmiths University, and the NYC Parks Department to develop their work. Their pieces have been exhibited in New York, London, Mexico City, Chicago, and Cyprus. Earth Ængel lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, with their partner Rob Rose, where together they form the art duo Ængel-Rose.

Sammy Bennett (b. 1990 , Ypsilanti, MI) is an interdisciplinary artist that works across painting, printmaking, textiles, and installation to depict an intimate and idiosyncratic world. Surrounding neighborhoods and apartments become both a backdrop and overarching portrait of the artist, as he employs materials sourced from the city and his own family's history. His rural Michigan, blue collar background and experiences living in Brooklyn manufactures strong dichotomies between analog and digital, country and city, high and low culture, inside and outside, soft and hard. His works often reference quotidian settings such as bedroom interiors with vibrant wood grain flooring, dirty windswept sidewalks and cluttered grassland parks. These seemingly banal spaces pumped full of melodrama give recognition to everyday life as a constant struggle, while his subjects are surrounded by large swaths of pattern, conveying an existential loneliness and dark undertone offset by humor, saturated color and a playful collage-like aesthetic. Littered in these Dutch Vanitas-esque landscapes are an assortment of scavenged mass produced consumer products interwoven with personally worn textiles, which tap into a shared collective memory, and allow his personal identity to become absorbed as another commodity.

Bennett received a BFA from Kendall College of Art and Design in 2012 and an MFA from Michigan State University in 2016. He received the Stanley and Selma Hollander Graduate Fellowship in Studio Art in 2015 along with a Summer Research Development Fellowship from Michigan State in 2014. Bennett attended the Scoula International de Graficia residency in Venice, Italy in both 2012, 2016 and 2025 and ChaNorth Artist Residency in 2022. Recent exhibitions include: All Street (NYC), Strata Gallery (NM), Underdonk (NYC), Ann Marie Sculpture Garden (MD), Local Projects (NYC), and Equity Gallery (NYC), The Eli and Broad Art Museum (MI); Satellite Art Fair (FL), Ortega y Gasset (NYC), He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Aruni Dharmakirthi

Aruni Dharmakirthi is a Sri Lankan-American artist based in New York City. Dharmakirthi’s work explores personal mythology through quilted tapestries and soft sculpture. Content and form are stitched together into works that resemble collage. Their practice utilizes materials such as Memory foam, felt patches, old clothing, and recycled fabrics. Dharmakirthi has participated as an artist in residence at the Bric Workspace Residency (NY), and Centrum Emerging Artist In Residence (WA). Their works have been exhibited nationally and internationally. They are currently participating in the Canopy Program (NY) an artist year-long mentorship.

Rhonda Khalifeh is a Syrian-American artist working with textiles to investigate surface and the

ways in which it negotiates with, protects, and betrays the human body. She utilizes printmaking, dyeing, sewing, and digital collage to create site-responsive installations, multi-layered assemblages, and artist books. Drawing from her personal experience with assimilation in the U.S. and from stories of the Syrian Diaspora, Khalifeh uses materials with intentionality to invoke feelings such as comfort, belonging, and loss. As she layers and reworks different materials, she reflects on safety, security, and the right to movement while questioning what or who gets left behind and what endures.

Rhonda Khalifeh is a Syrian-American interdisciplinary artist based in the Hudson Valley. She received her MFA from the fiber department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2017 and has been an artist in residence at SVA Bio Art Lab, Textile Arts Center, and Center for Book Arts. Khalifeh’s work has been exhibited across the country and can be found in several public collections including the Met Museum, New York Public Library, and Fine Arts Library at Harvard University. She published Project Z (2018) and Project Z Book II (2022) with Open Projects Press.

Ayqa Khan 

Ayqa Khan is a textile artist and fashion designer based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work is primarily interested in nets, knot making and building with fabric strips cut from scavenged overflow. Sustainable, communal and collaborative describe Khan’s studio. Khan’s work in textiles is technique based, instinctively attentive to flow, drape, mass and known for using connections as markings in the textile. Their interest in nets and chainmail is as present in their work as their yearning to mend the ruptures and quakes of a world in peril.