Devin Troy Strother knows how to throw a party on a canvas with his mixed media explosions of color and cut paper. He’s a California artist transplanted to Brooklyn, and he’s one to watch. When I look at his work, I hear loudness (in a good way).

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Los Angeles-based Taiwanese artist Sean Chao creates curious and imaginative creatures in a world filled with wonder. Each mixed-media piece combines sculpture and illustration to capture an odd moment frozen in time, and each tells a story of its own, some strangely nostalgic, some delightfully whimsical.

Beth Hoeckel, a Baltimore-based artist, has created some wildly experimental and wonderfully psychedelic works over her career. Her figures tend either directly challenge or ignore the viewer, referencing themes of identity and perception. Bright and bold, these are insistent images. Do they remind anyone else of Run, Lola, Run?

Artist Julia Tepasse, aka Großstadtheidi, lives in Heimathafen, Hamburg, where she studies fine arts at the University of Lueneburg, with a particular interest in minimal, abstract and post-modern art.

What art can wash your guilt away? This is the question Rachel Kilback explores in her mixed-media pieces using found animal remains, garbage and other items she finds in the wilds of British Columbia. Vaginas and the human relationship with other animals are constant themes in her ever-changing work.

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Cristina N. Paulos creates interesting, emotional artwork using Mirror Twin cartoon characters and titillating vixen female imagery. She now has an online shop.

Lucy Fahey has put together some amazing mixed media portraits, combining colour pencil drawing and photography digitally assembled. Using a hyper real style, she has accentuated facial features usually associated as traditional markers of beauty. The portraits blur the boundary between the real and an absurd distortion of the truth.

Directed by mixed-media artist Japeth Mennes, the vibe of the new Judson Claiborne video, Moonraker, constantly shifts from an eerie and unsettling darkness to kaleidoscopic bursts, leaving you with a quick glimpse of your surroundings followed by the warm glow of a secret message.

Kim Piotrowski’s vaguely representational mixed-media paintings emphasize the process of their creation, with each splatter, smear, drip, and brushstroke as important to the form as the composition and the layering of colors and values. It reminds me of the work of Steven LaRose, who we mentioned a while back.

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Femke Hiemstra’s beautifully rendered and haunting images transcend those of typical neo-surrealist fairytale artists — her mixed-media paintings and graphite drawings of anthropomorphized fruits, vegetables, toy parts, and animals reference retro packaging from around the world and have an expressive complexity about them, encompassing entire narratives within single panels.

Shelby Fischer is a mixed media artist living in Central Virginia. Her work is beautifully realised, laborious in its detail and subtle in its colorings. ‘My mixed media collages and assemblages blend surrealism with otherworldly imagery’, she says. ‘Each work is a fragment of an intuitive story — odd and mysterious narratives that are familiar echoes of a long lost, often twisted fantasy or nightmare’.

Zeljka Fuderer Levak is a graduate student at the Art Academy In Osijek, Croatia. She’s studying new media, but paints and illustrates on the side: ‘I have made short videos for MTV Adria last year and I’m also doing t-shirts stickers, posters, urban interventions, and installations’.

Barry W. Hughes is an Irish media artist who has exhibited both digital and analogue photography, video and web-based projects throughout Ireland and internationally. Hughes’ practice involves the use of time-based media in exploring the conceptual themes of his work, such as psychological states relating to the process of time as interpreted by physical activity. He currently lives and works in Dublin.

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