Heather Hobler-Keene, is known for her small, richly colored works on wood panel, works that are at once paintings and sculpture. The artist meticulously builds her surfaces using layers of casein paint to achieve a saturated surface of solid color, and then uses a fine jigsaw to add and subtract elements from her compositions, maintaining a special interest in the periphery, the edge, that which is seen out of the corner of the eye.

In "Somewhere Over", Hobler-Keene adds the colors and curved symbol of the rainbow to her visual vocabulary, with an eye to the Color Field painters as well as to the basics of vision and nature. Describing her interest in exploring, recreating and expanding upon the relations between the curved, colored shapes that make up rainbows, Hobler-Keene says: “These works are distorted reiterations, simply repeated, duplicating the original copy.” She quotes Rene Descartes, whose famous investigation into rainbows is notable because of the famous French philosopher, mathematician and scientist’s decision to approach his complex subject by simplifying it to the study of one droplet of water and its interaction with light. “Direct my thinking in an orderly way, by beginning with the objects that were the simplest and easiest to understand, in order to climb little by little, gradually, to knowledge of the most complex.” (From De l’arc-en-ciel (On the Rainbow), Rene Descartes, 1637).

Josh Aster, uses sumi and calligraphic ink on vellum to create drawings that have geometric and architectural elements, teetering like scaffolding with a mind of its own, or skeletal, organic forms, extending into mysterious space. Aster lets his idiosyncratic lines build on themselves, creating magnetized-looking shapes that call to mind aerial views and super-structures. He explains, "I am interested in using architecture as a metaphor for psychological constructs - buildings sheathed in glass reflect, repel and distort the city, which surrounds them. Beneath the skin of glass stands a skeletal apparatus devised of complex patterns, joints and repetitive elements - there is a humanness revealed by these structures."

Aster is currently beginning his first year in UCLA’s Fine Arts Graduate Program. He received his B.S. in Studio Art from Skidmore College in 1998, and pursued his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1997, and at the Vermont Studio Center in 2000.