Alex Lopez earned his MFA degree in sculpture from Alfred University, NY (1998). He taught at Trinity University and The University of Texas, both located in San Antonio before coming to Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Lopez’s work is diverse, ranging from objects and videos to installations. His approach is that of scientist and anthropologist, observing, evaluating, experimenting and mapping spectacular moments and events. Alex’s explorations of social patterns during child development stages forces his audience to question the severity of compromise and conformity with an unsettling contradictory wholeness, as his work moves between factual and confabulatory narratives.

Ruth Root (b. 1967 Chicago, lives New York) graduated from Brown in 1990. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 and subsequently studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, in 2015, and at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, in 2019. She was included in Greater New York, at PS1 in 2000, and in group exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Art, Columbus, the LA County Museum of Art, and the Seattle Art Museum, among others.

Erik Benson makes paintings that are informed by fragments of urban landscape and culture that are found in the everyday. He is particularly attracted to imagery that is ubiquitous within an urban architectonic setting, in which elements of plasticity and temporality are depicted in a suspended state of in-betweeness. It is his intention that these elements incorporate a resonance of a special psycho-geography of place and placelesness that conveys the infrastructure (physically, psychologically, and conceptually) of an urban landscape. An urban sampling of fragment and space, that attempts to express something new about the spaces we inhabit.

Janice Caswell lives and works in New York City. She has had solo shows at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Savannah College of Art and Design, Schroeder Romero (NY) and Matteawan Gallery in Beacon, NY. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions at museums and galleries, including the Weatherspoon Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Marlborough Chelsea, ArtPace (San Antonio), the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Galerie Anne Barault (Paris). In 2017 Janice was awarded an Arts and Letters award and a purchase prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been a fellow at Yaddo, the Maison Dora Maar and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has been featured in several publications including Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information by Manuel Lima and The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, by Katharine Harmon.