Abstract Picnic
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Members
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Abstract Picnic 〰️ Members 〰️
Billy Bilbro has been a ceramic artist for over 30 years. She creates narrative sculptures using stream of consciousness illustrations with personal and collective symbolism to simplify complex ideas, to reflect the minutiae of her inner world and the expansiveness of universal concepts. Currently based in Madrid, New Mexico, Bilbro draws inspiration from the high desert landscape where she lives and works. Her daily conversations with the crows and her meandering explorations through the desert inform her practice, bringing an element of natural observation and interspecies connection to her work. This environment provides both solitude for deep creative work and a profound sense of place that permeates her artistic vision. Her current body of work has expanded to include performance, illustration, and multi-media installations. Billy often tricks people into thinking that she is more serious than she really is. Follow Billy on Instagram.
JESHAKA (pronounced Jes-Ha-Ka), aka Jes LaVecchia, is a mixed media artist, Reiki Master, Meow Wolf Project Coordinator & Pittsburgh native living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In line with the idea that nothing should be taken seriously except for self-love, her body of work explores & celebrates the gift of the human experience through a whole lot of hotdogs. As Jes has traversed her healing journey over the last several years, hotdogs took center stage in her art as the quintessential embodiment of what it means to be human, especially American: horrifying, delicious, sensual, hilarious, revolting and everything in-between. She uses them to help spread joy & share the wisdom she’s gained along the way. In 2024, Jes received the lifetime title of Hotdog Ambassador by the National Hotdog & Sausage Council and revisited a mixed media style that is prevalent in her artwork today. Find her on instagram @jeshaka
Lori Swartz makes art across media because the universe is too weird to be contained in a single discipline. She make things. Clay things that fire and hold. Painted things that stare back. Sculptural things that occupy space the way a good story occupies memory. Lori performs, writes, collaborates with her creative co-conspirator in a venture we call Mudmittens (don't ask, or ask!). It is promiscuous devotion—one grand love affair with making, expressed in multiple positions. Find her work in galleries nationwide, @loriMetals or loriMetals.com, or at her studio in Madrid, New Mexico, where the sky is still having that affair and everyone's invited. The sky is in love with the earth….and with you. Don’t miss the whole sordid, glorious thing.
Mudmittens is a collaboration between Lori Swartz and Billy Bilbro exploring new and old mediums through questions of identity, time, death, presence, and connection. They use raw video, images, and projections focusing on the finite (or is it infinite? )nature of time and place. Through hand drawn animation, spontaneous interactive performances with nature, and found object installations, Lori and Billy aim to highlight the continued need for raw, analog, unpolished expression as we move into the digital unknown.