Author: Aria Sorell Vantine

The art of Carlotta Schaivio aka YaTii Talisman, moves fluidly across disciplines, building a practice rooted in curiosity, intuition, and layered meaning. Working within contemporary multimedia art, she explores identity, transformation, and the meeting point between nature and technology. Her approach is not confined to a single medium. Painting, jewelry design, fashion, installation, and visual storytelling all sit comfortably within her practice, each informing the other. What connects these paths is a desire to create immersive environments—spaces where symbolism, material, and emotion intersect. Her projects have appeared in galleries and cultural settings across Europe, Africa, and the United States, reflecting…

Born in Cuba in 1983, Reynier Leyva Novo approaches art as a method of inquiry—one that questions how power, memory, and belief take shape in everyday life. Working across sculpture, installation, sound, painting, and research-driven processes, Novo examines how histories are constructed, erased, and quietly sustained. His practice often focuses on symbols tied to authority and ideology, asking what remains once their public certainty fades. Rather than presenting fixed narratives, he works through fragments: dust, sound, damaged architecture, and overlooked records. These materials become entry points into broader reflections on collective experience, especially within the Caribbean and diasporic contexts shaped…

Alexandra Jicol creates from a place of connection—between inner life and outer world, between memory and the present moment. She grew up in Bucharest in a period marked by limitation and social pressure. Her early years held contrasts: the quiet of mountains and rural landscapes set against the restraint of city life shaped by control. This duality left an imprint. You can sense it in how her paintings hold both calm and tension at once. There is space, yet also compression; softness beside unease. Jicol approaches art as an act of observing, feeling, and translating lived experience into color and…

Julian Jollon is an American artist whose journey into art has unfolded in chapters rather than a straight line. He trained in Fine Arts, Photography, and Painting, and originally envisioned a future rooted in studio practice. Life redirected that vision. For more than a decade, he worked in Hospital Epidemiology, a profession shaped by research, structure, and the protection of human health. During those years, he also underwent a liver transplant, an experience that reshaped his perception of time, vulnerability, and what it means to keep going. When he returned to art, it was with focus and intention. His work…

Working from Athens, Greece, Vicky Tsalamata builds prints that look in two directions at once. They draw from literature, myth, and moral narrative, yet they stay fixed on the frictions of contemporary life—how people relate, what power protects, and what gets traded away in the process. Her ongoing dialogue with Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine isn’t a reenactment or a nod for its own sake. It’s a tool. Balzac’s wide social lens becomes Tsalamata’s way of reading the present: patterns of behavior, public performance, quiet cruelty, and the everyday negotiations that keep systems running. The key is her voice. There’s intelligence…

Vandorn Hinnant was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1953, and his practice has always lived at the intersection of making and thinking. From the start, art wasn’t just a skill to him—it was a tool for asking questions about how we live, what we value, and what shapes us. He earned a B.A. in Art Design from North Carolina A&T State University, then deepened his command of three-dimensional form through sculpture studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. That mix—design discipline paired with sculptural training—shows up throughout his career: his work is built with clarity and intention,…

Sonja Kalb comes to painting through an unusual doorway: engineering. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, she started out in textile and design engineering, a field built on exactness—systems, structure, materials, and the quiet logic of how things hold together. That background still shows up in her art, but not as stiffness. It shows up as clarity. She understands construction, and she understands restraint. What makes her work feel fresh is that she doesn’t treat discipline as a cage. She uses it as a base, then steps past it. In her abstractions, control and release sit side by side. There’s planning in…

Haeley Kyong doesn’t make art you solve. She makes art you register. There’s a difference. Some work invites analysis before anything else happens. Kyong’s work moves in the opposite direction—it lands in the body first, then the mind catches up. It’s built on a quiet confidence that art can reach us before we find the words for what we’re experiencing, before we file it under meaning, before we decide what it “should” be. Kyong grew up in South Korea, and later spent formative years in New York, studying at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and…

Sylvia Nagy works in the space where hand-built skill meets bigger frameworks—where a ceramic form can carry private feeling while still echoing ideas about technology, process, and a world in motion. Her background moves between industrial design and fine art, and you can feel that dual training in how she treats material: with respect for structure, but also room for intuition. She studied at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, completing an MFA in Silicet Industrial Technology and Art, a program that honed her understanding of fabrication and how concepts translate into physical reality. Over time, that technical…

Nicola Mastroserio doesn’t make work to keep pace with what’s “in.” The studio, for him, isn’t a place to answer demand or anticipate what will appeal to buyers. He’s after something slower and harder to pin down—questions that don’t expire. Art becomes his way of investigating what lies beneath the visible: not the look of things, but their underlying nature. What he returns to, again and again, is essence—how reality is formed, how it’s experienced, and how it might be approached beyond the noise of everyday surfaces. That focus gives his art a distinct tone. It feels contemplative without turning…