Global Conversation 2020

This painting portrays waves made from one-use plastic bags responsible for the growing mountains of plastic in our lives and in our seas that are caused by climate change.

The images of a grandfather clock, a tank and a baby doll allude to the limited amount of time available to mitigate the events damaging the environment we are leaving our children.

So, do you need a bag?

Collectively, we must reduce the burden on future generations or face the frightening realization our children's children will have at checkout.

Blind participation all adds up in the end.

Kalejaye O. Tosin creates life on paper with his photo-realistic portraits.

This young black woman draws on the colonizing of black female bodies within patriarchal capitalism.

His work is largely based on story telling, historical documentation and creating deep connections through photo-realism, working mostly with graphite and charcoal pencils.

This photorealist drawing asks for a kind of quiet that leads to justice for Breonna Taylor and count-less other victims of police brutality.

Kalejaye O. Tosin, a Nigerian self-taught artist, wants you to close your eyes and imagine a better world not only for humanity but also for yourself. This realistic portrait drawing titled 'Self-Acclaimed' illustrates the importance of listening to children's voices and asks the viewer to choose peace, universal harmony and global cooperation in helping awaken the consciousness of others. Tosin's portrait further intends to instill a feeling of peace that children have nothing to fear and can silence this fear by  encouraging a shift in the nature of ongoing conversations about what we can do to create a better world. We can start by meeting our commitment to placing our children and young people at the centre of the conversation. Listening to their ideas and emotions. Shouldn't a 'Global Conversation' include our children?

Jeramy Turner’s paintings are about history, society, power and the abuse of power. In her painting, ‘The Meating’ we see exposed bare-naked, a deadened world, polluted and destroyed beyond comprehension by perpetrators of catastrophe and madness who shirk in fear of their potential public image online. The vultures spotlight a symbolic gesture about the beginnings of the decaying process for America, about the horrors inflicted on this earth by American imperialism and other ruling nations. 

Simultaneously, 'The Meating' is about capitalism and the need to transform that which appears immutable before we're left with the remains of dead meat and bones.

This new daring and surreal work by Jeramy Turner made during the early stages of the Corona Pandemic, represents the notion of backward pharmaceutical companies and the reform they oppose. While we see jolly commercials of a happy family on TV, in the background, Jeramy Turner sees a new miracle drug being experimented on animals with unknown deformities. One might believe the intention of Big Pharma is to make our lives immediately better but money-making capitalists are only concerned about one thing; the price they don’t tell you about.

Artist Jeramy Turner takes us behind the curtain with 'Council of the Gods' and exposes as vividly as one can the underside of power, in a surrealistic depiction of pharmaceutical capitalism.

Artist Guvanchmyrat Hojaniyazov (born 1972 in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan) expresses a calm lyrical composition with hidden playful anagrams to highlight the absurdity and locality of the theme, meaning, and plot behind his 2018 work titled “Non Childish Games”. Guvanchmyrat’s work sends a  message that no matter the age, the corporate nationality or beach sand we live near, it still applies in the real world that childhood is fleeting. The monochrome undertone of the background draws more attention to the child but creates this contrast between the sandbox, where life is vibrant and a digital tech world, where life is colorless.

The digital world turns the real world into monochrome. Children play non-childish games?

In this mixed media on board painting, we're invited to share the emotional capacity found in the soul-stirring eyes of this immigrant child. Claudia Nki Zamberia, a 27 year old artist from Kenya currently living in Florence, Italy, lends her voice to narratives that go unsaid, exploring the immigration crisis, social contexts, and the nature of our psyche through many of her paintings.

With pencil, acrylic, foam and plastic, Claudia Nki Zamberia frames this tragic realization of an immigrant child being left alone on a lifeboat somewhere in the middle of the immigration crisis.

Brigitte Dietz, an artist born and based in Heidelberg, Germany paints to explore the paradox of human beings living in communities they do not represent yet freely discuss. This painting titled ‘The Ignoramus’ does not merely aim to transmit a statement, but challenges the observer to look deeper into why this child is pointing the finger at the POTUS. We must think courageously, as this artwork invites the viewer towards an uncomfortable conversation. 

Whether it is comfortable or not, we cannot overlook the act of this child pointing, nor the unaffected demeanor of President Donald Trump.

Depending on how you respond to both, the observer might learn something new about themselves in their own reaction. This tension is a concept often found in Brigitte Dietz’s work.

In these confusing times, where our minds are screaming and our bodies spinning, we ask if you are you pulled in deeply, where the stars of the flag are falling inward or do you see it another way, where new stars are rising up and emerging from a crisis-filled world? Philip Michael Wolfson re-examines these forms and ideas of the early 20th century Modernist movements in his work the ‘Vortex of Meaning’, and through a variety of modules, particularly Constructivism and Futurism, he allows you to find your own meaning analyzing this two-way movement and geometric distortion of the American flag.

Within the context of a pandemic, this conceptual abstraction can be a swirling and gapping vortex of mixed emotions.