Past CMAI Artists

Brittany Severance is a Worcester-based multimedia artist and an assistant professor of communication at Worcester State University. Her ongoing series Blind/Blend explores the relationship between vision and understanding motivated by her own degenerative vision impairment. Uncorrected, Severance’s nearsightedness limits her visual acuity to approximately eight inches which extends to a few feet with correction. Reflective of her visual engagement with the world, she simulates her uncorrected visual experience by photographing her daily life using a soft focus and a shallow depth of field. To this end, Severance subverts the viewer’s expectations of what it means for a photograph to accurately serve as a document of the world around us.

Nancy Diessner is a Florence, MA, based printmaker who creates etchings and sculptural wall pieces. She is a dedicated environmentalist who works in low-toxic printmaking processes. Diessner taught as a professor for seventeen years before leaving academia in 2010 to create Dog’s Eye Print Studio and to teach as a core faculty member at Zea Mays Printmaking in Northampton.

The artist explores the intersection between sculpture, photography, painting and printmaking in her work. Her imagery is created through various alternative photographic and printmaking processes that use UV light to expose film to plates that are developed with water, which she then prints like traditional etchings. She frequently works back into the plates after they are made, and prints the plates onto paper in multiple colored layers.

She draws inspiration from rowing and the river environment. Moving her long, thin boat over the surface of water, Diessner has stated, “…my boat becomes an extension of my studio.” In her recent work she has used paper made from invasive plant species for her artwork. That paper and the images printed on it are shaped, reworked, and adjusted over and over around the hull of a retired wooden rowing shell until the piece is completed. At that point, these paper boats rise and hang onto a wall. Inside are images of plants, human bodies, and animals, which rest and float within the cocoon of a plant-fibered boat.

Cesar Rodrigues is a Worcester-based abstract artist who responds to the material properties of acrylic paint. Though explorations in color, texture, gravity, and viscosity, his paintings are recognized for their sophisticated and vibrant palettes. Rodrigues considers his body of work a metaphysical representation of what lies outside of our perceived reality.

At an early age Rodrigues was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy which causes progressive muscle weakness. When he could no longer hold a paintbrush Easterseals Massachusetts helped engineer a custom-built assistive device that pours paint and rotates a canvas using Bluetooth technology. Today, he is a beacon of inspiration in the greater Central Massachusetts art community.

Hank von Hellion is a Worcester artist who works with street art, graffiti, illustration, installation, and photography. Having painted several outdoor murals in Worcester, he will create a site-specific installation at the Worcester Art Museum. It will respond to museums as places of contradiction, both empowering and at times elitist, in light of his own experiences as a developing artist. Von Hellion’s work is informed by his experiences growing up in the punk subculture, and reconciling his understanding of his art and identity in light of this. He says, this experience “shaped a virulent belief that action in the face of injustice is the responsibility of each and every human being and should be something we demand from ourselves at any personal cost.”

Von Hellion is Managing Director of the Worcester PopUp at the Jean McDonough Arts Center (JMAC). He is a freelance artist and muralist, workshop instructor, and creative consultant and independent curator for businesses and nonprofit organizations.

American | naciremA 1 is a metaphorical mirror — a reversed and fractured image of America across the racial divide. Artist Toby Sisson created this text-based work to explore ideas about ‘the other’ and author W.E.B. DuBois’ concept of Double Consciousness, in which black Americans see themselves reflected in, yet distorted and diminished by the dominant culture. American | naciremA 1 challenges the conventional perspective of a unified nationality.

The artist notes, “When I was young, my father was a member of the Nacirema Club in my Midwestern hometown. The ‘Nac’ was one of a network of black social clubs throughout the country that served our communities when many private clubs did not welcome non-white members. The reversal of the word ‘American’ into ‘Nacirema’ was intentionally political, undermining the status quo.”

Toby Sisson is Associate Professor and Director of the Studio Art Program at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Sisson’s studio practice explores complex themes of race and representation through mixed media drawing, painting and printmaking with elemental materials — wax, ink, charcoal and oil on paper or wood. Her recent series engages the poetry and prose of African American writers, re-inscribing their words through an abstract visual vocabulary centered on marginalized identities and the struggle for equality.

Read more about Toby Sisson and her work