Keita Morimoto (born 1990, Osaka, Japan) is a Japanese artist renowned for his cityscapes and portraits. He immigrated to Canada in 2006, earned his BFA from OCAD University in 2012, and returned to Japan in 2021. Now based in Tokyo, Morimoto engages deeply with the techniques and themes of Baroque lighting, early 20th-century American Realism, and pre-modern Genre Painting. By referencing these historical movements, he reimagines contemporary urban life, transforming ordinary streets into extraordinary narratives. Through the symbolic use of light, he merges its sacred and natural connotations with the stark realities of consumerism and industrial culture, creating works that resonate with both historical depth and modern complexity. 

Morimoto’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada, K1 Musea, Powerlong Art Museum, Art Gallery of Peterborough, The Power Plant, and Fort Wayne Museum of Art. His pieces are part of the permanent collections at the Shiga Museum of Art, Arts Maebashi, High Museum of Art, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and ICA Miami.

Jay Gard explores form and ornament as fundamental elements of visual culture. From architectural details in the built environment—such as molding profiles, stucco motifs, or the f-shaped sound hole of string instruments—he develops autonomous sculptures through enlargement, isolation, and recombination. His work combines constructive grids and industrial supports with expressive, gestural curves and color-theoretical decisions; recurring is the analysis of historical models, including their palettes, as seen in Sanssouci. Since the 2020s, his earlier geometric approach has shifted toward more open, baroque-like swirls. Frequent materials include aluminum, plywood, and ceramics. Fabrication traces—welds, screws, cut edges, paint splashes, and splatters—remain intentionally visible and make the artist’s hand legible despite a design-level precision.

His work has been shown at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (2020), Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center, Vilnius (2017), and Museum Gunzenhauser, Chemnitz (2019). In 2023, he realized the sculpture Sanssouci, a five-meter-tall public artwork for the forecourt of the State of Brandenburg’s Investment Bank. The large-scale work Plywood was created for Chemnitz European Capital of Culture 2025. In the same year, he presented the monumental sculpture Baroque Schnörkel at Pilane Sculpture Park on the Swedish island of Tjörn.

Rose Eken works with a distinctive sensitivity to the traces left behind by people and cultures. Her practice moves across sculpture, installation, and ceramic painting. The starting point for her work can be found in the remnants of Copenhagen punk concerts, which she helped clean up after as a teenager. Cigarette butts, beer cans, scraps of clothing, forgotten phones, and other fragments of nightlife became, for her, symbols of the energy and community of punk culture. This fascination has since evolved into a broader exploration of the material and emotional imprints of everyday life, expressed through detailed recreations of often overlooked objects in hand‑painted ceramics. Clay
in particular, with its unpredictable nature and inherent imperfections, plays a central role in her artistic process.

She shapes and paints objects from concert venues, kitchens, studios, and other everyday spaces, often arranging them in systematic grids reminiscent of scientific catalogues. In doing so, her works take on an anthropological or archaeological character, preserving the fleeting and informal as cultural-historical relics.

“I paint places and things that I’d like to see clearly, to experience and enter into. Once materialized, I can go into it with my body and new things emerge. The landscape of what I see is modified whenever I have a new experience. These paintings remind me that I compose the world I see, and being moved by some impact of that world, the way I’m seeing it changes.

Seeing something is touching it. I lend my body to the visible world to convert it into painting; painting then returns to shape how I see the world.” — Nina Molloy

Nina Molloy (b. Bangkok, Thailand; lives and works in New York) received a BFA from New York University in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Nina Molloy: These Griefs, These Gardens, at Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA (2025); Shrine, curated by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Ph.D., Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary  Art and Co-director of the Asian American Art Initiative, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University; Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA (2023) and select group exhibitions include Under the Talking Tree, curated by Kathy Huang, KUNSTHAL N, Copenhagen (2025); Studiolo, curated by Kathy Huang, Adler Beatty, New York, NY (2025); Beginnerland, Medici Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2024); Spirit House, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA (2024); The Descendants, K11 Foundation, Hong Kong, China (2023); and Wonder Women, curated by Kathy Huang, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2022).