Jillian Mayer steeps her artistic practice in the verisimilitude of a generation that came of age in the 1980s. Mayer calls upon drawing, photography, video, online platforms, installation, and performance to enact scenarios of apathy, dysfunction, and disillusionment. Indoctrinated into expectations of upward mobility, instant gratification, and the succinct finesse of a television sitcom and web experience, Mayer critiques the dissonance between her childhood optimism and the state of contemporary culture with an erudite playfulness. In 2010, her video Scenic Jogging was one of the 25 selections for the Guggenheim’s Youtube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video and was exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany. Recent solo projects include Family Matters at David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2011), Love Trips at World Class Boxing, Miami (2011), Erasey Page at the Bass Museum of Art (2012) and Precipice/PostModem at Locust Projects (Miami) for which the gallery received a Harpo Foundation grant. Her video works have been premiered at galleries and museums internationally and film festivals such as SXSW and Sundance. She was recently featured in Art Papers and in ArtNews discussing identity, Internet and her artistic practices and influences.Mayer is the front woman for #PostModem, a performance collaborative that makes meta-pop music based in art/web theory. Their original songs will be used in a feature length musical film that Mayer is writing, directing and producing in collaboration with Lucas Leyva. The satirical film takes place in the future and tackles digital identity and net neutrality. The film extends to software apps, poetry, installations and Internet experiences.

Nikita Gale is a self-taught conceptual artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a BA in Anthropology (Archaeological Studies) from Yale University and exhibits regularly throughout Atlanta, Georgia and New York City, New York. She was an Artist-in-Residence at The Center for Photography at Woodstock in Woodstock, New York in 2011 and is currently in the Studio Artist Program at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. She currently serves on the board of directors for BurnAway, and Atlanta-based non-profit arts publication.Her work can be found in numerous collections including the Howard Greenberg Gallery collection in New York. Gale has had work featured in ART PAPERS, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Headline News, and Oxford American and has been profiled and reviewed by numerous publications including Frank151 and Artforum. Listen: Interview with WUNC's The State of Things July 16, 2013, Live from Triad Stage

John Q is an idea collective whose name references “John Q. Public.” The “public” is left understood, though the work is considered a kind of public scholarship, and the “Q” is left hanging to reference the group’s interest in queer history and politics. The collective consists of Wesley Chenault, Andy Ditzler, and Joey Orr. John Q has been funded by Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue (New York) and has participated in the 2012 National Queer Arts Festival at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco.

Joey Orr holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an ABD Arts and Sciences Fellow at Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. His dissertation, Practicing the Past: Socially Engaged Remembering in Contemporary Art, looks at cooperative memorial practices at the intersection of memory studies and art history. The study includes a practice component in the context of the collective, John Q, of which he is a founding member. Joey also currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal for Artistic Research (Bern, Switzerland). Past projects have been reviewed by Art Papers, Art in America, ARTnews, Contemporary (UK), Public Art Review and Sculpture magazine, among others.

Wesley Chenault is a certified archivist and head of special collections and archives at Virginia Commonwealth University’s James Branch Cabell Library. His interests in memory, place, and identity take forms as diverse as collection development, exhibitions, public art, teaching, and traditional scholarship. Chenault’s work on Atlanta LGBTQ archives, history, and memory includes the book Gay and Lesbian Atlanta; public artworks, exhibits, and publications with idea collective John Q; and exhibitions at the Atlanta History Center and online through OutHistory.org. He holds a PhD in American studies from the University of New Mexico and a MA in women’s studies from Georgia State University. 

Elsewhere Project | Untitled (Books)

Born and raised in Detroit, Melissa Vandenberg is an artist, educator and curator living in eastern Kentucky. Her recent creative inquires investigate fear, impermance and power with everyday materials like fabric, stickers, temporary tattoos and found objects. Current events, nationalism and ancestry play a fundamental role in her studio practice through imagery of flags, gravestones, life-vests and atomic explosions. Additionally, she is exceptionally fond of mustard and cilantro, not together though.

Elsewhere Project | Sew To Speak

Nick Szuberla multimedia artist and the director of The Prison Poetry Workshop, a national radio series that connects audiences with the genre of prison poetry found within US jails, detention centers and prison. He  works with Appalshop -  a 40 year-old non-profit multi-disciplinary arts and education center in the heart of Appalachia producing original films, video, theater, music and spoken-word recordings, radio, photography, multimedia, and books. Dedicated to the proposition that the world is immeasurably enriched when local cultures garner their resources, including new technologies, to tell their own stories and to listen to the unique stories of others, Appalshop’s education and training programs support communities' efforts to solve their own problems in a just and equitable way.