The Eclektive
Dárē
Instagram: @daretheartiste
Website: http://daretheartiste.com/
Artist Bio
Dárē is a Nigerian-American visual artist based in Dallas, Texas. With over a decade of experience, he specializes in figurative painting, focusing on emotive portraiture and social realism. His work is deeply influenced by his Nigerian heritage and his experiences living in the West, drawing inspiration from the artistic cultures of Ilé-Ifè, Lagos, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and numerous cities across the United States, where he currently resides. Dárē’s figurative works serve as a response to his internal struggles as an artist, challenging the artistic status quowhile engaging with socio-cultural issues. His paintings are characterized by their rich complexity, depicting figures in a carefully curated tableau vivant, infused with raw emotion and a vivid color palette. His mastery of intricate brushwork, developed over the past decade, allows him to render his subjects with both precision and depth. Using meticulously mixed acrylic paints, he creates dynamic compositions that are both visually striking and culturally resonant. His bold use of color pays homage to his Nigerian roots, reflecting the vibrancy and energy of his heritage. Now based in Dallas, Texas, Dárē has established his studio in North Dallas, where he continues to create powerful, thought-provoking works that bridge personal narrative, cultural identity, and contemporary artistic discourse.
Artist Statement
My practice is grounded in sustained observation and material decision-making, using the fundamental elements of painting to evoke feeling rather than resolving likeness. I approach painting as a time-based, embodied process in which emotion is built through color, light, gesture, composition and surface, allowing the image to captivate the viewer before it can be fully interpreted.
My current body of work is a series of portrait paintings focused on faces and hands as the primary sites of emotional expression. Each painting is a unique encounter, created to recall heightened emotional states through intensity rather than narrative or likeness. My compositions are deliberately confrontational, using cropped framing and compressed space to amplify gesture, expression, and emotional tension. I also use vibrant colors in combination with strong chiaroscuro to heighten drama and presence. These choices draw attention to moments of vulnerability or strength in the faces and hands –– including using bold, unrealistic colors to intensify mood and response. Through this approach, the portraits compel the viewer, sparking an immediate, visceral response.
My portraits are painted with acrylic paint on canvas because of the medium’s versatile nature and its responsiveness to my technique. Acrylic allows me to build multiple layers quickly, which is essential to achieving the softness and subtle transitions ––through rapid brush work–– that define my painting surfaces. Through repeated layering, I can create smooth textures and dramatic shifts in color and light that heighten the emotional presence of the figure.
Rather than using acrylic paint for sharpness or immediacy alone, I employ it to soften edges, deepen shadows, and control contrast in my intense compositions. This approach allows vibrant color and strong chiaroscuro to coexist with delicacy and restraint. The surface becomes a site where intensity and softness are held in tension, reinforcing the emotional weight of the portrait. Through this material process, each painting develops a physical and psychological depth that invites an intimate engagement.
Like a hellebore, chasing the spring, 2024
Acrylic on Canvas, 30×30
Comes in Waves of blue over coral pink, 2025
Acrylic on Canvas, 30x30
Emblazons the sky like fractured light waving goodbye, 2025
Acrylic on Canvas, 24x30
Ryan Semegran
Instagram: @semegransculpts
Artist Bio
Ryan Semegran (b. 2000, Austin, TX) is a Dallas based interdisciplinary artist and curator. Semegran’s artistic practice focuses on the relationship between the body, identity, and the spiritual through immersive live performances, photography, found object sculpture, and video installations. Pulling from their ancestral folklore, Semegran intends to explore the idea of the ritual and how it transforms the way people commune, from person to person and through another plane.
Their work has been featured in institutions and galleries such as Satellite Gallery NYC, Dallas Contemporary, Arts Fort Worth, and the Oak Cliff Cultural Center. Semegran is a 2025 recipient of the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund through the Dallas Museum of Art. Semegran has used these funds to start a project space, 2 BED 1 BATH, inside their apartment in Oak Cliff.
Artist Statement
Since childhood, I have been exposed to the intimate practices of local brujas and witchdoctors, practitioners that my mother and grandmother sought counsel with. They were invited into our homes to cleanse whatever leftover spirits lingered in the space, they protected my sister and I from bad actors and gave my mom a sense of security through very difficult times in our lives. These witches are maintaining a practice that is precolonial, morphed into something that is tangible for the everyday person.
My current body of work views the act of performance as a ritual; conceptual alters to protect me and provide me with support. My upbringing in an interfaith household inspires my work heavily, pulling aspects that are recognizable to the senses. Incense, plant matter, salt, and other materials that carry spiritual weight. I am interested in triggering these senses; smells, sound, touch, and I am interested in how experiencing a specific sense can transport you somewhere. Taking these materials and practices, the visual language I am trying to create is one where I can dissect personal experiences and understand them in their totality. Whether it is my relationship with myself or others, these rituals are acts of clarity and understanding shared with the viewer.
It doesn’t hurt that bad!, 2025
Video Performance
Flatscreen TV, Ribbon
Intimacy Event, 2024
Video/Live Performance
Star Stickers
Left Out to Dry, 2024
Live Performance + Installation
Dirty Water, Found Clothes
Nadia Rosales
Website: nadiarosales.com
Instagram: @nadiarosales__
Artist Bio
Nadia Ala’i Rosales is a ceramic artist, living and working in Denton, TX. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Master of Arts in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of North Texas, where she focused her studies on feminist theory and feminist visual culture. Though she has no formal artistic training, her research in these disciplines inform her artistic practice, alongside her cultural background and personal experiences.
Rosales currently works full time as an artist, selling and exhibiting her work locally and internationally.
Artist Statement
I am a Mexican-Persian multidisciplinary artist whose work centers concepts of ritual, memory, and countercultural response. My interests lie in an exploration of how we modify surfaces through acts of customization in conversation with and against our physical and cultural surroundings. Inspired by other art forms and craft traditions, I use surface decoration on the vessels I create to investigate the connections between body, memory, and counter/cultural identity, while simultaneously exploring the ways in which customization plays a role in daily ritual, shaping our individual and collective experiences. I do this primarily through the use of imagery that traverses themes of cultural liminality, feminism, and sexuality. Through this, my hope is to illuminate the interconnectedness of all of the aforementioned, while injecting a playful approach rooted in the agency inherent in the modification of surface: bodily, ceramic, or otherwise.
SACRED/PROFANE, 2025
Stoneware, glaze, underglaze
BOTH/AND, 2026
Stoneware, glaze, underglaze
MIGRATORY UNION, 2026
Stoneware, glaze, underglaze
Estephany Cazares-Peña
Website: http://estephanycazares-pena.com
Instagram: @estephanycazares.photography
Artist Bio/ Statement
Estephany Cazares-Peña is a photographer that employs documentary practices as a relational act to record complex metaphorical conversations of cultural history between landscapes and people. As a first generation Mexican-American artist, Estephany’s expression is deeply connected to the current political climate. She uses photography to document landscapes that hold a collective significance of Mexican culture in an idealistic American lifestyle. In her work there are elements of documentation and performative marks to establish her presence in these landscapes. Through the lens of the rich Texas landscapes and its historical context in relation to Mexico, her work emerges from a place of resistance and care, advocating for herculture through the beauty found in its imagery.
Untitled, 2026
Archival Inkjet Print, 12in x 18 in
Iced Over, 2026
Archival Inkjet Print, 12in x 18 in
The Dream Land, 2026
Archival Inkjet Print, 12 in. x 18 in.
Lo
Instagram: @lure.n
Artist Bio/Statement
Lo is a Dallas based multidisciplinary artist, currently exploring sculpture through ceramics. With a background in illustration, their work always aims to tell a story, with use of the intricate, hidden language of florals that humans have carried for centuries, asking themselves how these themes can be applied to their own identity and experiences. They enjoy the meditative process of placing clay in their hands with very little plan and discovering what the clay reveals to them. Fascinated by the unpredictable and likely temporary results of mimicking delicate petals and stems with dense, weighty clay, they enjoy honoring the process with very little expectations.
Untitled, 2026
Clay
Caught In Eternal Dance, 2026
Clay
Fate, 2026
Clay