Supporting Women Artists Project (SWAP)
Claire Brassil - SWAP Studio Manager, creates delicate pencil and gouache drawings of surrealscenes based on family photos and tales of everyday life. Suggesting memories of a life already lived, the scenarios are psychologically charged and often suffused with a sense of melancholy. The images give an immediate sense of playfulness and innocence, that upon closer inspection reveal
complex relationships and power dynamics. Claire received an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BA inWomen’s Studies from Vassar College. She currently shows work with Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in New York City. www.clairebrassil.com
Katrina Jeffries is a multi-disciplinary artist working in New York for over twenty-five years. Originally from Columbus, Ohio she graduated from Ohio State University with a design degree in Theater. While in New York she continued her exploration of fine art and crafts by studying at Parsons School of Design, New York University, Urban Glass and private ceramic studios. She has taught at Community Centers, Private schools, studios and museums. Her work has been featured in Galleries and Boutiques and private collections in New York, Washington, DC and Chicago.
Sabrina Lee creates conceptually driven work that uses imagery and symbols derived from Popular Culture to discuss and challenge social expectation. She states, “As a second generation immigrant, I lie in a state of no man’s land, fluctuating between opposing social definitions, the Eastern ideal of the collective versus the Western ideal of the individual.”Sabrina was born in a small town in Central California where her parents owner-operated a Chinese restaurant. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BA from San Diego State University, and has studied abroad in Italy and Sweden. www.sabrinalee.net
Born and raised in Chicago, Liz Lessner spent her youth spying on her neighbors as they paraded through the alley. During the dull hours of surveillance she planned bank heists and worked out complex equations in preparation for her career as a mathematician. Sometimes, she amused herself by making figurines cobbled together from household items. A short and transient decade later, she discovered the joy of building strange and fantastical structures out of familiar and mundane materials. Thus the desire to transform space and prompt emotional and analytical engagement with the world of the physical was born. Her early passion for surveillance has since manifested itself in her works current themes of voyeurism and intimacy and her early lust for the logic of mathematics has found new life in the permutations of design. She received a Bachelors in Art from the University of Oregon in 2004. Liz works and exhibits in New York City.
Rachel Murawski experiments with a variety of media and concepts to create unique three-dimensional works of art. Her approach combines traditional sculpting methods, casting, and assemblage. She utilizes many discarded and recycled elements in her sculptures, giving a new life and context in which to view the objects. Her style has both an urban and organic aesthetic, due to the materials she combines and contrasts in her work. Her most recent series is concerned with ecological health and sustainability, and a common theme of transformation and transcendence is apparent in many of her pieces. She received her BA in Art Studio from the University of California at Davis, and her teaching credential from San Francisco State University. She is a recent transplant of the San Francisco Bay Area, where she exhibited frequently, and taught high school. She now lives and works in New York city as a scenic artist in set design and fabrication and as a sculptor.