When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I enthusiastically proclaimed, "A veterinarian!" It was a vision I maintained until the second year of college, when I realized the visual study of animal anatomy was tremendously more interesting and appealing. Naturalist artists like Audubon and Durer adored animals. Their love for nature was apparent in their minute detail and dedicated examination of flora and fauna. Concurrently, I am fascinated by children's literature and cartoons. Children are enthralled by stories that feature animals, and I was certainly one of them. My work treads the fine line of intimate nature study and cartooning. Like illustrators of the Golden Age, such as Arthur Rackham and Beatrix Potter, I want to imbue my characters with personality and whimsy, while preserving the mystery and majesty of what makes them animals.

Nicholas Sale's splash paintings are inspired by New York City's walls.

We are surrounded by water, touched by it at our coast and carried by it on ferries. How much water does New York City consume? We take it for granted that water will continue to carry us, kiss our shores, and give us life. For my project I will install a series of paintings inspired by study in the deserts of New Mexico and Egypt. The stark desert scenes, with their isolated human forms, will be placed near water, where a brief glance by preoccupied passengers may pull them out of daily reveries for a moment, to consider the blessing of water that surrounds them.

The subjects are colorful, whimsical, life-sized vessels that each embody an anthropomorphic quality, so spectators will have a "body to body" scale of viewing and relating to these richly painted surfaces. This group of nine large oil paintings is coherent and interrelated by color and subject matter. I would like to do a workshop for adults and children where they can draw and paint their own versions of their favorite vessels.

I will create a selection of micro-mini paintings for display on a tiny patch of wall space. I draw inspiration from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City painter Albert Pinkham Ryder and his watery night scenes. I combine this inspiration with marine biology sources and a passion for New York's waterfronts.

I plan to create one or more wacky, large, ornate empty frames that can be hung from trees. People can stand in them and take pictures with their own cameras, like a DIY photo booth.

This photo documentary series about Haiti focuses on the country's youth, especially their happiness and resilience no matter how bad their living situations may be.

A large banner proclaiming "Coney Island ALIVE," hung for the duration of the event.

Zakiya loves to paint images from her dreams and her innermost secret thoughts.

Tortured plywood metal-clad reliefs, about the power and rhythm of water.

Paintings from the Spanish artist.

This project consists of a series of acrylic paintings representing the logical and emotional sides of one's personality. The logical side is captured with symbolic paintings incorporating a realistic style that tell stories driven by the commonality of human nature and the struggles of existence. The emotional side consists of vibrant abstracts that make dramatic use of color in various methods of applications to evoke a feeling of life and energy. These paintings seek to convey universal truths through leveraging easily recognizable objects posed to challenge one's conceptions of life and meaning. The two styles are often displayed side by side to reflect these primary aspects of one's existence, the pensive state and the active state.

Mourning is a process we start soon after we are born. If all goes well, you mourn your separation from your mother, which is initially all-encompassing. After the first courageous steps into the world outside, you mourn your sense of omnipotence as you realize your limits and dependency on others. You mourn your youth, the people who fail and abandon you, and the ones who die. You mourn the things you give up in order to become who you are. You mourn the idealization of your parents, superheroes who eventually become frail and fallible. This project represents this process, and the fact that we recognize and acknowledge the world around us and develop our subjectivity through loss.

I will paint images of puddles reflecting buildings on Governors Island, as well as other city reflections. These images will be painted on thin panels placed on the ground, so people can walk on them. The images will either reflect the buildings, trees, and objects surrounding the paintings themselves, as if there were a true puddle there, or an image of other city buildings or places unfamiliar to the viewers.

A powerful, larger than life wood sculpture.

Being the son of a Japanese family in Buenos Aires, as well as a neuroscientist turned photographer, I have a lifelong experience in looking at things from the outside. I document urban life with a smile, showing not only humor but also warmth and acceptance, generating a feeling of awe at the beauty of coincidence.

My daily space is centered in the middle of three bridges. Routine perception of my surroundings becomes a mode of artistic exploration.

The ocean is simultaneously dangerous and beautiful, ever present and continuously changing. In "Sentient," I began to photograph waves at night, a time when the ocean feels the most unknown and un-navigable. Even photography, a medium of light, captured only the white crash of waves, the lone visible sign of the water in the darkness. "Sea Change," a series of palladium-based photograms, references the complex character of the ocean. Water is always in combination with other elements or in various transitional phases. To produce the images, I stand in the water holding light sensitive paper in the break of a wave, and allow sand to form a pattern on the paper as it exposes in the sunlight. This process entwines the material aspect of the medium with the ocean and shows the trace of water.

"LaLa Art Factory" is a series of highly creative digital compositions created by photographer Lauren Koch and partner and graphic designer Julian Zee. The work in this series consists of staging people --- mainly in outdoor, natural environments --- photographing them multiple times, and digitally merging the images.

Through countless hours of observing moving water, this work uses formal complementary elements of opacity and transparency, repetition and chaos, and uniqueness to build dialogues about observation, movement, and pathfinding. No matter what I am doing, three challenges always arise. What do I genuinely see in front of me, and how do I represent it with marks that will map what's been revealed? Is there a break in the regularity that illuminates, by contrast, the uniformity of chaos and the disorder of repetition? Does any of this dictate a specific path to be followed? Just how far can I really see?

Plain and simple, I just want to come and paint.

This project involves the creation of a big "Plastik Wev" piece formed by interlacing and knotting recycled trash bags, and then bringing them together with pipe cleaners. The participants will be encouraged to add to an existing piece that was created during an amazing weekend event in Bushwick called BETA Spaces in November 2008.

The purpose of Martin's work is to dissect the elements of light in motion and transform this into abstract and minimalist elements. With color and light as his palette, the artist paints and draws with a photo camera. Realistic form is then broken up into multiple images and overlapping fragments of color and motion.

This project provides space for people to come together and create through the use of color, shapes, and text. The surface of the four walls will be covered in white paper, each with a different shape drawn in the center of the wall. The ceiling will be covered in black paper with six yellow circles. The floor will also be covered in white paper with a spectrum of color cut-outs from magazines for collage. A large container in the shape of a head will be in the center of the room, filled with drawing materials. Around the room are smaller heads filled with tempura paint, glue, and brushes and sponges for application and painting. There will also be “The Pile,” which consists of words or text for collage. Each head represents the open mind for each participant to influence, encourage, alter, and transform the space collectively.

A canvas of mixed media --- acrylic paint, fused objects, and EL wire fiber optics --- represents the life of a musician In New York. She is balancing precariously on a bar stool, singing like a three legged contortionist and playing a small guitar with a doll-like smile on a glitzy, tiny stage. The East Village is rapidly being removed in wheelbarrows; buildings and local parks are replaced with upscale buildings. The economy is screaming, credit cards are flying, waiters are serving up platters with waxing politicians, and UFOs pop in to add to the chaos and color of a New York lifestyle. Her tiny guitar omits a gentle flickering light while her thicker microphone cable fluctuates in response to the surrounding sounds, be it the artist herself singing in front of the painting or a viewer commenting on the work. Alternators vary the resonance of sound-to-light response.

The purpose of this project is to attract viewers to the beauty of nature and hopefully encourage audience participation. The details of flowers and soothing sceneries are hopefully thought provoking for the viewer.

A group of colorful, body-painted characters will bring buckets of sidewalk chalk to the island. They will encourage everyone in attendance to participate in a giant sidewalk chalk drawing.

This project consists of Polaroids mounted on tiles, suspended with fishing line in a cascade. Each image is randomly and artfully married with a fortune from fortune cookies consumed by my friends and me over several years. The work captures that moment when you read your fortune and try to apply it to your situation in life. Everyone will read something different and draw his or her own conclusions as to the message that is being "sent." It's about the randomness of life and how we try to make our own meaningful message.

"Photoscapes" is a series of multi-layered photographs with the texture of dreams. Each contains three or more individually complete photos digitally stacked on top of one another to create the final product. The idea is to encapsulate the feeling of a single event, emotion or idea in one complex photo. The project will have all of the component images of one of the shots placed next to it so that the process can be better imagined by the viewer.

New York and its spatial politics have long been both the real and imagined site for my works of video, installation, sculpture, and other performed and pedagogical acts. Now my chief preoccupation with my own work is in the process-oriented building of sculpture evocative of indeterminacy and id-driven bodily processes which are then recreated as projections in interaction with an overdeveloped urban environment. The sculptures along with their digital collage counterparts blur boundaries between male/female as well as the internal and external (environment.) They introduce fluid, moving relations between corporality and the excessive-even phallic- verticality of the 21st century landscape and the fight for space that results in an ever-changing urban environment. Their organic, bodily-oriented forms rely on process-oriented “bottom up “growth, paying homage to women sculptor’s before her in their emphasis on materials. For Figment I hope to create the illusion that 2-3 of these works are planted on a patch of earth along with their digital collage counterparts which are on foamboard..I would use stones, moss, and potting soil around the sculptures and pictures, which I could remove after the festival.

I have been doing live paintings for parties and art events in New York for many years, and have always found that audiences enjoy watching a work of art come to life right before their eyes. Some of my past events include the Burning Man Decompression parties and many large-scale dance events.

SHEDDING IDENTITY is a community-building conceptual portrait project. The public will be invited to shed some of their hair and, with it, their identities, as a contribution to a conceptual community. Participants will use disposable combs to collect hair samples into Ziploc bags. My assistant(s) will be responsible for collecting hair, documenting the participants, and delivering the hair to me, where I will glue the hair to a canvas, loosely following a sketch of Governors Island that maps the site of our communal experience. The portrait confronts personal identity and questions our willingness to be altruistic when new possibilities of human interaction are at stake.

A gigantic canvas scroll depicting a colorful assortment of world characters and events, using a brightly luminescent, abstract background with influences from Picasso to Keith Haring.

A visual meditation upon the body, self, and memory.

The Mass Manifesting Mobile is a publicly created, hanging work of art which inspires people to state their wishes and desires and artistically display them as affirmations in a public space. The Mobile will consist of a hanging net (approx. 6' tall, 4' wide, and 8' long) supported by standing poles from which small cut paper shapes will hang. Participants are provided with art materials to color and collage their own hanging addition to the mobile. The Mass Manifesting Mobile is an opportunity for people to publicly and proudly share the often hidden and protected desires of our hearts and souls. The ultimate purpose of the Mass Manifesting Mobile is to give everyone more freedom to allow their magic, feel their passion, and live their love!

In my recent project, I look at the urban landscape via hazardous waste sites in order to explore the transformation of a space over time. The subjects in New York, Korea, and Japan are connected through my personal background. I use a combination of drawing over transparent Plexiglas and altered photographs, which create a feeling of history and time past within a space.