David Brooks was born in 1975 in Brazil, Indiana, and lives and works in New York. Brooks’s work is driven by his interest in the ways in which humans interact with natural and built environments. Working as a volunteer with biologists in the Amazon basin, the artist draws parallels between the scientific process and an artistic desire to understand the world. His projects often bring natural elements into an art context.

Liz Magic Laser was born in 1981 in New York, where she lives and works. Laser’s practice includes video and performance as well as sculpture and installation. Dissecting ideas of power and how it is performed, Laser has worked with such forms as presidential speeches, TED Talks, and nightly news broadcasts. She often integrates audience participation into works that involve social and political critiques, and has staged performances in public spaces such as banks and movie theaters. More recently, Laser has expanded her interest in the construction of identities to include children and the ways in which their self-perception is influenced by the news media.

Marela Zacarías was born in 1978 in Mexico City, Mexico, and currently lives and works between New York and Mexico City. A muralist painter for more than ten years, Zacarías wanted to bring walls into three-dimensional space. Her resulting wall-mounted painted sculptures twist and turn in unruly ways, built from window screens, joint compound, and polymer before being painted in bold, geometric, abstract patterns. Explaining her shift away from figurative painting, Zacarías says, “I feel like abstraction really allows for the story to be filtered and to come out in a different way in which people can see it or not see it at all.”

Anicka Yi was born in 1971 in Seoul, South Korea, and currently lives and works in New York City. The artist studied at Hunter College and the University of California Los Angeles. Yi works with unexpected and unpredictable materials, ranging from bacteria to tempura batter to artificial intelligence, creating works that embrace ephemerality and challenge our expectations and biases. Using tools and techniques from varied disciplines, Yi’s practice manifests our culture’s fictions, fears, and possible futures, asking where they might come from and how we might actualize or move beyond them.