Long Tone Exhibition

Cory Bertelsen. Non-Artist / Artist. Raised in the Pacific Northwest. Studied Art in Colorado. Currently living in New England, looking to move to New York City. Trained as a painter. My work:
What is new: Working through curiosity with people towards purpose. The work aims to uncover necessary avenues of exploration personally and socially. To push past uncomfortability, and learn something you have previously not understood before. To take risks. 
The crisis: From the beginning, I have tried to understand the nature behind things. Regardless of what I have found, I have sensed a withdrawing of an Aliveness in myself and others. It feels like this battle to be ‘Alive’ is necessary to our health and purpose in life. It is our responsibility to reconcile with it. 
The work: The Painting and Engines are examples of the avenues I have explored here at Arts Letters and Numbers. The work aims to nurture this ‘Aliveness’ in doing so, finding further clarity and purpose.

Elias Claborn Dills is a multimedia artist and draftsman. Inspired by natural phenomena and focused through meditative acts, his work interrogates the tuning and articulation of perception and relationships between precision and gesture. Dills was born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and studied undergraduate at The Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture with a minor in philosophy, history, and society.

Marco Emiliano Meztli Castro Asmussen is a multidisciplinary artist based in Averill Park, New York, working at the intersection of mark making, drafting, poetry, and sculpture, which culminate in large site specific installations. His practice meanders between mediums to explore the relationships between memory, perception, and consciousness. Through these physical and drawn gestures, MEMCA investigates the vibration that occurs across multiple spatial temporalities. He works with found objects, shadow, and sound to produce an assemblage of atmospheric experiences that confront our sense of gravity and weight. MEMCA is a Mexican American who grew up in New York City and Payette, Idaho. He studied Architecture at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York City and has worked on various projects with The Cooper Union, The Glass House, a83, Head of State, Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Paria Shahverdi was born in Tehran, Iran, where she earned her first degree from the Fine Arts University. In 2004, she immigrated to Canada, where her artistic practice flourished. Her drawings were selected annually for the Toronto Annual Drawing Exhibition, marking her early recognition in Canada’s art scene.

In 2016 and 2018, Shahverdi presented solo exhibitions featuring her distinctive mixed media series, earning critical attention and public acclaim. In 2017, she was awarded a grant from the Ontario Arts Council to support her second body of work, which received further recognition through interviews on CBC Radio and CBC Television. Her artwork, deeply rooted in personal and socio political narratives, has been exhibited widely across Canada and Iran.

Shahverdi pursued her academic journey alongside her professional career, earning a second Bachelor of Fine Arts degree as an honorary student at York University. She later completed her Master of Fine Arts at York University, where her research focused on creation as a form of individual and critical artistic practice. Her work often explores themes of identity, displacement, resilience, and the lived experiences of women, drawing from her personal history and cross cultural perspectives.

Today, Shahverdi continues to create, exhibit, and research as an independent artist, committed to producing work that bridges personal experience with broader cultural and political dialogues. Her practice integrates painting, drawing, and installation, inviting viewers into narratives that reflect on freedom, struggle, and transformation.

Sovereign Strickland, also known as SovereignLaw, is the founder and creative director of Stepp’Don Studios, a donation based fashion brand reframing what it can look and feel like to explore emotions as a Black woman from her perspective, one of the statistically stepped on and systematically underrepresented, underprivileged, and unseen. The practice she refers to as rage painting became a means of storytelling to transmute harsh times into empowering, wearable art. Through the reorientation and reinterpretation of what a canvas can be, of streetwear, and of language, the underlying human experience of turning sour lemons into sweet lemonade is captured.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Sovereign fuses her internal and external worlds through fashion, painting, drawing, and music, including songwriting and engineering. Her work champions the positive representation of Black voices for common humanity, sustainable living, and creative practices that reflect on overcoming the effects of systemic inequality.

I was stepped on. I have become Stepp’Don, a vessel behind a Sovereign production, and somehow in front of it and on the sides, present and absent.

Undine Brod grew up in Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York City, raised by parents whose professional careers in the arts immersed her in creativity from infancy. Brod received her MFA from The Ohio State University in 2011 and her BFA in Ceramic Art and a BA in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Washington in 1998. She also studied art at New York University and the NYS College of Ceramics at Alfred University. In addition to exhibiting in the United States and internationally, she has participated in many artist residencies including The John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts Industry Program in Wisconsin, The International Ceramics Studio in Hungary, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine, Women’s Studio Workshop in New York, and the Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan.

Undine has received several honors, grants, and awards in recognition of and in support of her work, including the New York Art Sprinter Emerging Jewish Artist Award, an NCECA International Residency Grant, and the Women’s Studio Workshop Ora Schneider Residency Grant for Regional Artists. Although Undine’s main focus is on developing and exhibiting her own artwork and teaching, she has co curated many exhibitions and hosted creative events. Her home and studio are located in Rhinebeck, New York, where she welcomes studio visitors.