Melody Owen is an intermedia artist and researcher whose work spans multiple disciplines and mediums, including hand-cut and digital collage, curation, video, photography, 3D building in and for VR, and site-specific installation. Thematically, her work centeres around the intersection of technology, the environment, and zoosemiotics.  Specifically, she is concerned with rapid enviroemental destruction t and how animals are often overlooked as subjective beings with their own embodied forms of language and culture.

She has exhibited her work at prestigious venues such as the Portland Art Museum, Nine Gallery, PDX Gallery, the Art Gym, and Reed College, among others. Additionally, she is the recipient of prestigious artist residencies around the world, including Paris, Quebec, Iceland, Switzerland, California, Austria, and Oregon.

Currently, she is a PhD student in social creative virtual worlds and zoosemiotics at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where she builds virtual worlds and utilizes her conceptual collage methodology. Owen holds an MA in Environmental Arts and Humanities from OSU and an MFA in Electronic Integrated Art from Alfred University.  She is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery, and Pearl Hyacinth is her representative in-worlds.

Jack Snell-Ryan is an interdisciplinary artist and curator. His practice explores trance and contemporary culture through the conduits of sonic theory, sculpture, and optics. 

His practice largely explores aesthetic relationships between language and sound, mediated between human beings and their environment, in a field of divergent interests surrounding audio ecology. In a more refined sense he uses sound as visual material substance to explore culture, theory, and form shaping outcomes in drawing, sculpture, sound and digital works. Recent research interests involves the convergence of experimental sound arts and political players with new tools and technologies in the 60’s which collided with the burgeoning music scene laying the groundwork for the development of novel symbolic patterns. He is interested in the “language” of sound’s aesthetics that has seeped into the semiotics of a broader popular culture and relationships between sound and power.

While many sound practices focus on listening, his work is acutely focused on seeing. He is interested in the generative possibilities of cross-pollination between aesthetic modalities and the complex imagery in relationships between sound, audio technology, sculptural space, cultural space, and political landscapes.

Snell-Ryan is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Oregon he has held positions at a number of universities including The School of Visual Arts in New York. He studied at Hunter College (NY) and received his MFA from the University of Georgia (Athens). At the University of Oregon he teaches CoreSTUDIO courses, Printmaking, Graduate Studies, and has collaboratively taught in the School of Music.