Lisa Kuppinger, is a Chicago-area artist who “explores the idea of being a wordy worldling through animalism's, hair-brained cookery, hocus pocuses and other billowy riddlings”. Her paintings are filled with glowy fogs and gleamy seams, and have been creeping up in group shows across the country. This is Lisa’s second show with GARDENfresh. When she is not busy making things she can be found “sprinkling sproutlings, looking at bloodshed films, and seesawing with a bearded wheeler”. www.chickenperm.com

The Chicago artist Elisa Harkins (aka Pooper) loves cute stuff. She put in 6 years
as an Internetologist, but all the advertising that comes along with Web programming and designing made her queasy. In response she started drawing large-scale caricatures of her native culture and affixing them to vacant storefronts. She also enjoys making zines (R.I.P., Digital Disobedients), producing tiny videos of fucked-up stuff, DJing from elaborate set lists, Jagerbombs, and dancing, but her favorite past-time is still illegally posting her art on the street. Photos of her work have been published in Lumpen, Punk Planet, and UR Chicago. www.pooptronica.com

Trish Grantham, a self-taught painter and emerging Northwest artist, has truly captured our imagination with her playful works. Using a variety of media and acrylic paint on wood panels, Grantham paints a cast of doe-eyed, cartoon-like characters: Bunny, Robot-Panda, Girl, Carl the Squirrel, Think-Monster, Toast, Birds, and more populate her surfaces. The simple lines and stylized characters parallel Japanese anime, yet the fantasy world they inhabit is wholly original. Appearing alternately wistful, pensive, punch-drunk, in love, or troubled, these characters play out classic themes of good versus evil, and romantic love. They are often surrounded by cartoonish action-lines, scrawled text, or schoolgirlish hearts, and they engage in mysterious antics over complex backgrounds of cumulous clouds in washes of pale blues, greens, or pinks. Like a Japanese manga series, these works pull the viewer into their quirky world. The plotlines, however, are left open. [www.trishgrantham.com]