On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Feb 2008, artist Kara Walker will be showing “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love”. The artist explores racism in the American psyche through large-scale silhouettes that tell a story as they spread from one end of a room to the other. Walker has created a repertoire of narratives in which she conflates fact and fiction to uncover the roots of racial and gender bias. Her imagery is haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation while depicting historical narratives of injury caused by the legacy of slavery. She’s been featured in Art21 and was in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in The World, Artists and Entertainers in 2007. Walker received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She now lives in New York and is on the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia University.

Blowing up on the rock-poster scene, Leia Bell is bringing a new show of posters and original paintings titled “The Business of Ferrets” to the Richard Goodall Gallery in London Sept. 29 – Oct. 25. After only seven years Bell has created 250 limited edition hand-printed silk-screened music posters for bands such as Echo and The Bunnymen, The Darkness, My Chemical Romance, and The Decemberists. Bell uses a camera to document people she knows at parties and shows. She later uses the photos as references simplifying the scene to something universal that anyone can relate to. The artist was recently featured in Print magazine’s “20 Best Under 30″ annual issue and Art of Modern Rock. Bell received her BFA in Print Making from University of Utah.

Galerie Adler in New York will present new drawings, animations and an installation in “Paradox Parade,” opening this Friday, featuring Icelandic artist Sigga Bjorg Sigurdardottir. The artist produces several anthropomorphic creatures existing in stark white environments that seem to walk the line between playful and grotesque. The illustrated creatures have a strange humanistic quality, often becoming menacing while simultaneously offering comic relief in their awkward and laughable stance. When describing her work the artist has stated, “My work is about what happens when someone does something to somebody or something happens to someone but sometimes someone is simply doing something or thinking something else.” Sigurdardottir was born in Reykjavik, Iceland and currently lives and works Reykjavik and Glasgow, Scotland. The artist is an MFA graduate of The Glasgow School of Art and received her BFA from The Icelandic Academy of Art and Design. Sigurdardottir has already began an international career with exhibitions “Wrong House,” with Washington Garcia Gallery in Glasgow, “Paracide Park,” with Centre d’art et de diffusion Clark in Montreal, Canada, and a forth coming exhibition at Kunstverein Uelzen in Uelzen, Germany. The artist has been featured in LIST Icelandic Art News and received an artist award from The Woollen Glove, from The Icelandic Art Academy in 2006.

Outlining sidewalk stains, skid marks and graffiti on the streets on New York City, Los Angeles and Las Vages is just a portion of what goes into the work of L.A.-based artist Ingrid Calame. What may look like a Pollock-style painting at first glance is more a method of controlling shapes and outcomes than personal expression. After the painstaking process of tracing each found stain, Calame returns to the studio and begins to cut out the forms and arrange them in what she calls constellations. She then creates a final tracing of the pattern in order to transfer them onto an aluminum panel as the underdrawing for a final painting. For her first solo show at Deitch Projects in 2000, Calame included three elements of her project: colored pencil drawings, enamel on aluminum paintings and an excerpt of a large constellation. Calame received her BFA from Purchase College in New York and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Calif. The artist will be showing at the James Cohan Gallery in September and the Indianapolis Museum of Art in November. She also has a show scheduled at Galerie Schmidt Maczollek in Cologne, Germany, in 2008 and has served as a studio assistant for Harriet Schorr and Chuck Close.

Chris Dent is a 22-year-old British illustrator and artist who explores the energy of urban street culture through densely informative drawings of cityscapes. Dent often captures his imagery with pen directly on paper, preventing any reworking and allowing the first mark-making instinct to dominate. The artist recently graduated from Camberwell College of Arts in London with a degree in illustration. Since his graduation, the young artist has been busy working on commissioned illustrations for Zoo York, Capitol Records and Swindle Magazine, among many others, and has also co-founded HYBRID BUNNY, a collective group of illustrators and designers. Dent has exhibited his work with the Subway Gallery and Notting Hill Arts Club, both in London.

Dysfunctional Americana that uses familiar imagery to tell stories is how Michael Paige Glover describes his new body of work. Glover uses adults and children that are placed against backgrounds of anarchy, destruction and uncertain imagery that he relates to past memories and self-awareness. Pulling inspiration from ’20s to ’50s photos, films, magazines and personal photographs, the artist spends months combining, arranging and decoding metaphors that unravel a specific feeling contained within each piece. In the end, Glover creates personal symbols using iconic imagery that aid in the discovery of his process. After traveling to Vance, France, to apprenticeship alongside Nall Hollis at the N.A.L.L. Art Association and then to Florence, Italy, to study with Andrea Spinelli, Glover received his M.F.A. from the New York Academy of Art. The artist also received a one-month fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center and was recognized by the Queen Museum of Art for the Queen Artist Registry.

Artist, illustrator and designer John Malloy was born in rural Pennsylvania and began drawing cartoons, rock stars and other related material at a very young age. The artist’s interest eventually developed into graphic novels, comics and the contemporary arts. Malloy continues the illustrative tradition of rendering the narrative through figuration and text. The artist currently lives and works in Baltimore. This month, Malloy will be exhibiting at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) in New York City. Malloy’s illustrations and designs have appeared in several national publications, such as Dazed & Confused and BPM.