Interact at Open Invitational Miami

Founded in 2024, Open Invitational is a contemporary art fair dedicated to showcasing the work of artists with disabilities, with the aim of building artists’ careers and dismantling outmoded hierarchies in the contemporary art world.

Interact will present a vibrant group of paintings, soft sculptures, and artist books by HML, Ashlea Karkula, and Victor Van. The three artists bring a wealth of experience: Karkula has practiced at Interact for 11 years, and both HML and Van for 9.

HML’s wearable soft sculptures, known around the studio as “muscle suits,” explore the intersection of disability, gender identity, and sexuality. In Karkula’s highly saturated – and often fluorescent – representational paintings, subjects intermingle in a chaotic slurry of friends, villains, and humor. Van’s encyclopedic paintings and artist books process content that he finds on the internet and the radio, serving as painterly observations of American triumph and tribulation.