My photography draws from my background as a director and lighting designer for theatre. I create mixed scale scenarios, using the disorientation that results from these surreal scenes to draw attention to the beauty and power of everyday objects and daily interactions. I encourage people to see things that they might otherwise overlook. The fantasy of being tiny in a giant environment is universally compelling. Whether it is interpreted playfully, politically or spiritually, we have all had some experience of feeling miniscule compared to our surroundings or our challenges. I have exhibited this series since 1996, when I made my first nerve-racking public appearances on the walls of San Francisco coffee shops. Since 2000, I have been a full time artist, showing at top juried art festivals around the country, and around the world via the web, and I published my first book, “Overlooked Undertakings” in 2009. I feel passionately about creating community, and building bridges between people, so when my pictures spark a conversation, or evoke a shared smile I feel tremendous delight. My work has been published, collected and commissioned internationally. I live and work in my native San Francisco Bay Area.

The effects of light and the sky are intriguing. Light thoroughly transforms an object or a scene. Shadows, at the same time, are evocative and mysterious; they indicate the presence of something not necessarily visible in the image. An allegorical feeling is the result. My work often captures this. Language in all its forms is a great source of entertainment for me. In addition, many things appeal to my sense of humor in unexpected ways. My photographs often contain words as well as incongruous objects.

I am driven by a need to make sense of the world around me, which I see as fragmented, contradictory, and anxious. I seek to capture the cartoonishness that runs through American society wherein the individual is not only bombarded by an excess of choice, information, and rampant consumerism, but is also in a constant state of wanting more. Flotsam from this perpetual cycle of consumer pop culture is woven into my paintings, embedding my figures in an intricate web that suggests the non-stop movement of the mind, as well as the depth, complexity, and interconnectedness of life.

My work is influenced by music, cartoons, and dreams: I am fascinated with their spatial, temporal and structural components which I see as analogous to contemporary consciousness. I work primarily with layers of paint and collage that are woven together to create a dense network of relationships ripe with narrative possibilities. By using disparate and often ambiguous images, the flow of ideas becomes disrupted, meaning is subverted, and logic is obfuscated. My work becomes infused with an elusive visual poetry that seeks to inspire viewers to make their own connections based on personal associations.

For almost three decades Sharon Steuer has pioneered the merging of traditional and digital art forms. Sharon's recent work weaves together her oil paintings, drawings, digital paintings, photographs, and personal artifacts to explore and reflect fragmented memory. Awards for her artwork include the national Faber Birren Color Award, a Windsor Newton Painting award, and a Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Her studio is in the 60-artist building Workspace Limited, studio 14a, 2150 Folsom Street (between 17th and 18th).

Sharon is also is an author who teaches how to use digital tools to create artwork in books (The Adobe Illustrator WOW! Books, Creative Thinking in Photoshop), videos (lynda.com/SharonSteuer), and as a regular contributor CreativePro.com.

Bio: Scientist by education, programmer by trade, artist by necessity, Mr Rogers has been creating art for most of his life. After spending 15 years as a photographer, both journalistic and artistic, he put away his camera in 2000 in favor of building, painting and creating art featuring Bunnymatic and friends. These characters have served as subject matter and inspiration for Mr Rogers to experiment with different media (including paint on canvas, wood sculpture, collage, recycled material constructions and more).

Most recently he's been focused on wall hanging sculptural pieces with wood, paint and other recycled materials.  

In my artwork, I am interested in expressing what I can't express easily in words. When I was younger, I was very interested in poetry and I feel that my interest in the visual arts comes from the same source, involving the construction of a kind of visual poem. Much of my work process is intuitive, or possesses intuitive elements within a rational framework. I am most interested in conveying a sense of energy, emotion, or an idea, through a form that may also have a planned and methodical basis.      Most recently, I've developed a series based on the forms and surfaces of icebergs.  Looking at photos of icebergs and glaciers, I was really surprised by the variations in different colors, surfaces and textures of the their forms. For example, striped or jade-green icebergs, plus the many uniquely shaped holes, tunnels, and cracks in their surfaces.  They looked quite sculptural and some brought to mind carved rocks or caves, while others were curvy and smooth, resembling sea creatures rising up out of the water and possessing a kind of poetic quality.  The works together convey a sense of interior versus exterior, support versus covering, and structure versus sensuousness.  Overall, my recent bodies of work are about birth and growth, variation among similar elements, the structure of natural forms, and a sense of communication and mystery in life. 

What you see in this body of work is a totally new direction for me.  I've been photographing exclusively in digital media for about 5 years now. The instantaneous nature of digital work is appealing and satisfying. That said, having learned photography in a conventional darkroom, I yearned to somehow get my hands "back on the prints” and experience that feeling of surprise and wonder that only comes from watching an image develop in a tray and the experience of how each print might be different based on temperature, developer mix etc. So I recently began experimenting with a new process to provide me a proxy for the darkroom experience: Hand washing of my digital prints. To create a unique image, I soak and wring the paper in warm water until it softens. I then dry and iron the print, which due to the unique paper/ink combination and the conditions under which it was washed produce a one of a kind image that has almost zero probability of duplication. (Note: The images shown here are photos of actual prints, none of which will be identical after washing.  So please know that each and every print will vary in effect.)