Montrealer Elyse De Lafontaine started as a milliner, drawn to feathers from childhood. Bored of straw and felt, De Lafontaine wanted to explore other, less-used resources and began developing her own raw materials. Leaving hats behind to evolve into a textile artist, De Lafontaine sculpts and weaves primarily with hand-dyed horsehair and feathers. Her one goal is to impart emotion. No longer need she be tied down by the constraints of function, having found the freedom to focus on form.

Artist: Elyse De Lafontaine
+ elysedelafontaine.com

The otherworldly nature of Sicilian Manfredi Beninati’s soft focus dreamscapes is reminiscent of a childhood of fairytales. Beninati’s figurative works reflect a state of innocence that exists behind the subtlety of pastels and candy colours. These paintings depicting children surrounded by flora and fauna seen through layers of light and softly applied colour have been described as “somewhere between Bosch, Renoir and Thomas Kinkead”. Does anyone remember the magic of The Water Babies?

Artist: Manfredi Beninati
+ jamescohan.com

American painter Michael Pfleghaar brings cool tones of modern-retro to his pieces Dance and Lounge. Pfleghaar, in the heart of Michigan's furniture industry, is as much driven by contemporary design as the fluidity of colour. Pfleghaar focuses on the relationships between objects in his compositions, careful to create visual conversations within the pieces. Opening this week in Palm Springs is an exhibition of allegories on canvas that reflect the artist's continuing search for that which is meaningful.

Artist: Michael Pfleghaar
+ pfleghaar.com

Some installations must depend on photography in order to exist. Such is the case of Stacked Hotel Rooms, a series of ten installations by Adam Dade and Sonya Hanney. The hotel room is booked as a place to stay, not a medium, only for the pair to painstakingly stack everything they can move or disassemble into a tidy rectangular stack. The efforts and results are photographed and video’ed along the way, before Dade and Hanney restore the room to its original state. Wonder what they would have been like during Spring Break?

Artist: Adam Dade & Sonya Hanney
+ ikon-gallery.co.uk

One of the neatest things about Ottawa-based painter Christopher Griffin is that his studio is a former corner store smack dab in the middle of a residential neighbourhood. His windows provide an ever-changing display of huge canvases, depicting wildlife culled from his various travels to skaters on the Rideau Canal. His art is immediately accessible, found in your favorite coffee shop or while dining to the tunes of wax-spinning djs at chichi Market eateries. Griffin’s upscale primitivism shows a fondness for the environment while making ours better.

Artist: Christopher Griffin
+ christophergriffin.ca

British painter Julie Fountain captivates the eye with her series of diminutive monkey business oils, creating portraits of primates with personality. Particularly remarkable is her placement of the subject against striking, colourful backgrounds not meant to emulate nature in the least. Fountain’s use of neon brights causes the apes to jump right out of the jungle and into an urban landscape.
Artist: Julie Fountain
+ britart.com

George Stoll does not refer to this work, Untitled Sponge Painting (9 Pack - Multi Colored), as a sculpture but as a painting. His sponges are in fact pieces of balsa wood with holes burned into them to fool the eye into thinking they are the real thing. Stoll uses the candy colours we are accustomed to seeing at the hardware or grocery store so that his paintings are as sponge-like as they can be. Ironically, from a distance, the sculptures resemble monochromatic blocks of colour.

Artist: George Stoll
+ thestranger.com

Since his first 1998 exhibition of Tupperware in LA, George Stoll has concentrated on fabricating ordinary household objects by hand. By taking the Tupperware containers out of context and placing them in simple, colourful groupings, Stoll instills his arrangements of paraffin and beeswax with subtle beauty. To Stoll these sculptures are drawings because he does not use any oil pigment to colour the waxes. The dry pigment employed is closer to media used for drawing rather than painting.

Artist: George Stoll
+ artscenecal.com

Cathy Daley has become known for her post-feminist fashion drawings since her little black dresses garnered attention in the late 1990s. The femininity of dressing is depicted by an abundance of stilettos, shapely black-stockinged legs and the fluidity of diaphanous skirts. Although this Toronto artist does offer a broad range of works, it is the quirky glamour of her more recent oil pastels on vellum that evoke an after-the-party feeling that is like an invitation too good to turn down.

Artist: Cathy Daley
+ newzones.com

Darrel Morris learned to embroider at his grandma’s knee, back in Appalachia. Now a textile artist and associate art professor, he uses his skills to portray a society where umpteen socio-economic and gender issues are as yet unresolved. Bellbottoms is a poignant piece of social commentary that employs techniques of appliqué and embroidery. Morris also creates large-scale murals based on collages of newspaper photos that he stitches onto canvas and then tears away to reveal only ghostly outlines.

Artist: Darrel Morris
+ secondstreetgallery.org

Some days you just want your art to make you smile and feel safe. Artur Duch Puig’s paintings of the quotidian sometimes have a surreal edge to them, but all impart a sense of the light-hearted. This Spanish painter and sculptor lets his brush border his works with a “frame” of black, seemingly casual, yet this effect lends stability to the whimsy. Upcoming exhibition at the Galeria d’Art Roglan in Barcelona this April.

Artist: Artur Duch Puig
+ galeriasardon.com