This was absolutely our best year yet! We feel that we've really come into our own as an event, and the community has shown us so much love and enthusiasm. This year we displayed nearly 250 pieces of art from 120 artists. It is the creative efforts of you artists that make this show possible- thank you all so much for making it such a wonderful weekend, and for sharing your art with the community. We'd also like to thank the art students who ran interactive art projects throughout the weekend. They added a level of depth to our ability to engage with the public. We're already looking forward to next year!

Your TAPS team,

Jamie Molaro, Sarah Peacock, James Keane, and Hannah Tanquary

First Place

Robot 30/Plantimal 2

graphite on Paper

Andrew Lincoln Nelson

“Plantimal 2” is one of the most visually direct images in the “Living Machine” series. This work explores themes of mimetic evolution, Lamarckian evolution and self- construction. The creature in this drawing has both plant-like and animal-like components. This “plantimal” might be in the process of taking on the form of a smaller more machine-like creature which it is carrying.

Andrew Lincoln Nelson is an emerging artist working in Tucson, Arizona. His work includes graphite drawings of creature-like machines. His Living Machines series depicts life as it might be on other worlds (exobiology) or on an Earth of the distant future. The series explores post technological scenarios in which a fusion between which organic life and feral technology has occurred.

Robot Child website

Second Place

Geomagnetic Reversal 2

photography

Patrick Cobb

This series envisions what we may witness during a magnetic field polarity flip. The Earth currently possesses only one set of magnetic poles that drift aimlessly around the geographic North and South poles. During a polarity flip, multiple sets of poles may appear spontaneously resulting in the “northern lights” becoming a regular phenomenon at any latitude, from Miami to Machu Picchu.

Patrick Cobb is a mostly self-taught landscape photographer. The series, Geomagnetic Reversal, combines two of his favorite subjects, southwestern landscapes and the northern lights. He currently works as a solar installer, trying to help ween this country off of its fossil fuel addiction before its too late.

Patcaribou Photography website

Third Place

Port 2099

digital art / photoshop

Matthew Stricker

Industrial space port located inside a massive nebula.

Matthew is inspired by the eternal beauty of the heavens and is fluent in both traditional and digital art. Currently in Tucson he continues to work full-time as a painter/illustrator and graphic artist and recently had his work published in The Art of Space by Ron Miller. “I feel very blessed to be a self-taught artist and I’m continually inspired by the wonders and mysteries of God.”

visiblesoundsgallery@gmail.com

First Place

Exo-Resonance

digital print

Joshua Lothringer

As two planets orbit their star, the line connecting them draws out intricate geometrical patterns, some akin to lotus flowers, others to wormholes. The left pattern is Venus and Earth, which are in a near 8:13 resonance. In center is 55 Cancri b and c, two exoplanets 40-ly away close to a 1:3 resonance. The right pattern is Kepler 11, 2000-ly away, with exoplanets c and e in a near 2:5 resonance.

Joshua Lothringer is a second-year graduate student at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory studying the atmospheres of super-Earth and sub-Neptune exoplanets through transit spectroscopy using optical and infrared observations from Hubble Space Telescope. He thinks exoplanets are awesome.

Joshua Lothringer's website

Second Place

The Moon, in Gravity

digital media

James Tuttle Keane

Measurements of a planet's gravity field provide clues to the interior structure of a planet. These graphics illustrate some of the beauty within the gravity field of the Moon, as measured by the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission.

James Keane is a 5th year PhD candidate at the University of Arizona, Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. He studies the interplay between orbital/rotational dynamics and planetary geology of terrestrial and icy satellites (with an emphasis on the Moon). In his spare time, he enjoys drawing, painting, and graphic design.

Third Place

Wind and Water at Great Sand Dunes, Colorado

prints on aluminum

Stephen Scheidt

By subduing and stretching reflected light, a desolate desert appears as a dark, turbulent sea of sand. On a wet day in its future, would rain wash away Mars' red dust from the planet's black sands? At Great Sand Dunes, one ponders how rivers and dunes entangle each other, pushed and shoved around by the same elements that shaped the red planet.

I gain a unique view of our planet using a camera mounted on a kite. The photographs are collected with specialized equipment and are processed by computer to create data for research. The images often invoke the unfamiliar, reminiscent of other worlds, some unreal. Here I explore a space with arbitrary color, scale and perspective to ponder the strangeness of our own planet.

sscheidt77@gmail.com