The Maker City Directory Show
Date: May 1, 2026
Location: Ijams Nature Center
This show kicks off the weekend for the Outlandish Adventure Festival and it feels like the right way to begin.
Set inside Ijams Nature Center, this exhibition brings together a group of artists who see the world a little differently. Some are capturing it as it is, others are reshaping, layering, or pulling meaning out of the details most of us miss.
There is a shared thread: attention. To light, to texture, to place, to story.
Before the music starts, before the trails fill up, before this outlandish weekend gets moving, this is a moment to slow down and take it in and connect with the creative energy that captures what we love about the outdoors.
Participating Artists:
Kelsey Dillow is an artist, photographer and co-founder of Whistlepig Farms, a collective of artists growing food and making art in the holler outside of Knoxville, TN. In her darkroom she practices various alternative photographic processes, specifically wet plate collodion (tintypes) and silver gelatin printing. She takes her tintype studio on the road throughout the region, making portraits at events, festivals and private house call sessions.
In her personal work, Dillow’s studio practice explores folklore, myth-making and the Appalachian identity. Her work has been exhibited throughout the region.
Deb Cikovic is a graphic designer by trade and an artist at heart. When the pandemic brought her client work to a near halt, she did what any restless creative would do — she went back to her roots. Deb dove into painting and epoxy techniques, eventually carving out a distinctive niche in guitar clocks, tables, and fluid art. Equally at home in traditional and abstract styles, her work reflects a fearless willingness to explore new forms and ideas.
Deb’s art has earned well-deserved recognition beyond her studio walls. She has shown paintings at the Van der Plas Gallery in New York and completed a residency focused on guitar art at the Vivant Gallery in Reno — a testament to the kind of creative momentum that can come from simply refusing to sit still.
Beth Meadows creates mixed media drawings and paintings on wood that mix her life in East Tennessee with an aspirational life inspired by contemporary fashion, graphic, architectural, and interior design. Her style is modern meets folk art, where things are drawn in a flat, cartoon-like way.
Beth is fascinated by human behavior, why we do what we do. Her subject matter often deals with interpersonal relationships and how that stems from the relationship we have with ourselves.
Bailey Earith makes art with a mission: to bring a little more peace into the world. Every piece she creates comes to life in an environment that is intentionally uplifting, joyful, and positive — and she believes that energy finds its way into the work itself.
Bailey’s medium is contemporary fabric art, rich with visual and tactile texture. Her pieces often incorporate beads, vintage buttons, feathers, hand-painted and manipulated fabric, yarns, and found objects, creating works that invite you to look closer and reach out and touch. Deeply eco-conscious, she works with recycled and repurposed materials whenever possible, and draws inspiration from the colors and textures of the natural world. Her artistic sensibility is also shaped by the visual traditions of African, Asian, and Tibetan cultures — influences that lend her work a layered, global warmth.
Brandon Woods makes paintings that ask questions. Working on dimensional shaped panels, each piece he creates is an inquiry into art, math, science, craft, and the connections between them. Brandon finds equal inspiration in the elegance of the natural world and the beauty hiding inside science and innovation, and that dual fascination has taken his work in some remarkable directions: exploring the mathematical geometry of flowers, mapping our relationship to the planets and stars through both science and mythology, and investigating how geometric patterns shape visual perception and interact with memory.
That spirit of investigation has led Brandon to develop his own innovations in painting, woodworking, and most recently, prismatic photography. At its core, his work is about understanding; deepening his own sense of place in the world, and inviting viewers to do the same.