Author: Nicole Bray

LESLIE MARTINEZ

NB: So what are some of your earliest memories of making art, and how does it relate to the way you work now? 

LM: I want to talk about an aspect of my childhood which was around the age of 12 or 11. That’s when I really acknowledged myself as an artist. I checked out a book at my library and it blew my mind because it had a spread in it that showed pretty much every single drawing tool that existed. I remember showing it to my mom and enthusiastically letting her know that this information was a big deal to me. She took me to the art supply store and just let me go on a shopping spree and that felt like a turning point in my life.

At that time I started to organize my drawings into a small manila folder that I would carry around with me at school. The drawings were all random, from a picture of Abraham Lincoln to a lobster, or to an underwater scuba diving scene, pretty much anything because I was just teaching myself how to use pencils to create soft gradients, really focusing on photorealistic rendering. 

A few years later I started moving into mixed media and I established a studio practice in my bedroom. Everything sort of naturally and progressively helped me get to a place of discipline, and that’s how it relates to the way that I work now, going to the studio everyday. Regardless of what’s going on in your life, you always keep working, always keep painting.

Leslie Martinez,The Glowing Ardor of the Piers, 2024. Canvas scraps, used studio rags, used studio clothing, polyester sewing threads, paper fragments, paint chips, modeling paste, acrylic paint on canvas. 80 x 60 x 8 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

NB: Where do you start and how does your use of color relate to the surface that you’re working with?   

LM: I start my paintings through the process of gessoing the canvas, which I don’t do the way a traditional painter would, I’m not precious about getting the surface perfect. Instead I use a screen printing emulsion scoop coater, which is a little rectangular trough thing that allows you to get material up onto the surface really fast while it’s standing. From there I use a cake frosting spatula to spread the gesso around, and the beginning of the painting really starts there because whenever one layer crosses the other layer, it produces the double white and once it dries you get to see some highlights. Then I push those highlights even further with yellow or whatever the brightest color is, and I start to see some of the gestures that my body naturally produces. The second part happens when I’m covering the whole thing with color, almost thinking of color just as cover. It doesn’t matter what the color is, I just cover the canvas to allow myself to see what is happening spatially and I follow it.

Then there’s a material based aspect which happens parallel to the canvas, on a table sometimes even 10 weeks before, and it is an evolving process: I have these bins where I collect all of the byproduct from the studio, like the trims of excess canvas from the back of a painting, old studio clothes, and rags that are soaked with paint. Then I combine all these by process of sewing or pasting and they come together creating this other surface, with a smaller backing, that then gets attached to the canvas. When I’m working with these smaller elements is when all the pinching, twisting, and the sort of dimension happens. I’m into this process where smaller elements blend themselves into another larger surface, and you get a sense that you don’t know what you’re looking at, if everything is carved out or if everything has been added on to it. 

Color itself is hard to talk about because there’s so many ways to talk about it. It’s definitely vaguely referential to the world, ’cause each body of work will have a different color palette based on the way that I am imagining the space at the time. For example, if I’m thinking about something more earthly, the color might be more browns, greens or blacks. On the other hand, if I’m thinking about the sky, then it’ll be more pastel-like tones. Color is not necessarily meant to reference anything, for me it’s more about letting the color guide the eye through the work. And then, as I mentioned earlier, color comes in at the beginning, but keeps coming back in through the process, and if I need to add more material, I’m not afraid to go back and add more. There’s no end point to either process, it’s more of an iterative – back and forth – process.  

Leslie Martinez,The Reconstitution of Rejected and Refracted Voids, 2023. Canvas scraps, used studio rags, used studio clothing, plastic film stuffing, polyester sewing threads, paper fragments, mylar balloons, iron silicate, iridescent cellophane, crushed charcoal, paint chips, saw dust, pumice, modeling paste, mica flakes, mica powder, iron oxide, sumi ink, and acrylic paint on canvas. Photo by Kris Graves. Image courtesy of the artist and MoMA PS1.

NB: What happens next? The elements that are initially attached to the smaller backing, are they stitched or they glued? How do you determine where things go? 

LM: Very often it’s all attached in the sewing machine, so that if you were to look really, really, close at the paintings, you would start to notice things like the way that edges might be tucked under or sewn over like a hemline. There’s a very intuitive use of the sewing machine that I consider to be sort of unruly or chaotic. I’ve used the word irrational sewing because the process of sewing garments is so exact, but I like to use a sewing machine and allow it to run backwards and forwards over a surface in a very fast way. It is a way of misusing the machine, but it is a very easy and malleable way to get the materials to twist and turn in their own unique ways and hold them down quickly.  

Leslie Martinez,The Urgency of Objecthood, 2023. Paint rags, studio clothes, dried paint chips, charcoal, coarse sawdust, pumice, and acrylic on canvas. Approx. 42 x 36 x 8 in (107 x 91 x 20 cm). Photo by Paul Salveson. Image courtesy of the artist and commonwealth and council. 

NB: Can you expand on how your process and materials relate to themes of geography and identity?   

LM: When I first moved to Dallas after graduate school, I was already working with mixed media and fabrics, tearing things apart and putting them back together. Yet, I don’t really think it was until I got back to Texas that I understood the connection of my work to identity, family, and geography as much. Most of it goes back to envisioning the potential of materials, and also from a place of being stripped down to having absolutely nothing to work with. As I mentioned earlier, I had a studio at my parents house and absolutely no money. I’m talking about construction paper and tempera paint from Dollar Tree; I was working with that type of material or found material, which meant that at that point everything looked like a material to me, anything in the kitchen, aluminum foil, or just typewriter or printer paper. 

I was learning to adapt, which is relevant to my own personal family history. Almost everybody on both sides of my family were at some point migrant farm workers from South Texas who had to travel up to the Pacific Northwest, California, and all over the country. They had absolutely no choice but to accept and adapt to the unknown because you’re forced to leave your home every single year to go work the fields in some state up north. My parents gave me some rags, and I found some stretcher bars that were up for grabs, and since I didn’t have canvas, I sewed up all those rags and made a surface. At that point I tapped into my family’s history of not knowing what the future holds with the mentality that the work needs to get done by any means necessary. 

The geography aspect too is that back home, in South Texas where I traveled frequently as a child, there’s an aesthetic sensibility to the landscape that incorporates a lot of architecture that is handmade, sometimes old and decaying. This is a place where you witness Spanish colonial architecture being held up by poles, then there’s a cactus growing out of the roof, and all different time periods are present. There’s a mysteriousness to the things you see where you’re like, “Whoa! What is that thing?!” 

Leslie Martinez, A Sublime Concealment of Time, 2023. Paint rags, studio clothes, dried paint chips, charcoal, coarse sawdust, pumice, acrylic on canvas. 60 × 75 × 8in. Image courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art and the artist. 

NB: So there, there really is kind of an autobiographical presence to the surface of the work?

LM: I think there is, but that’s not the goal. 

NB: So do you have any upcoming projects or exhibitions that you can share with us?  

LM: I am currently in a show at the Whitney Museum, that is up until 2026, and it’s a beautiful show called “Shifting Landscapes”. Organized by Jenny Goldstein, Marcela Guerrero, Roxanne Smith and Angela Arbellias the exhibition is a 76 person intergenerational group show, with so many wonderful artists that I’ve long admired along with a lot of new artists that I am now starting to get to know. The show considers a more expansive interpretation of the category of landscape, exploring evolving political, ecological and social issues that motivate artists as they attempt to represent the world around them.

 

ELIZABETH SCHWAIGER

 

NB: What are some of your earliest memories of making art and how does this relate to what you’re making now?  

ES: I went to the zoo when I was four years old and squirreled away some of the animal food pellets in my pocket. When I got home I tried to glue them onto a piece of pink construction paper to varying degrees of success, trying to make forms and patterns with them, and that was the first moment that I thought I could spend my life being an artist — that this is what artists do and it was a worthwhile thing.

I didn’t really think I was destined for art again until a semester in Beijing under a language pledge. There was something about the rigor of the writing system in particular that rewired my brain so when I came back to the states I found that I could draw representationally without the same sort of struggle I had in the past, and that realization along with just a different sense of image balance and composition opened the door to a very different path than I had imagined up unto that point. 

NB: So can you tell us about your creative process and how you choose the spaces that are the subjects in your painting?   

ES: Yes. So I think of the spaces more as the setting instead of the subject. The subject is something unseen, an absent protagonist, a universal force, or sometimes the viewer itself. I like to think of these scenes as malleable, amorphous places, like in dreams where things are always sort of shifting. 

When you’re in a dream, you know some things, you know the background story and what might happen and you receive that knowledge effortlessly, all at once, without even feeling it. I want to convey spaces like that — ones that are heavy with knowledge, history and potential — weighty with things that are happening and things that will happen. In my paintings you have this kind of time that’s condensed or collapsed: the past, present, and future depicted all at once. 

That’s why I find resonance with and depict artist’s studios, writer’s desks, or museum display cabinets; because these are things that speak of what might have been and what could be. It’s fertile ground for layered experience that exists across multiple times at once. These things all speak to impermanence, the fragility of culture, and our strange attempts at stabilizing what will, despite our best efforts, always remain in a state of flux. 

NB: How would you describe the relationship between architecture and nature? How do you see this relationship resonate with human emotion and behavior?  

ES: I see architecture as trying to reign in, to create boundaries around our space, to protect us, to keep the wild world at bay in some way and to demarcate things. After I had my own little girl, I started feeling like, wait “I am nature, we are all nature”. We are all this kind of chaotic force and so the demarcation is basically just completely fake. I think that maybe we need more architects who have experienced pregnancy. We’d have a very different built environment. 

I love the way that we already have hints of the porousness of those boundaries in the ways we choose to live in architecture, you know, with houseplants or with pets: we’re bringing nature inside and we’re trying to control it and keep it tidy when really it has a much bigger presence.

One of the plants that I often paint is the Monstera plant. I have one in the corner of my studio, and inside they’re like a small or regular size, but if you see pictures of them in the wild, they are these enormous, massive things that live up to their name. Somehow I think our personal sense of expansiveness can be stunted as well into something that hungers for control, so there’s always the dichotomy of creating boundaries and order within this kind of entropy, chaos, and wildness. When architecture is bad, you feel the hostility of that boundary, and when architecture is at its worst, it creates spaces that make you feel dissociated from the nature within yourself.

NB: So given you’re the one in control, how do you let go of it?  How do you work within the boundaries of order and chaos?   

ES: In painting there’s always the dance between gaining control and letting go, and I find that I do my best work when I’m right on the balance between those two. Earlier we were talking about how if I go into a painting and I know exactly what I want it to look like when it’s finished, then the constraints of that – even if I can make that happen, makes the process lose some of its presence. Instead, if I go in with a bit of a road map, but am willing to veer off into the wilderness if needed, it may lead down a long precarious path, but the result is always better. There is something more genuine and lithe in the paintings when I approach them with more freedom.

So there’s a flow between letting myself off the hook and kind of letting things just develop as they’re developing, and responding to each new puzzle that the composition or the colors present. I follow the painting and it leads me along until it eventually reaches a point when there’s nothing left to change, which feels like discovering something rather than forcing something into existence.

NB: When as a viewer I look at your paintings, the reveal and disappearance of the setting really kind of speaks to that order and chaos. I’m looking, for example, at a painting and the sculptures are appearing and then I’m losing them again — nature is appearing and I’m losing it again. So it’s really a beautiful dance for the viewer that I’m sure as the artist, is a process that you have to kind of allow to develop and materialize very organically.   

ES: Yes, one hundred percent. I love that you said that too, because that’s my experience when I’m producing the work, and it’s always my hope that the viewer mirrors that dynamic, alongside any specific personal interpretations they bring to the art.   

NB: Could you expand on your use of color and what the different palettes represent or symbolize?  

ES: Sometimes I feel that if I force my use of color into some sort of strict system of logic or reason then the magic drops out of it, so I’m resistant to look too closely or explain exactly what the colors I use mean, but I can say this: color for me is linked with time. Perhaps as an outgrowth of that, color can very much code experience as homelike or uncanny, familiar or alien. It also might be surprising to some, that the palette of many of my works is one of the last things to finally firm up, often changing dramatically in the final moments through allover glazing or last minute additions of unexpected hues.

There’s one orange painting that comes to my mind, which is an interior night scene from my apartment. Looking out the window I could see both the reflection of the interior of the room, and the buildings and lights of my neighborhood filtered through the trees outside and the houseplants on the window sill. I think of orange as a nighttime color because of the lamps in my apartment, and I also think of orange as a color that gives kind of a warm feeling of coziness, or being at home, a sort of safe energized feeling. 

Sometimes my blue paintings are night ones too, but they are something exterior or outside of the self, something potentially sharper or ominous. It’s possible that with a handful of exceptions all my paintings are night paintings — I guess that’s just evidence of how slippery and subtle color play can be and how tied it is to time, memory, emotion, and our own gauges of safety and vigilance.

NB: It reminds me how at night the human eye sort of adapts to reveal things as you adapt to the light around you. I feel like that is something that also happens here with your paintings, as I’m seeing it and I adapt to it. Your paintings you have to spend time with. 

ES: Yes, I want them to continually reveal themselves. It’s like a good album that even when you’ve been hearing it for years you pick up something layered in that you hadn’t noticed before. That’s the goal. A flash and then a slow burn. 

NB: Lastly, do you have any upcoming projects or exhibitions that you’d like to share?   

ES: I just donated work to Artists for Kamala Harris, and I feel like I’m in great company there along with 165 respected artists donating work, and before the year is out I’ll be showing with Nicola Vassell at Art Basel Miami.

ANNA PLESSET

NB: So what are some of your earliest memories of making art and how does it relate to your current show at Jack Barrett Gallery, American Paradise?  

AP: I’ve been making art ever since I can remember. I grew up in a creative family: My grandfather was a painter and furniture designer and my grandmother was an interior designer, so their art and furniture always surrounded me. My grandfather had a particularly outsized influence on me and my work. When I was a teenager he started sending me his collection of art books little by little, and by the time I was in college I had amassed a sizable collection. 

After grad school, during a residency in Giverny at the Terra Foundation, I started doing some research on the artist Lilla Cabot Perry whose studio I occupied during the program. She was a prominent member of the Impressionist community in Giverny in the late 1800’s and was a friend and neighbor of Monet. As I was looking through my books, I couldn’t find any mention of her outside of a photo credit in a book on Monet. That’s when I realized that my inherited collection was totally male-dominated and completely lacking the presence of women. I began thinking about how information is passed down and how history is authored and shared. These ideas have shaped my practice in a major way and directly relate to my current show American Paradise at Jack Barrett Gallery, which reframes the history of the Hudson River School to give visibility to the many 19th-century women landscapists who were affiliated with the movement, but who have been omitted from the canon. 

NB: So how did you become familiar with the Hudson River School, and what was so enticing about it?  

AP: I grew up in New York State and spent much of my childhood hiking in the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the White Mountains and beyond. So the geography that is depicted in the paintings of the Hudson River School is actually quite personal to me. The Hudson River School  movement was always there in the background; I don’t remember when I specifically learned about it, but I knew the names Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church.

I was thinking about landscape and was doing some research on the White Mountains and the Catskills and I came across an exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site called Remember the Ladies that, at the time, was the only historical corrective I could find. I ordered the catalog immediately, and when it arrived I was surprised to see that it was this thin, 35-page booklet. I then started to look into major Hudson River School survey exhibitions, and was particularly interested in one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was put on in 1987 called American Paradise: the World of the Hudson River School. The exhibition, considered by many to be the definitive survey of this movement, and accompanying catalog featured 84 works by 25 male artists and not a single mention of a woman artist. We know that these women exhibited their work widely and they sold their work at prices on par with their male counterparts, but much of the work has been lost to time and they have been written out of the history books.

Making work about the Hudson River School was particularly enticing to me because it’s considered one of the most iconic American art movements, and the idea of  it being founded by and comprised solely of men is a story that’s been perpetuated for nearly 200 years by books and institutions. It’s a period of art history—like most of art history—that was in dire need of correction. As an artist interested in reframing history and trying to make the invisible visible, this was really the perfect subject for me, and the Met’s exhibition title American Paradise was perfectly suited for critique.

NB: We found this quote in one of the works in American Paradise“I would advise you to copy some good oil paintings before you attempt to compose your own subjects.” Could you expand on this quote? From the work: Copies from The Young Ladies’ Assistant in Painting and Drawing, 1833 (version 2) 

AP: This work speaks to the way that there are multiple versions of history and forms the conceptual basis for much of the work on view at American Paradise. Over the course of my research, I came across a book written by the artist and teacher Maria Turner in 1833 called The Young Ladies’ Assistant in Painting and Drawing, an art-making manual that was geared towards teaching young women various basic techniques. The work you’re referring to is a set of carbon pencil drawings that are meant to look like Xeroxes of 2 pages from the chapter on oil painting. In the first paragraph of that chapter, Turner suggests that women should copy some “good oil paintings”–which I infer means paintings by men–before they attempt to compose their own subjects. Historically, copying was very common not only as a learning tool, but also as a way to pay homage and confer status. 

Around the same time that I found Turner’s manual I started learning about Sarah Cole, Thomas Cole’s sister. She was an artist who actively exhibited and sold her work in the mid 1800s, but only a handful of her works exist today, maybe 5 or 6 paintings, the majority of which are copies of her brother’s paintings. This discovery of Sarah Cole’s work along with Turner’s suggestion to “copy some good oil paintings” inspired my Value Studies, a series of paintings in which I’m copying the works of several women associated with the Hudson River School, such as Cole, Louisa Davis Minot, Harriet Cany Peale, and Laura Woodward. The first Value Study painting I made references Sarah Cole’s A View of the Catskill Mountain House. This work, a copy of Thomas Cole’s Catskill Mountain House, is the same size as Thomas’ paintings and also on canvas. On the back of Sarah Cole’s painting, there’s an inscription that reads “A View of the Catskill Mountain House / Copied from a picture by T. Cole / by S. Cole / 1848”. This inscription and the way it delivers so much information in an economical way informed the titles you see across my Value Studies series. 

My Value Studies paintings are all the same size and facture as their originals, only in my versions the copies are in progress and are being painted from what look like printed screenshots of Google search results and other kinds of research material depicting the original artworks taped to the canvas or, as in Value Study 6, the wall. These references, all painted using trompe l’oeil, are like paintings within the larger paintings and are the actual true copies of the original works. In each Value Study painting, the unfinished part of the painting along with the trompe l’oeil portion make visible the act of historical recovery and acknowledge that work as always in progress.

NB: Your practice is very research based. Can you tell us how you find your references and the process of incorporating them into your work?   

AP: My work requires a lot of research and because it’s largely about how history is authored and shared, the research often becomes part of the work itself. When I began working on this project in the summer of 2020 during the COVID lockdown, my only access to the paintings I was researching was through the internet. As a result, most of the references you see in the paintings are Google search results. I really wanted to incorporate those digital markers into the work because it’s an important element of this project in particular. Not only does it place it in time, the contemporary layered over the historical, but even if I did have access to museums and libraries it wouldn’t have helped since the vast majority of these paintings are not on view. The paintings by these women are rarely on display, many of them are in private collections, and there are very few catalogs featuring their work. So the fact that they’re not easily accessible is part of why we haven’t heard of these women, and situating  them in the digital realm tells you a lot about where these paintings really live.

I mentioned earlier how I incorporate the reference materials into my work through trompe l’oeil, which is a centuries-old painting technique dating back to Greek and Roman times that literally means to fool the eye. I take a lot of cues from the 19th-century American trompe l’oeil painters, like painting 1:1 so that the viewer encounters the painted objects and ephemera the same way they might encounter them in their natural environments. This technique has become a really integral part of my practice because I feel that it enables me to challenge viewers’ perceptions, subvert their expectations, and help call into question what they see and therefore know.   

NB: Do you have any upcoming exhibitions or projects that you would like to share with us? And/or are there any other subjects or themes that you are currently researching? 

AP: Well, I’m still working on the American Paradise project. I don’t feel like the number of works that are on view in the show right now can even do justice to the amount of correction that this history needs. So I’m actually still working on that project and later this  month I’ll have a new Value Study painting on view in a group show at Perrotin in New York that opens October 29th. 

Next month,, the Met is opening a major re-hanging of the American Wing in celebration of its 100th anniversary. They invited me to contribute to an audio project that brings contemporary voices into the collection and gallery spaces. In their Hudson River School galleries, you’ll be able to hear me talking about a Julie Hart Beers painting titled Ducks in the Woods, the second painting by a woman affiliated with the Hudson River School to enter the collection. The first painting, acquired in 2021, is a work also by Julie Hart Beers titled Summer Woodlands, which you might remember also appears in my show at Jack Barrett in a sculptural work called American Paradise (Third Edition).

Finally, in December, I’ll have some work on view at Art Basel in Miami with PATRON. It’s been a very productive year! 

GENEVIEVE GAIGNARD

NB: What are some of your earliest memories of making art and how does it relate to what you’re making now?

GG: I remember sketching faces from magazines, I would like the eyes of one person and the nose of another, and from there make unique portraits. 

I often had a sketch pad with me, and I was also collaging the walls in my bedroom as the angsty teen I was. I grew up in an old house and the walls were covered in wallpaper. I didn’t plan to work with wallpaper as a material when I first started using it in my work, but now I can see the connection. I was using wallpaper pretty early on; it was instinctual and I was simply drawn to it. 

NB: Can you tell us about your process and the different mediums you use in your practice?

GG: Let’s start with photography because I went to school for photography. Even though I was working in all these different ways and exploring all these different mediums while in school, photography was the medium that spoke to me first. I saw the work of Diane Arbus and I was just like “that’s what I want to do.” Then I got a camera like hers, tried to print like her. I wasn’t necessarily going up to strangers and photographing them, but I’d get my mom to do weird stuff that I thought felt like something Arbus would photograph.  And then I slowly kind of started to turn the camera more on myself. Once I started photographing myself as these different characters, I often got compared to Cindy Sherman, and I understood that connection, obviously. Still I felt like I was trying to get at something beyond that, so I would make shoes. I’m not a cobbler, but I would use shoes that I had and add different materials to the exterior of the shoes. During this process I was often thinking–what does that shoe represent or tell you about the person that would be wearing them if the person wasn’t there?  

Collage has always been there, too. I felt I was getting somewhere with photography, but because everyone takes in information differently, maybe they didn’t get the full story with the photo. So I thought about how I can expand on that with collage, and if they still didn’t fully get it, then how can I expand with installation?  That’s how installation became a part of my practice. Today I think of installations as psychological spaces that give the viewer an insight on the character (me) that they are seeing in the photographs. In my installations there are many objects throughout that allow people to create some sort of vignette, and when looking at these things it might create a familiar feeling or spark some sort of memory, yet it might also put the viewer in a place that they’re not as familiar with. 

At times there can be stereotypical things that you would find in a white family’s home and also in a stereotypical Black family’s home. So I ask, “what do those things look like together?”  Because that’s more of the space I grew up in, and I think this is also a way to bring people together. 

NB: How does each medium help you explore the different themes within your practice?

GG: It all starts with photography. I think specifically through photography I talk about my mixed race identity, and how I navigate the world. I didn’t want to do it by photographing other people because I barely knew what I was dealing with, so I ended up using myself as the subject. Working in that way allowed me to gain more understanding about how I can further that conversation through the other mediums.  

I would say that collage is an expansion of that previous theme. Photography is more direct: you hit the button, you get the print, and when it’s good you move on. Yet I always get the feeling-I’ve got to do more with it, and so I incorporate collage which I think of as a “cut out of the installation,” in a way. The way I approach installation is similar to how I might create a collage, and so the two mirror each other at times, and work as a call back for the viewer. Wallpapers are a big part of it too, because you’re working with patterns and shapes, and they bring this nostalgic and comforting feel. I’m taking lots of pictures on my phone, simply gathering material that I’ll combine with magazine images or my family’s photo archive.

I have my own personal image archive of African American family photos and photo booth pictures because at the end of the day, I have a big love for photography. Growing up predominantly in white spaces, I didn’t often have access to these images, hence why I use Ebony, Life and Jet magazines because I needed my colleges to represent something that looks more like the diverse world we live in. To be clear, I used Ebony, Life and Jet because white America excluded imagery of Black folks from their popular magazines. I also collect vintage photographs, so I’ll have an array of images that I’ll use for collages. 

NB: Could you expand on these themes and tell us about your work from the lens of a woman in America? How do you see this being affected by technology today?

GG: My work very much lives in a feminine space, and Americana is also quite present in my work. I am often speaking towards race and identity in America, which is inevitable because I come from a family of interracial parents in Massachusetts.  My mom’s from Maine, my dad’s from New Orleans, so you get this northern and southern mix. For me this is a blend of two extremely different places and experiences. 

I use materials that maybe seem less threatening, in a way, because they’re everyday materials, and if it smells like warm apple pie it brings the viewer into the familiarity of a domestic space. I like using these materials to slightly trick the viewer into thinking that the work will be light and breezy. Up close the work is actually much weirder, and you’re hit with the reality of these moments and themes in the work that people often don’t want to talk about. I just want to create a space where I can unpack these themes a bit more, not only speaking about my story, but where the viewer’s story impacts this story, and my story. 

As far as technology goes, I’m kind of old school. I’m still excited about the fact that if I need a photo or any reference I just go out, take it on my phone or my camera, and then I can print it right away in my studio. Then I’ll use that image combined with hand painted wallpaper. It’s the old and the new, the hand painted wallpaper with iPhone photos. The use of Americana imagery and its materials is also a comment on class, giving information to the viewer about where I come from, and these items might be stained, torn, or tattered. The house I grew up in still has the same wallpaper from years ago; most households don’t have the means to upgrade their homes to each new decade or trend.

My favorite part of creating, especially with the collage works, is deciding what a piece is going to be about. Then I get distracted on Instagram for a minute, scroll endlessly, and see so many things that spark new ideas. Then I add layers to the work of what I was originally thinking, with the addition of the current news flash or trend that scrolled across my screen while creating a work.

NB: So do you have any upcoming projects or exhibitions you would like to share with us

GG: Yes, so you’re sitting with me here in the studio and you’re looking at works that will be part of a show opening in September at Vielmetter Los Angeles, called Thinking Out Loud – and I’m mostly in the midst of creating that show.  I’m also in a traveling group show called “Multiplicity” which is all about collage. The last and final iteration of the show has just opened at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

RACHEL EULENA WILLIAMS

NB: What are some of your earliest memories of making art, and how does it relate to what you’re doing now?  

REW: I’ve always been interested in collage, for me moving things around feels super powerful. I don’t know what it is, but I feel there’s so much interesting and amazing information in the world that there’s something very connecting about actually looking at an object and connecting with that object that you use in your every day. Collage is a way of inserting culture into any conversation that you’re having on a two dimensional surface. For me, collage has been that inspiration that began when I first started cutting up pictures or scrapbooking. Scrapbooking to me was so thrilling because information wasn’t just alone, it had a companion and a whole narrative around it.  You could save a receipt, or save a little pressed flower, and those are simply really humble and sweet things that we naturally do as humans.  

Then I turned it into my own practice. I feel like what I’ve done is I’m saving my own paintings and my own moments by creating those lines and marks, like scrapbooking them together so this collage is a kind of collective and personal memory. When I’m working I am remembering or  going through a certain moment as I’m making something. A lot of times I’m looking at what I’m making, and it feels like there’s these really free open things that then I kind of layer into each other. I can remember each of those moments when I’m working, and I can see how they connect over different works. That’s something that will always be really exciting for me, and I love that the painting is time and energy and abstraction in itself – it  becomes a ‘tool’ that I get to play with.   

NB: Can you walk us through your process?  Where do you begin?   What guides you through your composition and how do you decide when the piece is finished? 

REW: So as I mentioned, when I’m starting a piece I’m working freely and I’m not really thinking so much about the end product. I go into the studio and just work on these large splotches of paint and canvas. Then I sort of compose them and break them down and move them around. I usually have something in mind and I have sketches and I have drawings, but then those drawings usually just end up being more like a blueprint or a map.

I accumulate and gather all these elements over months and years, and then I work with them. I go into this awareness (or non awareness) and then build up the work over time. I know that for me, a painting is complete when every element is shining through and there’s a flatness that blends in and also moments that show the structure and the different color combinations. Each work is sort of a journey and it’s a lot like a mystery. It’s one of my favorite things to get lost in that journey.  

NB: This is just tangential, but in your studio, do you have a cataloging of your materials or is it more of a free for all?  

REW: I would say because of the way I’m working I usually collect a lot of things and save them. There’s tons and tons of cut moments on the wall, and then tons of like cut fabric moments, and then there’s painted moments. They all kind of live on the wall together. So there’s this wall with just tons of hanging things. Then I have another area for my panels, so everything is ready for me to grab – one of my favorite things is having everything ready and allowing there to be fluidity so everything can come together.  

NB: So where do the materials in your paintings, like the pieces of canvas, rope, and paint come from? What do these represent?  

REW: For me I’ve always been very interested in working with rope and string. There’s always this kind of dual or double meaning and function for things, and for me it’s about the freedom that I get to do all of this very freeing stuff with it, going past the representation of the rope and go into the function. This is a very metaphorical, and symbolic representation of life and living. I’ve always kind of described my works as this sort of portraiture in existence or of my own existence without my body or actual physical representation of me in it.   

NB: So what are some artists that you’re looking at that inspire your practice?  

REW: When I have to speak at different schools or connect with lots of different audiences, I usually like to express all of the artists that inspire me.  Usually those are: Howardena Pindell, I love that there is both that function and symbology metaphor within her work, which is abstract, but also there’s just something that makes me feel so connected to her work. Then there’s Alma Thomas, who is a painter that I feel for me looks like collage. It feels like she’s painting a mosaic and she’s very intentional about how things don’t speak or touch each other. There’s also David Hammons, that I’m always thinking about, in some of his most simple works there is form, function, and materiality going past materiality.  I think about Theaster Gates as well and how there’s a lot of works that make me feel validated, you know, and how those artists make me feel validated.  

Yet, I think it’s important to look at all the work, you know? Especially as an artist, it’s important to appreciate the journey of art as much as you want people to appreciate the journey of your work. It’s critical because otherwise in your studio, you’re just painting in a vacuum in this kind of insular world, just painting iterations of yourself versus the actual world that we live in. 

NB: Can you tell us about your most recent exhibition ‘Dream Speak’ at Canada Gallery? 

REW: For me ‘Dream Speak’ is an interesting and complex exploration about symbols. I think symbols are like speech, and sometimes it’s hard to find the courage to figure out the perfect way to say things. I wanted to go through some of my thoughts through symbology.

There’s a lot of pillow shapes within the show and a lot of small moments of symbols within the work that are made with rope, drawn, or painted. For me, there was this kind of imaginary ‘journaling exploration’, sort of what we were speaking about earlier, where the work is this collective of memories put together. I have a lot of different books and different glossaries of  symbols, so a lot of the symbols are added to the growth of previous symbols. Some of the first ones that I used were actually the inspiration for my first show at Canada Gallery and I wanted to create a second iteration of it.

NB: Just as a side question, when you speak about your work, how do you refer to them as paintings, sculpture and/or air reliefs?  How do you prefer people to refer to your work?  

REW: It’s a really hard question because some of the works feel so sculptural and others feel much more like painting, so there’s moments where I’m thinking of them as paintings and sometimes I’m thinking of them more as sculptures. For me, I find it really interesting that the canvas and the rope have the same properties – I use them together and there’s a transformation of what the canvas does and how it reacts gesso and paint and it all becomes one. I love the way that I’m looking at this canvas and I’m thinking of it as the fabric that it is and how I can sew it and move it around, playing with its physical properties. So I think that’s kind of where the painting and the sculpture are going in each other’s circles because the line becomes the rope and that’s sculptural, but it’s still a line within this painting. 

JOSH PETKER

NB: When did you first pick up a brush and what drew you to becoming an artist?   

JP: The short answer is I first picked up a brush and fell in love with art making in my early 20’s, by happenstance. I didn’t grow up around fine art or admiring museum artists. It was the making of a painting that awoke me to the realization that I’d be making paintings the rest of my life.

Growing up, most of my creativity was spent writing and playing music. My father is a musician so I grew up studying music and learning instruments which eventually led to playing in bands with friends. So, the discipline of studying a creative practice was imbued into me at an early age. Eventually, when I left home for college, I wasn’t in a musical band anymore, I was just a guy trying to figure things out. So in college I signed up for a foundational art course and I remember feeling a little guilty, like it was a waste of my education. I was thinking ‘why am I doing this? I’m not an artist’. However, I took the course and I absolutely fell in love with art making. It reminded me of making music because I experienced it as a meditative process where my brain was clear and I followed an inspiration to fruition. Making art has fewer rules than making music and you don’t have to perform for people which is a part of music making I don’t enjoy. I discovered that I enjoyed making art so much more than making music. I wasn’t thinking about becoming a career artist at this point, but that evolved over time. 

NB: Your work is characterized by drawing inspiration from historical works. What are some of the artists or art history periods you draw inspiration from the most? Why these?   

JP: The first thing to say is that many of the historic artists that inspire my work are historical inspiration as opposed to technical artistic inspiration. When I look at Frans Hals or Johannes Vermeer, for example, it’s the fact that they painted scenes of leisure and everyday life, where people relate to each other, that inspires me far more than their impeccable detail or technical virtuosity. Looking at art history allows one to time travel.

Visually, I feel that the way I employ layers of figuration atop the historical references creates an effect that appears similar to cubism at times, although I am not making cubist paintings. It’s the layering of references that naturally creates the result. Then there’s influence from the psychedelic rock n’ roll poster art from the 1960s, which combined Art Nouveau with clashing neon colors to make their look, and of course the musical references of the day. 

When I was studying art history a lot of movements were introduced as if they’re in opposition to the movement before them, but I don’t feel like I’m on a timeline. I like it all: I love abstraction, I love surrealism, I love historical, academic, painting and all for different reasons. Why not use them all? In one sense, my work is about time, but it’s about how it all blends together and not so much about a chronological order.

NB: OK so then how do you approach the canvas? Do you do sketches at all first?   

JP: No, I don’t plan out the compositions. In my studio I have numerous folders of inspiration, categorized by many things I’m interested in, including time periods, ideas, and moods. I use the folders like a DJ would use albums and turn to them over and over again. Once I land on an idea that I think is compositionally interesting, I start painting a version of it on canvas. I anchor the painting with a historical reference and then once that’s ready, the real painting, layering, and expression happens.

NB: So can you tell us about the characters and subjects in your paintings that are often drinking, celebrating, and performing? What is interesting to you about these scenarios?

JP: What’s interesting to me, and what’s the most fun about these scenes of taverns, is that they’re scenes of basic human nature. I feel like despite all the changes that happen through time with science and technology, human relations is still a universal theme. I recently marked out something that curator and writer Kathy Battista wrote that I loved: “Despite changes in technology, politics, fashion or health standards, humanity remains the same across epochs. We eat, we work, and we long for meaningful connection with our friends, lovers and community.” I feel that’s the gist of it.

In my paintings, I often include a Bard. It’s not a rule, but there is often a musician or someone playing music. I have an affinity for the multifaceted agency of the Bard: they are the fool, the story-teller, the brave traveler, and inebriated comedian. Though I prefer the solitude of my studio, I relate to the trope of the Bard. 

NB: Yes, I remember your most recent show at Rachel Uffner was called ‘Serenade’.   

JP: That’s right. And my last show at Anat Egbi was called ‘Tambourine’. That’s because they are about music and I think paintings can be heard like a ‘moment of still music’ somehow. I suppose I view myself as an ‘art Bard’ in some way. Shakespeare was a Bard. Bob Dylan is a Bard. A Bard is all about sharing stories about the human condition and then people hear the stories and retell those stories and so on. The literal embodiment of passing time through song and story. The Bard is akin to the fool in terms of historical work. It’s a character that can reveal universal truths while also making fun of the king and the absurdity of the system. I like Bards.

NB: As you were talking I thought that I see that the larger scale works are more of these group scenes and the smaller paintings appear to be more detailed shots. Could you just talk a little bit about that?

JP: I think of the smaller detail works as suggestive fragments or crops. It could be about the touch of one hand on a shoulder, or the dangling of a shoe that really exemplifies another layer of what’s going on at any moment. In the original painting that I’m pulling the crop from, let’s say there’s a wash maiden who’s just dangling a shoe – yet cropped on its own it suddenly becomes so much more, you know? It’s suggestive of domesticity, intimacy, leisure, flirtation, exhaustion, etc

NB:So let’s talk about color palette, and how this relates to the themes you explore.   

JP: I’m very affected by the 1960s explosion of psychedelic art and the psychedelic music that the art corresponded with. I think of the psychedelic light shows taking place behind live music groups and how the colors and forms change and go with the music. These early pioneers of popular music were sort of like the Troubadours of new sounds and new ideas. In my work, like in those rock posters, I’m interested in colors that move and clash against each other. Glaring orange and green fonts outlined in neon pink make the eyes move all around the image and suddenly you’re in that dreamy, trippy place. That’s where I like to be. 

The fragments or cropped paintings rely on color play a lot of the time. They’re mostly blue with just a hint of red that accentuates what I was describing as a ‘moment’.I’m painting historic images, but then by giving them these contemporary colors it makes them live somewhere in between past and present. The colors sing out to me, ‘life is but a dream’.

NB: So last question, what are some projects you’re currently working on? Any upcoming exhibitions you’d like to share with us?   

JP: Right now I’m working towards a solo show that will take place in early 2025 with Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York City. I also work with Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles and things are coming up there soon as well.

MICKEY LEE

NB: So what are some of your earliest memories of art? What aspects of those early encounters remain relevant to your practice today?

ML: My earliest experiences with art are with my father. He is a woodworker and he had his own shop, so I would often go with him while he was working. To keep me occupied he would give me scraps of whatever was around, whether it was paper or pieces of wood. He had those pencils that carpenters use that are kind of flat and fat and thick or leftover house paint, just sort of whatever materials were there. Anything to keep my hands busy. 

Also, when I was young, I struggled with speaking. Although I knew how – I refused to. So my dad realized that my way of communicating or to see what was happening within me and if I was OK was through my drawings. I credit him a lot for having that as a method of communication and it was something that just continued to develop. 

The imagery in my work has a very honest, uninhibited quality to it, so maybe not much has changed from those early encounters. 

NB: Great! So let’s talk a little bit about your process. How do you approach each new painting? 

ML: That’s a good question. That’s a tough question. I draw almost every day, almost every morning. It’s the first thing I do when I wake up, it’s sort of my version of note taking. So if I have something going on in my brain, putting it to paper is the first thing I do. And then when I’m approaching a canvas, I look through my “notes”, my studies, and I kind of flesh out what story is being told and what images and characters are speaking to each other. 

I think storytelling is really what my work is rooted in. Each piece is sort of its own ‘fable’. The story unfolds as I move through the canvas and build out these characters and the world they live in. I don’t always know where I’m going. It almost feels like working with a block of clay, you’re taking things out and then you’re putting things back in, there’s a push and pull to the painting. I’m surprised by it sometimes, just as much as the viewer. The paintings, moreso the figures, reveal themselves as I keep painting, I often feel as though I’m under their lead. 

NB: Can you tell us about the way you portray the female body in your paintings and the characters that surround it, like the rabbits, the babies, wolves, and spiders? 

ML: The figures are kind of me and kind of not. They’re an idea of something, whether it’s something ugly or beautiful, that is how they take shape. I enjoy playing with the idea of the nude figure, especially if I see myself in it, being distorted and exaggerated. I like them a little grotesque. You have to remember that the word grotesque is not necessarily a synonym with “gross” but an umbrella term for strange, mysterious, magnificent, as well as disturbing or ugly. That is how I feel. That is how this world is, and theirs too. Strange, mysterious, magnificent, disturbing and ugly. 

Now the animals – I simply love them. They are fantastic story tellers, they’re such an excellent vehicle for conveying things that are unpleasant without being overtly salacious. They’re just as much, if not more, of the narrators of the painting. 

NB: Where do you draw your inspiration from? What are some artists or aspects of life that are significant to you and your practice alike? 

ML: Expanding on what I was discussing before with the animals- you know how Cecily Brown was able to do these orgy scenes with rabbits, right? Even though it is a violent orgy scene, it’s more palatable because they’re bunnies. I like that trickiness and I am always attracted to something that has a dark undertone or that is immediately unsettling. I want to be challenged. I enjoy having to visually dig through an image and having to keep coming back to it. I think a really great living artist that does that and who also explores sort of this mad genius ugliness is Dana Schutz. 

Although my favorite artist in the entire world is, Maud Lewis, a folk artist from Nova Scotia. She too painted lots of animals in the bright and cheery landscapes of her home. The work is nostalgic though, there is something that makes your heart cry a little bit. Perhaps it is the honesty. I think she was ahead of her time. 

I love pretty things like rabbits and trees and flowers, but I also want my stomach to turn a little bit, you know? 

NB: So, you moved to New York last year and you’re now in Mexico City. What’s next? What are some future projects, exhibitions, or places that you’ll be visiting that you would like to share with us? 

ML: Right now, yes, I am working in Mexico City. Though I return to New York in April, and all of the work I’ve made here will be coming back with me which is exciting. As for the near future, I have a small solo in East Hampton that I am very excited about, as well as a show in Stockholm with Loyal Gallery at the end of summer. The future looks bright, I get to keep painting, which is all I can ask for!

YIRUI JIA

NB: Your paintings evoke a sort of childhood nostalgia. Can you tell us about how your practice has evolved over time and how you either deal with this nostalgia or keep the inner child alive?  

YJ: That’s just who I am, being honest about what I feel and being honest to the painting. My practice is more like a play, like flying a kite. I lose the string first and then it’s all between gaining and losing control. I always start with losing control then pull some control back. It’s always the painting that leads me, although sometimes it leads to a dead end. Then I just start over.   

NB: Who are the characters in your paintings? Where do they come from and what do they represent to you?  

YJ: I used to have many characters that went in and out of the frame, but for this new series I’m focusing more on their solo presence. A lot of my most recent works are about the astronaut, the bride, and the skeleton. This painting behind me is sort of a mix because I painted pharaoh figures before and I’m very amazed by the visual look of the pharaoh’s head cloth – its shape feels so fictionalized and scenic, the pattern and volume… So this figure is actually a mix of astronaut outfit and pharaoh head (Home…..sick, 2023-2024). Then there’s the girl, I call her ‘The Bride’, and there’s the skeleton, that little guy over there (pointing at skeleton painting). 

For me, all these characters are connected and they morph between their visual forms. I began with the female character ‘The Bride’, which I think has some reflections of myself, fearless but at the same time sentimental. When I was painting the white dress, very loosely, I started to see this translucent, almost structured outfit. That’s how the dress evolved to a physical shell or a cocoon of the figure, similar to what an astronaut suit means to an astronaut. Conceptually the astronaut for me is about someone who’s devoted themselves to outer space – to the danger of the unknown. As for the skeleton I think about how we are all skeletons with different skins, which is also at the core of all the other characters. The skeleton resonates with the astronaut in a funny way visually because I like to think that this astronaut I paint could undress from their white NASA outfit into a skeleton. The astronaut sounds futuristic, and the skeleton belongs to the past, so you have the past and future meeting in one character. 

NB: Would you describe your painting process more as storytelling, or as a play/game with paint? (Perhaps both?) What does that look like when you’re working on a new piece?  

YJ: In some of my early paintings there may be a feeling or a sense of narrative in them, although the narrative parts seem very fragmentary and temporary to me. The parts that seem to be narrative are only fragments of information. In other words, the visual forms and shapes of objects are always more important in my paintings than how they serve the painting to ‘make sense’. My newer works start to lose that intentionality and external narrative, they rather feel more grounded and internalized, with more dimensions and depth of emotions.

NB: We are now in your studio. What do you keep in here that you draw inspiration from?   

YJ: I draw inspiration from how I feel in my life. I had a honeymoon period with New York, because I moved to the city a few years ago from a small town, Gettysburg, where I went to college. So at the time the paintings were about all these sorts of objects, dissonance, speed and city life. There used to be a lot of objects that would fly in and out, like cigarettes, cherries, matches, lips.  

As I stay longer in the city, I feel I’m more and more internalized. Now I tend to go back to natural things like flowers, weather, and seasons that are always around – I think they convey a more pure and liberating feeling.

NB: So can you tell us about your upcoming exhibition with Mitchell Innes & Nash? What would you like to highlight about this new body of work?  

YJ: The show will open on March 14th, very soon! I’m done with the big works and now I am just spending the last months finalizing the sculpture and some smaller works. I think there’s been many changes since my last show. The latitude of the paintings is expanding, and there’s definitely more personal emotions and more sides of me reflected on the new works.

PATRICIA GEYERHAHN

NB: Can you tell us about some of your earliest memories of art and your recent experience completing your BFA? 

PG: My grand dad on my father’s side is an art collector in Brazil so I was exposed to a lot of art from a very early age. His house and our house were used as storage for art, so there were always paintings around. My grandmother was an artist too, a painter, poet, musician, and philosopher. She was probably the person who inspired me the most to become an artist. Although she passed away before I was born, I heard stories and was sort of identified with her a lot by my parents. I would be drawing all the time when I was younger, and they would be like “Oh! you’re just like her!”

In terms of my BFA I was doing a dual degree with philosophy and since I was partially educated during the pandemic, at times there was a big limit in terms of what I could make. Being forced to stay in made me obsessed with the idea of ‘internal worlds’ and ‘virtual worlds,’ ‘places’ beyond those that we physically exist within, and so I was painting a lot of smaller works that I could escape into. 

Later on for my thesis, my sense of self felt very far from my body, so for my thesis I tried to bring myself back to my body through bigger body movements, therefore working at a larger scale. I went from painting small (more intimate) pieces where I was really isolated in my practice, where my movements and gestures were really small, to larger size canvases depicting more complex relationships. In some of my earlier works, I have this bulb-like kind of flower based on a dandelion, a symbol of a possible wish, that came back during my most recent work.  

NB: What’s your process like?  When you begin a new painting or a series of works,  where do you draw your inspiration from?

PG: I think primarily it’s from emotion, because my works are metaphors of people and relationships. In terms of what the work looks like II’ll often get a vision or an image in my head that I think comes from my subconscious. There’s something about it that just really speaks to me even if I don’t fully understand it, so I try to understand as I work on it. There are times I try to depict ideas from a more intellectual route, where I think about how to use this language that I created for myself to illustrate an idea I think is important.

NB: Well, that’s actually a great segway into talking about your most recent show and recent body of work Doppelganger that was on view at Andrew Reed Gallery last month. Can you tell us a little bit about that?  

PG: It was an amazing opportunity, my first solo show right out of my BFA. It started with Andrew seeing a piece from my thesis and really liking the work. We met up and after talking a bit he included some pieces in a group show and a few months later he asked me if I was interested in a solo show at his Tribeca gallery space. I was like ‘Oh my God, I can’t say no!’ And so he was like ‘OK great, it’s in four months and I think it should be a whole new body of work’. So it was a lot, and since I didn’t have much time I just pulled from whatever ideas I was thinking of at the time: After my thesis I was thinking about how I reduced all subjects to just this one icon, a sort of repetition or symbol, which made me think about how we’re all just people and we are all the same to some extent. There were also some painting marks I had noticed I kept making over and over, very repetitively without thinking. They were becoming copies of each other because I kept using that same motion, same symbols and color palette—so the word ‘doppelgangers’ kept playing in my mind.

Also, when I was brainstorming the show with Andrew we spoke about loss and  it stuck with me. I began thinking about how, even if you lose a person, they still have an imprint on you and you have an imprint on them. In a way, if you spend time with someone for long enough, it’s almost like you become mirrors of each other in many ways, especially if you spend a lot of time with that person, or are codependent and enmeshed.

NB: Why don’t we talk about your use of color and how that is related to the themes that you explore in your paintings?

PG: The kind of red I have recently been working with in my thesis and Doppelganger was a bit of a random thing that just stuck with me. I heard this story on a podcast about a woman who had a fourth color cone (another red) in her eye. People usually have three color cones, and we see colors differently than other animals which have different sets of color cones. This woman specifically could see more reds than the average person, so when she looked at the sky she said she saw red in the sky.  

There was another story in that episode where a color scientist asked his kid ‘what color is the sky?’  and the kid couldn’t answer, he hadn’t been indoctrinated into just labeling the sky ‘blue’. Red became this color my mind associated with whats beyond things, or with things being more than what they appear to be. When I paint with red, when I use repetitive symbols, I’m reducing the things I’m painting, like when I’m painting a flower but it’s just a ball and a stem, the simplicity leaves room for interpretation, for the stem and ball to be a head and a body, for red to be red but also subtly complex.  

I also have a background in black and white photography, so I do tend to see things in light rather than in color, therefore ‘monochrome’ makes more sense to me. I was feeling very overwhelmed by color and limited by it because I felt like I had to do it correctly. There’s so much science to color theory I felt like it was holding me back to some extent because I’m a bit of a perfectionist.   

NB: Can you tell us a little bit about your upcoming projects or exhibitions that you’re most excited about or are you in recovery mode?   

PG: I’m in a little bit of a recovery mode. When you’re working in a big body of work you put away certain ideas, like random split offs that in this case didn’t necessarily make sense for Doppelganger, so I’m working on those pieces now that are fun and exciting to me but unrelated to a bigger project.  Also, my partner Devin Düster is the one that made all the frames for the Doppelganger pieces, and I would like to learn how to make them myself.    

I am also now represented by Andrew Reed Gallery, which is very exciting. So there will definitely be a few projects coming with him.   

KATINKA HUANG

NB: What are some of your earliest memories of art and how does it relate to your work today?   

KH: My earliest memory of art was drawing people in my grandmother’s living room and trying to make a perfect circle for the head with a jar cap and she was like ‘you know heads aren’t perfectly round’ and I remember having a sort of revelation. I think that sparked an interest in art as I started paying closer attention to details, and the ways we decide to represent what’s in front of us.

I grew up in Shanghai, and moved to London when I was about 11 years old and went to an all girls school there. Shifting from East to the West at such a young age and going into a totally female centric environment was definitely a shock. I was surrounded almost entirely by women, most of my teachers were women, my friends, and my ‘housemothers’ who were the women who looked after us and put us to bed…  

All of that really ignited my interest in exploring the female psyche and female body, comparing and exploring the difference between the ideologies of femininity in the East and in the West. I create these satirical images of women, giving them kind of animalistic bodies. It’s all about diving into absurdism and capturing those raw and turbulent emotional states through the figure. The female body in my work is always a site that rebels against the ‘sophisticated’ portrayals of women across culture. 

NB: Let’s talk about your process. Where do you begin?  How do you approach a painting?

KH: I never really plan or sketch before I paint. I do a lot of drawings and small canvases, but I don’t consider those sketches, these are works on their own. I don’t have a premeditated narrative, simply because I always want to focus on the body first. I wet my surface and I spontaneously draw a very vague figure with acrylic paint. I let the paint really seep and bleed into the canvas, forming its own shape. And then through these abstracted organic shapes, I find a figure and a narrative. It’s similar to cloud gazing where a familiar form emerges when looking at clouds.This is how the bodies are found in my work, and I allow the material to do its own thing and really guiding the direction of the work.

NB: Can you tell us about the theme of the female body and womanhood?

KH: I am really intrigued by the history of female hysteria and the accounts of witchcraft. Many women were labeled and punished for being ‘witches’ or considered ‘hysteric’ simply because the female anatomy and behavior were misunderstood. I am really fascinated in exploring how misconceptions of the female body led to the ongoing sensationalization of women. French neurologist Jean Charcot attempted to uncover the root of female hysteria using hypnotism to identify mental disorders. Charcot experimented on mainly marginalized women who displayed dramatic symptoms associated with hysteria such as thrusting, contorting, convulsing and shaking, in front of male spectators. Charcot’s sensationalized displays of ill women were popular amongst his male contemporaries in the auditorium at the Salpêtrière.

History aside, I want to address how society sensationalizes women today especially on social media and in films. Take Jennifer Coolidge’s character in The White Lotus, for example—she’s this mix of needy, sensitive, obsessive, simple-minded, neurotic, and sexual, which basically sets her up for some serious mockery. Or Britney Spears back in 2007, whose spiraling mental health was exploited by the media used as a source of entertainment. I’m looking into how today’s culture dishes out images of ‘unhinged’ women, and consequently the women I paint are painted in a similar way, never depicted in an ‘appealing’ way. It’s always slightly morbid, slightly grotesque, and you can say it’s confrontational.  

NB: How does your use of material and color relate to those narratives and themes in your paintings? 

Well, my color palette is red and flesh tone oriented. For me red is a symbolic color, it echos vulnerability, passion and conflict which are subjects that I explore in my work. But more than anything,  I’m just really attracted to all tones of red. Not all of my paintings are red but I certainly always start with it. Red really resonates with me, sometimes I think my aura is red.

The cigarette and long black hair in my painting are both symbols that connect the characters to me. These are not necessarily self-portraits and I’m not a chain smoker, but I wanted to bring these fantastical, often beastly looking women in my paintings down to earth reinforcing the fact that they are human and they have a bad habit, and that’s ok. It’s a sort of play on how these figures can be so uncanny yet human at the same time. 

There’s also a ‘dog looking’ creature that repeats across a few paintings. This came from the ancient diagnosis of the “wandering womb”. Doctors would diagnose women with the “wandering womb” when they were unable to explain the cause of the illness. The wandering womb is when the womb “ moves around your body” causing all sorts of ailments. This diagnosis was taken seriously because the female body and organs were a foreign site in the world of medicine run by men. So the ‘dog’ is sort of a symbol of the wandering womb. It’s not really a dog, but rather a little creature that meanders around the body mocking the absurd misconceptions of the female body and and echoing the enigma around the female psyche. 

NB: So what are some current and upcoming exhibitions that you’re excited to talk about?  

Currently in New York I have a show at the Latchkey Gallery. It’s a newly renovated viewing space within the gallery at 173 Henry St and it’s open until the 22nd of November.  I also have a two person show with artist Claire Bendiner coming up at Galeria Leyendecker in Tenerife, Spain on view through December 16th.