Author: Nicole Bray

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.

CHRISTOPHER PAUL JORDAN

NB: Can you tell us about your experience with art before starting or completing your MFA and how you arrived at where you are now with your practice? 

CPJ: I’ve always thought of myself as a public artist. I know perhaps that’s a bad word in the Gallery scene but there’s something about work that has a sense of collective ownership that has always resonated for me. Over the years I’ve created a lot of public murals, but throughout the displacement and forced migration of thousands of folks out from my hometown a lot of these murals ended up lost, painted over, and removed. I also grew up next to a salvage yard that has remnants of Black neighborhoods demolished over the past 60 years. Some of them were torn down when i-5 was built. That made me want to create. So as I struggled to maintain my sense of home despite the world around me being shredded to pieces, I started painting on fragments of buildings and houses and eventually window screens.   

There’s something about the way that screens respond to the brush, pushing back and even fighting against me. Painting a window screen is to some extent a futile process, the paint falls right out, so it takes layers, and layers, and layers of activity to have a surface to begin with. Negotiating with futility, with the completely illogical compulsion to do something like paint at the world’s end…I didn’t realize it at first but painting the screens had physicalized my process of working through grief. A lot of the material in my paintings is me reckoning with the experience of loss and surrender. What excited me about grad school was equally what scared me the most: the reality of leaving home. School took away my defense mechanisms and challenged me to develop a deeper faith. Both my own creative power and that power of my community. A power that won’t be stopped.

NB: Let’s talk about your process. Where do you begin? How do you approach each new painting or installation?  

CPJ: Each painting begins with the trimmings, the scraps, bones, and remains of the previous painting. I have painting ‘grounds’ that I re-use, each one with its own history that has accumulated over time. So the painting starts with me responding to fragments that remain on the surface. Oftentimes I work layering color on a surface over the course of months, not really knowing what it’s going to become. After cutting, reorganizing, and collaging together different sections, I use a window screen material to peel those paintings off of their original surface and see what kind of information is left behind.  
It’s funny because during school I went through a kind of horrible breakup, and that final loss pricked open my unaddressed grief. Grief of my own estrangement from my parents, the loss of family and friends, grief of the loss of my spiritual home. So I’ve ended up working essentially with separation, peeling and painting off, or ripping apart, seeing two things that are interconnected, and the ways that their histories are forever embedded in one another. The process of painting has really deepened my understanding of the way that experiences of relocation shape us (whether in terms of forced migration, family estrangement, or changes in relationships) and I’m learning about how all these losses contribute to who we become. When I look at some of the paintings, all I see is the pieces that are missing. Actually, in order to convince myself to let work go, I had to actively start painting memories that I needed to separate myself from. In some ways, I think that the loss these paintings undergo helps me appreciate just how vulnerable and how fleeting our memories are.  

NB: Beautiful. How do you relate your painting process and photography, to the themes of memory and the internet?   

CPJ: There’s this concept of ‘living systems’ that is fascinating to me. These are systems in constant change, like the human body or the weather and if you introduce a new element it is impossible to predict how the system will respond. There’s a degree of chaos, autonomy, and unpredictability, which expresses its existence beyond our control. 

These systems relate to photography and the internet through latency, which is explained as the time delay between cause and effect. For example, we can talk about pandemics, whether we’re talking about HIV/AIDS or COVID, there’s a latent time between when an illness is introduced into our body and the period where we actually are able to recognize its symptoms and effects – which is a complex concept for us to deal with socially. In photography, the concept of latency is present when you are developing an image. The image isn’t there at first, but when dipped in this liquid and the image surfaces. So this concept of a latent image just fascinated me from the very beginning. I’d say my paintings are reckoning with the concept of latency in different ways: At a personal level, there are qualities of our parents and grandparents that perhaps we’re unaware of, and that suddenly get expressed through a new generation, meaning we can probably trace some of our most bizarre tendencies from family members generations back. In a way my paintings take shape in a somewhat similar way whether it is through the course of several paintings or maybe through just one painting: Let’s say you’re looking at the surface and you see one little speck of of magenta, but then you look back and there’s all this background of magenta, teeny dots of history peeking through little small quirks that are the sort of like latent histories, like ready to announce itself, ready to burst forward.  

NB: So now, can you tell us about the subjects in your paintings? Who are they, how do you choose them, and how does this connect to your community?  

CPJ: All of my images come from daily life, from about 4 to 6 years ago, and anyone in the frame is usually a friend, relative, or someone I’ve spent time with. It’s often the strange ones that speak to me, the photos I don’t understand. I paint them because I don’t understand them.

But my most painted person is Gwen Jones. She is the inheritor and manager of the salvage yard. She’s a photographer actually, and describes herself as my muse. She’s kind of an archivist of neighborhood history. My family lost the house where I grew up, and so the salvage yard, that space, is literally physically, the closest thing that I have to home. So I end up there with her often. In there the world disappears. 

NB: What are some of your upcoming projects, residencies or exhibitions that you’re excited about?  

CPJ: As far as public art projects I’m working on two large scale sculptures, they’re both around 35 feet. One is a freestanding structure and the other one is a suspended structure that’s almost like a metal tapestry piece. I’m working with a couple engineers on those pieces right now. My favorite thing about that work is that I can do it from anywhere, and so we get to collaborate online and play with different pieces of things, share models, etc. The sculptures will be sited along the new transit line between Seattle and Tacoma and Washington.

And at the moment I’m in Mexico City for a couple months working on a solo show at Naranjo 141. I’m reprocessing a lot of my own religious conditioning from early life, engaging with biblical rapture to work through aspects of fundamentalism, spiritual displacement, abduction, forced migration, and the all too common queer experience of estrangement from one’s family of origin. Honestly it helps being away from home to process some of these things. The exhibition here opens on December 9th!    

CAMILA VARON JARAMILLO

NB: What’s your earliest memory of interacting and/or experiencing art?  

CV: When I was little I would come home from school and grab a block of printing paper, sit at the kitchen table, and draw through the entire block. I also remember feeling when I was younger that it wasn’t easy to meet other people or kids that were interested in the same things. Then, when I was thirteen, I visited New York with my mom and she took me to MoMA. I remember looking at some paintings and just being like “Wow! This person sees the sky same way I do!” or “this person sees flowers the same way that I see flowers!” And that sort of made me realize that “these people” were thinking in the same way that I was thinking.

My grandma always painted too. She had a room in her apartment filled with oil paints and paintings of (mostly European) landscapes. Looking back, her paintings were bright, and had a great sense of color.

NB: Can you tell us about the themes of space and landscape in your work?  

CV: As a young girl I always knew that I wanted to be an artist, but then I ended up studying architecture. Studying architecture felt like studying anthropology or psychology through space, and not so much physical spatial design. So what I learned was how architecture can affect or respond to people, communities, and places. Therefore over time every space acquires an emotional value, and what this means is that a space can affect you emotionally, it can alter your state of mind, and perhaps even shape who you are. So the surroundings that we chose, and more importantly the respect that we have for them, whether it is a constructed environment or a natural environment, has an immense psychological impact in every aspect of our lives and consequently the world around us.

In terms of landscape specifically, that in itself, is loaded with context because I grew up in Colombia, one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. I remember traveling and driving through the mountains, going up and down and around, seeing as the landscapes changed from one place to the other. Colombia has some of the wildest, most beautiful places in nature that I’ve seen, and all of them are extremely different from each other: there’s the Atlantic and the Pacific ocean, the Amazon, the Andes mountains (that splits into three), deserts, valleys and flat plains. At the same time, during the 90’s and 00’s Colombia was very unsafe because of the political situation with guerrillas and narcos, so many of these places were sort of mystical and magical because I grew up hearing about them, but not being able to physically go there, so there was a lot of imagination involved. 

Colombia is much safer today, and my generation is sort of rediscovering these places that we grew up hearing of, and rediscovering our own country. I think this says a lot about the psychology of a generation that is interested in traveling within their own country and to nature rather than to other cities around the world. At a personal level, these paintings are perhaps a way to research and reconcile the fact that I am here, and not there.

NB: How does your process, color, and material relate to these themes?  

CV: When I first started to really focus on landscapes, I was trying to work in a way that would resemble how nature works in real life, so I could learn from it: Working with a lot of water, with movement, rhythm, light, and gravity. I think of these as the ‘common denominators’ and ruling elements of every living thing whether it is a landscape, a flower, or a human being. 

While experimenting with textiles, I discovered a silk and cotton fabric that changed the way I used paint and that responded very well to these aspects of nature that I wanted to explore through my work. For example, the fabric allows a lot of light through, and instead of applying paint onto canvas, the fabric absorbs the paint and the color travels to where the surface is most ‘hydrated’. The process is also psychologically more freeing because there’s physically a lot of movement, like being on the floor and working with my hands, letting go of excessive control. These landscapes are created in such a way that they evoke the natural movement of the body, the fluidity of water, the lightness of the material, and the organic shapes that are created through a repetitive rhythm or vibration. All of this energy from the process comes to rest as a painting of a landscape, that then radiates this same energy through an image. 

 

NB: So what are some books or images that you currently have in your studio?  

CV: There’s all these little messages on the wall that I like to write around reminding me of what’s important. One of them is “do the dance before con amor” which is a reminder to stretch and dance and leave everything out, to put myself in the right state of mind before beginning to work. There’s Georgia O’Keefe, of course. There’s a book that I love that’s called The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton, which speaks about all these themes that we were just talking about and how to build accordingly. There was this one professor of mine at architecture school that once said “a license to build is also a license not to build” and I think of it very often because of the state of the world today and the rate at which we build and destroy.  There’s Fierce Poise, which is Helen Frankenthaler’s biography by Alexander Nemerov, and a little postcard of Alice in Wonderland that my studio neighbor during my MFA at School of Visual Arts gave me because she thought that I was like Alice in Wonderland when I was in the studio.

NB: So what are some projects that you’re most excited about in the future?  

CV: Well, I’m very excited about my first solo show in New York at 89 Greene, the project space curated by Kathy Battista at Signs and Symbols which opens on October 19th. I also have two paintings at a gallery in Chelsea, Tuleste Factory, where I collaborated with a friend of mine who’s a very talented architect Ceren Arslan. It’s like a whole immersive room, there’s these two paintings and it’s so colorful and fun and otherworldly. There may be a few things coming up in December for Miami, and next summer in LA. I’m happy and curious about what’s to come this year after my MFA, and just spending as much time as possible in the studio (or the Met).

ALANNAH FARRELL

NB: What are some of your earliest memories of art and how do they relate to where you’re at with your practice today?

AF: My mom and matrilineal grandmother are painters, although both sides of the family are creative. My earliest memories were seeing their process, which relates to my paintings today on a technical level, like motor skills and eye-hand coordination. My mother and I have very similar hands. It’s almost witchy. It’s a little freaky. Beyond the technical, I saw their devotional relationship with painting as a place to land, solace in an often relentlessly challenging world, which I learned young and continue to this day.

Growing up around creatives, I also witnessed adversities around the artists’ lifestyle, including financial hardship. My parents didn’t necessarily encourage me to be an artist, they were very realistic and said this life is a struggle and this lifestyle is unpredictable. My mom said I would always run home after school, throw my school shit, probably rip off my clothes, and start making something immediately. Over time, once they saw that there was no stopping me, they became much more encouraging.  

One fond memory is of my Nana, Ginger Fox (Yes, that is her real name, maiden surname), entering her home studio, which was a mess, walls covered in paint and strongly smelling of turpentine. I loved seeing her paintings which often included cats and women, goddess-like and voluptuous, some based on her daughters and grandchildren. It sounds like stereotypical grandma subject matter, but her paintings were weird, wild, and slightly erotic. She’s in a nursing home now, but recently, my mom curated a show of her paintings installed throughout the facility—it brought her and the residents a lot of joy, and they’ve left her work up. I think it’s important not to forget the humanness of art and art-making outside capitalism and the art world. 

NB: Can you tell us about the subjects in your paintings? Who are they, and how do you think of painting as a way to share a story or narrative ? 

AF: I met many people I painted when I started doing New York City nightlife in the 2000s, on the fringes of the queer club kid scene. Club kid culture largely died out at that time because people saw it as more of a 90s thing, but I was part of a lingering downtown scene. I recently watched the film “I Hate New York,” which documents (several) trans people in this scene from 2007 to 2017, which is around the same time when I went to those clubs. It wasn’t until that point that I’d met anyone in my life where I was like, “Ohh, these are my people.” So I started working with people I met from those parties, and some of the people I paint now are the younger generation of that scene, an evolution. They’re doing these incredible things in queer and trans nightlife—which seems more prominent and exciting than ever.

And I’ve always been interested in figurative work. Still, I’m cautious about sharing real people’s stories because of the possibility of exploitation, especially if it’s something that the public will consume. I think of the person, and then I think of the potential audience. I think about money exchanged because money is involved, and I’ve concluded that it’s fair to share bits of stories with consent and share the money with the person or people sitting for the painting. 

There is also a fair amount of fantasy to each image, even when working with real people and places. Sometimes I envision a painting almost entirely, even before I meet the person/subject, so ultimately each work becomes ‘auto-fiction’ filtered through my perception. I often think about human emotion and life experiences, and I’m interested in how that changes over time and in learning from other people. We all have complex interiority, and it blows my mind the depth that every person contains that another person can never really know. 

And, of course, many paintings reflect my frustrations, insecurities, sense of humor, or sadness at how pathetic, beautiful, or painful being a human in a body can be.  

NB: Could you tell us about the relationship of identity and self expression with the spaces and objects in your paintings?

AF: These spaces are real-life places where the model(s) and I are in. I want to focus on the emotionality and psychology of these spaces, so I aim to balance familiarity and off-kilter anonymity. Even though I have a personal relationship with the cities and rooms I paint, I want them to feel accessible to people who haven’t been to those locations. It’s more about how place, space, and architecture can strongly influence the human psyche. 

In terms of objects and fashion, these usually come from the subjects in the portraiture or self-portraiture. I am selecting certain people who most likely have a particular taste in how they present themselves. All clothing and objects contain coded language about their culture and who creates and consumes it, and those meanings change throughout history and contemporary cultures. My paintings’ objects and ancillary clues, like clothing, speak more to identity than the spaces. Except in those paintings without people, the settings play a more prominent role in expression and story and tend to be more deeply personal.

NB: How does color relate to these themes in your practice? 

AF: Color and lighting are my painting’s primary elements, which sounds weird because I’m working with real humans and places as subject matter. Still, I almost think light and color communicate emotionality the most. I have nostalgic attachments to specific color palettes, which feel intuitive when painting. I don’t even know how to articulate it, but it’s something that I’ve always had a strong emotional reaction to. As a kid, I remember a salmon-pink kindergarten, a public school with very institutional fluorescent lighting in its classrooms. I remember being so disturbed by that lighting, everything bathed in a sallow green and those primitive bulbs buzzing a la horror film. Those sensory elements, especially the visuals, color, and light, made me very distracted and uncomfortable.  

Like train lighting, nobody looks good on the subway. We all know on some level—conscious or not—these mass public spaces and lighting are designed for oppression. They become psychological spaces. And this is how I think of color and light in painting— means to create psychological space and narrative.    

There are photography influences in my paintings too. When I started at Cooper Union, I took half a semester of painting and panicked about surviving financially after school. So I wanted to learn something more technique based, practical, and applicable to the world, outside of just the art world. And I was like, ‘Photography! That makes sense.’ Little did I know that it was on the verge of becoming somewhat obsolete with phones nowadays. But I learned lighting, analog, film, and digital photography, which was helpful because I started getting little gigs in school—I did nightlife photography and assisted photographers in setting up lighting for fashion or commercial shoots. I also had some experience with the modeling world in New York City at that time. I think about how all these different worlds are so complicated on their own, but they’re all now converging through painting.   

NB: What are some projects that you’re excited about in the future?

AF: I’m tremendously excited about attending the Denniston Hill Artist Residency in October. I can’t get over my excitement for that. I’m also happy to reconnect with upstate New York in this new way—Denniston is a sanctuary that’s allowed space to grow for many creative visionaries I admire. It’s an honor to go! So that’s my focus right now. I’m in a hibernation chrysalis back-to-the-drawing-board phase, recovering from two exhausting shows in the past year.  

I’m excited about what’s to come because I want to communicate something I can’t articulate in words or images. But it feels like whatever that is, it’s just under the surface, and I know something new will come out on the other side. Hopefully, it is something I’m proud of and work that communicates with others who see it.

Other than that, I’m in the Armory Show with Anat Ebgi, and a few shows soon open at Alexander Gray and Sean Horton. Both shows address topics I deeply care about and feature work by artists I respect and admire, art heroes like G.B. Jones, Justin Vivian Bond, Hugh Steers, David Byrd, and Peter Gallo.

Between Us

Sept 1st—Oct 15th, 2023

Alexander Gray Associates 

224 Main Street, Garden Level

Germantown, NY 12526, United States

Place — World

Sept 7th—Oct 7th, 2023

Sean Horton

515 West 20th Street, 3rd Fl

New York, NY 10011, United States

KATARINA CASERMAN

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

KC: I often come back to this specific memory when we were children. We had these notebooks with blank pages  that were called “memory books” and we gave them around to our friends and family so they would draw  something in it and write something like ‘for the memory of Katarina’. I remember my mom one day she  made this drawing of two deers, and back then it was one of the most beautiful drawings I’d seen. I remember I told myself ‘one day I’m gonna be as good as she is at drawing’. So my motivation was just to get as close as I could to my mother’s drawing.  

With time I realized it’s just about practice and sometime around high school, I  got pretty good at realistic drawings by observing things around me and copying them on paper. So these were my earliest memories of making art, trying to match my mental image with what I was drawing on paper. This always brought me comfort and happiness and something that has always made me feel something and luckily for me I was also good at it. 

Now it’s of course very different. For me it’s not enough to just look, and mimic what I’m seeing. It’s more  about ‘what else is there’? It’s not enough to just observe the world around me and then reflect upon it. I aim  to turn inwards, reflect upon that and relate it to the external in order to create alternative structures of the  visible reality. 

NB: Can you describe the process when you’re starting a new painting, where do you begin? How do you move  through it?  

KC: I’ve attempted to do sketches many times in the past but it’s just not working for me. My body reacts  completely differently in front of a canvas than it does sitting down and making a tiny paper sketch. I lose the  momentum and it feels forced to match the painting to the sketch.  

I usually begin by making a very thin layer of oil paint and then I take it off with a cotton cloth, creating an  image by bringing back the whiteness of the canvas. The very first stages feel more like building or constructing  than solely painting. I let the layers interact with each other, see the direction of different drips and just let the  paint and gravity do its thing and let it sit for a bit. There’s a lot of sitting time involved because I need to be  patient to recognize which trajectory the painting wants to go. I also need to take into consideration that the  painting will change over a span of a couple days because of all the drying and dripping and other micro  chemical processes. So this is how it usually goes, there’s a lot of waiting and observing and reacting upon it  over and over again. 

NB: So it  requires a lot of patience, right?  

KC: Oh yes absolutely, a lot of patience. Especially because there are many things that I do in the painting that are  rather complex and I often forget how difficult they are. It’s quite simple though, complex forms require a high  level of complexity and it’s impossible that you would achieve complex forms with simple solutions.  

NB: Your work exists between opposing themes: it is organized yet chaotic, strange yet familiar, and dynamic yet  still. Can you tell us more about these themes and opposites/binaries in your work? 

KC: I used to say that my work has this notion of the opposite. I’ve been investigating this for over a year, ever since  I came across Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein in which the use of words is so specific in how to describe  certain conditions. For example when she says that the creature is reanimated, it goes from being ‘dead’ to  being ‘undead’. So the creature was neither alive nor dead, it was in the zone of being ‘undead’. It was a  walking contradiction. That just provoked me into thinking about how we can use language in order to expand  the possibilities of the opposite.  

For instance, if I ask ‘what’s the opposite of black?’ the answer would probably be white, which would mean it’s white and nothing else but white. If you say ‘non black’, then it would mean it’s everything but black, giving you more possibilities of what the opposite can be. When I talk about my work I use the proposition of ‘non’, meaning I don’t say there’s order and chaos but rather ‘non-chaos, artificial/non-artificial, movement/non-movement and so on. This sets the paintings in almost a ‘third zone’. I’m playing with the idea of opposites that exist in the same reality, so it has this notion of impossibility, like  with these spaces where you constantly have some sort of a glimpse of light and at the same time a glimpse of  darkness.  

So it’s not about depicting something in particular, or descriptive, but they are setting a mood. When you stand  in front of the painting you are getting primed/ready for the zone that you are about to enter, and this zone is  the painting itself, but there is a specific mood that surrounds the painting.  

NB: How does color relate to these themes in your process?  

KC: It’s very, very, intuitive when it comes to color. At the beginning I don’t overthink it, I use any color that  resonates with me in that moment because I know that the specific color will not determine the outcome. I  usually just like to play with layering and getting different shades that don’t necessarily exist if they were only  on one layer. These are colors you get once you layer one color over the other, in order to get a third one. It’s  the optical mixing of the colors instead of just a physical one. I enjoy playing around with this because it gives  me a unique experience when I’m moving around the painting. It seems as if the painting is changing all the  time due to its multiple layered structure. 

NB: Where are you currently drawing inspiration from? What artists, movies, music are you looking at?  

KC: I’m not being the best artist right now because I don’t think I’m seeing enough art shows and I’m not  intentionally looking at any visual art. On the other hand I am looking at all sorts of things every day because  Instagram exists. I’m also the last person in the world to watch ‘Twin Peaks’ by David Lynch so this is something  I’m currently obsessed with. It feels as if the whole series puts your brain into a dreamlike state so everything  suddenly has a thin layer of ‘Twin Peaks’ over it. 

I used to listen to a lot of music while I painted, and I still do, but now I mainly listen to podcasts or audio  books. I recently realized that music has too strong of an impact on me. It will either make me paint faster, or slower, or evoke memories, which is very distracting. I switched to podcasts and audiobooks because as you follow the story, you’re in an ‘in between zone’ of being present in the painting, yet not fully there. I think of it being similar to how a pianist is when having a performance. When they are playing they are in this ‘flow’ estate where their body is acting instead of their brain.

NB: Can you tell us about any upcoming projects or exhibitions that you’re excited about?  

KC: Yes! I’m represented by Tabula Rasa Gallery, and we have so many exciting projects coming up this year. I do  have a group show in Beijing, in November and before that I’m also having a group show at a London-based  gallery, which will be announced very soon and that I’m very excited for. Then there’s also art fairs and a couple  of other things as well so it’s gonna be a very, very, busy year. To which I always add: being busy is a good  problem to have. 

KATE BARBEE

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

KB: Well, my grandma always made these stained glass fixtures for the windows in her home, and I believe it left an impression on how I lay down shapes and colors in my paintings today. Even my use of wax and linseed oil I feel are reflective to the transparency of the stained glass. I feel like the lines I add into my work today are like the grout we would use to fill in the gaps of the glass shards.

I began painting at a young age and I was very interested in abstract shapes. I felt proud and excited about discovering something that was outside of the world we lived in, and I enjoyed the cathartic trance I would go into whenever creating an imaginary world of broken up colors and shapes. Shortly after I became a little more interested in fashion illustration and would draw dresses and outfits on figures as a way to almost live vicariously through my designs. I couldn’t wear these clothes because I didn’t have access to them and as a child I felt as if by creating it on paper I could own something beautiful. I think everybody makes art to escape from their own world, and for me the fashion design and abstraction really helped me delve deeper into my imagination as a child. 

NB: So we can definitely see the stained glass windows, the stitching together, and the fashion design. Can you tell us about your process using mixed media? How did you incorporate the use of beads and stitching on your canvas?  

KB: It all started when I was in high school, in this little punk scene in Dallas. I always sewed my jean jackets with band patches and pressed little silver studs into all my clothing because I felt this was my way to stay relevant. The stitches on my paintings now reflect the rawness of the stitching on my clothing in the past. Back then I was in Austin after graduating from college, and I was raising money selling jean jackets to move to Los Angeles. I bought a whole bunch of jackets from thrift stores and used the wood cut prints I made in school and trashed paintings to sew onto the back of them.

Once in LA I started adding patches on the paintings. I liked the idea of a living painting with loose fabric hanging from the painting and blowing around whenever someone would walk by, or when a breeze from an open window would bring it to life. Then I realized it was not sustainable and the pieces were going to fall off or fold/crinkle at a certain point, so I started fully sewing them down and I was very much touched with how familiar this process was with my history of sewing onto clothing. 

At times when I’m working on the bigger paintings, I feel like I’ve created a social quilting circle because my friends have had to help me sew the pieces on. When someone is helping me sew onto the works it becomes a passing of energy where we’re passing the sewing needle back and forth, telling stories. Since I can’t go around the canvas and do this by myself it becomes a special process and I think about my family members in the past sharing this same experience when creating quilts with and for their loved ones. 

NB: So what is the process like to build your fractured and intertwined compositions and these nonlinear narratives? Where do you start?  

KB: I start with a few lines and I’m very impulsive. I see a blank canvas and I immediately attack it. Sometimes that leads me into a dark complicated place with the painting, because there’s no thought put into it. Yet in my practice I work with oil paint, and I think oil is not that forgiving. So I’ve learned to also approach a painting and sort of forgive myself when I make these mistakes. I will usually paint something impulsively and then I will impulsively cover it back up with a different shade of paint and at times it drives me crazy. As time goes on, I turn the painting around, I rotate it and see shapes coming out of it. At some point I would stretch my canvases on the floor and with whatever dirt was picked up, I would find a figure connecting the dots and tracing it out. I’m interested in seeing if I will ever have a calm moment in my painting process, but so far I have been enjoying this way of creating.

NB: I love it. So can you expand on your use of interior and exterior or inside and outside spaces? How does this relate to other themes you explore through your work?  

KB: So I tend to ponder on this daily and I’ve figured that I sort of work with three types of locations: One is the place within myself that is fleeting and is an emotional place, the place that I create from my imagination to escape to. Then there is a physical space that is also fleeting because it is temporary and won’t be there forever. For example, I made a painting of my friend in her garden, which is planned to be sold to developers who will most likely destroy it and build something new. The garden is set on top of a hill, lush green and with a wooden bungalow with large windows in the middle. The space is like a Monet painting and although there’s sadness to painting a space and a moment that will eventually be gone, l also I feel there’s a justice with capturing this moment in time. 

The third space I work with is also a physical location, and generally it’s a location that I have photographed when I’m walking or in a car. I usually take photos of storefronts and signs that I find interesting, then I screen print them onto fabric and sew them as patches onto the paintings. So far I have only done this with photos I’ve taken in Paris and Los Angeles, but the world is always changing and I am always growing. I believe that it is important for me to capture these stamps in time. Of moments, feelings, energies, and locations.

NB: Incredible. Do you have any upcoming projects or exhibitions you would like to share?  

KB: Yes, I’m going to be in a group show at Albertz Benda, showing work next to the late Ken Kiff’s work and many other great artists. I’m also working on my presentation for Sotheby’s Institute and a show at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles in 2025. I am very much looking forward to continuing my career now in New York, and excited to see how I will grow out here. Thank you so much for coming by my studio!

DYLAN ROSE RHEINGOLD

Nicole: So when did you first begin to paint and what drew you to be an artist? 

Dylan: I don’t remember if there was a specific instance when I realized I wanted to be an artist. I’ve always been painting and drawing, and both of my grandmothers were artists or creatives in some ways so from a very early age I was always encouraged to use my hands. When I was younger I had some anxiety struggles and I think a big outlet for myself, that was encouraged by my family, was drawing. Drawing was always just very natural, it simply stuck with me and I can’t imagine my day-to-day without it. A lot of artists that I talk to, they say I didn’t have a choice, and this is who I am, although it sounds almost corny saying it out loud, but it’s very much true.

Nicole: So could you tell us about the storytelling narrative aspect in your work? 

Dylan: In terms of the storytelling aspect I’m working with a narrative that’s non linear. When people are looking at my work, and also when I’m making the work, I like to think of all of the paintings in dialogue with each other. It’s hard for me to pick apart or speak to only one painting in series. The reason I like working in series and working on multiple pieces in unison is because I like to see how they interact and talk to each other. What’s also interesting to me in terms of the narrative is this aspect of self discovery, thinking about my identity and taking a look at girlhood. I’m interested in the transitional space between girlhood to womanhood, or even in a broader sense, childhood to adulthood. 

Nicole: How is the process of painting and the use of mixed media related to this narrative?

Dylan: The first time I did a mixed media painting was when I was studying painting and screenprinting a couple years ago in Florence. Before that I studied illustration, so I was learning and going through an education that was focused on mastering the traditional skills before you could move on and come up with your own style. I had a really hard time with this more traditional education and got into a lot of altercations with my professors in my undergrad because I really didn’t like that way of learning. I’m grateful for having those skills mastered now, but it was really frustrating at the time. 

Before that, I was never using mixed media because it wasn’t the traditional thing to do, and it wasn’t until Grad school, after that semester in Italy, when I started thinking about all of the layers I was trying to address through painting and how that fell hand in hand within my own narrative. Speaking as someone who comes from a mixed background in terms of race and religion, I think it also naturally evolved into pulling all these different materials together and layering, and layering, and building these pieces without realizing at the time the connection it had with who I am and my background. I also love mixing materials that are a bit more traditional or high end with things that you wouldn’t expect, and that speaks to the parallels of adolescents and the coming of age. I have on my desk these packs of sparkles or glitter that I’m mixing with these expensive oil sticks and navigating how they can work together and what emotions that can evoke: It’s the girlhood and the womanhood in one.

Nicole: What do you have pinned to your walls and what books do you have open right now? 

Dylan: I have a lot of drawings currently pinned or taped to my walls, and all of these start off in the automatic drawing or automatic writing, surrealist automatism manner. So I’m not trying to think about it and I’m just trying to let the subconscious sink in. What I believe is successful is that they give off a dreamscape and surreal feel to them while also speaking of the narratives I’m interested in. 

The books that I have open at the moment are Katherine Bradford, Rita Ackermann, Cy Twombly, David Humphrey, and a Tracey Emin book. 

Nicole: The expressive line across all of them, you can see how that transgresses into your work. 

Dylan: Thank you, that’s a big compliment! Also there’s Philip Guston, I feel like a lot of people have been looking at him recently, but he’s like my everything.

Nicole: So tell us what are some of your upcoming projects or exhibitions that you’re excited about.  

Dylan: I’m very excited about my solo show at T293 Gallery in Rome opening May 11th through June 1st.  The show will be taking form with eight large scale mixed media paintings and six wood panel studies that are also mixed media. These studies aren’t really traditional studies because they don’t look like an underpainting or an outline for any of the large scale works. There’s a layover between the objects and the symbolisms throughout those drawings and I think if you take your time and really look at the group together, you’ll find that there’s a lot of crossover with the larger works. After this show in Rome, I’m preparing for a solo show in the winter at M + B Gallery in Los Angeles.