Interviews by Brainard Carey

Splat Daisies, is a solo exhibition of dreamlike paintings and sculpture by Sarah Alice Moran. Splat is a cartoon word and the spaces in these paintings draw on that system of suspended rationale. By loosening the rules of scale, gravity, and time, Moran creates dreamy pastoral scenes where humans, animals, and nature coexist without hierarchy. The show explores the quiet, almost mystical bonds between humans and animals, and the ways they shape our emotional lives. Moran paints wet-on-wet, letting thin washes of color blend and bleed across the canvas. Sunflowers dissolve into daisies, shadows become shapes, and light seemingly glows from the flowers themselves. Her compositions balance the elastic logic of cartoons with a sophisticated command of color and atmosphere. Figures, rainbows, and blossoms appear in different configurations while animals move through these spaces less as narrative agents but as symbolic or devotional presences. Among them, inevitably, is the artist’s dog Pepper. Pepper died early in the making of this series, and her prolonged illness ushered in an extended period of anticipatory grief. During this time, Moran found solace in researching ancient Roman dog epitaphs—concise, tender monuments that affirmed the endurance of this bond across millennia. The result is a body of work that is a meditation on companionship, loss, and remembrance—a garden for Pepper to inhabit and for the artist herself to heal within. Two large-scale column paintings, inspired by the artist’s research on ancient Rome, create an architectural space – a temple – for the sculptures to operate as a shrine, and visitors are encouraged to bring their dogs; milk bones will be provided.

De Mont’s practice emerges from her work as an intuitive guide, leading immersive experiences in which participants are invited into states of openness and release. It was within these rituals that she began making photographs — images conceived not as portraits but as reflections, offering back to each subject a picture of themselves liberated from the hierarchies of identity and status. The camera, in De Mont’s hands, becomes a kind of witness to what she describes as a direct encounter with the divine. What results is a body of work of striking formal beauty and genuine spiritual weight. A figure floats in a glacial pool, arms wide, body small against the massive indifference of boulders and jade-green water — surrendered, but also luminous. A woman lies curled on a sand dune at dusk, the full moon burning above her in a wide blue sky, the curve of her back answering the curve of the earth. Throughout, De Mont is drawn to moments when the border between the human figure and its surroundings seems to dissolve — not in romantic idealization, but in something closer to fact. De Mont is particularly drawn to the feminine as a site of intuition and receptivity, and she often photographs two or three figures together, finding in that small gathering an amplification of communion — bodies acting as extensions of each other and of the earth itself. “We are incredibly sophisticated energy beings, I hope to capture a transmission that is contagious, that makes our bellies soften with peace and belonging.” It is a quality her pictures genuinely carry. They ask something of the viewer — a willingness to be still, to look, to feel the pull of a life that is waiting. Stella De Mont is based in Los Angeles. This Life Wants You is her first solo exhibition with Benrubi Gallery.

Michalik has exhibited internationally in art institutions, fairs, university galleries, community spaces, and commercial galleries the current show of this interview at Kathryn Markel. Her paintings have been published internationally in Architectural Digest, Michalik’s newspaper, “Devour,” was published in collaboration with Brooklyn based Raw Meat Collective, and was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York. It was displayed in the exhibit, “Please Knock: A Teen Album of Art” at MoMA through October 1st, 2023. Her painting “I Feel with my Eyes,” is in the permanent collection of WAG-Qaumajuq and is currently on view in the exhibition “Backyard Florilegium” through March 31, 2025. Michalik lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Born in 1987 in Kingston, Jamaica, David Smalling lives and works in New York City. He studied Mathematics at Yale University, where he also trained at the Yale School of Art, and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Drawing from the tradition of Mannerism and the Dutch Golden Age, Smalling’s paintings examine how contemporary social codes and gender norms shape identity and behavior. Through carefully constructed domestic and ceremonial scenes, he explores themes of belonging, aspiration, and restraint, questioning the roles we inherit and perform. The exhibition of all new paintings on wood panels takes its title from the Elizabethan collar, the veterinary device colloquially known as the “cone of shame”—a protective apparatus designed to prevent an animal from tearing at its own sutures. The collar, as depicted in Cone of Shame, becomes a metaphor for conditional belonging: entry into a space that promises safety and prestige while quietly limiting autonomy.

Catherine Birk (b. 1994, she/her) is an artist and researcher currently based in Chicago, IL. Her interdisciplinary practice brings transgender studies, queer theory, and critical theory into the expanded field of painting. Catherine earned her MFA in Painting at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (2024), and BAs in Studio Art and Art History from the College of Charleston (2016). Solo exhibitions include My mother is a horse., at the Chazen Museum of Art (Madison, WI). She has exhibited in group shows nationally, including at Redux Contemporary Art Center (Charleston, SC), Trout Museum of Art (Appleton, WI), Arts + Literature Laboratory (Madison, WI), Real Tinsel (Milwaukee, WI), and D. D. D. D. (New York, NY).

dean erdmann lives and works between San Diego, CA and Brooklyn, NY. dean erdmann is an interdisciplinary artist in moving and still images, sculpture, and installation. Their sculptural practice evolved from their image-making practice. They live and work between Brooklyn, NY and San Diego, CA. Their work has been exhibited at ONE Archives, Mexicali Biennial, Hammer Museum, REDCAT, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Spiral Hall, Tokyo, Kavi GuptaBerlin, the Sheila Johnson Design Center, Torrance Art Museum, and Public Fiction, among many others. Their permanent public commission for the LA K-line Leimert Park Station opened Fall 2022. Over the following years, they collaborated with an evolving team of dedicated artists and producers—Grace Whiteside, Celeste Wilson, Christopher Duffy, Esteban Salazar-Cucalon, Michael Haddy, and James Corporan, —while receiving support from fellowships and residencies at Vera List Center for Art and Politics, Urban Glass, and The Chinati Foundation.

Rochelle Voyles (b. 1989, Toledo, Ohio) is a Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary artist whose works explore the cyclical nature of humanity’s patterns and the underlying impulses that drive behavior. Mining historical textile diagrams and found images, Voyles arranges fragments of different moments meticulously in collage on-wood cut sculpture. She dislocates, interrupts, and re-purposes found images in order to decontextualize her experience of reality and decipher our collective relationship to photographs. She received her BFA in Fine Arts/Printmaking from Pratt Institute in 2012. She is an upcoming resident of the Wassaic Project, and was a resident at The Peter Bullough Foundation, the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony and the ChaNorth Residency. She has shown at galleries in New York such as Below Grand, 81 Leonard Gallery, Trestle Gallery, Peninsula Art Space, Field of Play Gallery, and Collarworks. Voyles has been published in blogs and online such as Collé, Shoutout LA, Paradice Palase, and The Jealous Curator. Her recent solo show “Unreliable Narrators” at 81 Leonard has been featured as a March 2026 editors select in Impulse Magazine, and as an editorial feature on Art Rabbit. Additionally, the show received favorable reviews in Art Spiel and White Hot Magazine. Neptune in Pisces, 2026Mixed media; collage, paper, and wood, 20 x 23 in.

Leonardo Madriz (b. 1987, Louisiana) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He makes expanded cinema installations and material assemblages regarding the inter- and inner-states of belonging. Madriz holds an MFA from Hunter College, NY (2021) and a BFA from Louisiana State University (2010). Residency awards include Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2024-25), Bemis Center (2024), Wassaic Project (2024), and Vermont Studio Center (2014). Solo shows include Sisyphus Altered at Strobe, New York, NY (2023) and Can’t Forget, Dying to Know at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY (2023). His installation Letters to Home was selected for CURRENTS New Media Festival in Santa Fe, NM (2022), and a reformatted excerpt of Letters to Home II was presented by the DUMBO Projection Project (2025). Recent group exhibitions include Repair at Shadow Walls for Upstate Art Weekend, NY (2025) and I’m Not Alien, I’m Discontent at the Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2024). Permanent collections include the LSU Museum of Art. He is currently an adjunct faculty at the International Center for Photography.

Torbjørn Rødland (b. 1970, Stavanger, Norway) makes photographic images that pointedly address their viewers, evoking a wide range of emotional and intellectual states. Curiosity, humor, criticality, artifice, reverence for the natural world, and romanticism appear throughout his work and often in the same image. Rødland also emphasizes the formal attributes of his photographs, pushing the medium toward modes of visual expression more commonly associated with painting, and forging links between twentieth-century art photography and twenty-first-century approaches to image-making common to advertising and social media. Often prompted by non-photographic imagery that he transforms into real-world photographic subjects, Rødland portrays scenes designed to generate psychological reaction through his depiction of highly sensory qualities. The physicality present in the work is driven by his use of film-based cameras and chemical darkroom processes. Torbjørn’s first exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery’s New York location, Bones in the Canal and Other Photographs, is on view now through April 25, 2026.

Kevin Umaña (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Spending his early years between Los Angeles and El Salvador, Umaña’s personal history has profoundly shaped his visual language. In El Salvador, he was immersed in a rural environment rich with natural textures, vibrant flora, and traditional crafts. While in Los Angeles, he confronted the intensity of city life and the pressures of assimilation. This duality seeded the fragmented forms and layered symbolism that define his art today. His practice continues to carry echoes of Latin American patterns, nature’s geometry, and American architectural influences, all reimagined through abstraction. Umaña received his B.F.A from San Francisco State University in 2014. In 2025, Umaña received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. He has completed residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (2024); Anderson Ranch (2024); Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2023-24); Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Helena, MT (2023); The Center for Book Arts, New York (2019). In 2017, Umaña created a permanent installation at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Institutions owning his work include The United Nations Art Collection, New York; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Munson, Utica, NY; Fidelity Mutual Funds Collection; Center for Book Arts Library, New York; and The Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato, CA. In 2026, Umaña will be participating in the MacDowell Fellowship in New Hampshire.

Rob Davis was born in 1970 in Norfolk, Virginia. He graduated from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1997 with a degree in painting. His work has been exhibited both internationally and, in the U.S., It has been included in exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Chrysler Museum Norfolk, VA; Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Luce Gallery, Turin; Rental Gallery, Long Island; and Untitled Gallery, New York. Davis currently lives and works in New York.

Jeffrey Heiman is a painter whose work draws on personal memory and art historical references to explore intimacy, absence, and the surreal within domestic or imagined space. Blurring figuration and negative space, his paintings evoke a liminal sense of presence and emotional residue. He has been an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony (Woodstock, NY), Neddy Artist Award Finalist 2022 (Seattle, WA), and recently earned his MFA in Painting from Bard College, he currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

Omar Kholeif is an artist, author, curator, cultural historian and professor of global art theory and practice at the Glasgow School of Art and Program Leader of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice with the University of Glasgow. They work and operate under numerous guises, including as the avatar of Doctor O—The World’s Leading Pop Physician (TM). Born in Cairo, Egypt, they were raised in Glasgow, Scotland, Los Angeles, CA, and elsewhere. An author of over two dozen volumes on art, a curator of over 100 exhibitions, they are the co-founding director of artPost21, a not-for-profit publishing and broadcast platform for artists and their dreamwork. Their recent books include, Nil Yalter: Circular Tension (2024), Otobong Nkanga: Stitched Dreams (2024) and Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs (2023). In 2025 their long-awaited critical biography on Huguette Caland was published as part of imagine/otherwise. Forthcoming in 2026 is Luísa Correia Pereira: World Child, published by Sternberg Press. Forthcoming projects include the curated group exhibition, Fellow Travelers at Tabari Art Space, Dubaiand a survey exhibition of their creative practice at The Third Line curated by Sofia Victorino.

A note: On the interview concerning the 3 channel video “Same as me” from 2002 shows an abbreviated day in the life of a total of 18 different versions of the artist. Only viewed three at a time, the possible variations are synchronized across time and space or arise in daydreams of elsewhere or other than. For Campbell, the process of making the video revealed the thesis of the work. “It was very challenging to learn how to reenact my self…. it was hard to keep up with myself.” Beth Campbell, (USA, born in Illinois), demonstrates the inextricable entanglements of past, present, and future through her thought-provoking sculptures, installations, ceramics and works on paper. Equal parts humorous, prescient and morbid, Campbell confronts an overwhelming multiple future, culled from research on the philosophies that fueled the early internet and AI. Campbell is best recognized for her drawings and mobiles that draw from a specific moment in her life, multiplied into a profusion of speculative possibilities. The drawings, each titled with the opening line, “My potential future based on my present circumstances…”, mimic the form of a tree diagram, a graphic structure used to visualize probability and hierarchy. This diagram becomes Campbell’s means to channel anxieties about an overwhelmingly multiple future. She began to make these drawings about her life as an artist in New York City in the late 1990’s. In them, she suggests taking a moment to look both forward and backwards, taking into account actions and positions and the circumstances that led to them. Beth Campbell earned her BFA from Truman State University in 1993 (Kirksville, MO) and her MFA from Ohio University in 1997 (Athens, OH). She has held over a dozen solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions, including The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2017); Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH (2010); “Following Room” at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2007); Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY (2020, 2017, 2012); the Public Art Fund, New York, NY (2007); White Columns, New York, NY (2000); and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, NY (2008, 2005, 2004). Her work has been shown at MoMA PS1, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Artists Space, and the Bloomberg Financial Offices in Conjunction with Sculpture Center. Campbell has also been featured in exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, (Pittsburgh, PA); Manifesta 7 (Italy); The Andy Warhol Museum, (Pittsburgh, PA); Contemporary Arts Center, (Cincinnati, OH); OK Center, (Linz, AT); and EX3 Centre for Contemporary Art, (Florence, IT). She has a large commission permanently on view in the Landmarks program at the University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX). Campbell received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), a residency at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Arts/Industry Residency (2010), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship (2009) a Pollock- Krasner Foundation Grant (2006) and a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Art Grant (2000). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Clementine Keith-Roach (b. 1984) received a BA in Art History from University of Bristol, Bristol, UK and now lives and works in Dorset, UK. She has exhibited at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Ben Hunter Gallery, London, UK; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; Blue Projects, London, UK; Centre Regional D’art Contemporain (CRAC), Sète, France; The Villa Lontana, Rome, Italy; Open Space Contemporary, London, UK; Pervilion, Palermo, Italy and London, UK; The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Wellcome Collection, London, UK; Kasmin, New York, NY; and Villa Lontana, Rome, Italy; among others. She is also an editor of Effects, a journal of art, poetry and essays. Keith-Roach’s work was featured on the cover of Art in America’s September 2022 issue illustrating Glenn Adamson’s article Monuments for the Moment, which contextualizes her vessels alongside other influential sculptors including Baseera Khan, Julia Kunin, and Martin Puryear. She presented her first solo exhibition with P·P·O·W in 2024, and her fourth solo exhibition with Ben Hunter Gallery in 2025.

Based in Brooklyn, NY (b. 1986, Taishan, China), Ye Zhu is an interdisciplinary artist focused on painting, public art, and social practice. He has presented solo exhibitions at DIMIN (2023) and Harkawik (2022) in New York, NY; at Moskowitz Bayse (2021) in Los Angeles, CA; and at the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx, NY (2022). His work has been included in group exhibitions at The Sugar Hill Museum in Harlem, NY (2022–23), Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles (2023), Galerie Marguo in Paris, Harper’s (2023, 2021), and James Fuentes (2021) in New York. Over the past year (2024–25), he completed residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), Dieu Donné Workspace in Brooklyn, and Wave Hill in the Bronx. Zhu has created numerous public projects, including a tribute installation for healthcare workers at the Yale School of Medicine (2022), a billboard project with Kingsgate Project Space in London (2021), A Universe in Strafford, NH (2021), and CONSTELLATION on Governors Island (2021), featured in The New York Times. He is a founding member of Haven Arts Park (2020–2023), an initiative dedicated to transforming contaminated land into an art park, and was a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant (2022–2023).

Ron Norsworthy is an interdisciplinary artist whose broad practice engages the fields of art, architecture, filmmaking and design. Informing his work is a foundational belief that the rooms, spaces and environments we inhabit and interact with speak volumes not only about who we are now, but also about our dreams, aspirations and our struggles as well. Through the creation of collaged reliefs, decorative objects, textiles and installations, his work carries the viewer through a non-linear, layered story of his life, one shaped by his lived experience as a queer person of the global majority. Norsworthy was born in South Bend, Indiana and currently lives and works in Connecticut and New Jersey, respectively. His work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem, NY; The Old Stone House, Brooklyn, NY; Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ; The Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY; Five Points Gallery, Torrington, CT; Standard Space, Sharon, CT; Project for Empty Space, Newark, NJ; the International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, NE; the New York Historical Society, NYC; the Governor’s Island Art Fair, Governors Island, NY; the Armory Show, NY; Paris Photo; and it is also in the permanent collection of the Newark Museum of Art. In 2023, Norsworthy was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in Visual Arts.

Xanthe Burdett (b. 1995) is an artist from Devon currently living and working in London. Her practice is led by painting but also encompasses drawing and installation. She graduated from MA Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2024, and received her BA in Education, English and Drama at Cambridge University. Her work explores the relationship between the body and nature, questioning the notion of the body as nature itself. Through a personal mythology deeply rooted in place, Xanthe weaves bodies and stories into layered works where the boundary between the human and non-human shifts and stretches. Her pieces, which move between extreme scales, evoke a dynamic interplay as strange, otherworldly creatures emerge through the layers of glazing. Xanthe approaches her practice as a mesh, with her paintings existing within an interconnected web. One thread extends to the monumental hunting tapestries at the V&A, another to the way light dances across a fallen tree on the riverbank of her childhood. Xanthe is a recipient of the De Laszlo Foundation Young Artist Award and has been shortlisted for the Jacksons Painting Prize.

Katie Simmons is an artist, educator, and wildlife biologist from the Appalachian mountains in east Tennessee. She holds baccalaureate degrees in art history, visual art, and wildlife biology and her MA in education and MFA in drawing and fiber art. Katie is an instructor of drawing and fiber art at Colorado State University and Front Range Community College. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally in numerous group and solo shows in the United States, western Europe and South America. Her research on feminist aesthetics, the uncanny, and the commodification of bodies through sex trafficking has also been published and presented at regional and national conferences. Katie has been the recipient of the Charlie and Gwen Hatchette Creativity Award, the Keith Foskin MFA Scholarship, the Boynes Artist Award, the Oak Springs Garden Foundation Residency, Centrum Residency, and a finalist for the Women United Art Prize and Prisma Art Prize. She is also a vocal advocate for the Sexual Assault Victim Advocate Center in Colorado. In her free time, Katie loves ultra trail running, spending time with her family, and watching bad tv with her dog. Katie’s work has most recently been exhibited in a solo exhibit at Metropolitan Community College’s Gallery of Art and Design and she has upcoming shows this spring and summer at the Sanger Gallery in Key West, Florida, the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art in Fort Collins, Colorado and Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Paul Scott (b. 1953, United Kingdom) is a UK-based artist, living and working in Cumbria, with a diverse practice and an international reputation. Creating individual pieces that blur the boundaries between fine art, craft, and design, he is well known for his research into printed vitreous surfaces, as well as his characteristic blue-and-white artworks in glazed ceramic. Scott’s artworks can be found in public collections around the globe, including the National Museum, Norway; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; National Museums Liverpool; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY. Commissioned work can be found in a number of UK museums, as well as in public places in the north of England, including Carlisle, Maryport, Gateshead, and Newcastle upon Tyne. He has also completed large-scale works in Hanoi, Vietnam, and at the Guldagergård public sculpture park in Denmark. A combination of rigorous research, studio practice, curation, writing, and commissioned work ensures that his practice continues to develop. His work is fundamentally concerned with the reanimation of familiar objects, landscape, pattern, and a sense of place. He was professor of ceramics at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) from 2011–2018. Scott received his Bachelor of Art Education and Design from Saint Martin’s College and his PhD from the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design in England. His current research project, New American Scenery, has been supported by an Alturas Foundation artist award, Ferrin Contemporary, and funding from Arts Council England. Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, Souvenir of Portland OR Black Lives Matter (After Killen & Howard)/Trumpian Campaigne, No.5, 2021. Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, Residual Waste (Texas) No.5/1, 2022 Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, The Sleep of Reason, Wood Cuts (After Spode’s Woodland/Wild Rose) 2, 2024 Cumbrian Blue(s), New American Scenery, Sampler Jug, No.7 (After Stubbs), 2021