THE FOCUS

Faira Herod: You stated that what the body loses, an art practice can make visible and transmissible. Has this idea played a role in leading you to create art in response to your chronic illness? How has this act of creating art helped you overcome what you cannot control in your own body? Jocelyn Mathewes: Generally, I make art out of fixation, whether that be from a desire to understand, a fascination, love, or frustrated preoccupation. I make in order...

Rachel Bubis: As a Lao refugee and immigrant, you describe how your experience during and post-Vietnam War continues to heavily impact your life and art. You’ve also mentioned that this experience of war shows up as visual fragments, unlike your siblings who remember specific sounds or smells. Why do you think your experience was different? Sisavanh Phouthavong: As the youngest girl of seven, I grew up with four brothers and an older sister. My siblings were always very protective of...

Rachel Bubis: Your work returns again and again to Southern identity, asking what it means to be Southern. Has the process of making your work changed or clarified that question for you in any way? And looking forward, where do you feel Southern identity is evolving or revealing itself in unexpected ways? Isaiah Kennedy: The South, as an ideological construct, is polylithic in nature, not a monolith. What being Southern means to one person is completely different than what it...

Wesley Roden: Whether by arranging drama scenes with ceramic figures and tequila umbrellas or depicting portraits of people in motion, your work conveys narrative. How do you arrange items or choose subject matter that creates parameters for imagination or a bigger story? Do you ever hint beyond the canvas or silhouette of the figure? Denise Stewart-Sanabria: The objects in paintings have to have a level of fabulousness to them. They want to pose. They want to star in something. Whoever...

Daniel Holdridge: Your practice is anchored in drawing. Through multiple technical and material processes, you’ve demonstrated a sincere interest in what the formal elements of drawing can accomplish. What are some qualities of drawing (historically, technically or otherwise) that invite this kind of focus, for your work? Laura Cleary Williams: I think I want to say drawing was the first thing I was doing, but that’s not true. What happened was I fell in love with printmaking. Through lear...

Rachel Bubis: You’ve spoken about how your grandfather and great-uncle’s roles as explorers shaped your thinking around desire, land, and ownership. I’m curious whether those ideas were ever part of your conversations with them, or whether they were aware of how their histories informed your work. McLean Fahnestock: Both my grandfather and great uncle died before I was born. So, their influence on my work has come through my family’s, especially my grandmother’s, remembrances of the expedi...

Jered Sprecher, Looking for the Eye, 2022, oil on canvas, 72 x 80 inches, photo by Bruce Cole, courtesy the artist and Ferrara Showman Gallery Anna Mages: In a statement from your show at Tri-Star’s Candoro Marble Building, you discuss your work as exploring the “precarious relationship between nature and technology.” The way that you describe this relationship recalls the theme of “nature v. nurture.” Do you see these relationships as part of the same conversation? Jered Sprecher: Those are definitely related to that. W...

Rachel Bubis: After developing your drawing skills for many years, you decided to shift away from realism which you’ve described as an “escape velocity.” What led to that moment, and how did it transform the direction of your work? Was it over time or suddenly? Lain York: It happened fairly quickly coming out of university. I was looking for a particular immediacy for what I was doing. Ideas were coming quickly and I found myself moving away from what I thou...