THE FOCUS

McLean Fahnestock: I wanted to talk to you because I am really interested in your work. I work a lot with appropriated images and I was struck by the surveillance images that you have been using for a long time now, in the different photographic processes, and how that has evolved over the past 15 years. You began manipulating images of airplanes in C-prints to now you are creating digitally manipulated patterns -- I don’t know if you call them co...

Amelia Briggs: Can you talk about your use of synthetic hair and how you got started using this material?  Althea Murphy-Price: When I first begin exploring hair in my artwork, I used only my own hair. When I did this I always felt the work was bound to my biography and I wasn’t satisfied with the way the narrative became directed at me instead of a larger discussion about identity and society. In my adolescence I...

Note: Jessica Wohl spoke with Eleanor Aldrich four days before the 2016 presidential election at her show "Love Thy Neighbor" at Sewanee's University Art Gallery. Eleanor Aldrich: Formalism is often thought of as apolitical, where as illustration can border on the didactic- how do you reconcile these in your work? Jessica Wohl: I was actually an illustration major in college, but as I graduated I instantly began distancing myself from that and realized that the work I was making was...

McLean Fahnestock: So what brought you to Memphis? Jesse Butcher:  Corkey and I moved down -- Corkey Sinks is my wife, she's from Dallas. I was actually born in Memphis but I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. We met while we were both living in Texas while maintaining our own studio practices. Both of us were curating shows for smaller independent galleries. And then both of us did our graduate degrees in Chicago. I was teaching in Chicago for...

Amelia Briggs: What are you working on right now? Joel Parsons: Girl, I am spent. I am tired. And I’m angry and scared about the state of the world. So I’m focusing on giving myself permission and pleasure in the studio, and letting the studio be wherever and whatever I want it to be. Some recent projects took a lot out of me, they were heavy and fraught and intense and involved a lot of plumbing of a lot...

Joshua Bienko: I’m interested in how you construct a painting. I just saw “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible" at The Met Breuer. It was incredible. There’s a Rubens painting where the horses and people in the background are rendered in high detail, like 30 or 40 of them. Right down to the kind of thread they’re wearing, but in the foreground, the horse’s head that carries Henry IV, is still sketched out in two or three different positions. It’s trans...

Mary Addison Hackett: The first thing that struck me about some of your recent work was the ambiguous reference to water. You grew up in Haiti, before settling in Palm Coast, Florida—a community developed under the guidance of William Levitt, whose nickname was, “The King of Suburbia.” Can you talk about how your background and coastal living has informed your work? Abigail Lucien: Growing up I was never too far from a body of water; it hadn’t struck...

Amelia Briggs: In Equal Parts you pulled ideas from two different bodies of work. What are those individual bodies of work and what is their relationship to Equal Parts? Virginia Griswold: Sometimes I feel like I am making one long continuous body of work with no beginning or end to it. Exhibitions offer an opportunity to pause, reflect, frame-up ideas, package, and diverge. They offer punctuation on what would otherwise be a long (maybe too long!) run-on sentence. I would...