THE FOCUS

Jessica Gatlin: I think process is an important question for me… to ask myself. Because I really don’t know how my work comes about. Corinna Ray: So, we’ll start with process. A Curious Reality, silkscreen on paper and fabric, assemblage, dimensions variable JG: I don’t want to talk about it. [laughs] CR: Do you decide the thing before you make the thing? JG: I think so… I decide some things before I make the thing....

Jody Stokes-Casey: With being selected to exhibit in State of the Art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and being named a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, you’ve had an impressive bout of major successes recently. Congratulations!  John Douglas Powers: Thank you! Being named a Guggenheim Fellow is a tremendous honor and has certainly been a welcome surprise. My inclusion in State of the Art was—and continues to be—a re...

Sara Estes: You are primarily a collage artist. How did you come to use ready-made images as raw material? Have you always done collage? Lester Merriweather: As I was attending Skowhegan in 2002, I was in grad school and went there working on a lot of things digital, a lot of photography work. Somewhere during all that, when I had time to work and process things in that setting, I came back to simply wanting to draw. From that...

Eleanor Aldrich: It seems like there are reoccurring characters that appear in different roles throughout Soft Bark. Do you think of the work in the show as related to theater or portraiture? What is your relationship to these subjects? Paul Collins: The subjects of the paintings are all cut trees from my neighborhood. If they’re portraits, then the portrait is of my romantic projection onto those trees. So I’m using the forms of the trees, but the tree...

Vanessa Mayoraz: [Walking around her recent show “Between You and Me” at the Reece Museum in Johnson City, TN]. This installation is the second version of an installation titled “Infrastructure” that I showed this summer in Switzerland. Amelia Briggs: Are the sketches and 2-D work on your website mock-ups for large scale installations like this one? VM: I tend to see everything in 3-D even though I do a lot of work in 2-D. This piece was done from a sketch...