THE FOCUS

Katie Thompson Murphy, Some Inward Maze, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 inches, (left), Light and Languor, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 inches, (center), A Plunge at Daylight, 2025, acrylic and oil on canvas, 84 x 72 inches (right) Wesley Roden: How can color reframe a subject in an unreal light? Alternatively, does color, especially saturated tones, lend to a subject feeling hypereal? Katie Thompson Murphy: I love color. I love thinking about color, playing with color, staying with color. When I’m working with non-literal co...

Rachel Bubis: Your practice spans painting, filmmaking, and graphic design. Do ideas typically begin in one medium before finding their way into another? How does your approach change from one medium to the next? Noah Thomas Miller: All the time, but it's a fairly natural process. I love working across mediums and finding intersections between them, and once I established my own visual language, it made it easy to blend whatever I'm doing. Normally everything starts from a written idea...

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...