THE FOCUS

The work of Juan Rojo has always been rooted in tradition, from Spanish Baroque painters to more contemporary masters like Lucien Freud or Frank Auerbach. While the paintings still contain allusions to those works, they exist as points of reference instead of the kind of derivative mimicry of his early paintings. In his new body of work, decoration plays a primary role as an element that intrudes and at times even obscures the faces of the subjects and disguises their...

David Underwood is a Professor of Art and the Director of Exhibitions at Carson-Newman University, in Jefferson City, Tennessee, where he has been teaching since 1990. As a former Chairperson of the university’s Art Department, he led his academic department through two successful reaccreditations with the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. Underwood is pictured here (below) in one of the campus galleries that he manages, with his 2019 mixed-media piece, “Finding a New Honesty.” David Underwood, Virtual Studio Visit,...

"I’m interested in the apophenia one curates to make sense of the world around them. I tend to explore themes of safety, control and power and how these are implemented visually. I want the works made to perform a woven narration, constantly looping back informing and reimagining themselves to reference a larger, futile attempt at solving a mutating puzzle of our fictionalized ideal of America." Jesse Butcher, Virtual Studio Visit, June 2020 Jesse Butcher, Virtual Studio Visit, June 2020 Jesse Butcher, Vi...