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...
Read more >THE FOCUS
Rubens Ghenov was born in São Paulo, Brazil and immigrated to the US in 1989. He received his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2010. Ghenov has shown nationally in both solo and group exhibitions at Morgan Lehman Gallery (NY), Geoffrey Young Gallery (MA), TSA Brooklyn (NYC), Woodmere Art Museum (PA), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PA). In 2013, he co-curated with Dona Nelson the 72nd Annual Juried Exhibition at the Woodmere Art Museum. Ghenov has been featured i...
Read more >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...
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