THE FOCUS

The Focus contributor Ansley Gwin recently visited Knoxville's renowned artist-run gallery space Bad Water, caught the exhibition Piselli by Angélique Heidler, and documented her experience. Check it out! Gallery Visit, Bad Water, November 2021 (feat. Piselli by Angélique Heidler) Gallery Visit, Bad Water, November 2021 (feat. Piselli by Angélique Heidler) Attraction and repulsion, innocence and violence, obsession and indifference; in her new body of work, Paris-born artist Angélique Heidler investigates the paradoxical dualities embedded within mainstream depictions of both...

Rachel Bubis: Much of your work explores occult imagery. Have you experienced anything supernatural? Has a spirit ever approached you when sewing beads onto a Ouija board (Ie: Ectoplasm (2015)? Nick DeFord: Even though I am fascinated by the supernatural and unknown, I (sadly) have never had an unexplainable experience. I want to! I have had uncanny things happen to me, but the truth is that I am pretty skeptical of finding supernatural answers to phenomena we can't explain. It seems...

Rachel Bubis: Your work combines text into a visual language. Can you talk more about your process in translating text/words to color, line and paint? Do you find a passage or a line and directly work from there? Can you give an example? Also, are these expressed in the titles of the work? For example: She wove during the day the sadness. Michael Giles: The process begins with the overall text on a page. As I read a book,...