Interviews by Brainard Carey

Brainard Carey

Lives of the most Excellent Artists, Architects, Curators, Critics, Theorists Poets and more, like Vasari’s book updated. (Interviews with over 1200 artists and others about practice and lifestyle from Yale University radio WYBCX)

  1. 3 DAYS AGO

    Sarah Alice Moran

    Splat Daisies, is a solo exhibition of dreamlike paintings and sculpture by Sarah Alice Moran. Splat is a cartoon word and the spaces in these paintings draw on that system of suspended rationale. By loosening the rules of scale, gravity, and time, Moran creates dreamy pastoral scenes where humans, animals, and nature coexist without hierarchy. The show explores the quiet, almost mystical bonds between humans and animals, and the ways they shape our emotional lives. Moran paints wet-on-wet, letting thin washes of color blend and bleed across the canvas. Sunflowers dissolve into daisies, shadows become shapes, and light seemingly glows from the flowers themselves. Her compositions balance the elastic logic of cartoons with a sophisticated command of color and atmosphere. Figures, rainbows, and blossoms appear in different configurations while animals move through these spaces less as narrative agents but  as symbolic or devotional presences. Among them, inevitably, is the artist’s dog Pepper. Pepper died early in the making of this series, and her prolonged illness ushered in an extended period of anticipatory grief. During this time, Moran found solace in researching ancient Roman dog epitaphs—concise, tender monuments that affirmed the endurance of this bond across millennia. The result is a body of work that is a meditation on companionship, loss, and remembrance—a garden for Pepper to inhabit and for the artist herself to heal within. Two large-scale column paintings, inspired by the artist’s research on ancient Rome, create an architectural space – a temple – for the sculptures to operate as a shrine, and visitors are encouraged to bring their dogs; milk bones will be provided. Sarah Alice Moran, Bodega Flower Dream, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14 inches Sarah Alice Moran, Good Night P, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches Sarah Alice Moran, Sun (Flower) Bather, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14 inches

    20 min
  2. 4 DAYS AGO

    Stella De Mont

    De Mont’s practice emerges from her work as an intuitive guide, leading immersive experiences in which participants are invited into states of openness and release. It was within these rituals that she began making photographs — images conceived not as portraits but as reflections, offering back to each subject a picture of themselves liberated from the hierarchies of identity and status. The camera, in De Mont’s hands, becomes a kind of witness to what she describes as a direct encounter with the divine. What results is a body of work of striking formal beauty and genuine spiritual weight. A figure floats in a glacial pool, arms wide, body small against the massive indifference of boulders and jade-green water — surrendered, but also luminous. A woman lies curled on a sand dune at dusk, the full moon burning above her in a wide blue sky, the curve of her back answering the curve of the earth. Throughout, De Mont is drawn to moments when the border between the human figure and its surroundings seems to dissolve — not in romantic idealization, but in something closer to fact. De Mont is particularly drawn to the feminine as a site of intuition and receptivity, and she often photographs two or three figures together, finding in that small gathering an amplification of communion — bodies acting as extensions of each other and of the earth itself. “We are incredibly sophisticated energy beings, I hope to capture a transmission that is contagious, that makes our bellies soften with peace and belonging.” It is a quality her pictures genuinely carry. They ask something of the viewer — a willingness to be still, to look, to feel the pull of a life that is waiting. Stella De Mont is based in Los Angeles. This Life Wants You is her first solo exhibition with Benrubi Gallery. Stella De Mont, Owls, 2024 Stella De Mont, Glory, 2024 Stella De Mont, Cradled, 2025

    25 min
  3. 14 APR

    David Smalling

    David Smalling portrait © Stefen Pompee Born in 1987 in Kingston, Jamaica, David Smalling lives and works in New York City. He studied Mathematics at Yale University, where he also trained at the Yale School of Art, and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Drawing from the tradition of Mannerism and the Dutch Golden Age, Smalling’s paintings examine how contemporary social codes and gender norms shape identity and behavior. Through carefully constructed domestic and ceremonial scenes, he explores themes of belonging, aspiration, and restraint, questioning the roles we inherit and perform. The exhibition of all new paintings on wood panels takes its title from the Elizabethan collar, the veterinary device colloquially known as the “cone of shame”—a protective apparatus designed to prevent an animal from tearing at its own sutures. The collar, as depicted in Cone of Shame, becomes a metaphor for conditional belonging: entry into a space that promises safety and prestige while quietly limiting autonomy. David Smalling, Party Favor, 2026 Oil on panel 61 × 91.5 cm — 24 × 36 in. Courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York. Photo © Charles Roussel. David Smalling, Cremaster, 2025 Oil on panel 51 × 61 cm — 20 × 24 in. Courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York; Photo © Charles Roussel. David Smalling, Follicular, 2025 Oil on panel 91 × 61 cm — 36 × 24 in. Courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York. Photo © Charles Roussel.

    27 min
  4. 1 APR

    Rochelle Voyles

    Rochelle Voyles (b. 1989, Toledo, Ohio) is a Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary artist whose works explore the cyclical nature of humanity’s patterns and the underlying impulses that drive behavior. Mining historical textile diagrams and found images, Voyles arranges fragments of different moments meticulously in collage on-wood cut sculpture. She dislocates, interrupts, and re-purposes found images in order to decontextualize her experience of reality and decipher our collective relationship to photographs. She received her BFA in Fine Arts/Printmaking from Pratt Institute in 2012. She is an upcoming resident of the Wassaic Project, and was a resident at The Peter Bullough Foundation, the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony and the ChaNorth Residency. She has shown at galleries in New York such as Below Grand, 81 Leonard Gallery, Trestle Gallery, Peninsula Art Space, Field of Play Gallery, and Collarworks. Voyles has been published in blogs and online such as Collé, Shoutout LA, Paradice Palase, and The Jealous Curator. Her recent solo show “Unreliable Narrators” at 81 Leonard has been featured as a March 2026 editors select in Impulse Magazine, and as an editorial feature on Art Rabbit. Additionally, the show received favorable reviews in Art Spiel and White Hot Magazine. Neptune in Pisces, 2026Mixed media; collage, paper, and wood, 20 x 23 in. The Bowline at Dusk, 2025 Mixed media; collage, paper, and wood 32 x 31 in. Returned in Fragments, 2026 Mixed media; collage, paper, wood 8 x 7 in.

    22 min
  5. 25 MAR

    Leonardo Madriz

    Leonardo Madriz (b. 1987, Louisiana) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He makes expanded cinema installations and material assemblages regarding the inter- and inner-states of belonging. Madriz holds an MFA from Hunter College, NY (2021) and a BFA from Louisiana State University (2010). Residency awards include Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2024-25), Bemis Center (2024), Wassaic Project (2024), and Vermont Studio Center (2014). Solo shows include Sisyphus Altered at Strobe, New York, NY (2023) and Can’t Forget, Dying to Know at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY (2023). His installation Letters to Home was selected for CURRENTS New Media Festival in Santa Fe, NM (2022), and a reformatted excerpt of Letters to Home II was presented by the DUMBO Projection Project (2025). Recent group exhibitions include Repair at Shadow Walls for Upstate Art Weekend, NY (2025) and I’m Not Alien, I’m Discontent at the Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2024). Permanent collections include the LSU Museum of Art. He is currently an adjunct faculty at the International Center for Photography. Leonardo Madriz, Sentinel Adorned in the Leavers’ Wake, 2025. Image by Gustavo Murillo, Courtesy of Parent Company Gallery.  Leonardo Madriz, Down Is the New Up (Möbius Recalibrates), 2025. Image by Gustavo Murillo, Courtesy of Parent Company Gallery.  Leonardo Madriz, Sentinel of Lacrimosa Guerrero, 2026. Image by Gustavo Murillo, Courtesy of Parent Company Gallery.

    24 min

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Lives of the most Excellent Artists, Architects, Curators, Critics, Theorists Poets and more, like Vasari’s book updated. (Interviews with over 1200 artists and others about practice and lifestyle from Yale University radio WYBCX)

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