Interviews by Brainard Carey

Brainard Carey
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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)

  1. 23H AGO

    Nicola Tyson

    Nicola Tyson was born in 1960 in London, England. She attended Chelsea School of Art, St. Martins School of Art and Central/St. Martins School of Art in London, and currently lives and works in New York. Primarily known as a painter, Tyson has also worked with photography, film, performance and the written word, in addition to running Trial BALLOON, an NYC project space in the early 90s. In 2023, Nicola Tyson: Selected Paintings 1993-2022, the most comprehensive overview of the artist’s work to date, was published. In 2011, Tyson released the limited-edition book Dead Letter Men, which is a collection of satirical letters addressing famous male artists. Her unique archive of color photos documenting the London club scene of the late 1970’s — Bowie Nights at Billy’s Club — was the subject of shows, both in New York and London, in 2012 and 2013. In 2025, Tyson was commissioned for Hayward Gallery’s public project banner. Tyson has mounted solo exhibitions at Petzel Gallery, New York (2026, 2025, 2024, 2020, 2016); Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels (2022); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021, 2017, 2013); The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis (2017); The Drawing Room, London (2017); Nathalia Obadia, Paris (2015); Susanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); White Columns, New York (2012), among others. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Design Museum, London (2025); The Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, Fort Worth (2022); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2021); Drawing Room, London (2021, 2018); Drawing Center, New York (2020); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018); Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland (2016); Wexner Center for the Arts (2013); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); among others. Tyson’s work is included in major collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Tate Modern, London. Nicola Tyson, Random Attachments, 2026 Charcoal, conte, pastel on sanded paper 50 x 38 in 127 x 96.5 cm. Photo: Meg Symanow Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. Nicola Tyson Nature Nurture, 2026 Charcoal, conte, pastel on sanded paper 50 x 38 in 127 x 96.5 cm. Photo: Meg Symanow Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. Nicola Tyson Motherload, 2026 Charcoal, conte, pastel on sanded paper 50 x 38 in 127 x 96.5 cm. Photo: Meg Symanow Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

    20 min

  2. 6D AGO

    Christina Kruse

    Christina Kruse, the New York-based artist whose practice navigates the shifting terrain of value, perception, and collective meaning, opens her latest solo exhibition Field Agents this April 2nd, 2026 at New Discretions. Curated by Tamar Dresdner, the exhibition unfolds as a study in instability – where systems of belief are unsettled and reassembled in response to a world in flux. Working across sculpture, wall relief, and collage, Kruse positions negotiation not as resolution, but as a condition of existence – an ongoing recalibration between competing truths. Bruchlinien (Fault Lines), 2026 Bedingter Anspruch (Contingent Claim), 2026 Der Erbe (The Heir), 2026 Der Porter (The Porter), 2024

    19 min

  3. APR 28

    Giordanne Salley

    In this new body of work, Giordanne Salley constructs shifting tableaus that attempt to visualize not time itself, but the feeling of the passage of time. Our experiences of life can often feel like we are riding along on time’s arrow. Days repeat and build like the rhythm of waves lapping at the shore. Each tide brings forth trash and treasures, bits of flora and fauna, before the lunar cycle pulls them back out to sea. So too does one’s conscious experience of life move through time, accumulating, folding in on itself, and gradually building into the future. Ripples and corrugations form over Salley’s images, diffracting their shapes into myriad frames. Like peering at the bottom of the sea through the waves, we see the subjects dance in the minute turbulence. In pieces like Endlings, these scenes verge on abstraction. Though semi-psychedelic in their optical qualities, Salley’s paintings are rooted in the natural world. Animals and human forms bathe in the undulations, adding a moment of specificity while also acting as a tether to reality and a reminder that these patterns depict the fluctuating surface of water. Coursing through glowing layers of energy, works like Infinity Loon pair discernible imagery with vibrating geometry. The waterfowl, leaving a wake in the paint behind it, upsets the lines and creates a cascading pattern that echoes toward the edges of the frame. Though often based around real-world subjects, in these new works, Salley does away with the horizon line in an effort to flatten the surface and invoke a feeling of the infinite. Repetitive and continuous, her lines and patterns are full of potential as they press onward and outward. Finding her color by applying paint in numerous thin layers, Salley works around predetermined lines, building up meditative markings of the hours spent. With every new application, the image grows richer. The use of collage and underdrawing affords each canvas a nuanced texture, both physical and visual. In Time Flows, Salley combines these elements as “a sort of scaffolding to hang the painting on or around.” Intense investigation rewards the viewer with subtle glimpses into the artist’s process. Each piece becomes a palimpsest, offering ghostly reminders of the past that push through to the final image. At the heart of all of this is a potent rumination on universal themes through the lens of Salley’s own subjectivity. Like time, so too do ideas of love, loss, and memory ebb and flow infinitely like the tides. Slipping through fingers like the ocean in our hand, the present is instantaneous and always on the way out. Salley slows down these moments, capturing them in paint and offering a moment of contemplation and reverie, reminding us that everything is always changing and evolving. Reflecting the world around it, offering vital nourishment to life, and functioning as a symbol of the incomprehensible vastness of time and consciousness, water is transformative. Subtle Bodies, 2025, 12 x 14 in, oil and paper on canvas Quasi-Material Woman, 2026, 40 x 48 in, oil and paper on canvas Time Flows, 2026, 60 x 78 in, oil and paper on canvas

    18 min

  4. APR 22

    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

  5. APR 21

    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

  6. APR 15

    Tess Michalik

    Michalik has exhibited internationally in art institutions, fairs, university galleries, community spaces, and commercial galleries the current show of this interview at Kathryn Markel. Her paintings have been published internationally in Architectural Digest, Michalik’s newspaper,  “Devour,” was published in collaboration with Brooklyn based Raw Meat Collective, and was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York. It was displayed in the exhibit, “Please Knock: A Teen Album of Art” at MoMA through October 1st, 2023. Her painting “I Feel with my Eyes,” is in the permanent collection of WAG-Qaumajuq and is currently on view in the exhibition “Backyard Florilegium” through March 31, 2025.  Michalik lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Tess Michalik, Possession, 2026 oil on canvas 48 x 40 in. Tess Michalik, Could Heaven Ever Be Like This, 2025 oil on canvas 45 x 32 in. Tess Michalik, Love Crimes, 2025 oil on panel 30 x 24 in.

    22 min

  7. APR 14

    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

  8. APR 10

    Catherine Birk

    Catherine Birk (b. 1994, she/her) is an artist and researcher currently based in Chicago, IL. Her interdisciplinary practice brings transgender studies, queer theory, and critical theory into the expanded field of painting. Catherine earned her MFA in Painting at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (2024), and BAs in Studio Art and Art History from the College of Charleston (2016). Solo exhibitions include My mother is a horse., at the Chazen Museum of Art (Madison, WI). She has exhibited in group shows nationally, including at Redux Contemporary Art Center (Charleston, SC), Trout Museum of Art (Appleton, WI), Arts + Literature Laboratory (Madison, WI), Real Tinsel (Milwaukee, WI), and D. D. D. D. (New York, NY). Catherine Birk | hut (interference), 2025 Oil, acrylic, cold wax medium and netting on canvas 13 x 15.5 inches Catherine Birk | dam (for Morandi), 2025 Oil, acrylic, cold wax medium, and Dragon Skin Silicone on panel with artist’s frame 17 x 21 inches Catherine Birk | hut (for Strega Nona), 2026 27 cast beeswax slabs; dried herbs and essential oils of rosemary, thyme, basil, sage, and oregano; cast urethane rubber; bolts Dimensions variable: 11 x 14 inches each

    23 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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