Interviews by Brainard Carey

• Maureen McQuillan

  Maureen McQuillan (photo credit: Etienne Fossard)Pictured in front of “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” her permanent public art installation, completed 2018, which spans three sides of the 36th Avenue N/W station in Astoria, Queens, and was commissioned by Metropolitan Transit Authority/Arts & Design. Maureen McQuillan creates process-focused, system-based paintings from multiple layers of ink and acrylic polymers that convey a deep but elusive sense of space. Vibrantly hued, she uses rippling, wave-like linear elements and undulating rounded forms to suggest shapes in nature as well as the human body. Her systematic approach to color results in a luminous and complex optical mix reflecting her interest in how our perceptions of color have changed as technology has advanced. Born and raised in New York City, Maureen McQuillan is a graduate of Columbia University and the New York Studio School.  Since the early 1990s she has been exhibiting her work in solo and group shows in galleries and museums throughout the United States as well as in France, the UK, Costa Rica, and Hong Kong. McQuillan’s work has been reviewed and reproduced in many publications, among them The New York Times, The New York Daily News, The Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Artnews, Architectural Digest, and Art on Paper; and her work is held in public and private collections all over the world. Maureen McQuillan, Untitled (C/T), 2025 Acrylic polymer, ink and acrylic on wood panel. 10 x 10 inches. Courtesy the artist and McKenzie Fine Art, New York. Maureen McQuillan, Untitled (C/B2), 2025 Acrylic polymer, ink and acrylic on wood panel 30 x 40 inches. Courtesy the artist and McKenzie Fine Art, New York. Maureen McQuillan, Untitled (C/RB/BG), 2024 Acrylic polymer, ink and acrylic on wood panel. 16 1/4 x 16 inches. Courtesy the artist and McKenzie Fine Art, New York.

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• Clare Grill

  Clare Grill (born 1979, lives and works in Queens, NY) received her MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2005 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Parlance, Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY; Cutwork, Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain; and Wich Language and Oyster, M+B, Los Angeles, CA. Group exhibitions include Things I Had No Words For at the Center for the Arts, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Interisland (New Paintings from New York and Hawai’i), University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Of Flesh and Air, Marta Cervera Gallery, Madrid, Spain; The Feminine in Abstract Painting, Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY; Deep! Down! Inside!, Hales Gallery, NY; and New Skin, curated by Jason Stopa, Monica King Gallery, New York, NY. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe. Clare Grill, Drape, 2025, oil on linen, 80 x 112 inches (diptych) Clare Grill, Dune, 2025, oil on linen, 94 x 73 inches Clare Grill, Flit, 2025, oil on linen, 46 x 42 inches

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• Keiran Brennan Hinton

  photo by Colin Outridge. The exhibition Change of Scenery,  marks the painter’s third solo show with the gallery. It is the culmination of a year’s worth of travel across the U.S., as Brennan Hinton spent extended time in residency in Corsicana, TX, Martha’s Vineyard, MA, and Fishers Island, NY. Brennan Hinton’s practice focuses on the sustained act of observation, the plein-air discipline, and painting’s ability to capture the essence of a place. The time spent in three distinctive towns, each in its own ways divergent from Brennan Hinton’s familiar Ontario, required the artist to meet each place with open eyes and a fresh palette. To situate himself, Brennan Hinton leaned on two formative texts, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry and Moby Dick by Herman Melville, which are each set in the same landscapes in which he painted. Keiran Brennan Hinton (b. 1992, Toronto) lives and works in Toronto and Elgin, Ontario. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 2014 and his MFA from Yale University in 2016. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Ogunquit Museum of Art, Ogunquit, ME and The Dennos Museum Center, Traverse City, MI. Past international solo shows of Brennan Hinton’s work include exhibitions at MAKI Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2022); Thomas Fuchs Gallery, Stuttgart, Germany (2021); Charles Moffett, New York, NY (2023, 2021); Nicholas Robert Gallery, Ontario (2022); and Francesco Pantaleone Gallery, Palermo, Italy (2019) among others. His paintings have been featured in institutional exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario; James Castle House, Boise, Idaho; and Katonah Museum of Art, Westchester, NY. Keiran Brennan Hinton, The White Pine, 2025. Oil on linen, 70 x 60 in. Photo by Lauren Finlay. Courtesy the artist and Charles Moffett. Keiran Brennan Hinton, Texas Sky (Sunrise), 2024. Oil on linen, 56 x 44 in. Photo by Daniel Greer. Courtesy the artist and Charles Moffett. Keiran Brennan Hinton, Fishers Island Living Room, 2025. Oil on linen, 9 x 12 in. Photo by Zeshan Ahmed. Courtesy the artist and Charles Moffett.

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• Leslie Smith III

  Leslie Smith III (b. 1985) was born in Silver Spring, MD and lives and works in Madison, WI.  Smith’s interests lie in our conscious effort to alter personal perception. Recent works explore Abstraction’s inherent personal and political properties as they relate to broadening notions of Black representation and expression. Smith creates paintings with a mindset that it’s possible to present a new interpretation of contemporary abstraction. One with expectations of a different sensibility than that offered by the 1950’s and 60’s, he offers an alternative worldview; one of inclusion and acceptance.  Leslie Smith III earned a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA at the Yale School of Art. Smith exhibits nationally and internationally. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; the Birmingham Museum of Art; the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, AL; and the FRAC Auvergne, France. Leslie Smith III, Ancestral Meeting, 2025 Oil on shaped canvas and sewn upholstery fabric, 36 x 45 1/2 in 91.4 x 115.6 cm. Copyright The Artist Leslie Smith III,  Under the Skin of Light, 2025 Oil on shaped canvas 45 1/2 x 36 in 115.6 x 91.4 cm, Copyright The Artist Leslie Smith III, Night Scene From a Moving Train Window, 2025, Oil on shaped canvas and sewn upholstery fabric 36 x 45 1/2 in 91.4 x 115.6 cm. Copyright The Artist

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• Charisse Pearlina Weston

  Charisse Pearlina Weston (b. 1988, Houston, TX; based in Brooklyn, NY) is a conceptual artist who works across sculpture, writing, installation, and photography. Utilizing techniques such as concealment, repetition, and enfoldment, her work posits Black interior life as a central site of Black resistance. Weston often integrates glass into her work due to its inherent nature. Whether it be through photographs, fragments incorporated into a canvas, or an element within a sculpture, the duality of the material speaks to Weston’s understanding of Black resistance. Both fragile and susceptible to shatter at the hand of an act of violence, glass is also highly malleable despite that risk. Etched and embedded into the surface of her works are poetic fragments, as well as historical and autobiographical images. These intimate moments are often concealed and ensnared through intentional folds, offering a layer of protection and privacy to the object on display. The artist writes: “Central to the artistic methodology is the reuse and re-articulation of materials.” From photographs of past installations or fragments of discarded glass, Weston formulates “yet another representation of meaning’s capacity to shatter.” For the artist, “these recurrences develop into new forms that represent the ways in which repetition is both a symbol of black cultural production and its reliance on an order of temporal engagement in which the second time encodes an emergent originality.” Charisse Pearlina Weston, untitled long before the squeeze, 2024 inkjet print on Hahnemühle canvas, matte medium, epoxy, frit, glass 44 x 132 inches (each) 88 x 132 inches (overall, unframed). © Charisse Pearlina Weston. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Patron Gallery, Chicago Charisse Pearlina Weston III. final test of the prefixal squeeze, 2025 inkjet print on Hahnmühle canvas, oil stick, frit, epoxy, silicon carbide 49 x 74 x 9 inches. © Charisse Pearlina Weston. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Patron Gallery, Chicago Charisse Pearlina Weston, untitled (after the squeeze and the fuse and the lift), 2025, fused Mirropane, Solarcool breeze surveillance glass, and Solexia glass panels with embedded and oxidized, photographic decal, lead, 26 x 51 1/4 x 28 inches (overall), 33 1/2 x 60 x 40 inches (with pedestal). © Charisse Pearlina Weston. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Patron Gallery, Chicago

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