Interviews by Brainard Carey

• Greg Chann

  Greg Chann has shown his work with Denise Bibro Fine Art, NYC; Dorsky Gallery, NYC; Margaret Thatcher Projects, NYC; The Drawing Center, NYC; among other spaces around the country. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, NY Arts, and Time Out New York. He has received a NY Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, and the NY Foundations of the Arts/Felissimo Award and lives and works in New York. Greg Chann, Stack XVI, 2024 Acrylic and ink 7 x 6 x 4 in. Greg Chann, Vertegres, 2024 Acrylic and ink 20 x 30.5 x 1.25 in. Greg Chann, Wall Stack IX, 2024 Acrylic and ink 15 x 13 x 3 in.

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• Jessica Helfand

  Photo: by Philip Bennett Jessica Helfand (b. 1960) is an artist and writer. She grew up in Paris and New York City, and received her BA and MFA from Yale University where she taught for more than two decades. She is the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism, and was the first-ever recipient, in 2010, of the Henry Wolf Residency at the American Academy in Rome. A 2018 Director’s Guest at Civitella Ranieri and a 2019 fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, Jessica Helfand was also the 2020 Artist in Residence at Caltech. She lives and works in New England. A view of some of the paintings which will be on view from May 1 to June 1 at Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York. (Photo courtesy of the artist.) Agnes Grey, Anne Brönte, 1847, Mixed media and oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches, 2024The cold wind had swelled and reddened my hands, uncurled and entangled my hair, and dyed my face of a pale purple; add to this my collar was horridly crumpled, my frock splashed with mud, my feet clad in stout new boots, and as the trunks were not brought up, there was no remedy … so having smoothed my hair as well as I could, and repeatedly twitched my obdurate collar, I proceeded to clomp down two flights of stairs, philosophizing as I went. Claudine, Claudine in Paris, Colette, 1901, Mixed media and oil on canvas, 52 x 42 inches, 2025.                  Pointed chin, you’re attractive but don’t, I implore you, overdo that point. Hazel eyes, you persist in being hazel and I can’t blame you for it; but don’t retreat under my eyebrows with that excessive modesty. Mouth, you’re still my mouth, but so pale that I can’t resist rubbing those short, colorless lips with petals pulled from the red geranium in the window. (Incidentally it only gives them a horrid, purplish tinge that I promptly lick off.) As to you, my poor little white, anaemic ears, I hide you under my curly hair and secretly look at you from time to time and pinch you to make you redden. But it’s my hair that’s the worst of all. I can’t touch it without wanting to cry ... they’ve cut them all off, just below the ear—my auburn ringlets, my lovely, smoothly-rolled ringlets!

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• Alan Bray

  Alan Bray was born in Waterville, Maine, and grew up in Monson, a small slate-quarrying town set in the northern reaches of the Appalachians. Bray attended the Art Institute of Boston before graduating from the University of Southern Maine; he received his MFA in painting from the Villa Schifanoia in Florence, Italy. It was during this formative time in Florence that he was exposed to casein tempera on panel. Bray’s work has been the subject of no less than 25 solo exhibitions and is included in the public collections of the Portland Museum of Art, ME; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, MA; the Farnsworth Museum of Art, ME; Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY; Zillman Art Museum, ME; Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, WI; Lyman Allyn Museum of Arts, New London, CT;  Maine Savings Bank Collection, Memphis Cancer Center, Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts, Menlo Park, CA; among others. The artist lives and works in Sangerville, Maine. As both a naturalist and a painter, Bray is drawn to what often goes unnoticed. “I paint what is right around me,” he says. “Occasionally it’s a big subject, but more often it’s a bird’s nest or a farm pond.” Like the subtle geometry of his compositions, Bray’s preference for modest, unassuming subjects—backwater meanders over mountaintop vistas—is deliberate and quietly profound. He has become an expert observer of bogs and shorelines, rock slides and fallow fields, daybreaks and dusks, the shifting edges of seasons. In the overlooked landscapes of his native Maine, Bray uncovers a deep sense of spirituality that gives his work its quiet power—transformative in its presence, not merely descriptive. Bray paints in casein, a milk-based tempera that has virtually no drying time. Necessarily, his paintings are technically complex because they consist of thousands of tiny brush strokes, built up in layers, out of which the images – the vision – advance from the foundation of a mirror-smooth, absolute void of white ground. It is a method of painting that follows directly from his method of exploring his subjects. Alan Bray, Neighbors, 2025 Casein on panel, 11 x 14 in. Alan Bray A Whisper Breaks the Silence, 2024 Casein on panel, 15 x 20 in. Alan Bray Refuge, 2024 Casein on panel, 16 x 20 in

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• Zuriel Waters

  Zuriel Waters was born in 1984 in Philadelphia, PA, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Received an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2010 and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from San Diego State University in 2007. Has shown work in group exhibitions throughout New York City at galleries such as Underdonk, Marvin Gardens, Tappeto Volante, CANADA and others and has recently had solo shows at Left Field Gallery in Los Osos, CA, My Pet Ram in NYC and Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in NYC. Tongue Drum, 2025 acrylic pigment-dyed burlap, canvas and twill, upholstery thread, felt, eye-hooks 28 x 42 in. Elle, 2024 acrylic on denim, thread, industrial felt, cotton duck, hardware 35 1/2 x 21 in. am/pm, 2025 acrylic pigment-dyed burlap, canvas and twill, upholstery thread, felt, eye-hooks 43 x 28 in.

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  21:34
• Laurie Sheck

  Laurie Sheck’s novel A Monster’s Notes, a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,  was long listed for the Dublin Impac International Fiction Prize. Her book of poems, The Willow Grove, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared widely in the Paris Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A member of the MFA Creative Writing faculty at the New School, she lives in New York City. This interview focuses on her new book, Cyborg Fever.

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