Interviews by Brainard Carey

Rachel Mica Weiss, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist. Rachel Mica Weiss (b. 1986, Rockville, MD) is a sculptor and installation artist based in Hudson Valley, New York. Weiss earned a BA in psychology from Oberlin College and an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. Weiss's work has been the subject of eight solo exhibitions at the following: Here Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA (2022); Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (2019) ; Lux Art Institute, San Diego, CA (2018); LMAK Gallery, New York, NY (2018, 2017); Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA (2015); Fridman Gallery, New York, NY (2014); the San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco, CA (2013). Weiss’ first institutional commission, The Wild Within, is part of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. Her largest permanent installation to date, Boundless Topographies, funded by the Gates Foundation, is installed at the University of Washington’s Hans Rosling Center for Population Health in Seattle, WA. Weiss’ work is included in the public collections of: the US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Microsoft Corporate Collection; Boston Consulting Group Corporate Collection; Media Math Corporate Collection; Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center, as well as the collections of Francis J. Greenberger and Beth Rudin deWoody. Rachel Mica Weiss, installation view of Collar (left) and Flesh of My Flesh (right), 2022, Carvalho Park, New York. Image courtesy of Carvalho Park. Rachel Mica Weiss, Portal, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist. Rachel Mica Weiss, Bowed Venus, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

Allison Jae Evans Allison Jae Evans is a painter whose restrained linear vocabulary draws viewers into a provocative world of seduction, objectivity, and power. Her current exhibition, Hung Up, combines painting, drawing, and installation to construct a layered narrative with references ranging from the nihilism of Richard Kern’s Cinema of Transgression to more contemporary ideas about sex and human connection in the digital world. Evans was born in New Haven, CT and currently lives/works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BA from Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH and an MFA from Hunter College in NYC. Evans's work has been exhibited at The Journal Gallery, 106 Green Gallery, Atlanta Contemporary, Edward Thorp Gallery, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, among other venues. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, and Hyperallergic, and has been reviewed in The New York Times. She was recently interviewed by artist Brian Alfred for the Sound and Vision Podcast and artist Alex Nuñez for the Sunday Painter Podcast. Hung Up is on view at Peninsula Gallery until December 10, 2022. Front Room Installation of Allison Jae Evans: Hung Up at Peninsula Art Space Back Room Installation of Allison Jae Evans: Hung Up at Peninsula Art Space Installation Image of Allison Jae Evans' "1-900-Hot-Fuck", 2022, 24 x 18 inches, Watercolor Crayon on Newsprint, at Peninsula Art Space

© Paul Pfeiffer. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Joey Trisolini Born in Honolulu in 1966, Paul Pfeiffer grew up between Hawaii and the Philippines before moving to New York in 1990 to attend Hunter College and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Pfeiffer is known for his highly sophisticated use of digital technologies and new media,and has created celebrated works of video, photography, installation and sculpture since the late 1990s. Using digital erasure, magnification, and repetition, Pfeiffer samples and retouches images or video footage from sporting events, concerts, game shows and Hollywood films to enhance their psychological effects. By drawing attention to certain aspects of visual culture and concealing others, he underlines the spectacular nature of contemporary media and its consumption. Pfeiffer’s videos are often presented using unusual monitors and hybrid hardware, further emphasizing the ostracizing effect of the found footage and incorporating a crucial sculptural element to the work. Pfeiffer has had one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003 and 2017-18); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005); MUSAC León, Spain (2008); the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009) and Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany (2011). Pfeiffer has presented work in major international exhibitions in recent years, including the Performa Biennial and the Honolulu Biennial in 2019 and the Toronto Biennial and Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2022. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Inhotim Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Inhotim, Brazil; the Pinault Collection, Venice; and Kunst Werke, Berlin, among others. © Paul Pfeiffer. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert © Paul Pfeiffer. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert Paul Pfeiffer, Red Green Blue, 2022 (3 Min excerpt) Paul Pfeiffer, Red Green Blue, 2022 (3 Min excerpt)

Kathryn Spence has spent years compiling, sorting and transforming culture’s discards into sculptural objects that reveal a human determination on the topic of sufficiency.Fascinated with space, materiality, and objectness, she attends to materials conventionally wasted to produce installations and individual objects that act as a point of unhinging between the natural world and the controlled world. The show being discussed is Kathryn Spence at P. Bibeau, September 9 - October 22, 2022. Kathryn Spence(b. 1963) resides in the Bay Area and is featured in numerous public collections including SFMOMA, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., U.C. Berkeley Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, Mills College at Northeastern University, the DenverArt Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Museum solo exhibitions include the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012, Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA, 2010, the Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca, 2001, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, 1999.Spence is a recipient of the Anonymous was a Woman award, the Eureka Fellowship, an Artadia award, and the Fleischhacker Foundation award. Her'Pigeons' were recently on view at SFMOMA in ‘Greater Than the Sum,’ 2021-22.Spence showed for 18 years at Stephen Wirtz in San Francisco. The books mentioned in the interview are: Douglas W. Tallamy, Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard and E.O. Wilson, Half Earth. Installation (close-up) P.Bibeau Gallery, 2019-22Socks, sweatpants, t-shirts, bed sheets, curtains, necktie, fabric scraps, found crocheted and knitted project parts, brown corduroy, yarn, cell phone ads, string, thread, mud, felt, wood, cardboard, pencil drawings, field guides, magazine scraps, stuffed animal fur, wax, plaster, plywood. Photo by Peter Sit. ‘Untitled, (Great gray owl)’ 2019-22:: Gray socks, sweatpants, t-shirts, fabric scraps, stuffed animal fur, cardboard, bird field guide pages, wax, wood. Photo by Peter Sit. 'Untitled, (Boreal owl),’ 2019-22 Found crocheted and knitting project parts, scraps of fabric, yarn, fur from stuffed animals, field guide, cell phone ads, cardboard, thread, string, mud. Photo by Peter Sit.

Craig Drennen is a painter based in Atlanta and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. His recent solo exhibitions include Merchant, Mistress, and T at Freight+Volume in New York City, Old Athenian & at Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN and First Acts at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, GA. He has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Triangle Arts Foundation, DNA Provincetown, and Skowhegan. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, and the New York Times. Drennen served as dean at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and manages THE END Project Space. Since 2008 he has organized his studio practice around Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Craig Drennen is a painter based in Atlanta and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. His recent solo exhibitions include Merchant, Mistress, and T at Freight+Volume in New York City, Old Athenian & at Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN and First Acts at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, GA. He has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Triangle Arts Foundation, DNA Provincetown, and Skowhegan. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, and the New York Times. Drennen served as dean at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and manages THE END Project Space. Since 2008 he has organized his studio practice around Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. The book of poetry mentioned in the interview is by Victoria Chang, Obit. (The Pill) oil & alkyd on canvas over panel 30-inch diameter 2022 This piece is dedicated to the character of Merchant from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. T25 oil & alkyd on canvas over panel 72” x 48” x 8” 2022 This piece is dedicated to the character of Timon from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. Ninth Mistress oil & alkyd on linen + latex paint on wall 15” x 15” canvas + two 2.5” x 5” vertical stripes 2015 This piece is dedicated to the character of Mistress from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens.

Michael McClard arrived in New York in 1973 with a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he also won a Peabody Award in Sculpture. He soon made his mark on the art scene as a member of a highly original group of young artists who helped to revive an interest in painting and visual performance. He was a founding member of the noted artists’ support group Colab and its first chairman. Sidestepping the confines of abstract conceptual art, McClard’s work seethes with figurative content; yet it has nevertheless retained a conceptual element and mines a strong vein of humor. During the 70s he staged provocative performances such as « Foes v. Foes » at the Kitchen and surreal, carnivalesque installations at venues such as the Clocktower (« There’s Meat on these Bones ») ; PS 1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources, De Appel, Amersterdam and N.A.M.E Gallery, Chicago. For these presentations, he constructed all sets and props and performed, often as sole actor. His one-act play, « Mumbo Jumbo, » was published in Avalanche 12, Winter 1975. In October 1981, his first large-scale one-man show of paintings and frescoes took place at Mary Boone, occupying both galleries on either side of West Broadway. Drawing on sources from mythology, history and everyday life, he created a pantheon of imaginary characters, notable for their tactile raw energy, range of facial expressiveness and astute power of observation. Also featured were inventive depictions of historical scenes, acclaimed by critics such as Grace Glueck of the New York Times for their verve and by Hal Foster of Art in America for their metaphysical insights. Many of these works were acquired by New York and Los Angeles public and private collectors. During this period McClard was also awarded two fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, in Visual Arts and Mixed Media. In the 90s McClard took a temporary hiatus from painting to explore new media. He embraced the digital revolution and applied his draughtsmanship skills to the creation of original software with his brother Peter McClard through their dotcom enterprise, Hologramophone Research. The computer installation «Characters» furthered his interest in human physiognomy by generating an unlimited sequence of drawings of faces and was exhibited in «A visage découvert,» Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Jouy-en Josas, France. The book mentioned in the interview: Leavings: Memoir of a 1920s Hollywood Love Child. “I Might Have to Bite You” 1983, pastel on Strathmore, 24” x 18” “Hello Darling” 1983, pastel on Strathmore, 24” x 18” “Miss Bozzart” 1983, pastel on Strathmore, 24” x 18”

Spencer Lai is an artist, writer, curator and DJ in Melbourne. They have exhibited extensively at both artist-run and commercial spaces within Melbourne and internationally. They graduated from the Victorian College for the Arts (BFA with Honours) in 2014. Working across multiple forms and formats, including sculpture, installation, curation, writing, drawing, Spencer's practice produces associative meaning from a range of accumulated materials that are worked into assemblages, installations and exhibitions. These materials often include text, found objects, design elements or images from consumer cultures, lifted from thrift stores, replicated, or traced or by chance encounters. As well as these object based assemblages they produce expanded paintings, often making grotesque use of cut coloured felt, coloured pencils and printed textile offcuts. The resulting outcomes of their practice are rarely singular or stand-alone objects - rather, their identities are intentionally constructed from multiple references, works, as well as contributions from other artists, sometimes resulting in the form of curatorial group exhibitions. Besides Spencer’s work as an exhibiting artist, their work as both a DJ and gallerist attests to their commitment to fostering community and contributing to the formation of a cultural scene. Upcoming exhibitions include a curated group exhibition at Inge, NYC and solo presentations at Neon Parc & Asbestos, Melbourne, 2023. Recent exhibitions include: Academy for the Sensitive Arts, Theta, NYC; Oriental Painting., Neon Parc, Melbourne; up the hill in my city shoes with Allan Rand, off-site location, Melbourne; A Patience Game with Jürgen Baumann at Holden Garage, Berlin; buddhaminefield., Ge Hinnom Small Group Love, London. The book mentioned is Lapvonaby Ottessa Moshfegh. Academy for the Sensitive Arts, 2022 Installation view form: egg (army green), 2022 Powder coated steel, foam core, acrylic spray paint, rubberised spray paint, synthetic felt, beads, sequins 68.5 x 47 cm (27 x 18.5 in) form 010 (Princess II), 2022 Resin, spray paint, vintage beaded trim, synthetic fabric trim, butterfly 50 x 14.5 x 14.5 cm (19.68 x 5.70 x 5.70 in)

Dianna Settles is a Vietnamese-American artist in Atlanta, Georgia who received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Her current work explores moments of joyful stillness amidst the cascading series of crises called modern life, accomplished through her synthesis of traditional Vietnamese and classical European painting styles. Dianna Settles
Colorfast/fugitives (a vital knowing of the potential to shape, to change, to build, to play, to open the world to new worlds, new possibilities, newly knotting ourselves to our place and time), 2022
Acrylic, colored pencil, watercolor on wood panel
32 x 48 inches Dianna Settles
How do we follow after you? Cupping circles, culling rows, 2022
Acrylic and colored pencil on wood panel
32 x 24 inches Dianna Settles
How to make it last, how to share (apple season) , 2022
Acrylic and colored pencil on panel
32 x 24 inches

Portrait by Zach Baker Jessi Reaves (b.1986, Portland, Oregon) earned her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI in 2009. Her practice centers on sculptures that also operate as furniture, rupturing traditional binaries of the functional and the aesthetic. In 2021, Reaves work was featured in two iterations of the two person exhibition Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas and The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia. Reaves’ solo exhibitions include At the well, Bridget Donahue, New York, NY (2022), Going out in Style, Herald St, London, United Kingdom (2019); Jessi Reaves II, Bridget Donahue, New York, NY (2019); Kitchen Arrangement within The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives on Tabletop Art Objects, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2018); android stroll, Herald St, London, United Kingdom (2017); Jessi Reaves, Bridget Donahue, New York, NY (2016); Now Showing: Jessi Reaves, Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Slant Step Forward, Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento (2019); Carnegie International, 57th Edition, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2018); Ginny Casey and Jessi Reaves, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia (2017); Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2017); Looking Back/ The 11th White Columns Annual, White Columns, NY (2017) among others. She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago in 2023. Jessi Reaves — Installation View, “At the Well”, September - November 2022, Bridget Donahue, NYC Photo by Gregory Carideo Jessi Reaves, A sample of the truth, 2022, Wood, metal, cord, sawdust, wood glue, paper, enamel paint, 44 ½ × 42 × 45 in. (113.03 × 106.68 × 114.30 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC Photo by Gregory Carideo Jessi Reaves Warming Rails Extended (Towel Rack), 2022, Metal, hardware, sawdust, wood glue, 58 ½ × 27 × 27 in. (148.59 × 68.58 × 68.58 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC Photo by Gregory Carideo

Masamitsu Shigeta (b. 1992, Tokyo, Japan) lives and works in Hoboken, NJ. Shigeta primarily paints landscapes depicting urban nature and architecture. Shigeta plays with painting conventions by shifting the medium toward sculpture, either by shaping his canvas or utilizing custom artist frames. He holds an MFA from New York University and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Solo exhibitions include SITUATIONS, NYC and Tyler Park Presents, LA, who jointly represent the artist. Group exhibitions include The Landing, LA, Chinatown Soup Gallery, NY and Tutu Gallery, NY. His work has been reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail and a publication titled Dancing Plants was released for his most recent exhibition at SITUATIONS. His most recent exhibition at SITUATIONS can be found here. A copy of his book can be obtained by writing to [email protected]. Masamitsu Shigeta Red Light, 2021 Oil on canvas 48 x 36 inches Masamitsu Shigeta Colorful city, 2022 Oil on canvas with wood frame 42.5 x 32.5 inches Masamitsu Shigeta A thinking Tree, 2022 Oil on canvas with shaped frame 24 x 21 inches