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.

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.

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).

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.

Torbjørn Rødland (b. 1970, Stavanger, Norway) makes photographic images that pointedly address their viewers, evoking a wide range of emotional and intellectual states. Curiosity, humor, criticality, artifice, reverence for the natural world, and romanticism appear throughout his work and often in the same image. Rødland also emphasizes the formal attributes of his photographs, pushing the medium toward modes of visual expression more commonly associated with painting, and forging links between twentieth-century art photography and twenty-first-century approaches to image-making common to advertising and social media. Often prompted by non-photographic imagery that he transforms into real-world photographic subjects, Rødland portrays scenes designed to generate psychological reaction through his depiction of highly sensory qualities. The physicality present in the work is driven by his use of film-based cameras and chemical darkroom processes. Torbjørn’s first exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery’s New York location, Bones in the Canal and Other Photographs, is on view now through April 25, 2026.

Kevin Umaña (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Spending his early years between Los Angeles and El Salvador, Umaña’s personal history has profoundly shaped his visual language.

In El Salvador, he was immersed in a rural environment rich with natural textures, vibrant flora, and traditional crafts. While in Los Angeles, he confronted the intensity of city life and the pressures of assimilation. This duality seeded the fragmented forms and layered symbolism that define his art today. His practice continues to carry echoes of Latin American patterns, nature’s geometry, and American architectural influences, all reimagined through abstraction.

Umaña received his B.F.A from San Francisco State University in 2014. In 2025, Umaña received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. He has completed residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (2024); Anderson Ranch (2024); Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2023-24); Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Helena, MT (2023); The Center for Book Arts, New York (2019). In 2017, Umaña created a permanent installation at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Institutions owning his work include The United Nations Art Collection, New York; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Munson, Utica, NY; Fidelity Mutual Funds Collection; Center for Book Arts Library, New York; and The Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato, CA. In 2026, Umaña will be participating in the MacDowell Fellowship in New Hampshire.

Rob Davis was born in 1970 in Norfolk, Virginia. He graduated from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1997 with a degree in painting. His work has been exhibited both internationally and, in the U.S., It has been included in exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Chrysler Museum Norfolk, VA; Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Luce Gallery, Turin; Rental Gallery, Long Island; and Untitled Gallery, New York. Davis currently lives and works in New York.

Jeffrey Heiman is a painter whose work draws on personal memory and art historical references to explore intimacy, absence, and the surreal within domestic or imagined space. Blurring figuration and negative space, his paintings evoke a liminal sense of presence and emotional residue.

He has been an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony (Woodstock, NY), Neddy Artist Award Finalist 2022 (Seattle, WA), and recently earned his MFA in Painting from Bard College, he currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley.