Interviews by Brainard Carey

Owen Westberg (b. 1986, Pittsburgh) received an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been included in recent exhibitions at Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles; and Dunes, Portland, ME.

Lake is his first solo exhibition. Westberg lives and works in Pittsburgh.

“For over a decade, Owen has been painting discreet scenes in oil on smoothed birch panels or aluminum flashings that fit smartly into a purse or piece of hand luggage: late afternoon landscapes, round, glowy fruits, a fictional painter or pair of sneakers, tinted windows on a corporate building, and often, patterned fabrics. He paints these low-stakes subjects with wet, slightly oversized brushes that approximate rather than articulate. His marks are straightforward yet sensitive. Never sentimental. Tender but not sweet, and a bit unhinged—as if in a rush to get it all down. His color—always exact—pulls clarity from a hand that favors a wobbly line over a straight one. Simple shifts from cool grey to warm champagne cast a rippled cloth into full relief. The palette is limited but nuanced— soft ochre, medieval blues, kiwi, terracotta and buttercream, and the regular colors: yellow, orange, navy” – Anna Glantz

Alison Judd is a multi-media artist whose work is rooted in themes relating to nature, the passage of time, and mothering.

Recent shows include Vitality, Abigail Ogilvy, Boston, MA; Be-tween, Brandeis University Alumni Art Gallery, Waltham, MA; Sweet Season, Provincetown, MA; Raw Emotion, Boston, MA; Reprise, 13forest, Arlington, MA. Alison grew up in New York City, studied painting and art history at Brandeis University and received her Masters of Fine Arts in painting and printmaking at MassArt. She currently works out of her home studio in the Boston area where she lives with her husband, three children, and her dog.

Esther Sibiude is a visual artist, writer, and harpist working in New York. She studied Fine Arts at the Universität der Künste Berlin from 2009-2014. She currently has a show of new drawings at Entrance Gallery in New York City.

David Bordett (b. 1991, Shenandoah Valley, VA) is an interdisciplinary sculptor whose work critically examines American lore, half truths, and false promise, casinos and class struggle, road side attractions and exploitation, the optimism of the post war 20th century and the ideologies of control that are at work always in aesthetics. Objects and environments operate as catalysts of fantasy, creating a zone of simultaneous horror and seduction that reveals through popular cultural forms our collective desires, aspersions, and fears.

He received his BFA from the VCU Department of Sculpture and Extended Media, and MFA from the Yale Sculpture Department. For now, he maintains no permanent residence and continues to drive his 1999 Toyota Tacoma that at the time of writing shows over 330,000 miles on its odometer.

Susan Vecsey adapts the Color Field technique of pouring paint to create a personal language of abstraction, rooted in the natural world and the human experience of it. In a distinctive process that includes plein-air charcoal drawing, pastel and color studies, and multiple pours of liquefied oil on a surface of raw Belgian linen, she builds compositions in luminous tonal combinations that evoke the optical effects of sea, light, and air. Inspired by the landscapes of eastern Long Island, Vecsey’s paintings evoke not just a place, but it’s very atmosphere.

Born in New Jersey in 1971, Vecsey earned her B.A. from Barnard College and her M.F.A. from the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, where she studied with Graham Nickson. She has had solo exhibitions at Greenville County Museum in South Carolina, John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor, Tayloe Piggott Gallery in Jackson Hole, and Berry Campbell Gallery in New York, among other venues. She lives and works in Manhattan and East Hampton, Long Island.

Diana Copperwhite (b. 1969, Ireland) lives and works in Dublin and New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Driven by Distraction, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2016), Depend on the Morning Sun, Thomas Jaeckal Gallery, New York (2016) and A Million and One Things Under the Sun, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2015). Selected group exhibitions include Last Picture Show w/Mary Heilmann, Chris Ofili, Danny Rolph, Vanessa Jackson, Elio Rodriguez, Jill Levine, Rebecca Smith, Thomas Jaeckel Gallery, New York (2017) and Virtú, inc. Picasso, Giacometti, Henry Moore, Elizabeth Magill and Sean Scully at the Hunt Museum, Limerick, Ireland (2017).

Copperwhite’s work is held in numerous public and private collections including: the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Arts Council of Ireland, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Office of Public Works, Contemporary Irish Art Society, Highlanes Municipal Art Gallery, Mariehamn Stadbiblioteque, Aland (Finland), Dublin Institute of Technology and The President of Ireland.

Bjørn Friborg (Danish, b. 1983) is a glass artist who defies historical methods of making and reinvents process with a dramatically physical approach that pushes the limits of material and technique. His practice is as much performance as a functional act; with unbridled intensity he pierces, ruptures, and manipulates the molten substance with results that are otherworldly, his tour de force actions viscerally reflected in the transformed material.

Friborg’s innovative approach is directly linked to his current position as the hot shop manager at Holmegaard Værk, Denmark’s leading glass factory which has been resurrected to develop the practice of contemporary glassmaking both in Denmark and internationally.

Friborg received a BFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, Design and Conservation in 2013 after studying in Sweden at both the Åfors Glasbruk, V.1 Mästare Ingvar Carlsson “Kalle Pack” and the Kosta Glass School. His work has been exhibited throughout Scandinavia and internationally.

Tom Duncan’s love for sculpture began at age 4 when he was given a clay set by his aunt. Born in Scotland in 1939 just before World War II broke out, he moved with his mother and brother to New York City shortly after the war ended. Much of Duncan’s artwork reflects memories of his childhood during the war.

He is an original tenant at Westbeth, where his three daughters, Rachel, Gwynne, and Jane, grew up. In his Westbeth studio, he has created mixed media pieces like Dedicated to Coney Island and Portrait of Tom with a Migraine Headache, each of which took some twenty-five years to complete.

Julia Felsenthal (b. 1983) is a painter and writer working in Brooklyn and Cape Cod. Born and raised in Chicago, she studied English at Yale University and has written extensively about art and culture for T: the New York Times Style Magazine and Vogue.

A lifelong painter, Felsenthal turned her focus to making art full time while living on Cape Cod during the Covid pandemic. Her water paintings emerged from the eeriness and anxiety of that time, and have evolved to reflect the ways that small permutations of the quotidian can become endlessly captivating and sublime. Her work has been exhibited in Brooklyn, NY and across the outer Cape, as well as on Block Island, in Woodstock, NY, and in Seattle, Washington. Felsenthal’s debut solo exhibition with JDJ is on view June 8 through July 21st, 2023.

Amy Winstanley (b. 1983, Dumfries, UK) is based in Glasgow, UK.

She is currently having a solo show, Lost Hap, at Margot Samel in New York.

She received a BA (Hons) in Sculpture from the Edinburgh College of Art (2005) and an MA from the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam (2019). Recent solo exhibitions include: Moral Limb, Stallan-Brand, Glasgow, UK (2021); Grief Bruise, Lunchtime Gallery, Glasgow, UK (2021); Inscapes, AndCollective Gallery, Bridge of Allen, UK (2016); and Interconnections, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries, UK (2015).