Interviews by Brainard Carey

ToddGray portrait, img © Brian Guido

Todd Gray (b. 1954, Los Angeles, CA) works in photography, performance, and sculpture. Gray’s most recent photo works are comprised of photographs gathered from his own archive and recontextualized via their juxtaposition with one another and the use of antique frames as a structuring device.

Gray's work is represented in numerous museum collections including the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN; and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, among others. He was the recipient of the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome in 2022,  John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant in 2016, among others.

Todd Gray, the hidden order of the whole (venus), 2021, Four archival pigment prints with UV laminate in artist's frames, 109 5:8 x 146 1:8 x 4 1:2 in

Todd Gray, Atlantic (the Dancer), 2022, Four archival pigment prints with UV laminate in artist's frames, 72 1:2 x 49 1:8 x 4 1:2 in

William Wegman in his studio

William Wegman was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1943 and received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston and an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His work has been exhibited extensively in both the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1982); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1988); Whitney Museum of American Art (1992); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2001); and The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2002). The retrospective “William Wegman: Funney/Strange” was held at the Brooklyn Museum, and traveled to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2006-07).

Since his first exhibition at Sperone Westwater in 1990, Wegman has exhibited regularly at the gallery (1992, 2003, 2006, 2012, 2016, 2017 and 2022). 

The book William Wegman: Writing by Artist was edited by Andrew Lampert and published in April 2022 by Primary Information. The first collection to focus on Wegman’s lengthy and deeply funny relationship to language, the book is filled with over 300 previously unknown and wildly entertaining texts, drawings, and early photographs spanning the early 1970s to the present. 

William Wegman, OMG, 2021, acrylic and charcoal on wood panel, 40 x 60 inches

William Wegman, Untitled ("Moths cost us millions..."), 1970-71, typewritten text on paper, 11 x 8 1/2 inches

Vivienne Griffin (they/them) is an multi-disciplinary artist who uses sound, sculpture, drawing and text in various forms. Griffin works with the voice through digital post-processing and in a workshop format called Synthetic Voices. They work with sound alongside sculptures and installations. More recently they have used generative sound in videos of virtual worlds. Their current work looks at the opaque boundaries of human-computer relations; where does the mind end and the machine begin?

Born in Dublin, Ireland and living in London, Griffin studied fine art at Hunter City University New York supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. They completed one year DPhil in visual art at the Royal College of Art, where they are now a visiting lecturer. They moved their research to the Sonic Arts Research Center, Queen's University, Belfast to pursue a PhD in Music with a focus on sound in an art context, noise, and the voice. Recent shows include Manchester International Festival, 2021, the AGM in Somerset House, 2021, for Montez Press Radio in NYC, Condo in London. They are represented by Bureau, in NYC. They won an Oram Award in 2021, they are a resident at Somerset House Studios, London.

Still from Mercy, 2022, Digital video, sound.

Still from Mercy, 2022, Digital video, sound.

Mercy from Vivienne Griffin on Vimeo.

Since the beginning of his artistic practice, Erik Lindman’s incorporation of anonymous found surfaces as compositional elements in painting has occupied a central place in his work.

Reinterpreting and repurposing cast-aside materials such as shards of steel or canvas webbing, he combines a variation of surfaces in a cascade of decisions with a focus on scale and negative space. Lindman lays down and builds up marks and gestures, ultimately articulating value and attention while asserting the materiality and tactile nature of each painterly composition. His topographical surfaces become the final result of what is buried beneath them, and upon closer inspection, layers of paint reveal further color and traces of discarded elements. As Lindman states, his practice and methods are the most efficient means he has discovered to create a space of reflection and contemplation for viewers to generate their own meanings. His practice with its inherent content and subject matter intends to add to the complex discourse of abstract painting for his own generation and time. Lindman pursues a new mediation of abstract traditions, both original and eclectic, while instilling subjective importance into his multifaceted process.

Erik Lindman (b. 1985, New York) lives and works in New York. He earned his BA from Columbia College, Columbia University in 2007 and received a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship in 2006. Lindman was honored at the Hirshhorn Museum’s Artist x Artist Gala in 2019. He has also received The Louis Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Arts from Columbia University in 2007, and has also received an Ellen B. Stoeckel Fellowship for Yale Norfolk School of Art in 2006. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Kunstalle in Freiburg, Switzerland, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, White Columns in New York, le 109 in Nice, France, Kaviar Factory in Henningsvær, Norway, and Foundation Hippocrène in Paris among others.

Tamarack, 2021, acrylic and collaged cotton webbing and tarlatan on linen, 63 x 56 3/4 inches (160 x 144 cm)

Dahlia, 2020, acrylic and collaged canvas webbing on linen, 78 3/4 x 59 1/8 inches (200 x 150 cm)

Erica Baum lives and works in New York. She is well known for her varied photographic series capturing text and image in found printed material, from paperback books to library indexes and sewing patterns. She received her MFA from Yale University in 1994 and her BA in Anthropology from Barnard in 1984.

Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Sparkassen Stiftung Collection, Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf; MAMCO, Geneva; Albright‐Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; FRAC Ile de France, Paris; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Erica Baum Bow, 2022 (Patterns), Archival pigment print, 15 × 13.9 in. (38.10 × 35.31 cm), Edition of 6 plus II AP

Erica Baum Pant Pant Skirt, 2022 (Patterns), Archival pigment print, 15 × 14.23 in. (38.10 × 36.14 cm), Edition of 6 plus II AP

Edoardo Ballerini is an actor, narrator and writer. On screen he is best known for his work in The Sopranos and the indie classic Dinner Rush.

As a narrator, he is a two time winner of the Audio Publisher Association's Best Male Narrator Award, and a two time winner of Society of Voice Arts awards.

In 2021 he co-created the Audible Original "The Angel of Rome," with Jess Walter, named one of Audible "Best of 2021."

Ben Coonley is an artist working with video, computers, 3D, and cats. His work has exhibited in “3D: Double Vision” at LACMA in Los Angeles; “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; “Flat is Beautiful: The Strange Case of Pixelvision,” at Lincoln Center, New York; “Continuing Education for Dead Adults,” New Museum, New York; “3D in the 21st Century,” Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Brooklyn, NY;  and “Greater New York: Cinema,” MoMA PS1, Queens, NY, among others. Coonley’s works have also been screened widely including at Performa, Anthology Film Archives, the Moscow Biennale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Rotterdam, The Netherlands. His works are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others, and have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Artsy, Frieze, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, among others. Ben Coonley studied Art Semiotics as an undergraduate at Brown University, and received an MFA from Bard College in 2003. He was born in Boston, MA and currently lives and works between New York City and the Hudson Valley, New York.

Robert Zandvliet is one of the foremost Dutch painters working today, whose work has been on the cusp of abstraction and representation since the early 1990’s. He examines the tension between self-reflective artistic practice and painting bound to a representational function. His pictures arise out of a movement between opposites, a symbiotic relationship between deliberate composition and chance occurrence, abstraction and figuration, part and whole, space and surface, and in which these elements are fused into polyphonic structures that re-envision the history of painting through his own lens. Oftentimes using landscape as a conceptual frame of reference, recognizable representations of a landscape become replaced by a gestural play of lines, colors, and surfaces that shift and merge foreground and background, reorienting the viewer’s perception of depth and surface.

Robert Zandvliet (b. Terband, Netherlands, 1970) lives and works in Haarlem, Netherlands. He received an MFA from De Ateliers, Amsterdam, Netherlands (1994). Solo exhibitions include Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands (2019); De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands (2014, 2005, 1997); Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands (2012); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2005); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2001); Neues Kunstmuseum, Lucerne, Switzerland (2001); Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg, France (2000).

Public collections include Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg, France; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Museum de Pont, Tilburg, Netherlands; Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands. He is a recipient of the Prix de Rome (1994).

Tangerine, 2019, acrylic and egg tempera on linen, 83 7/8 x 106 1/4 inches (213 x 270 cm)

Untitled, 2019 egg tempera on linen 24 3/4 x 28 3/8 inches (63 x 72 cm)

Sarah Slappey (b. 1984, Columbia, South Carolina) is a painter based in Brooklyn, NY. Slappey received her MFA from Hunter College in 2016. She has had solo exhibitions at Maria Bernheim Gallery (Zurich, Switzerland) and Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Schlossmuseum (Linz, Austria); Carl Kostyal Gallery (London, UK); Deanna Evans Projects (New York, NY); König Galerie (Berlin, Germany); White Cube (Paris, France); The Pit (Los Angeles, CA); and Andrew Edlin Gallery (New York, NY). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO) Geneva, Switzerland; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC. Slappey’s work has been reviewed by Artforum, The New Yorker, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Artsy, ArtSpace, Vogue Italia, and Flash Art, among others.

She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters. 

Sarah Slappey, Blue Gingham, 2021, oil and acrylic on canvas, 80 x 100 inches

Sarah Slappey, Shower Scene, 2021, oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 62 inches

Antoine Catala is French. He has lived in the US for the past 17 years. He has exhibited at the Whitney Museum, New York, New Museum, New York, Sculpture Center, New York, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria, MACLyon, Lyon, Fridericianum, Kassel, MoMA PS 1, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, among other institutions and galleries. He was part of the Venice Biennale in 2019. He is represented by 47 Canal, NYC and Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich.

"I am interested in the banal, everyday use of communication tools. I look at platforms and devices, and scrutinize how they are used to communicate, or miscommunicate. So at the center of all I do, there is language. New platforms of communication (such as smart phones, texting, net 2.0) allow language to evolve in radical new ways (images as words, short form messages, audio messages, etc). Language is by essence playful, and this playfulness flourishes in any form. More and more language develops a symbiotic bond with technology. In studying these new forms of language, I am interested not as much in what is changing about us, but what remains uniquely, deeply, human in communication.

As time progresses, I am more and more fascinated in how art communicates about its presence in a room.” - A.C.

Jardin Synthétique à L’isolement, Installation View at MacLyon, 2015, photo Blaise Adilon

I am here for you (t-shirt), 2017, silicone rubber, coated foam, resin coated foam, electronics, 15 x 34 x 31 in., 38.1 x 86.4 x 78.7 cm, courtesy 47 Canal and the artist, photo Deniz Guzel