Interviews by Brainard Carey

Malachi Black is the author of Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God:  An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale U.P., 2013), Discoveries:  New Writing from The Iowa Review (Iowa Review, 2012), and The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing [U.K.], 2016).

A 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, Black has also received fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hawthornden Castle, the MacDowell Colony, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. Black’s work has been featured in exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad, including several musical settings and translations into French, Dutch, Italian, Croatian, and Lithuanian. Black is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego.

Carole Silverstein is a Los Angeles based artist who has exhibited in galleries and alternative venues throughout the US, including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and San Francisco. In 2015 she showed at the 56th Venice Biennale in an exhibit entitled “We Must Risk Delight: 20 Artists from Los Angeles” at the Magazzino del Sale, Venice Italy. Additionally, her work was featured in an exhibit which traveled to London, Paris, Berlin, Manila, Capetown, and Johannesburg. She received her MFA from Queens College, CUNY and her BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, with additional study at the International School of Art in Montecastello di Vibio, Italy.

In 2000, a book collaboration of her collages and the poetry of Jim Henderson was published entitled “Clearly These Clouds”. Her artworks are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Citibank, Art in US Embassies (US Embassy Djibouti), Art for Healing, The Salser Collection, and numerous private collections. She lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles.

Books mentioned in the interview are Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses and Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.

Solo show at Nancy Toomey Fine Art, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco. Includes installation elements of silver tape floor drawings and satin & sequin fabrics running along the borders of the gallery floor.

touching the constellations, 40” x 36”, Acrylic Ink on Mylar

she wears her potency as ornaments, 58” x 42 1/2”, Acrylic Ink on Mylar

William J. Simmons is a writer and curator based in Los Angeles and New York.

This is his third interview in this series, the second interview can be found here, and the first interview can be found here.

Matthew Ronay

Matthew Ronay (b. 1976, Louisville, KY) lives in New York. In 2016, his work was the subject of a solo-presentation at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, with a fully-illustrated exhibition catalogue published on the occasion.

He has exhibited extensively at major institutions worldwide, including: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville; Kunstverein Lingen, Germany; University of Louisville, KY; Artspace, San Antonio; Serpentine Gallery, London; Sculpture Center, New York; Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, and Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London. Ronay participated in the 2013 Lyon Biennale, curated by Gunnar Kvaran, and the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

His work is included in numerous major public collections, including: ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark; Astrup Fearnley Muset for Moderne Kunste, Oslo; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; Dallas Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA. The artist currently has a solo show at Casey Kaplan entitled Ligatures.

Matthew Ronay Recursionizer, 2021 Basswood, dye, gouache, flocking, plastic, steel, epoxy 16.25 x 59 x 12"/ 41.28 x 149.86 x 30.48cm Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York

Matthew Ronay, Forces, 2020, Basswood, dye, gouache, flocking, plastic, steel14 x 11.5 x 9"/ 35.56 x 29.21 x 22.86cm, Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York

Ariana Page Russell creates images that explore the skin as a document of human experience, using her own hypersensitive flesh to illustrate the ways we expose, express, adorn and articulate ourselves. Her fascination with skin and the body are inspired in part by her dermatographia, a condition in which one’s skin temporarily welts when lightly scratched. Dermatographia also connects her to people all over the world via her images and writing. She's been making art with and inspired by her skin for about 20 years.

Russell is a Los Angeles based artist whose work has been exhibited in New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Dublin, Belgium, New Dehli, Toronto, Australia, Bolivia and Venezuela, amongst other places. Her work has appeared in Art in America, the Huffington Post, Wired, The Atlantic, VISION Magazine: China, The Indian Express, Women's Health Magazine, and the monograph ‘Dressing’ published by Decode Books. She was featured on ABC News 20/20 and was invited to give a TEDx Talk at University of North Carolina in 2016. She received her MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2005.

The book mentioned in the interview is Hunt, Gather, Parent.

Index, c-print, 23 x 17 inches, 2005. This image became viral back in 2008 and was pretty much the impetus for forming an international dermatographia community. I wrote freehand text on my legs, kind of recounting a dream I had the night before.

Wild Cucumber, from my Bloom Back series, archival inkjet print, 19 x 13 inches, 2021. I found these on a hike in the mountains near my home in Southern California. My son and I love to collect these.

Jessica Piazza is the author of three poetry collections and a children’s book. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Jessica now lives in Los Angeles where she is a writing professor at the University of Southern Californiaand a book club facilitator for Literary Affairs. She co-founded Bat City Review and Gold Line Press, and is the 2019 recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency Program award. To learn more, visit www.jessicapiazza.com.

The books  mentioned at the end of the interview are: Bree Rolfe, Who's Going to Love the Dying Girl / Unsolicited Press, 2021, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun / Knopf, 2021.

The books pictured below by Jessica Piazza are Interrobang / Red Hen Press, 2013, This is not a sky / Black Lawrence Press, 2014 and Obliterations / Red Hen Press, 2016.

Margaux Williamson is an artist from Toronto, born in Pittsburgh. Her first book of paintings, I Could See Everything (Coach House Books) accompanied shows at Frith Street Gallery in London, and Mulherin+Pollard in New York.

Her full-length movie, Teenager Hamlet, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and now lives on UbuWeb. And a YouTube video she made in collaboration with the band Tomboyfriend, dancing to the end of poverty, was praised by Playground Magazine in Madrid as "Finally, a generation using YouTube the way God intended",  Her text projects, including How to Act in Real Life, have been commissioned by museums, festivals and anthologies. Her work has been covered by Frieze, the New York Times, Canadian Art, Vogue, The Believer, and  elsewhere. She has been artist-in-residence at MacDowell in New Hampshire, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Klondike Institute in the Yukon. Her most recent work was an on-line show with White Cube, March 2021.

Branches / 63 x 90 in / 160 x 228.6 cm / 2021 / oil on canvas

Table and Chair / 160x228 cm (63x90in)/ oil on canvas / 2016

Anna Conway, New York, 2019

Anna Conway (b. 1973) first came to prominence in the 2005 group exhibition, Greater New York, at MoMA PS1, where her meticulously rendered paintings announced the arrival of a singular talent. Her stylistic development has emerged from spectacular and unpredicted encounters with natural forces beyond normal human experience, to a more anthropological and psychological exploration of the human condition. Conway’s paintings are a testament to the continued relevance and fascination of the centuries-old tradition of realist painting—an archaic practice, which seems to grow only stronger with every passing year. She has exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe, and is the recipient of numerous accolades, including: the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2014); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2011 and 2005); and the William Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008).

Anna Conway, Fishing for Minnows on the Back of a Whale, 2021. Oil on panel 45 x 68 x 2 inches (114.3 x 172.7 x 5.1 cm) © Anna Conway; courtesy of the Artist and Fergus McCaffrey

Anna Conway, Ark, 2021. Oil on panel 45 x 68 x 2 inches (114.3 x 172.7 x 5.1 cm) ©Anna Conway; courtesy of the Artist and Fergus McCaffrey

Photo courtesy of Mizuyo Aburano/Woodstock School of Art

Polly M. Law is an artist, bricoleur, and mythologenist living and working in the Mid Hudson Valley of New York.  She explores attachment in both the literal and spiritual senses, humans and nature are her vehicles. Bricolage and monoprinting are her media which she exploits ignoring the boundary between art and craft- especially the traditionally feminine hand-crafts. She has been a craftswoman, illustrator- advertising and editorial, bricoleur, and printmaker. She turned her interest in language into a book: "The Word Project: Odd & Obscure Words- Illustrated," featuring over 100 of her "word-dolls." Ms. Law has an abiding interest in semiotics, the symbolism inherent in everyday objects; and an abiding and futile anxiety about entropy.

"Numen I/ Greenman" 9"x9" Bricolage

"Greenman D" 13.5"x11" Monoprint

Screen Capture from Class Demo Video

Paula Rebsom describes herself as an Artist, Mother, Educator, and Trickster. All of these identities inform her interdisciplinary visual art practice which includes making sculptures from wood and fabric, site-specific installations, and image-based work using motion-sensor cameras. She’s always had an interest in science, specifically wildlife ecology, and applies elements of that into her work.

Born and raised in Southwest North Dakota she spent a great deal of time exploring nature and learning to sew and craft. Much of her work after grad school was situated outdoors and used motion-sensor cameras to document animal interactions with site-specific installations. Becoming a mother 6 years ago radically shifted her practice. No longer able to spend extended periods of time in remote locations, she returned to sewing, making quilts in order to process the raw emotions she was experiencing as a new mother. She is currently returning towards more image-based surveillance work by documenting the flora and fauna using her backyard and neighborhood greenspaces as installation sites.

She is currently full-time faculty in the art department at North Seattle College. Her work has been exhibited across the US, including group shows in New York City, Philadelphia, Miami, and Los Angeles, along with solo exhibitions at The Art Gym in Portland, OR, Gallery of Contemporary Art in Colorado Springs and SOIL Gallery in Seattle.

The Books mentioned in the interview were Never Home Alone and The Artist as Culture Producer.

Undetected, 2013, Digital image taken with a RECONYX motion detection infrared camera, Dimension Vary.

Absence of Color, 2019, Pigment Print, 24"x18"