Interviews by Brainard Carey

Brendan Fernandes, born in Nairobi, Kenya 1979. Currently based in Chicago, his practice addresses issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, andother forms of collective movement. Constantly seeking to create new spaces and forms of agency, Fernandes’work often takes on hybrid forms: part ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity.

Fernandes is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Robert Rauschenberg Residency Fellowship (2014), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020), an Artadia Award(2019), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2019), and most recently, the PlatformAward (2024). In 2024, he was also honored with the Creative Voice Award by Arts Alliance Illinois. His work has been presented at prestigious venues such as the 2019 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum ofContemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; theNational Gallery of Canada,Ottawa; and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, MAC;among many others.

Fernandes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art,Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University. He is represented by Monique MelocheGallery in Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery in New York. Recent and upcoming projectsinclude performances and solo presentations at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis,MO; the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO; the Fabric Workshop andMuseum, Philadelphia, PA; and Prospect.6, New Orleans, LA. In spring 2026, a major newcommission and solo exhibition will debut at the Driehaus Museum in Chicago.

Antelman both deconstructs the body and then reassembles it, not just as a way of imagining a deeper connection with nature, but also as a way of expressing how malleable the very idea of it has become. In place of a techno-utopianism, in which the steady advance of technology is uniformly celebrated, Antelman expresses an atavistic position instead, one which delights in the complexity of nature rather than seeking to explain or instrumentalize it. Her work reminds us that what is mysterious in the world often connects us to what is mystical in it as well.

Born 1971 in Athens, Greece, Maria Antelman received her MFA in New Genres from Columbia University and a BA in Art History from the Complutense University, Madrid. Her work has exhibited internationally, including at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; Pioneer Works, New York; Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas, Austin; Botanical Garden I&A Diomidos, Athens; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens; Benaki Museum, Athens; Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporaneo, Cerillos, Chile and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Antelman’s work was included in Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has been the recipient of grants from the Onassis Foundation USA, as well as the National Museum of Contemporary Art and the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation, Athens. Antelman has taken part in artist residences including Silver Art Projects, Pioneer Works and the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York. Antelman currently lives and works in Athens.

Maria Antelman, Conjurer, 2024. Archival pigment print, 21 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches. © Maria Antelman. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York

Maria Antelman, Hypnos, 2020. Archival pigment print, 58 x 52 inches. © Maria Antelman. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York

Maria Antelman, Hall of Mirrors, 2020. Archival pigment print, 39 x 19 inches. © Maria Antelman. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York

Benjamin Freedman is an artist whose practice spans multiple mediums including photography, video and computer-generated imagery with an interest in the restorative potential of photographic research and play.

He received his bachelor’s degree in photography at the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) in 2013 and his Masters at The Ecole cantonal d’art de Lausanne in 2023. While probing the relative truths and deceptions of photography, he purposefully adopts visual vocabularies from cinema and television in an effort to create expanded documentary projects. He has exhibited extensively across the greater Toronto area and internationally at the Aperture Foundation in New York City, Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Foto-Undustria Biennale in Bologna and in the Riga Photography Biennale in Latvia. He recently presented work at the Images Vevey Biennale, Vontobel in Zurich, Switzerland and at Ptolemy Gallery in Queens, New York.

Installation view: Benjamin Freedman: Surface Imperfect. Ptolemy, Glendale, NY, 2025.

Installation view: Benjamin Freedman: Surface Imperfect. Ptolemy, Glendale, NY, 2025.

Benjamin Freedman, "I Spy," 2025. C-Print, 24 x 29 in.

Benjamin Freedman, "Musings," 2025. C-Print, 24 x 29 in.

Michelle Im creates ceramic sculptures that explore themes of home, displacement, and cultural identity in the context of globalization. Drawing inspiration from ceramic traditions, she examines how historical and cultural forces shape her experience as aKorean American. Using handbuilt figurative forms, Im addresses the psychological tension of embodying conflicting cultural ideologies such as individualism and collectivism. By portraying service workers such as flight attendants, she navigates the nuanced space between cultural dualities, using these figures to reflect on labor, performance, and community.

Michelle Im is a Korean-American ceramic artist based in Queens, NY.In 2024, she was selected as the Artist Fellow at the Museum of Arts & Design. Grants and awards include the Center for Craft Teaching Artist Grant, American Craft CouncilEmerging Artist Grant,Penland School of Craft Distinguished Fellowship, and Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist Award.Shewas a Visiting Artist in Residence at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Artsand has attended residencies atTownship10,Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, and Penland School of Craft. Herwork has received mentions byThe New York Times, ARTnews, and The Korea Times.She holds a BA in Biological Sciences & Art from the State University of New York atBuffalo and is a faculty member at Greenwich House Pottery in New York, NY

Joyce Weidenaar is a painter and monoprintmaker living in New York City. She began pursuing art ten years ago after retiring from a real estate career. Her works have been seen in solo and group exhibitions, and in private collections. Her paintings are rendered realistically but with unusual framing, bright colors and often a bit of whimsy. Her prints emphasize texture and are purely abstract. Joyce is a member of the National Association of Women Artists, Pleiades Gallery, The Art Students League of New York and the West Side Arts Coalition. Her paintings and prints are viewable on Instagram (@joyceweidenaar) and on her website (http://www.joyceweidenaarartworks.com). Her gallery talk at the Port Washington Public Library can be seen here. In addition to her art endeavors, Joyce is an avid ballroom dancer and skier.

Adam Cable (b. 1989) creates vignettes of American domestic life using found digital images. His work entwines perception and narratives into the reconstruction of these environments, highlighting ways that impressions and expectations inform experiences of space. These compositions blur the lines between picture and collage by overlaying keyword-sourced materials onto component shapes. Challenging the conventional idea of “home” as a blank canvas, Cable presents it as a complex space influenced by countless factors. Even seemingly static forms become imbued with emotions and meanings through the images he incorporates, reflecting the intricate dance between social norms and cultural values in our everyday surroundings.

Cable has shown in several group and solo exhibitions, including at the Amos Eno Gallery project space, NYC; The Painting Center, NYC; University of North Carolina, Asheville; PULSE Art Fair, Miami; Local Project, NYC; and The Plaxall Gallery, NYC. At the end of 2020, he co-curated "Annus Horribilis" with Float Magazine, a group exhibition of work created that globally significant year, while in 2021, The Wassaic Project included his work in the book Secrets of the Friendly Woods. Cable holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (2017) and a BFA from the University of North Carolina, Asheville (2013). He lives and works in Brooklyn NY.

Adam Cable, Am I There Yet?, 2022-23, archival pigment print, 24 x 18 inches

Adam Cable, Unrequited, 2024, archival pigment print, 20 x 14 inches

Adam Cable, Anywhere But Here, 2021, archival pigment print, 15 x 15 inches

Natalia Zourabova was born in Moscow, Russia in 1975, lives and works in Tel Aviv since 2004. She studied at the Russian Academy of Theater Art in Moscow (1995-2000) and the University of Arts in Berlin (2000-2003).

Zourabova is primarily a figurative painter. She paints scenes that she knows intimately – oftentimes city streets in her neighborhood in Jaffa, or familiar interiors. Color is central to Zourabova’s work; her palette and the mood of her paintings range from naturalistic to absurd, and her paintings vary along the spectrum of realism to abstraction.

Zourabova has exhibited various solo shows in Israel, at Haifa Museum of art (2024), Herzliya Museum of contemporary art (2019-20), Janco Dada Museum, Ein-Hod (2005); as well as at the Iragui Gallery in Russia (2008-2019), and had multiple solo exhibitions across Israel, Russia, France, Sweden and more. She has participated in group shows internationally at such venues as The Israel Museum (2015, 2018), Mediterranean Biennale (2020,2013), the Garage Triennial of Contemporary art (2020; Salaisons in Paris, France (2010); and the Vasternorrland Museum in Sweden (2000), among others.

Zourabova, Nightlight, 2025, 90.5 x 127 in, Oil on Canvas

Zourabova, Evening Meal, 2024, 51.2 x 51.2 in, Oil on Canvas

Zourabova, Women, 2024, 47.25 x 67 in, Oil on Canvas

Artist Lin Wang. Photo by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of Hostler Burrows

Lin Wang, China Oslo-based ceramicist Lin Wang produces large-scale still life installations and sculptural assemblages which investigate the corporeality and historic resonance of porcelain. Over centuries, porcelain’s combination of a kaolin-rich white clay body with deep cobalt glazes has registered the ongoing effects of contact and trade, as well as the phantasmic projections of a long-standing dialog between East and West. As an artist working between China and Norway, Wang’s interest in this interchange holds personal significance, tinged by her own wanderlust, homesickness, and experiences of cultural discovery. Since 2016, Wang has explored these themes through a cycle of exhibitions, video works, performances, and workshops titled Exotic Dreams and Poetic Misunderstanding.

As a group, these works intersperse the iconography of traditional blue-and-white chinaware with imagery of sailors’ tattoos, Buddhist and Christian religious deities, and the fantastic creatures populating the terra incognita of early maps. Wang engages these varied histories, combining her own experiences as ceramicist and tattoo artist, traveler and immigrant, fantasist and materialist. Her craft-based interdisciplinary practice is structured by the many forms of sculptural tableaus (the scroll, the folding screen, the still life arrangement) — artistic scenarios rife with complex interactions between personal objects, symbols of status, reminders of mortality, and allegorical stand-ins. Throughout, the delicate materiality and translucence of porcelain — which itself summons comparison with bone and skin — is refigured not only as canvas but as a quasi-corporeal body, marked by the ambitions of commerce and the aftermath of empire.

Wang received a bachelor’s degree in sculpture from the China Academy of Art and a master’s degree in fine art from the University of Bergen. Her central research project Exotic Dreams and Poetic Misunderstandings consists of an ongoing series of exhibitions over the past decade. In 2019, as part of the research for this project, she produced two solo exhibitions at the Kunsthall Grenland and the Vigeland Museum. She has completed numerous public commissions, including for the Hammerfest Hospital, Sarpsborg Library, and Tønsberg Courthouse. Her work is included in the collections of the Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Oslo Kommune, Porsgrunn Kommune, and the National Museum, Oslo, Norway.

Lin Wang, The Harbor Romance, 2025. Glazed porcelain, gold. 4.25" H x 12.25" W x 4.25" D. Photo by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of Hostler Burrows

Detail: Lin Wang, Porcelain Flesh Table, 2025. Glazed porcelain, stainless steel. 25" H x 124.5" W x 64" D. Photo by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of Hostler Burrows

Lin Wang, I Never Saw the East Coast until I Moved to the West (Jar I), 2025. Glazed porcelain, gold. 19.5" H x 10" Dia. Photo by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of Hostler Burrows

Naomi Okubo’s work explores delicate and often uneasy relationships between individuals, society, and the spaces that shape them. Drawing on her personal experiences, particularly her complex relationship with her mother, she examines how guise, decoration, and inherited roles—especially restrictive notions of “femininity”—affect human interactions.

In her early work, Okubo depicted women without faces as a symbol of the pressures to conform in Japanese society. Over time, these faceless figures have come to function more broadly as a mirror, allowing viewers to project themselves and reflecting both individual experiences and societal dynamics. In recent years, she has also been exploring the motif of the “greenhouse/home,” a confined yet seemingly nurturing space that resonates with her upbringing and contemporary life, highlighting how environments can both protect and constrain. Her works involve a complex, multi-layered process, where materials and techniques accumulate to convey the depth and contradictions of lived experience.

Okubo earned her MFA from Musashino Art University in 2011 and lived in New York from 2017–2019 with grants from the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan and the Yoshino Gypsum Foundation. She has exhibited widely in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., including Fou Gallery, New York (2024/25); GALLERY MoMo, Tokyo (2023); ELSA ART GALLERY, Taipei (2022); and Yoshino Gypsum Art Foundation, Tokyo (2022). She served as a residency artist at mh PROJECT, New York (2019); Residency Unlimited, New York (2017); and Art Department of Halland Municipality, Sweden (2014). Her work has been featured by Airbnb Magazine, ZEIT-magazine, Contemporary Art Curator Magazine, Financial Times, Juxtapoz Magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and a PBS documentary.

Bird Collector, 2025, Acrylic on raw canvas, 57 × 44 in.

Canary Cave, 2025, Acrylic on raw canvas, 38.2 × 51.3 in.

Dancing in the Flames, 2025, Acrylic on raw canvas, 28 × 12.4 in.

Eva Lake studied art history and archaeology at the University of Oregon and painting at the Art Students League of New York. She has exhibited internationally since 1980. As a singer in post punk bands she recorded with Trap Records in the Pacific Northwest. Her day job was in makeup, beauty and fashion and this, plus her studies in art history, have formed the foundation and subject matter for much of her work. For over a dozen years she interviewed other art people on the radio, specifically KPSU and KBOO, and has written about art for various publications including Art Week, Visual Art Source, Preview and the Bay Area Guardian. Lake also curated exhibitions and worked at artist-run and commercial galleries including Lovelake, Chambers Fine Art, Portland Arts Collective and the Russo Lee Gallery. Born in Los Angeles, she then grew up on a dirt road in southern Oregon. Lake currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon and is represented by Frosch and Co in New York City and Modernism in San Francisco.

Eva Lake, Crystal Helmet No. 4 Paper collage 17.5 x 14 2024

Eva Lake, Egyptian Sculpture Helmet Paper collage 23.5 x 19.5 inches 2024

Eva Lake, Giotto Helmet Paper collage 25.5 x 19.5 inches 2025