Brainard Carey's Blog

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.

Tess Michalik, Possession, 2026 oil on canvas 48 x 40 in.Tess Michalik, Could Heaven Ever Be Like This, 2025 oil on canvas 45 x 32 in.Tess Michalik, Love Crimes, 2025 oil on panel 30 x 24 in.

David Smalling portrait © Stefen Pompee

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.

David Smalling, Party Favor, 2026 Oil on panel 61 × 91.5 cm — 24 × 36 in. Courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York. Photo © Charles Roussel.David Smalling, Cremaster, 2025 Oil on panel 51 × 61 cm — 20 × 24 in. Courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York; Photo © Charles Roussel.David Smalling, Follicular, 2025 Oil on panel 91 × 61 cm — 36 × 24 in. Courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels – New York. Photo © Charles Roussel.

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).

Catherine Birk | hut (interference), 2025 Oil, acrylic, cold wax medium and netting on canvas 13 x 15.5 inchesCatherine Birk | dam (for Morandi), 2025 Oil, acrylic, cold wax medium, and Dragon Skin Silicone on panel with artist’s frame 17 x 21 inchesCatherine Birk | hut (for Strega Nona), 2026
27 cast beeswax slabs; dried herbs and essential oils of rosemary, thyme, basil, sage, and
oregano; cast urethane rubber; bolts
Dimensions variable: 11 x 14 inches each

dean erdmann lives and works between San Diego, CA and Brooklyn, NY. dean erdmann is an interdisciplinary artist in moving and still images, sculpture, and installation. Their sculptural practice evolved from their image-making practice. They live and work between Brooklyn, NY and San Diego, CA.Their work has been exhibited at ONE Archives, Mexicali Biennial, Hammer Museum, REDCAT, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Spiral Hall, Tokyo, Kavi GuptaBerlin, the Sheila Johnson Design Center, Torrance Art Museum, and Public Fiction, among many others. Their permanent public commission for the LA K-line Leimert Park Station opened Fall 2022. Over the following years, they collaborated with an evolving team of dedicated artists and producers—Grace Whiteside, Celeste Wilson, Christopher Duffy, Esteban Salazar-Cucalon, Michael Haddy, and James Corporan, —while receiving support from fellowships and residencies at Vera List Center for Art and Politics, Urban Glass, and The Chinati Foundation.Installation view: dean erdmann, Vitrum, Company Gallery, 2026dean erdmann, 700cc, 2026 Hot mold blown glass and steel armature 28 x 18 1/2 x 14 indean erdmann, (detail image) razr 2 (front), 2026 Hot blown mold glass 23 x 23 x 9 in

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.

The Bowline at Dusk, 2025 Mixed media; collage, paper, and wood 32 x 31 in.Returned in Fragments, 2026 Mixed media; collage, paper, wood 8 x 7 in.

Sebastiaan Bremer and son Tobias

Bremer turns photographs—found or snapped—of himself, his family, and appropriated imagery into trippy, dust-laden memories that, through his layered pointillist technique, reveal the subconscious and the real world in the blink of an eye. By laboriously painting his poetic braille over fast snapshots, he slows down time to render hauntingly beautiful interior landscapes—spaces where personal memory, art history, and cultural symbolism converge.

He maintains an extensive archive of images, ranging from intimate family photographs to pages sourced from historical flower books, particularly those rooted in the Dutch tradition of floriculture. Carefully sorting through this material, Bremer selects images that resonate with his memory, using them as the groundwork for each piece. His recurring engagement with floral imagery—tulips, roses, irises, and other blooms—places his work in dialogue with a long lineage of Dutch still life painting, while simultaneously reconfiguring it through a contemporary, psychological lens.

Once an image is chosen, redeveloped, and printed to size, Bremer begins to draw intricate webs of small dots with white retouching paint across the photographic surface. Paradoxically, this process obscures sections of the original image while redefining others, embedding new layers of meaning. His ethereal markings spread organically, like mycelial growth, evoking both proliferation and decay. Thin washes of coloured India ink are occasionally added, creating visual sensations akin to the colours perceived behind closed eyes.

Within his flower works, blooms become more than decorative motifs—they function as mutable symbols, at once seductive and unstable. Expanding, dissolving, and recombining across the surface, they evoke associations ranging from the intimate to the historical, from cycles of growth to the fragility of life. Drawing on the legacy of tulip imagery in the Netherlands—where beauty, commerce, and speculation have long been intertwined—Bremer’s practice reflects on the enduring entanglement of desire, value, and transience. His flowers carry echoes of memento mori traditions, embodying both vitality and inevitable decay, suggesting the delicate balance between joy and loss.

Each piece varies in its level of abstraction, shifting between figuration and dissolution. The visceral quality of Bremer’s work lies in its inventiveness and technical complexity, while his compositions maintain a fine balance between the intricate and the bold. Whether rooted in a fleeting emotion, a resurfacing memory, or the symbolic charge of a flower in bloom, each work opens onto layered worlds—where the personal and the historical, the aesthetic and the existential, unfold simultaneously.

Sebastiaan Bremer, Cunning stunts, 2025Sebastiaan Bremer, However humanity, 2025Sebastiaan Bremer, One foot resting on the ground, 2025

Leonardo Madriz (b. 1987, Louisiana) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He makes expanded cinema installations and material assemblages regarding the inter- and inner-states of belonging.Madriz holds an MFA from Hunter College, NY (2021) and a BFA from Louisiana State University (2010). Residency awards include Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2024-25), Bemis Center (2024), Wassaic Project (2024), and Vermont Studio Center (2014). Solo shows include Sisyphus Altered at Strobe, New York, NY (2023) and Can’t Forget, Dying to Know at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY (2023). His installation Letters to Home was selected for CURRENTS New Media Festival in Santa Fe, NM (2022), and a reformatted excerpt of Letters to Home II was presented by the DUMBO Projection Project (2025). Recent group exhibitions include Repair at Shadow Walls for Upstate Art Weekend, NY (2025) and I’m Not Alien, I’m Discontent at the Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2024). Permanent collections include the LSU Museum of Art. He is currently an adjunct faculty at the International Center for Photography.Leonardo Madriz, Sentinel Adorned in the Leavers’ Wake, 2025. Image by Gustavo Murillo, Courtesy of Parent Company Gallery. Leonardo Madriz, Down Is the New Up (Möbius Recalibrates), 2025. Image by Gustavo Murillo, Courtesy of Parent Company Gallery. Leonardo Madriz, Sentinel of Lacrimosa Guerrero, 2026. Image by Gustavo Murillo, Courtesy of Parent Company Gallery. 

Photo: Emma Jenkinson

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.

Rødland, The First Curtain, 2024-2026Rødland, Forgetting Victoria, 2025Rødland, Tavener’s The Lamb, 2024-2026

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.

Kevin Umaña, Revisiting the Roman Walls, 2026. Acrylic, oil, flock, ink, sand, marble dust, salt, resin, ceramics on canvas, 24 x 18 x 2 3/4 inches.Kevin Umaña, Sanguine and Spiraling, 2023. Acrylic, oil, vinyl paint, flock, ink, sand, gouache, ceramics on canvas, 24 1/4 x 18 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches.

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.

Rob Davis, Clothesline, 2026 oil on linen 48 x 56 inchesRob Davis, Truck, 2026 oil on linen 48 x 48 inchesRob Davis, Window, 2026 oil on linen 48 x 36 inches