Interviews by Brainard Carey

Christina Kruse, the New York-based artist whose practice navigates the shifting terrain of value, perception, and collective meaning, opens her latest solo exhibition Field Agents this April 2nd, 2026 at New Discretions. Curated by Tamar Dresdner, the exhibition unfolds as a study in instability – where systems of belief are unsettled and reassembled in response to a world in flux. Working across sculpture, wall relief, and collage, Kruse positions negotiation not as resolution, but as a condition of existence – an ongoing recalibration between competing truths.

Bruchlinien (Fault Lines), 2026
Bedingter Anspruch (Contingent Claim), 2026
Der Erbe (The Heir), 2026
Der Porter (The Porter), 2024

In this new body of work, Giordanne Salley constructs shifting tableaus that attempt to visualize not time itself, but the feeling of the passage of time. Our experiences of life can often feel like we are riding along on time’s arrow. Days repeat and build like the rhythm of waves lapping at the shore. Each tide brings forth trash and treasures, bits of flora and fauna, before the lunar cycle pulls them back out to sea. So too does one’s conscious experience of life move through time, accumulating, folding in on itself, and gradually building into the future.

Ripples and corrugations form over Salley’s images, diffracting their shapes into myriad frames. Like peering at the bottom of the sea through the waves, we see the subjects dance in the minute turbulence. In pieces like Endlings, these scenes verge on abstraction. Though semi-psychedelic in their optical qualities, Salley’s paintings are rooted in the natural world. Animals and human forms bathe in the undulations, adding a moment of specificity while also acting as a tether to reality and a reminder that these patterns depict the fluctuating surface of water.

Coursing through glowing layers of energy, works like Infinity Loon pair discernible imagery with vibrating geometry. The waterfowl, leaving a wake in the paint behind it, upsets the lines and creates a cascading pattern that echoes toward the edges of the frame. Though often based around real-world subjects, in these new works, Salley does away with the horizon line in an effort to flatten the surface and invoke a feeling of the infinite. Repetitive and continuous, her lines and patterns are full of potential as they press onward and outward.

Finding her color by applying paint in numerous thin layers, Salley works around predetermined lines, building up meditative markings of the hours spent. With every new application, the image grows richer. The use of collage and underdrawing affords each canvas a nuanced texture, both physical and visual. In Time Flows, Salley combines these elements as “a sort of scaffolding to hang the painting on or around.” Intense investigation rewards the viewer with subtle glimpses into the artist’s process. Each piece becomes a palimpsest, offering ghostly reminders of the past that push through to the final image.

At the heart of all of this is a potent rumination on universal themes through the lens of Salley’s own subjectivity. Like time, so too do ideas of love, loss, and memory ebb and flow infinitely like the tides. Slipping through fingers like the ocean in our hand, the present is instantaneous and always on the way out. Salley slows down these moments, capturing them in paint and offering a moment of contemplation and reverie, reminding us that everything is always changing and evolving. Reflecting the world around it, offering vital nourishment to life, and functioning as a symbol of the incomprehensible vastness of time and consciousness, water is transformative.

Subtle Bodies, 2025, 12 x 14 in, oil and paper on canvas
Quasi-Material Woman, 2026, 40 x 48 in, oil and paper on canvas
Time Flows, 2026, 60 x 78 in, oil and paper on canvas

Splat Daisies, is a solo exhibition of dreamlike paintings and sculpture by Sarah Alice Moran. Splat is a cartoon word and the spaces in these paintings draw on that system of suspended rationale. By loosening the rules of scale, gravity, and time, Moran creates dreamy pastoral scenes where humans, animals, and nature coexist without hierarchy. The show explores the quiet, almost mystical bonds between humans and animals, and the ways they shape our emotional lives.

Moran paints wet-on-wet, letting thin washes of color blend and bleed across the canvas. Sunflowers dissolve into daisies, shadows become shapes, and light seemingly glows from the flowers themselves. Her compositions balance the elastic logic of cartoons with a sophisticated command of color and atmosphere. Figures, rainbows, and blossoms appear in different configurations while animals move through these spaces less as narrative agents but  as symbolic or devotional presences.

Among them, inevitably, is the artist’s dog Pepper. Pepper died early in the making of this series, and her prolonged illness ushered in an extended period of anticipatory grief. During this time, Moran found solace in researching ancient Roman dog epitaphs—concise, tender monuments that affirmed the endurance of this bond across millennia.

The result is a body of work that is a meditation on companionship, loss, and remembrance—a garden for Pepper to inhabit and for the artist herself to heal within. Two large-scale column paintings, inspired by the artist’s research on ancient Rome, create an architectural space – a temple – for the sculptures to operate as a shrine, and visitors are encouraged to bring their dogs; milk bones will be provided.

Sarah Alice Moran, Bodega Flower Dream, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14 inches
Sarah Alice Moran, Good Night P, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches
Sarah Alice Moran, Sun (Flower) Bather, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14 inches

De Mont’s practice emerges from her work as an intuitive guide, leading immersive experiences in which participants are invited into states of openness and release. It was within these rituals that she began making photographs — images conceived not as portraits but as reflections, offering back to each subject a picture of themselves liberated from the hierarchies of identity and status. The camera, in De Mont’s hands, becomes a kind of witness to what she describes as a direct encounter with the divine.

What results is a body of work of striking formal beauty and genuine spiritual weight. A figure floats in a glacial pool, arms wide, body small against the massive indifference of boulders and jade-green water — surrendered, but also luminous. A woman lies curled on a sand dune at dusk, the full moon burning above her in a wide blue sky, the curve of her back answering the curve of the earth. Throughout, De Mont is drawn to moments when the border between the human figure and its surroundings seems to dissolve — not in romantic idealization, but in something closer to fact.

De Mont is particularly drawn to the feminine as a site of intuition and receptivity, and she often photographs two or three figures together, finding in that small gathering an amplification of communion — bodies acting as extensions of each other and of the earth itself. “We are incredibly sophisticated energy beings, I hope to capture a transmission that is contagious, that makes our bellies soften with peace and belonging.” It is a quality her pictures genuinely carry. They ask something of the viewer — a willingness to be still, to look, to feel the pull of a life that is waiting.

Stella De Mont is based in Los Angeles. This Life Wants You is her first solo exhibition with Benrubi Gallery.

Stella De Mont, Owls, 2024
Stella De Mont, Glory, 2024
Stella De Mont, Cradled, 2025

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.