Interviews by Brainard Carey

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 inches
Catherine Birk | dam (for Morandi), 2025 Oil, acrylic, cold wax medium, and Dragon Skin Silicone on panel with artist’s frame 17 x 21 inches
Catherine 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, 2026

dean erdmann, 700cc, 2026 Hot mold blown glass and steel armature 28 x 18 1/2 x 14 in

dean 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.

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, 2024-2026
Rødland, Forgetting Victoria, 2025

Rødland, Tavener’s The Lamb, 2024-2026