Interviews by Brainard Carey

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

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.
Kevin Umaña, The Clothesline Appearing as Aqueducts, 2025. Glaze on stoneware, 12 5/8 x 10 7/8 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 inches
Rob Davis, Truck, 2026 oil on linen 48 x 48 inches
Rob Davis, Window, 2026 oil on linen 48 x 36 inches

Jeffrey Heiman is a painter whose work draws on personal memory and art historical references to explore intimacy, absence, and the surreal within domestic or imagined space. Blurring figuration and negative space, his paintings evoke a liminal sense of presence and emotional residue.

He has been an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony (Woodstock, NY), Neddy Artist Award Finalist 2022 (Seattle, WA), and recently earned his MFA in Painting from Bard College, he currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

Jeffrey Heiman, Flip, 2026, oil on canvas, 48 x 30 inches, courtesy the artist and Freight+Volume Gallery.
Jeffrey Heiman, Washing in the Sink, 2026, oil on linen, 34 x 40 inches, courtesy the artist and Freight+Volume Gallery.
Jeffrey Heiman, Jenny Sleeping, 2025, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches, courtesy the artist and Freight+Volume Gallery.