SAN ANSELMO, CA .- Garvey|Simon announced its inaugural exhibition in the new California gallery space, Reality Check: Shifting Perspectives, on view from August 30 - October 29, 2022. Each of the artists in this group exhibition explores and disrupts the way we process our surroundings. Whether it be through subtle, controlled deployment of their medium, or bombastic and destabilizing confluences of imagery, this wide array of artistic modes comes together to present a prismatic and ever-evolving challenge to what is seen and known. Reality Check: Shifting Perspectives features work by Dozier Bell, Daisy Craddock, Joshua Flint, Margot Glass, Jane Hammond, Jenifer Kent, Kacper Kowalski, Lori Larusso, Emil Lukas, David Morrison, Julia Randall, and Mary Reilly. Garvey|Simons grand opening will be held on September 10, 2022 from 5-9pm at 538 San Anselmo Ave, San Anselmo, CA, 94960.
Perhaps the most inconspicuous in their subversion are the artists who use their medium to beguile and bewilder. Their challenge is one of tactility, drawing the viewer closer and daring them to touch. Emil Lukass deftly webbed thread paintings create extraordinary illusions of light and form. Dozier Bells poetic charcoal drawings on Mylar masquerade as nineteenth-century photographs as the translucent surface of the paper luminously transforms the medium. Lori Larussos shaped, pop-art paintings are dizzying contradictions: flat or voluminous, painting or sculpture? By altering the form of her metal panels, Larusso calls into question the very nature of her objects and simultaneously toes the line of art and artifact. Jenifer Kents hand-drawn abstractions appear almost mechanized in their precision. Organic bursts reveal themselves as a complex network of hash-marks, dissolving the image into miniature, individual vibrations.
Daisy Craddock, Margot Glass, David Morrison, and Mary Reilly each treat reality itself as a font of fantasy. Their detailed representations surpass the image of their subjects. Daisy Craddock observes her fresh produce at a near-microscopic level, finding discrete features across their skin and flesh. Her specificity and care has a dual effect: her diptychs are at once abstracted studies, and intimate portraits of individual sitters. David Morrison takes a
similar approach in his work, but to a hyperrealist effect. His colored pencil drawings are saturated with vivid detail, bringing the texture of his specimen to the surface of the pictorial plane. Coupled with the density of his shadows, Morrison achieves a trompe l'oeil that destabilizes the very idea of two-dimensionality. Margot Glass uses detail to enhance the fragility of her drawings of ephemera. Glass also toys with trompe loeil, gathering shadows around creases and scars on her envelopes, and the filigree in her graphite dandelions gestures towards their own capriciousness. Mary Reillys handling of graphite also allows her to amplify the details of her signature graffiti trees and drawings from nature. Each of these artists uses their proximity to their subjects to present a heightened version of reality.
Where the previous artists used tactility and detail to shift the way in which their works are viewed, Joshua Flint, Jane Hammond, Kacper Kowalski, and Julia Randall abandon the accuracy of time and space almost entirely. Their surreal scenes upset temporal sequencing and point back to the subjectivity of perception. Joshua Flints paintings are amalgams of memory. Fragments of narratives and icons blur together and interrupt one another, defying a linear passage of time. Jane Hammond marries layers of artistic eyes: the lens of the camera, the lens of the art students, and finally the lens of the viewer. The fallibility of these perspectives challenge the veracity of the image; what, if any, elements of the scene are real? Kacper Kowalskis aerial images have a similar impact. His distant vantage point changes the fabric of the Polish landscape, transforming valleys, trees, and fields into technicolor blasts of abstracted texture. Julia Randall approaches the body with this same sense of scope and surrealism. Her massive drawings of mouths and gum bubbles reframe lips as inhuman beings, breathing life into magical terrariums. Randalls scope brings together macro and microcosm, gleefully wiping away any sense of space or scale. The surrealist quality of each of these artists works pulls the viewer back and asks them to question the objectivity of their vision.
Dozier Bell was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship as artist-in-residence at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, and has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundations, residencies on Monhegan Island, at the MacDowell Colony, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2014, she received a Purchase Prize award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Bells work appears in the permanent collections of the Bates, Colby, and Bowdoin College museums; the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, ME; the Denver Art
Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, among others. She lives and works in Waldoboro, ME.
Daisy Craddocks work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States. Recent one person shows include Harvest, Garvey|Simon; Summer Produce, Garvey|Simon; and Daisy Craddock: A View of Ones Own, John Davis Gallery. Craddocks work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, Art & Antiques, American Artist, Art News, and Arts Magazine among numerous other publications. Public collections include the Anderson Museum, Newark Museum, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Georgia Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Roswell Museum, Rubin Museum of Art, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Daisy is the recipient of the Roswell Artist in Residency (NM), a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant, and most recently an ICA Residency in Umbria, Italy (2022). The artist lives and works in Germantown, New York.
Joshua Flint received his BFA from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 2002. His work has been exhibited extensively in the U.S. at such galleries as Garvey|Simon, New York; Robert Lange Studios, Charleston, Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA; Sloane Merrill Gallery, Boston and La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles. His work has been placed in the city collection of Astoria, OR, the Coléccion Solo in Madrid, Spain, the Hinson Art Museum at Wingate University, NC and in private collections in the US and Europe. Features in the Press include Colossal Art + Design, Booooooom.com, Art Maze magazine (London), Fresh Paint magazine and Oxford American magazine. He is an associate professor at Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Margot Glass grew up in New York City, and studied art at The Art Students League, Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Fashion Institute of Technology. Glasss work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and internationally, including the New-York Historical Society, Berkshire Botanical Gardens, MA, Garvey|Simon, New York, Kenise Barnes Gallery, CT and her work is in private and public collections including the collection of Beth De Woody, the Hunt Institute at Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA, Midwest Museum of American Art, Elkhart, IN. Her work was featured in publications such as Orion Magazine, Watercolor Artist, American Art Collector and others. She was the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council STARS Artist Residency and is currently working on a project for the Department of State under their Arts in Embassies division. She currently lives and works in Western Massachusetts.
Hammonds work can be found in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minnesota; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago to name a few. Her works have been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Massachusetts; deYoung Museum, California; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Colorado; Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; and FLAG Art Foundation, New York. Hammond was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1950. She currently lives and works in New York City. Jane works primarily with collage, print-making and photography.
Born in New Jersey in 1971, Jenifer received her BFA from Rutgers University and MFA from Mills College in 1999. Jenifer Kent lives in Northern California and has exhibited throughout the U.S. at venues such as the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Drawing Discourse Exhibition of Contemporary Drawing at UNC Asheville, as well as Garvey|Simon, NYC. Her work has been featured in the West Marin Journal and New American Paintings. She has been awarded an Artist in Residence at Wildlands, Kala Art Institute and the Lucid Arts Foundation. All of Jenifers intricate drawings capture meditative moments in time as the artist draws her lines freehand, from the center out.
Kacper Kowalski is a Polish aerial photographer, whose work was honored by World Press Photo (2009, 2014, 2015) and Picture of the Year International (2012, 2014, 2015, 2016), Photo District News and the Moscow International Foto Awards among many others. His first book of photography, Side Effects, received numerous international awards, and his photographs have been exhibited at galleries, art fairs and museums worldwide. He lives in Gdynia, a port city in northern Poland. All of his images are shot from approximately 500 feet in the air, aboard a gyrocopter that he flies himself.
Lori Larusso is an American visual artist working primarily with themes of domesticity and foodways. Larussos work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, and most recently in a solo exhibition Precarious Panoply at the Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, OH. Lori has been awarded numerous residency fellowships including MacDowell, where she received a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Sam & Adele Golden Foundation, Art + History Museums Maitland, and chaNorth, She is the 2019 Kentucky South Arts Fellow and is the recipient of the 2020 Fischer Prize for Visual Art. She lives in Louisville, KY.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1964, Emil Lukas has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad. Solo museum shows include The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; The Weatherspoon Museum, NC The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, the Hunterdon Museum, NJ, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. His work is in important private and public collections, including the Panza Collection, Italy; the Dakis Joannou Collection, Greece; Margulies Collection, Miami; Allentown Art Museum, PA; the Anderson Collection at Stanford University; Baltimore Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San José Museum of Art; UBS Art Collection, and Weatherspoon Art Museum, to name a few.
David Morrison has had four solo exhibitions with Garvey|Simon, NYC - most recently, David Morrison: New Drawings in 2021. A visiting lecturer and guest artist at numerous universities, he is well-known in the world of printmaking, specifically stone lithography, and he is the Professor Emeritus at Indiana Universitys Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. Morrison has exhibited widely, and his work is included in numerous public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New-York Historical Society, The National Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Figge Art Museum, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, and the Portland Museum of Art, to name a few. He lives and works in Plainfield, IN.
Julia Randalls colored pencil drawings have been featured in solo exhibitions at Garvey|Simon and Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City, and Esa Jaske Gallery in Sydney, Australia. Julia Randall is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also the recipient of multiple artist residency awards, including Arts/Industry Program at the John Michael Kohler Art Center, Yaddo, Jentel, and multiple residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, NY ARTS, Art on Paper, Flash Art, and The Sydney Morning Herald. Additionally, her drawings have been featured in New American Paintings, American Artist, and Beautiful/Decay magazines.
Born in New York in 1963, Mary Reilly studied art at SUNY Purchase, School of Visual Arts, The Art Students League, and the National Academy of Fine Arts, NYC. She is devoted to drawing masterful, photo-realist scenes of nature solely in graphite on paper. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in New York City since 2001, and is featured in the permanent collections of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New-York Historical Society, The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC, and the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. A large-scale book, Taller Than Trees, with foreword by art historian Roberta J.M. Olson, Ph.D. was published in 2021. The artist lives and works in Stowe, Vermont.