NEW YORK, NY.- Garvey|Simon announces the exhibition, Select, featuring work by seven artists chosen by director Elizabeth K. Garvey from the gallery’s inaugural Artist Review Program. The artists are Nancy Daubenspeck, Margot Glass, Leslie Kerby, Neema Lal, Linda Lindroth, Lily Prince, and Krista Svalbonas.
The Artist Review Program exists to create dialogue with artists and to offer an accessible platform for visibility and potential exhibition at the gallery. This year’s artists are all women whose works are diverse in both subject matter and form. There is a romantic element in the drawings of rumpled envelopes by Margot Glass and in Lily Prince’s dreamlike landscapes. Krista Svalbonas and Leslie Kerby study domestic space, with Svalbonas creating collages contrasting city and country, while Kerby explores the use of shipping containers for permanent or temporary housing. Working with a different sort of container, Linda Lindroth flays and flattens vintage boxes with lavish colors and textures. Nancy Daubenspeck and Neema Lal both utilize a subtractive technique, Daubenspeck taking away and retouching layers of casein paint while Lal sandblasts her glass sculptures.
Nancy Daubenspeck is inspired by the fresco iconography interiors of small Greek byzantine chapels, Egyptian hieroglyphics, calligraphy, and all types of hand-stitching and lacework. She loves the human mark placed in a patterned framework. Daubenspeck works with numerous thin veils of color, squares, and marks on a pattern of gridded points. Layers of casein are removed and retouched so the grid emerges from within. The resulting work has a sense of depth and a dry, luminous surface with spare but not minimal forms.
Margot Glass explores the fragility of communication, and people’s natural drive to find narrative in even the most ordinary of objects. In her Envelopes series, Glass works in watercolor, pencil and silverpoint, using trompe l’oeil to highlight the paper as a still life element. The drawing becomes an object through close compositional cropping and the choice of stiff watercolor board. By omitting text, the artist adds a minimalist element to the vivid representation.
Leslie Kerby focuses on social narratives exploring the constructs of identity, communal spaces and social media. Her Containment Series collages explore the use of shipping containers for permanent or temporary housing, and as vessels for risky passages to freedom. The containers, typically sealed and used for the safe keeping of their cargo, have become a burgeoning communal space. The titles are derived from the international numbering system used to identify the type of container and country of origin.
Neema Lal creates angular series of lines while she is in a contemplative state after meditation. The lines are variations on a theme, resembling a simplified lightning bolt, lengthened and appended in various ways. She is represented in this show by multifaceted sculptures made of optical glass. Light refracts through the glass and exits, interrupted by sandblasted areas of opacity and segments of prismatic color.
Linda Lindroth deconstructs and examines objects in an abstract way by photographing them. She finds something with an interesting color, surface or provenance and, with either a camera or flatbed scanner, creates a flattened image of it. In this two-dimensional photographic form, the object takes on an abstract quality with colors and details that invigorate the senses. Elsa, 2012, is created from a collapsed shoebox that originally held a pair of black suede evening sandals designed by Elsa Schiaparelli.
Lily Prince creates abstract landscape drawings of Florida and Tuscany. Drawings done en plein air as a finished work serve also as stimulus for large scale studio works that utilize one or a combination of watercolor, gouache and oil pastel. The landscapes take a dreamlike quality as Prince utilizes negative space, line, color and pattern to convey a dreamlike impression of the landscape.
Krista Svalbonas has a longstanding interest in architecture, particularly in urban environments. She examines the spatial relationships and the effect of architectural form and structure on the human beings who live in them. Svalbonas is acutely sensitive to the impact of politics on architecture and on daily life. Her work explores architecture’s relationship to cultural identity, social hierarchy, and psychological space.
