黑料不打烊

Garvey|Simon is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition in their 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|Simon鈥檚 grand opening will be held on September 10, 2022 from 5-9pm.

Perhaps the most inconspicuous in their subversion are the artists who use their medium to beguile the viewer. Their challenge is one of tactility, drawing the viewer closer and daring them to touch. Emil Lukas鈥檚 deftly webbed thread paintings create extraordinary illusions of light and form. Dozier Bell鈥檚 poetic charcoal drawings on Mylar masquerade as nineteenth-century photographs as the translucent surface of the paper luminously transforms the medium. Lori Larusso鈥檚 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 Kent鈥檚 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. They dive to such depth into their details that their 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 l鈥檕eil, gathering shadows around creases and scars on her envelopes, and the filigree in her graphite dandelions gestures towards their own capriciousness. Mary Reilly鈥檚 handling of graphite also allows her to amplify the details of her signature graffiti trees and seashells. 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 Flint鈥檚 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 Kowalski鈥檚 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. Randall鈥檚 scope brings together macro and microcosm, gleefully wiping away any sense of space or scale. The surrealist quality of each of these artists鈥� works pulls the viewer back and asks them to question the objectivity of their vision.