New York, NY (Chelsea) Garvey|Simon is pleased to present Inward/Outward: Responding to the Built Environment, a group exhibition, curated by Joseph A. Gross, that includes a selection of works, each in dialogue with architecture, interiors, and design. The Exhibition runs from January 4th until February 10th, with an opening reception on Thursday, January 4th from 6-8pm. 

The commanding photograph Loos, 2013, by Linda Lindroth, towers over viewers like a modernist building.  In it, an enlarged, collapsed box takes the shape of a high rise. Its horizontal black and tan lines are a nod to architect Adolf Loos’s unrealized design for Josephine Baker’s residence.  Loos’s buildings, such as The Looshaus (1911), in Vienna, illustrate his distaste for ornament, which he blamed for societal ills and decried as wasteful. Today, amongst conscious efforts to curb wastefulness, “repurposed” and “reclaimed” have become designer badges of honor.  Leslie Kerby explores repurposing with her Containment Series, collages that question how shipping containers, traditionally used for safely delivering cargo, affect human consciousness as they evolve into permanent and temporary low cost housing.  Timothy Hursley approaches repurposing from a different perspective with his pink-hued photograph Kid’s Room, Carlin Social Club, Carlin, Nevada, 1988/1990.  What was once a brothel, is now a private residence, and the children’s room, strewn with toys, bares evidence of its former life with a partially mirrored ceiling and bordello-red curtains.

Mary Heilmann’s Bab Boujeloud, 1996, inspired by the arched Islamic gate in Fez, Morocco, captures the changing colors of juxtaposed mosaic tiles as they reflect the sunlight. Tamiko Kawata explores Pueblo architecture, traditionally flat roofed structures, stacked and situated around an open communal space, in both two- and three-dimensional form in Pueblo Drawing, 2014, and Small Pueblo #2, 2015, the latter composed entirely from safety pins. Mary Judge’s time spent painting for the design market at the Grazia factory in Italy is evident in her symmetrical painting, Diadema Red and Green, 2014, which also faintly resembles an architectural floor plan. Shona Macdonald illustrates how the manmade interrupts the natural landscape with her silverpoint series Ground Coverings, and Sandy Litchfield creates dreamy amalgams of the urban and natural landscapes with her collages Purple Haze and Study for Metropolush, both 2011, illustrating how the constructed environment seeps into our unconscious.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS –

Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco, California.  She received her BA from the University of California in Santa Barbara and her MA from the University of California in Berkeley before heading to the East Coast to haunt the streets of downtown Manhattan.  In Manhattan, Heilmann became friends with a small circle of artists in the East Village, which included Susan Rothenberg, Carl Andre, and Jackie Winsor, among others.  Critical acclaim for Heilmann’s work began in the 1980’s, while she was exhibiting at the Pat Hearn Gallery.  She has taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City as well as the San Francisco Art Institute and the Skowhegan School. 

Timothy Hursley was born in 1955 in Detroit, Michigan, where he apprenticed in architectural photography with Hungarian photographer Balthazar Korab beginning in 1972. His apprenticeship continued until he moved to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1980, where he started his own studio The Arkansas Office.  From 1982 to 1987, Tim made architectural photographs of Andy Warhol’s last Factory on Madison and 34th street in New York City. Hursley revisited the Nevada brothels in 2001 and published the collection in Brothels of Nevada: Candid Views of America’s Legal Sex Industry (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003) In 1994, Tim began documenting the work of the architect Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio and continues today. This has resulted in three books: Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), Proceed and Be Bold (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005) and Rural Studio at Twenty (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014).

Mary Judge is known for her complex and reductive paintings, works on paper and sculpture. Her artistic development has been deeply affected by this formative experience and her frequent travels to Italy, to a summer home, where she built a deep relationship with contemporary Italian art and local artisans of the Umbria region. She worked for several years with the Grazia factory in Deruta, painting for the design market while maintaining her fine art studio practice, until the atmosphere of the factory infiltrated her art and lead to a break with traditional painting and to what she considers her mature work. Her first pivotal show in NY was in the “Selections ‘97” show at The Drawing Center where she first presented her unique “spolvero” drawings, based on a technique used to transfer drawings to another surface such as in fresco painting or in the decoration of traditional Italian ceramics.  Her work is process driven and could be considered “post minimal”. While the work is formally organized, the works are sensual, and suggest hidden geometries and have employed casual effects that result from the indirect processes she utilizes.

Tamiko Kawata grew up in Tokyo in the wake of World War II and immigrated to the United States in 1962. Her approach is informed by the modernist ideas of Dada and Assemblage. Kawata utilizes everyday, sometimes discarded objects in her work, including used pantyhose and food packaging. Impressed by the variety of safety pins in a tailor supply shop, Kawata adopted the safety pin as her basic readymade building block. Kawata builds rows of safety pins in multiple finishes on canvas, creating studies in line and color that are at once painting and sculpture. Kawata also creates fashionable wearable art in the form of jewelry for women.

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.

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.

Sandy Litchfield creates imaginary worlds from fragments of memory and remnants of her scrapped and torn watercolors. What is born is her own new geography, history, culture, and ecology. Litchfield uses a wide range of media including collage, paint, photography, and digital prints to create fragmented and abstracted landscapes.  Snippets of forest, sunshine, and foliage congeal as places of haunting enchantment or spiritual refuge.  In all the work is an inherent tension between the abstract and the representational, which remarks on both physical and psychological intersections of the domestic and the wild.

Shona Macdonald documents life in Western New England, where she lives and works. The silverpoint drawings in the exhibition include fleeting subject matter found in the landscape. These drawings evoke more than we see at first glance, particularly in the instances of the transient, such as puddles that will evaporate over time or garden coverings that will be peeled away. The silverpoint she employs – itself ethereal as it shifts from gray to sepia over time – emphasizes notions of displacement and disorientation. 

For further information and to see more images, please visit Garvey Simon or contact Elizabeth Garvey at liz@garveysimon.com or 646-869-7637.