Select 4

Charles Birnbaum, Katherine Cox, Joshua Flint, Elizabeth Mead, Duvian Montoya, Constance Scopelitis, and Sharon Shapiro

October 15 — December 31, 2019

An Artsy.net exclusive exhibition

Fourth Annual Exhibition of Artists Selected from the Gallery Review Program

Garvey|Simon is pleased to announce Select 4, the fourth annual exhibition of work by emerging and mid-career artists chosen by director Elizabeth K. Garvey through the gallery’s innovative Review Program. This year’s artists are: Charles Birnbaum, Katherine Cox, Joshua Flint, Elizabeth Mead, Duvian Montoya, Constance Scopelitis, and Sharon Shapiro.

Garvey|Simon established the Review Program in 2016 to open a dialogue between artists and galleries, a practice that has long been anathema to gallery orthodoxy. Neither the past practice of artists drowning galleries in heaps of slides nor today’s avalanche of emails is beneficial to either gallery or artist. Garvey believes that artists “need to have a working platform to engage with dealers who otherwise might not see their work.” In the multi-tiered program, artists must pay an administrative fee for their work to be reviewed. “We want artists to think before they submit and be sure their work is appropriate for our program – the small fee puts some skin in the game and detracts from artists sending generic, mass submissions.” Finalists are given a private meeting with the gallery to consider their work for the exhibition. Garvey|Simon has cultivated successful partnerships with artists Margot Glass, Eileen Murphy, Linda Lindroth, Leonard Sussman, Robert Stuart, and Sung Won Yun through the Select program.

In the progressive spirit of the Artist Review program, Garvey has turned to Artsy.net as the host for this year’s exhibition. By using this vetted online marketplace, the exhibition will have an extended duration, and the opportunity to reach an increasingly global audience. Though this year’s artists work in an array of media, they are united by their compositional intricacy and multi-lateral approach to making. From ceramic, to collage, to graphite, to photography, each of the artists stretches their material to its conceptual limit.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

CHARLES BIRNBAUM points to Jungian archetypes as inspiration for his porcelain sculptures. Though inherently abstract, Birnbaum’s sculptures share an aquatic, and perhaps primordial lineage. Sensuous curves and textures are countered by bone-white sterility, complicating the viewer’s attraction to their expectant form. Birnbaum currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

KATHERINE COX considers both literal and metaphorical scale in her graphite and colored pencil drawings of cloud formations and sea surfaces. The grandeur of her drawings evokes the intangibility of her subjects; the viewer is engulfed by the work in front of them in the same manner that they are dwarfed by the ocean or sky. The physical effort of Cox’s practice is distilled into the body of her drawings, adding to the sublimity of their presence. Cox lives and works in Ohio.

JOSHUA FLINT stages the scenes of his paintings using elements drawn from archival images and found photographs. Flint interjects a slippage between the narrative in the composition and its historical context, shifting between impressionistic swathes of color, and hard-edge realism. When designing these scenes, Flint employs digital software to create collages, adding or subtracting elements from his source-image. The result is an ethereal and unmoored representation of the near past. Flint lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

ELIZABETH MEAD revises and reframes reality in her photographs of paper and string sculptural objects. Isolated within the frame, Mead denies her objects a sense of scale or location, allowing natural light to define their volume. Mead uses depth of field to further remove her objects from the natural realm, creating perspectives and focal points that elude the human eye. Silent and enigmatic, paper becomes alien in front of Mead’s leading lens. Mead lives and works in Virginia.

DUVIAN MONTOYA blends fantasy and documentary in his gouache cityscapes. His artistic practice is centered on the experience of turning a corner, and the immediacy with which we register an unfamiliar scene. This most recent body of work captures the streets of urban Mexico. Vibrant, technicolor skies and building facades convey the heightened sensation of the experience, while detailed graphite grounds it in reality. Montoya lives and works in Connecticut.

CONSTANCE SCOPELITIS is fascinated by textiles and fabric, both as a subject and as a medium. Scopelitis executes the wells and folds of drapery with technical gravitas, casually suggesting bodily forms with the gentle sway of contrapposto. Fabric is her pictorial surface in the series, God is in Clean Laundry. Hyperrealist renderings of animals and icons of human vice ironically adorn antique handkerchiefs, staining the pristine white fabric. Scopelitis lives and works in Indiana.

SHARON SHAPIRO’s paintings and collages explicate and untangle the multilateral constructions of the female self. Layers and fragments of oil paint and collage mingle with references to memory, pop-culture, and iconography, resulting in kaleidoscopic scenes that are at once deeply rooted in personal history, yet somehow detached. Shapiro’s women and girls are permitted to be complex without being convoluted. Visual disruption thus functions as a tool for examining female vulnerability and self-possession. Shapiro lives and works in Virginia. 

For further information, to see more images, or to schedule a viewing, please visit Garvey|Simon, our Artsy.net page, or contact Elizabeth Garvey at liz@garveysimon.com or 917-796-2146.