Garvey|Simon is pleased to announce Select6, the sixth 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: Julia Whitney Barnes, Jimmy Fike, Anne Finkelstein, Jenifer Kent, Lori Larusso, Gwyneth Leech, Claire McConaughy, Debra Ramsay, Linda Schmidt, and Charles Yoder.

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, Karl Hartman, Kit Warren, Robert Stuart, Sung Won Yun, and Joshua Flint through the Select program. 

In the progressive spirit of the Artist Review program, Garvey will be producing Select6 online with Artsy.net and selected works on view by appointment on the Upper West Side. By using this vetted online marketplace, the exhibition will have an extended duration, and the opportunity to reach an increasingly global audience. Though these artworks represent a diverse array of modes and aesthetics, they are united by their unwavering attention to detail, and unmistakable presence of the artist’s hand. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Julia Whitney Barnes
Julia Whitney Barnes uses the power of natural light to craft her floral cyanotypes. She is indiscriminate in selecting specimen, gathering everything from weeds to cultivated flowers. After posing and drying her subjects, Barnes builds her compositions on the surface of her photo-sensitive paper. Barnes also integrates watercolor and digitally-rendered negatives into her ethereal scenes. The final product is a mélange of techniques, shapes, and colors that is at once familiar and extraordinary. Julia Whitney Barnes has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. She was awarded fellowships from New York State Council on the Arts administered through Arts Mid-Hudson, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Abbey Memorial Fund for Mural Painting/National Academy of Fine Arts, and the Gowanus Public Art Initiative, among others.

Jimmy Fike
Jimmy Fike seeks to compile an archive of North America’s edible flora with his botanical photographs. Motivated equally by taxonomy and phenomenology, Fike layers and composites images of multiple specimen of the same species to engineer an exemplar of his subject. This process not only allows Fike’s images to serve as something of a survival guide, but it cultivates an aura of primacy, as well. Fike is working towards a full volume of images entitled J.W. Fike’s Photographic Survey of the Wild Edible Botanicals of the North American Continent, Plats in Which the Edible Parts of the Specimen have been Illustrated in Color. Fike’s eponymous solo show has been mounted multiple times across the United States. The artist lives and works in Tuscon, AZ.

Anne Finkelstein
Anne Finkelstein’s hard-edged architectural paintings are built upon a foundation of poetry and history. Inspired by a lifetime of walking through New York City, Finkelstein’s own sense of memory and time are intrinsically tied to the forms of the surrounding buildings. By reducing architectural elements to their primary forms, Finkelstein allows for a multiplicity of memory, triggering a sense of nostalgia with their unfamiliar familiarity. Anne Finkelstein has been exhibited by the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Transit Museum of New York, and The Painting Center. She has received commissions from Highline Series: Hudson Yards and Bronx Council on the Arts and the Department of Cultural Affairs, and is included in the public collections at World of Macintosh and Metropolitan Transit Authority. Anne Finkelstein lives and works in New York City.

Jenifer Kent
Jenifer Kent’s abstract ink drawings are as simple as they are labyrinthine. Kent uses a fairly constrained language of mark-making to create her radial compositions. Surging out from a single origin point, minuscule ink marks ebb and wane. They are guided not by uniform measurement, but by the rise and fall of sound waves, the acceleration and lethargy of movement, and Kent’s own internal rhythm. Jenifer Kent has had multiple solo exhibitions throughout the Bay Area and has been shown widely in California, Florida, and North Carolina. She is the recipient of the 2018 Wildlands Artist Residency Award and is included in the permanent collection of the Alameda County Art Collection, Alameda, CA. Jenifer Kent lives and works in Montague, CA.

Lori Larusso
Lori Larusso’s paintings of domestic artifacts and stylized food are irreverent yet sentimental. Rather than the traditional subject-setting diametric of a still life, Larusso shapes her panels to her subjects. Innuendo and narrative are dependent on the artworks' context: a context that is constantly shifting and changing. Though she pokes at the pageantry of these rituals, Larusso celebrates the labor behind these images, as well. Lori has been awarded numerous residency fellowships including Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Sam & Adele Golden Foundation, Art + History Museums Maitland, chaNorth, and MacDowell where she received a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship. She is the 2019 Kentucky South Arts Fellow and is the recipient of the 2020 Fischer Prize for Visual Art.

Gwyneth Leech
Gwyneth Leech documents the evolution of the midtown Manhattan landscape with the same sense of care and attention to ephemerality as an en plein air painter. Interested in liminal moments, Leech captures cranes, scaffolding, and temporary machinery, as skyscrapers rise from their subterranean foundations. She often paints from the same vantage point multiple times, tracking not only the pace of the urban development, but the more subtle, atmospheric indicators of the passage of time, as well. Leech is the recipient of the Hell’s Kitchen Foundation Grant, several Scottish Arts Council awards, and a Thouron British/American Exchange Fellowship. Her artwork resides in private and public collections, including Brookfield, Cimolai, Despé Italia, Metropolitan Walters, NYC Constructors/Banker Steel, Sciame LLC, SL Green Realty and Stonebridge Inc.

Claire McConaughy
Claire McConaughy’s paintings are celebrations of the act of painting. They are neither squarely abstract nor representational; rather, a hybrid of recognizable forms and lyrical marks. This blend of modes heightens McConaughy’s landscapes, shifting them just outside of the natural realm, and infusing them with a highly saturated sense of serendipity and impossibility. Claire McConaughy has exhibited in galleries including "Selections 45" at The Drawing Center, "not so far away" at The Painting Center, "Persona" at the Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery, College of St. Elizabeth, "Eleven Women of Spirit" at Zürcher Gallery and others. She received a Ucross Foundation Residency and Santa Fe Art Institute Artist’s Residency. Her work has been reviewed in artcritical, White Hot Magazine, Hamptons Art Hub and other publications.

Debra Ramsay
Debra Ramsay focuses on the beauty and enigma of light and color to create her acrylic paintings. She uses paint mixing software to recreate the colors of twilight and dawn. Her translucent painting supports allow light to pass through the paint, creating an interaction with the changing light in the room, making the artwork dynamic and reminding us that life is constantly changing. Ramsay has exhibited her work internationally for the past three decades, including in Denmark, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. She was awarded residencies at the Golden Foundation, the Albers Foundation, and BAU Institute in Otranto, Italy. She will attend the Pouch Cove Foundation residency in Newfoundland in 2022. Her work is included in the permanent collections of Hofstra University Museum of Art and Brooklyn College.

Linda Schmidt
Linda Schmidt’s fabric sculptures intertwine public and private, luxury and common. There is a sense of egalitarianism present in both the way Schmidt sources and arranges her fabrics; thrifted fabrics and high-quality pieces are viewed with an impartial eye, looking purely at color, texture, and play. These soft sculptures encapsulate the intimacy of a warm blanket and the performativity of banner. Linda Schmidt has had multiple solo shows throughout the New York metropolitan area and has received commissions from NYU Hospitals and Hilton locations throughout Japan. Her works are also included in permanent collections in New York, China, and Canada. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 

Charles Yoder
Charles Yoder’s use of tight cropping and steeply-angled perspective adds a layer of implausibility to his nocturnal scenes. Branches intersect to form happenstance frames, and spills of artificial light magnify and distort the surroundings. Composed almost entirely of light and shadow, Yoder’s monochrome drawings take on a sculptural quality, adding solidity to these intangible effects. Over the years, Charles Yoder has supported his art-making habit with various jobs, including Director of Castelli Graphics and curator to Robert Rauschenberg. He is currently President of the Artists’ Fellowship, Inc., a nonprofit charitable foundation aiding professional artists in serious financial need. Presently he paints full-time and teaches printmaking part-time at the School of Visual Arts (New York City).

For further information, to see more images, or to schedule an in-person or Zoom viewing, please visit Garvey Simon or contact Elizabeth Garvey at liz@garveysimon.com or 917-796-2146.