Meadow: Paintings by Ashley Garrett
April 24 - June 5 2021
Reception May 15 2-5 PM
We are thrilled to announce our new show, Meadow: Paintings by Ashley Garrett. This is Garrett's first show with the gallery.
Garrett’s small, lush paintings depict a realm that is not exactly the known landscape. The longer one looks, the more the paintings slide away from the thing they first appear to be. With titles that point to the mystical capacities of nature, virtuosic brush work and a keyed-up palette, Garrett posits landscape as a setting for transcendence.
“To be surrounded by the land, with an empathy for what’s in it and all the details, all the individuals – trees, branches, grass blades, twigs, broken limbs revealing light and earth, movement. What do they see? The presence they each have. Landscape can be a site of projection, and it can also receive and reflect our emotions, move us away from our control and hardening - to be moved and touched by it. How perception softens and sharpens, shifts as we become aware of it, and lets go. The space inside the trees, around the trees, between the trees and me, between you and me. . .
Cooling, breathing, resting, releasing burden. Big movement, whipping sky, heat, dappled light, evolving time. The grace of seasons, slowing down, small discoveries, structures and layers.
Releasing what we hold to air.”
-Ashley Garrett, 2021
Ashley Garrett was raised in rural Pennsylvania, and lives and works in the Hudson Valley. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts (BFA 2008) after attending Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA from 2002 to 2005. Garrett has spent meaningful tracts of time in the realms of nature and of horses, as both a rider and trainer, and credits all of these aspects of life with informing her painting practice.
Garrett’s work has been included in exhibitions in New York, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Dallas, TX, West Hartford, CT, Catskill, NY, Saugerties, NY, Honolulu, HI, and Great Barrington, MA, and internationally in Greece, Vancouver, Copenhagen and Oslo. In addition to her painting and drawing practice, Garrett has curated exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. Her writing includes interviews with artists Katherine Bernhardt, Lisa Sanditz, Ann Craven, Judith Linhares, Brenda Goodman, Lori Ellison, and choreographer Molissa Fenley discussing their work and studio process.