Morgan Lehman is pleased to present “Timekeepers and Field Guides”, an exhibition of new installation, sculpture, and works on paper by Carly Glovinski. This marks the artist’s second solo show with the gallery.
Rooted in observation and fueled by a curiosity about the history of objects and handicraft processes, Carly Glovinski makes work that explores the make-do, resourceful attitudes associated with domestic craft and a reverence for nature.
The elements of time and place are embedded in the works on display: Glovinski mines her surrounding coastal New Hampshire and Maine environment for inspiration and looks to the repetitive cycles of seasonal blooms and celestial orbits. The artist sees herself as a sort of “tender”, or “keeper” with an eye towards preservation and conservation of the environment, bearing witness to the present moment.
Glovinski’s work takes many forms, pushing the boundaries of what a certain media should be or do. Her large-scale flower installation “Big Pollinator” is based on varieties that the artist grows in her own garden or has collected from friends and travel. After picking, pressing, and documenting these flowers, she recreates them larger than life through layers of washy color on semi translucent cut mylar. In such a context, the craft tradition of pressed flowers plays with the art-historical concept of “flatness” and tells a story about time: a suspended or collapsed moment, a memorial, a perishable keepsake, a memory.
In the ongoing project, “Canning the Sunset”, sunset imagery both observed and found is recreated out of hand colored sand. This act of preserving transient phenomena in recycled glass jars makes a connection to canning, and “putting up” rations for times of scarcity. The sunset marks the sky with color in a fleeting moment each day, slipping down behind the horizon like grains of sand through an hourglass. To try and capture it is a futile and impossible gesture. The sculpture is simultaneously cheeky and earnest in its playful imagining of the sublime within the everyday.
The works on paper take inspiration from Shaker basket weaving and early American quilt square flower patterns. They are handmade with care and intended as gifts, tokens of appreciation, offerings of comfort and beauty. This series of drawings brings together formal and conceptual elements of other bodies of work from the artist’s larger studio practice.
The title of this exhibition, “Timekeepers and Field Guides”, inspires a feeling of perseverance, the labor of care, and a repetition that is both physical and emotional. Glovinski reminds us that within nature’s cyclical processes, a restorative balance can be attained not only for the earth, but for its inhabitants. Similarly, the simple acts of observing and making something with one’s own hands brings insight, connection, and joy.
Carly Glovinski (b. 1981) received her BFA from Boston University. She has been awarded residencies at Surf Point Foundation and the Canterbury Shaker Village, and grants from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, and the Blanche Colman Trust. Selected exhibitions include Zillman Museum of Art, Maine; PCAI, Delphi, Greece; Colby Museum of Art, Maine; Morgan Lehman Gallery, NY, Richard Heller Gallery, LA; Monserrat College of Art, MA; the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and Tracey Morgan Gallery, NC. Glovinski’s work has been in discussed in publications such as New American Paintings, ArtMaze Magazine, Hyperallergic, Colossal, and Vice, and is held in public collections including Colby Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, Fidelity Investments, Cleveland Clinic, and Bank of America. The artist lives and works in New Hampshire.