Artspace is pleased to debut 10 x 10 x 10, a new initiative aimed at highlighting the programs of young and innovative galleries, around the world, through curated online exhibitions. Our inaugural presentation introduces a virtual collective of 10 galleries, each under 10-years-old, across the USA. Over the next four weeks, each gallery will present a rotating collection of cutting-edge artworks exclusive to Artspace. All works featured are priced at $10K or under, in support of our mission to make collecting art accessible to a broader audience. The exhibition will be on view through July 16, 2020.
Participating galleries include: Baby Blue Gallery (Chicago, IL), Carvalho Park (Brooklyn, NY), Channel to Channel (Nashville, TN), Davis Originals (Tempe, AZ), Erin Cluley Gallery (Dallas, TX), Et al. (San Francisco, CA), LatchKey Gallery (New York, NY), Resort (Baltimore, MD), River (Los Angeles, CA) and SEASON (Seattle, WA).
To highlight the initiative we'll be publishing interviews with the gallery founders in the weeks ahead. Today we talk with Carvalho Park co-founder Jennifer Carvalho.
Carvalho Park Gallery, Brooklyn, New York
Carvalho Park was co-founded by gallerist Carvalho and architect and sculptor Se Yoon Park. The gallery's visually distinctive programming features emerging artists who reconsider the distinctions between disciplines and expand the language of form. A synthesis of the directors’ backgrounds in architecture and the performing arts, exhibitions work to activate the viewer’s environment and to shift context and categorization, allowing objects to move freely in and across the art and design landscapes.
Who are you, where are you, and what do you do? I'm Jennifer Carvalho, Co-founder and Director of Carvalho Park, in Brooklyn, New York. Carvalho Park is a partnership catalyzed by an alignment of aesthetic pursuits and shared instincts.
Why did you want to start a gallery? When I first met sculptor-architect-designer Se Yoon Park in 2017, I believe I actually heard a voice say – he’s going to be important to you. We each held such high respect for the other’s mind and work – launching a gallery was an effortless evolution. Our backgrounds – mine in classical ballet before working in museums and auction houses, his in architecture – together form a complimentary point-of-view that shapes our program and informs how we consider the environment and atmosphere of each exhibition, but also the physicality of the viewing experience.
A synthesis of these sensibilities has been our north star in articulating Carvalho Park. We’re also not afraid of beauty. Our backgrounds inherently affect our individual work and perspectives each day, and we’ve therefore allowed that to permeate into our program and to be embraced. The cross-disciplinary nature of our program is authentic to Se Yoon and me while distinguishing the gallery from other contemporary art spaces. Se Yoon also built out a beautiful space from an abandoned, industrial laundry factory. It sets the stage for each show.
SE YOON PARK - Trio || Light and Darkness Type A, 2020
How has your program evolved since you began? Carvalho Park is only 16 months old, having launched in winter 2019. In the gallery’s first two years, my focus is defining our program, point-of-view and what we value. Our exhibitions feature emerging artists working across and reconsidering the distinction between disciplines – of the visual art, performing art and design realms. We’ve also introduced several international artists to the New York art scene this year. At this time, we are showing what excites us most, with an emphasis on work that engages as physically as it does optically.
As we plan our program for next year, the focus isn’t solely on exhibitions, but our individual artists’ trajectories – how do we nurture, shape and propel those. Our first 16 months have held mostly two-person exhibitions (which I find particularly nuanced and challenging in the best way). We are now working closely with many of our artists on focused solo exhibitions moving forward.
ROSALIND TALLMADGE - Sombra, 2020
What has been your biggest success? And what’s been your biggest challenge? Each exhibition is its own production, and I’ve been immensely proud of the manifestation and response to each. The ones closest to my heart are those in which we invite visual artists, a composer and choreographer to set a total work in the gallery space.
As a young gallery, it’s challenging to get on the radar of new collectors and audiences. I have to remind myself that Carvalho Park is new and that awareness will only expand. Patience and perseverance.
How do you advise your artists? I maintain close and collaborative relationships with our artists. I advise on the development of current work, but we also have constantly evolving conversations on the trajectory ahead. We are all around the same age – about ten years post-Masters – so it’s my hope that we will all grow up together – fully realizing our contributions to the arts.
What’s the thing that’s consistently surprised you about the art market over the years? To my surprise – and dismay – it’s been how willingly audiences allowed online viewership to replace the in-person experience of an exhibition. Gallery attendance has been on the exponential decline for years. We are fortunate to have platforms like Artspace that provide an indispensable means to facilitate introductions and acquisitions between collectors and galleries nationally and internationally. This should be a spark, a catalyst for attending gallery exhibitions in your city, which cannot be replaced by jpegs. It’s crucial to seek out and attend exhibitions in your city to sharpen your eye, elevate the psyche, and to support the existence of local galleries.
GUILLAUME LINARD OSORIO - November 23, 2019
How will you flourish in a post-Covid artworld? As a tie-in to your previous question, it was astonishing how quickly Online Viewing Room fatigue set in this spring, after a quite agile digital pivot in the art world. As we’ve been relegated to our own spaces during Covid quarantine, it’s my hope that this extreme will initiate a powerful desire to re-engage, for people to be more present, and to support their local galleries and artists by attending exhibitions in-person – to take all the stimuli in. Our audience is an irreplaceable part of the equation for the gallery. Each work is meant to be experienced. I’m optimistic.
What’s coming up for you in terms of shows and how will you present them? Our new two-person exhibition, which I was dying to launch this spring, is finally on view. After an anxiety-inducing international shipping experience at the onset of Covid-19, the work finally arrived and we’ve mounted one of the most palpably stunning exhibitions in the gallery to date. The atmosphere in the gallery actually vibrates. Order and Vertigo features the work of (Denver artist) Derrick Velasquez and (Parisian artist) Guillaume Linard Osorio.
BRIAN RATTINER - Almería 2 (The Sparrows are the Same), 2018
This fall, Carvalho Park will introduce the work of Brooklyn-based painter Brian Rattiner, whose paintings are a synthetist absorption of nature - of sound, of memory and of feeling. His marks remind me of Cy Twombly in energy and rhythm. Then, a much anticipated solo show of Mimi Jung’s fiber-based work. The gallery will also publish its first artist book. This winter will be host to a performance series. It’s too soon to divulge details, but it will be an exceptional collaboration with visual artist Rosalind Tallmadge who creates enveloping optically-elusive surfaces with gold leaf, and here, with a choreographer and dancer. To follow, will be a gallery takeover by a brilliant French designer. More soon.
GJ KIMSUNKEN - Figuration 20.5, 2020
Tell us about one or two of the artists or artworks included in this show?
In this selection for Artspace are two works that tie to Carvalho Park’s current exhibition, Order and Vertigo, featuring Derrick Velasquez and Guillaume Linard Osorio. In a moment in which we are collectively in a state of vertigo, having seen once seemingly concrete systems of structure questioned, or expeditiously upended, the work of these two artists feels particularly fitting. With incredible potency, the work tests the architecture of perception, of material distinction, of ways of seeing.
Se Yoon and I did a studio visit with Guillaume in Paris this winter. We had corresponded for about two years, but I was completely entranced upon experiencing the paintings in-person. Guillaume proposes a new field within the picture plane, a landscape of channels between sheets of polycarbonate. The artist renders the site a chromatic environment – injecting colored resins that result in a retinal play of liquid-like images. Voids become veils of impossibly beautiful transitions of color that oscillate between transparency and deep saturation behind a semi-reflective visage.
I had worked with Derrick previously, but it’s been such a pleasure to dive deeper with this exhibition. Derrick’s resonating lexicon of repeated bands of vinyl at first appear as emblems to high Modernist abstraction. His untitled wall sculptures – a well-known series at the center of his practice – signal the doctrines of geometric painting with their decisive color transitions, smoothness of surface and geometric totality. Yet it’s a process and material selection that in turn, wittingly and softly obliterates the rules dictated by hard-edge abstraction. Through the meditative, at times quiet lulling of layered bands, the sculptures also give way to a humanized character, mimicking the manner that a body may lay in repose, draped over the arm of a couch. Through these singular works Derrick composes a language of structure that eloquently disrupts our notions of how both material and art object should function.
We’re now in a moment where collaboration could point a way forward. How might this work for you? Cross-pollination between art forms is where you can see the most electric sparks. It’s my aim to facilitate at least one such collaboration – between the visual and performing arts – each year. In terms of galleries, there has certainly been a shift towards a more collaborative spirit, which to me signals a more in-tune, engaging and vibrant scene to come.
Order and Vertigo is on view in Brooklyn until July 25.
