Primary is proud to present Spring, a group exhibition featuring Adam Beris, Tess Bilhartz, Sarah Bedford, Miranda Byk, Corydon Cowansage, Douglas de Souza, Laura Findlay, Kevin Ford, Alanna Hernandez, Sally Jerome, Claudia Keep, Rose Nestler, Ben Sanders, Aaron Michael Skolnick, and Lina Tharsing.

On the subject of spring:

Some things must be visually soft and physically slow, approaching a state of suspension.
It could be the low roll of a pink ocean, a perfectly balanced breeze, or fingertips gliding
across the short hairs of your neck.
Visits consist of lying on your back in the thick, plush green, watching the clouds go by.
Movements are like slow steps to a fast song, shuffling across the dance floor with an intention but without worry, huge smiles, no fancy footwork.
Listening to Frederick Loewe and Alan Lerner’s "Wouldn't it be Loverly" on repeat.
In part for the florists; a bouquet for any occasion; becoming wilted.
Pondering our littlest's first years and wondering who they benefit more;
an ongoing exercise in purpose.

For some, the best part is standing at an altar made entirely of flowers promising each other the world; for others, it is sliding on your knees in a white dress across the polished wood floor while the adults give speeches and watch in awe.

My daughter came home with a small pot filled with soil and seed. Will it ever sprout? Fuck if I know. The anticipation is killing me.

Opens
Saturday, April 1, 2023
5 - 9 PM

More about the Artists:

Adam Beris (b. 1987, Milwaukee, WI) makes paintings that celebrate and challenge traditional relationships between object, subject, foreground, and background. Beris’ primary action in the studio is squeezing paint from tubes. Deftly extruding streams of unadulterated color into an array of symbols, characters, food, ideas, and abstractions, Beris has created an ever-expanding lexicon of pictographs that are informed by the shapes of language, infographics, and the pervasive influence of social media. Aligned in grids, Beris’ glyphs function like a lost codec of a childhood dream, but tangled amongst the blades of extruded paint grass, they resemble the refuse of a careless and anthropocentric society—and to prove his point Beris embeds litter from walks in his neighborhood in between painting sessions.

Beris received a dual degree in Painting and Creative Writing from Kansas City Art Institute in 2009. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including MCC Longview Cultural Center in Lee’s Summit, MO; Over the Influence in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, CA; Y53 and Fabien Castanier Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; The Omaha Creative Institute in Omaha, NE; and OCHI in Los Angeles, CA and Sun Valley, ID. Beris currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Tess Bilhartz (b. 1984, Dallas, TX) has always loved stories where the American landscape nurtures the fantasies and horrors of cultural myths and history, Her work is set in a natural world where drama and hallucination feel rooted in the bones of the place. Through immersive installation and the blending of mediums, her work aims to make edges disappear within a world of moods.

Bilhartz received an MFA in painting from Boston University. Currently she lives and works in New York City, teaching drawing and painting at Borough of Manhattan Community College - CUNY. Recent residencies include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2017), and the Sharpe Walentas Space Program (2013). Solo exhibitions include, Arts and Leisure Gallery (2016), 0-0 LA (2017), Below Grand (2020) and Rubber Factory (2022). Her works have also been exhibited at Embajada, San Juan, PR, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, NY, NY, Studio Archive Project, curated by Deanna Evans, and Metro Pictures Gallery, New York, NY.

Sarah Bedford (b. 1969, Roundup, MT) received her BFA from the Cooper Union and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Bedford has been a recipient of the National Academy of Design Painting Award, as well as a Lower East Side Printshop Artist Fellowship. Bedford has shown with Bellwether Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery, Charles Moffett and Deanna Evans Projects, New York, Mrs., Maspeth, NY; and Foyer, Los Angeles, CA. Her solo exhibition, Enormous Sunsets and Big Breezes was hosted on Martha’s Vineyard by Mrs. during the summer of 2018 and was included in a two person exhibition at the gallery in 2016. Bedford lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has been represented by Mrs. since 2020.

Miranda Byk (b. 1994, Ventura, CA) received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Byk creates haunting, dream-like vignettes that are immersive in nature, embodying a liminal space. Her practice explores deep personal narratives, including dreams, traumas, and anxieties. Byk often includes references from her childhood and familial relationships. Her work heavily examines nature, using plants, dew drops, and animals as common motifs and explores themes such as the passage of time, the cycle of life, and the ephemerality of existence.

Her debut solo exhibition was most recently realised at Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles (2022) and her work has been included in group exhibitions at K11 Musea, WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong (2022); Carlye Packer, Palm Springs (2022); The Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, Los Angeles (2022); Brothers Marshall Community Center, Malibu (2022); Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles (2023, 2022, 2021); Make Room, Los Angeles (2021); As It Stands, Los Angeles (2021); Layer Studios, Oakland (2017); and Book and Job Gallery, San Francisco (2014).

Corydon Cowansage (b. 1985, Philadelphia, PA) Corydon Cowansage’s work explores both the psychology of space and the relationship between abstraction, architecture, biomorphic forms and the body itself. The artist uses geometry and vibrant color to manipulate light and shadow, distorting our perceptions of physical space—while reconstructing the viewer’s point of access to the painting. Cowansage’s meditative compositions reflect on the speed of the world and feature invented forms that are simultaneously recognizable and slightly removed from reality.

The artist received an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island in 2011, and a BFA in Studio Art from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have taken place at: CHART in New York City (2021); Koki Arts in Tokyo, Japan (2019); Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia (2019); 17 Essex in New York City (2016); and Deli Projects, with Austin Lee, in Basel, Switzerland (2016).Group exhibitions that shown the artist’s work include: Desire and Anxiety at G/ART/EN in Como, Italy (2021); Highlight at Hollis Taggart in New York City (2018); RE_ARRANGE at Juxtapoz Projects at MANA Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey (2018); When Geometry Smiles at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, New York (2018); and The Last Brucennial at the Bruce High Quality Foundation in New York City (2014); among many others. Cowansage lives and works in New York City.

Douglas de Souza (1984, Blumenau, Brazil) creates figurative paintings based on his interest in images and elements that represent, in his personal everyday life, the experience of masculinity as a gay man and its subjectivities. His visual grammar consists of swans, often as decorative porcelain figurines, horses and deers; soft drapery; as well as motor racing artefacts like car and motorcycle parts, that are overlapped and combined in an attempt to intersect the dualisms like fragile and robust, static and fast-moving, effeminate and virile. The compositions come from the most varied sources and without a hierarchy: from art history: mainly from the genre of still life painting, photography, fashion magazines and pop culture, resulting in a unique universe of gleaming surfaces with a shiny varnish finish.

He holds a Licentiate Degree in Visual Arts at Faculdade Metropolitana Unidas (FMU) and five-year attendance in the classical painting school Cozinha da Pintura, both in São Paulo. Recent solo shows include: Good Mother Gallery, Los Angeles, US (forthcoming), Gruta Gallery, São Paulo, BR (2023), IRL Gallery, New York, US; And group shows at Wespace Gallery, Shanghai, CH (2022), Anita Schwartz Gallery, Rio de Janeiro, BR (2022), Casa da Luz, São Paulo, BR (2021), Instituto Tomie Othake, São Paulo, BR (2019), Atelier 397, São Paulo, BR (2019).

Laura Findlay (b. 1984 in Montreal, Canada) is an artist based in Toronto, Ontario. She completed an MFA at the University of Guelph (’14) and a BFA at Concordia University (’11). Working primarily in painting, Findlay’s recent projects generate fragmented natural worlds as an arena to collide occasions of metaphysical and ephemeral knowledge. Through an ecology of mark making employing additive and subtractive processes, her paintings ravel generative and destructive events as a site for cultivation.

Findlay has recently shown work with Egret Egress (Toronto), Jarvis Hall Gallery (Calgary), Galerie Division (Montreal), Arsenal Contemporary (Toronto), Forest City Gallery (London, ON), Evans Contemporary (Peterborough, ON), Brucebo Konstnärshemmet (Sweden) and Skylab Gallery (Columbus, OH). Findlay has participated in residencies including the Brucebo (Sweden), the Banff Centre (AB), and the Vermont Studio Center (VT). Her work is collected by the Royal Bank of Canada, Equitable Bank, and numerous other public and private collections across Canada, the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom

Kevin Ford (b. 1975, Stamford, CT) Kevin Ford is interested in intense looking. Using a combination of brushwork and airbrushing, he blends the languages of Spanish still lifes, symbolism, cartoons, and abstraction to bring a sense of historic urgency to overlooked, everyday objects.

Ford received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale and a BFA in Painting from Boston University. His work has been included in solo exhibitions at 12.26 Gallery, Dallas, TX, Semiose Galerie, Paris, FR, Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY, Tops Gallery, Memphis, TN, and at MARCH, New York, NY. Kevin's work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, ME, Inman Gallery, TX, Reyes Finn, MI, Casey Kaplan, NY, The Islip Art Museum, NY, Tops Gallery, TN, and elsewhere. His work has been featured in V Magazine, included in the book Artists II, published by Steidl, and has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, and other publications. He currently lives and works in Connecticut.

Alanna Hernandez (b. 1988, Malden, MA) Alanna is an artist and educator living in Midcoast Maine. She creates abstract work about trauma, human relationships, and power structures; and how the effects of these are felt in our bodies. She uses abstract ribbon forms that are interrupted, or intruded upon, by external objects to explore bodily feelings like hurt, tenderness, and protection. Her work also explores how we adjust to, or conceal the wounds we receive from these forces. How do we make space in our bodies for these wounds, and our strong emotions? Her process of drawing with colored pencils on wood is disciplined and meditative. It invites the viewer to similarly slow down, and notice.

Alanna grew up on Cape Cod (Wampanoag Land) and received a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2010 in Middle East Studies. During this time she gained some formal art training, as well as education in art history, history, and language. After graduating, she continued her art practice while training in yoga and meditation. Her work is a culmination of this combination of formal education in the arts and humanities, training in yoga and meditation, and self-taught art skills. She currently resides in Union, Maine (Narantsouk, Abenaki, Wabenaki Land).

Sally Jerome (b. 1990, New York, NY) is a painter living and working in New York City. She received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited at a variety of galleries and institutions including SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Art on Paper NYC, the Bronx River art Center, Flux Factory and most recently Sens Gallery in Hong Kong. She will participate in forthcoming exhibitions this spring and summer at Room 57 Gallery, Good Mother Gallery, Hashimoto Contemporary and Monti 8. She was a 2011 Ox-Bow Fellow and a 2012 recipient of the Florence Leif Award for Painting. Images of her paintings have been featured in Vellum Magazine.

Claudia Keep (b. 1993) paintings reveal the intimate complexity of quotidian moments. Composed of soft lines and shapes, they convey impressions of the ordinary that are curiously lucid. Working from both life and personal photographs, Keep illuminates the intricacies of simple scenes: light falling in a quiet room, the shapes that a modest object casts onto the sidewalk, infinite beads of water resting in a spiderweb. This record of detail rescues the humblest of beauty from invisibility, by its nature an invitation to look more closely.

Claudia Keep was born in Low Moor, Virginia (1993) and is currently based in Burlington, Vermont. She received her BFA from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. Her recent solo exhibitions include Aubade at MARCH (New York, NY), Day In, Day Out at Tif Sigfrids (Athens, Georgia), Claudia Keep at Tops Gallery (Memphis, TN), and Night Moves at MARCH. Keep has also exhibited at Blum & Poe (Los Angeles, CA), Venus Over Manhattan (New York, NY), Fortnight Institute (New York, NY), The Painting Center (New York, NY), Auxier Kline (New York, NY), and Ablebaker Contemporary (Portland, ME). She has been represented by MARCH since 2020.

Rose Nestler (b. 1983, Spokane, WA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and BA in Art History from Mount Holyoke College. Nestler has exhibited in the United States and internationally, including exhibitions at Public Gallery, London, UK; König Galerie, Berlin, Germany; Projet Pangée, Montreal, QC, Canada; BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Hesse Flatow and Perrotin, New York, NY. She was an artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans in 2022. Nestler has also conducted residencies at The Fores Project, London, UK, and The Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, NY, among others. Her work has been featured in the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB magazine, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, and New York Magazine.

Ben Sanders (b. 1989, Arcadia, CA) The art of Ben Sanders is just being an artist. Every interest or activity shapes his artistic practice and contributes to an ever-expanding umbrella of aesthetic value. Gardening, cooking, collecting, painting, parenting, bartending—arguably, any action executed with intention may be performance and/or is art. Raised in a Southern California environment that celebrated art in service of a story, mood, or feeling, Sanders spent much of his childhood in his dad’s workshop where Hollywood sets were designed and fabricated. Sanders’ bodies of work include paintings of food, drinks, logos and other found design imagery, bonsai, gardens, and post-human landscapes—all of which may be painted on terra cotta planting pots, enlarged metal bottle caps, gallery stationary, and on more traditional supports like canvas and wood panel.

Sanders received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Gagosian in Beverly Hills, CA; Asya Geisberg in New York, NY; Left Field in San Luis Obispo, CA; Carl & Sloan in Portland, OR; LVL3 in Chicago, IL; and OCHI in Los Angeles, CA and Sun Valley, ID. Sanders’s work has been commissioned by esteemed organisations including Nike, Dropbox, Louis Vuitton, and The New York Times and has been featured in publications including ARTnews, Galerie Magazine, LA Weekly, Artillery Magazine, KCRW, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, The Oregonian, Wrap Magazine, and Paper Magazine. Sanders lives and works in Pasadena, CA and is represented by OCHI Gallery.

Aaron Michael Skolnick (b. 1989, Erlanger, KY) paintings address the most human of moments through both literal and allegorical methods. Building on universal themes of intimacy, desire, and mortality, Skolnick’s work bears the mark of his own history. A means to investigate the most profound and complex of experiences, these paintings range from the most graphic of nudes to the most graceful of still lives. By nature, such visual intimacies serve also as symbols of intangible experience, revealing hidden memories, desires, and thrills.

He received a BFA from the University of Kentucky in 2012. He is currently based in Houston, Texas. His work was shown in MARCH’s inaugural exhibition, Between Two Suns (Taylor County, KY) in 2020. Previous solo exhibitions include Your Voice Lying Gently In My Ear at Institute 193 (1B) (New York, NY) and Feel It on Their Faith at Incident Report (Hudson, NY) in 2019, A Landscape that I Know at Fierman Gallery (New York, NY) in 2018, Running Where We Stand at Glacier Gallery (Cincinnati, OH) in 2016, and Pick Me Up and Turn Me Round’ at Institute 193 (Lexington, KY) in 2013.

Skolnick has been included in exhibitions at September Gallery (Hudson, NY), United Artists Space (Los Angeles, CA), Atlanta Contemporary Art Centre (Atlanta, GA), KMAC (Louisville, KY), and RARE Gallery (New York, NY). He has given guest lectures at the Speed Museum (Louisville, KY) and the University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY) in 2014, and attended the Maple Terrace artist residency (Brooklyn, NY) in 2018. Skolnick received the Theophilia Joan Oexmann Original Art Award and
the Merit Award of Excellence from the University of Kentucky in 2012. He has been represented by MARCH since 2020.

Lina Tharsing (b. 1983, Lexington, KY) Lina Tharsing uses paintings to examine experiences of time and memory. Bridging the natural world and interiors, Tharsing’s work evokes a sense of “passing through,” creating portals to moments and happenings past. Her paintings investigate the banal alongside the uncanny, echoing the artist’s environment and experience through literal depictions of place. Memory is explored not as a neural experience, but as a doorway to the supernatural, a tool to revisit past occurrences and add to them.

Lina Tharsing lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky. She has exhibited at MARCH (New York, NY), scroll (New York, NY), Lexington Art League (Lexington, KY), the University of Kentucky Art Museum (Lexington, KY), 21c Museum Hotel (Lexington, KY, the Elaine de Kooning House (East Hampton, NY), and the Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), among others.

More about Primary:

Primary. (Est. in 2007) is a context & research driven curatorial collective with a focus on public arts. Located in Little River, Miami, our private residence explores modern ideas on the subject of live/work, connecting new voices in contemporary art with growing audiences & collections.

For more information: info@thisisprimary.com