16 to 27 July 2014

LYNCH THAM is pleased to present Lower East Side, an installation by New York artist Ryan Garvey, the first of an annual series of site-specific projects over summer.

Lower East Side, the artist’s homage to New York’s iconic neighborhood, transforms LYNCH THAM into an immersive visual experience. Surrounding the viewer in a physical network of foraged material, a rich visual cacophony charts Garvey’s intensive study of contemporary life in the L.E.S. As with Garvey’s previous work, the formal elements of Lower East Side are dictated by the artifacts accrued, accurately representing an area of intense transition while questioning the distinction between medium and subject matter.

In his site-specific works, Garvey explores the social and transactional networks of densely populated communities. Describing his process as “part archeology, part apophenia,” Garvey identifies visual patterns in the staples of city life, amassing components from these environments to create conceptual cross-sections of the metropolitan experience. His installations blend cartography and abstraction to reveal complex relationships typically unseen by the casual observer.

“As I spend time in a space that interests me patterns emerge, and these patterns are the evidence of human interactions,” Garvey explains. “The finished pieces are composed entirely of their own subject matter. In a way I see them as serving the same function as a geologist’s soil samples.”

Ryan Garvey was born in 1981 in Springfield, Massachusetts and received his B.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art. Garvey has exhibited and lectured in Boston and New York and in 2014 he was chosen to participate in the Bronx Artist Documentary Project. He currently lives and works in the Bronx, New York.