Wendi Smith

Taxonomies

Nov. 8–Dec.8, 2024

reception with the artist Sunday Nov. 10, 2-4 pm
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artist talk at 3 pm

artist statement

The combination of a painted image and a 3-dimensional object is compelling to me.

I have been working with boxes for more than a decade, and each series is a springboard for the next. The work has evolved from boxes painted on all exterior sides, to containers where the objects inside the box (fetishes, relics) are represented on the lid, to boxes that must be opened to see the image.

This series of boxes contain paintings on wood shapes that can be removed from the box. Each plain wooden box is divided by dowels, and contains a taxonomy, a group of paintings of natural subjects presented with a list like a card catalog or a box of slides.

My concern for the vanishing natural world is at the heart of this work. For safe keeping there is nothing like a box.

Wendi Smith
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Lisa Austin, NCS
Life Is Strange: Narrative Collages

Oct. 4–Nov. 3, 2024

reception Friday Oct. 11, 6-8 pm 
artist talk at 7

National Collage Society member Lisa Austin presents fresh work, in 2d and 3d, that shares her love of a good story. Please join us!

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Artist Statement

I have always liked a good story from Rapunzel to Jack Reacher, a seven foot tall, former Special Ops who only owns a toothbrush and drifts around the country solving crimes at his own peril. I love books, movies and songs that tell a story. I am not much interested in character unless they enhance the story but I like a good tale. It is no wonder then I would incorporate, at first unconsciously and then deliberately, a story into my collages.

I have always been drawn to the quirky, odd, weird, and downright strange. It fascinates me, what life can offer and what people choose to do with it.

I particularly find America strange with all its emphasis on individualism and freedom of expression as this year’s election obviously illustrates. I must admit I am astonished at the eagerness to believe and act out all kind of behavior and where else in America can you find roadside attractions like a twelve-foot replica of an 1950s astronaut holding a rocket ship or a huge coffeepot that is obviously a restaurant?

Don’t even mention sideshows. The first lesson I learned as a kid after I paid twenty-five cents to see a two headed calf is a fool and his money are soon parted as my Dad liked to say. I could never bring myself to go to a freak show and gawk at people’s physical misfortunes even though I knew that is probably the only way they could make a living. It seemed prurient.

In Life Is Strange you will see life as I often see or imagine the tale it tells, albeit my own stories. They are often odd and just may be the greatest show on earth.

[This interview with gallery director Angie Reed Garner took place on Tuesday Oct. 27 2024.]

Aaron Raymer
Between Boredom and Oblivion
Artist Interview
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Beer Goggles This is a series I did when I was out drinking. I am always observing and taking pictures of things. I noticed when I took the last drink off my beer and looked through the glass, it looked like a filtered lens. Even though I wasn't in the studio, I still felt like I should be making something. That’s why I began doing them consistently, like a series, instead of a few random shots here and there. I think now they feed into this body of work because even though I was out doing things I was still looking to do more. I was bored. Even having a fun exciting time, I was still trying to do more, trying to create.

Pissing Your Life Away, Flush My Life Into Pieces, Meet Me in the Bathroom The three yellow pieces are a series… The first title comes from Tubthumping. They say “pissing the night away” but I always sang it as pissing your life away. Around that time (90’s)  I was still figuring out what I was doing. That was when I was not quite into contemporary art, I was still enjoying flash art and tattoos and stuff… I felt like I was missing something, wasting away, that along with the suicidal thoughts, is probably why I kept changing the words. 

It has to do with feeling like I’m not doing enough, kinda wasting your time, even though I enjoyed the socializing and drinking and drugs, I still always have something in me that feels like I am not doing enough, checking things off a list. So it references that. While the time was not necessarily wasted, I networked and made friends, it was still pulling away from my studio time. Even though I was still working and getting things done, I could have accomplished a lot more if I didn’t spend as much time drinking and drugging.

The glass fire hydrant form… I have three and I have been carrying those around for 20 years. The whole time I knew I was leaning toward a fire hydrant reference and I wanted to work with things on two different planes, elevated and also touching the floor. When I started thinking about the fire hydrant I began to relate it to my body, it was me as the fire hydrant pissing my life away. I use the height of my physical body a lot in my work. The crotch height on that piece is where my crotch is. I put myself in my work with the proportions. 

The tile work is a reference to a Rubik's Cube—I expanded the grout lines, to go back to party culture and 80s reference. I really love the aesthetic and the way the colors and the curves and the fluidity of the yellow forms vs the rigidity brutalism of the tile. So I expanded that to Flush My Life Into Pieces, looking for a way to work that into a wall structure, again on two planes. That’s also a 90s song “Cut My Life Into Pieces ” [Last Resort]. I continued with the forms and took it to the other piece (Meet Me In The Bathroom) which is a cocaine reference. There are two drips or drains going down, both sinuses. I’ve always had sinus trouble so I never got really into coke much, because it clogged me up. This one I see the yellow more as snot, mucous. ​

In My Own Way & Ok, Boomerang  New Balance pieces. I’ve had foot issues my whole life, and when I moved to NY I got plantars fasciitis from walking everywhere. I went to the podiatrist and had my food molded and he recommended a 10.5 2E New Balance. Off that recommendation I have exclusively worn NB for the past 20 years. Of course I have  dress shoes and a few others  but my uniform shoe is a NB lifestyle shoe. 

Again [as] with the lighters, a shoe carried experience with it. Walking in someone else’s shoes is to get their experience. So I’ve kept quite a bit of my old New Balance shoes… again not exactly sure why at the time I was keeping them. I didn’t know if I would dissect or deconstruct them, use them in sculptures… I started doing sculptures with my old New Balance shoes in 2006-7. I saw a commercial for restless leg syndrome so I made a sculpture with New Balance shoes with one tapping constantly. That was the first time I used them.  After that I knew I really needed to keep them for other projects in the future.

With these pieces, I accidentally came across the heels by working on another piece, which I am still working on. Sometimes I do a parody or homage to contemporary artists, I’ve referenced Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman. For this shoe piece in process I am referencing Robert Gober’s leg pieces that protrudes from the wall. I needed shoes to come out of the wall, so I cut off the heels. I had these two heels and realized they were really interesting joined together. It references kind of pushing against yourself or working against yourself, inward. Similar to how I feel like I have two brains working against each other. Once I had those heels formed I wanted to create the movement swinging back and forth, constantly moving but going nowhere, stuck in place. Stuck in a headspace. Sometimes it’s hard to get out of the overthinking and move forward. Once I used the heels together I started to work on the toes. Since they naturally have an outward trajectory I wanted them to spin to keep them internal or inward. They have somewhat of a boomerang shape when you put them together so I wanted to make them have a mechanism that revolves and rotates at the same time. It took me quite a few iterations of the mechanism to figure that out because there are two actions going on at once. I did some research but it’s better for me to get in the studio and just do it. If it breaks, start over.

Most of my stuff is hands on figuring out. I don’t do well with instructions or schematics. I’ve always tinkered and figured out how things work on my own, taking things apart or building them up and just trying and making it work. ​

Candy Cigarettes (Van Halen) The title comes from when I was 8 years old, me and a friend were bored and decided to try to smoke candy cigarettes by the railroad tracks just to see what would happen. We saw adults smoking and so we decided these candy cigarettes were kids’ [cigarettes]. We actually got some puffs off them but the sugar melted, I got burnt by the melted sugar. It made us cough and it was not a very fun experience but even at that age, looking back on it, it goes to the curiosity and trying to find new experiences, being bored, trying to find something new, something fresh. The Van Halen shirt… that album came out when I was 8 years old and the cherub smoking ties it back to that experience as well as the 80’s party culture that influenced my youth. 

The hand is a mold made from my son when he was around that age, 7 to 8. So I’ve had the mold a while and made a couple things, gave him one, it’s just been setting around. I am lucky I took that mold when I did because it lines up perfectly with this piece. And also, a lot of my genes are recessive, so he looks like his mother: dark hair, dark eyes. But a year or two ago when I was driving, he said “Oh my god! Our hands are the same.” We started looking at our hands and they are exactly the same. He has a smaller exact version of my hands. So it’s my hands in a way. 

This references my playing music and getting into the music of that era, the 80s and 90’s. Starting with the 80s music, I would play “Jump” and jump off my stairs imitating the singer, played Panama the whole way to Daytona… That album has a historical reference with me. 

The pedestal is a replicates the pattern of one of Van Halen’s most iconic guitars. The color scheme and patterning he did. His most famous signature guitar. I was always partial to the red and black, maybe growing up a U of L fan pushed me in that direction a little more. I wanted to integrate the pedestal into the piece. 

I try not to use pedestals but if I do they have some kind of relevance to the work. If I need to use a pedestal, I try to figure out how to make it a part of the piece… more meaning than just a display function. 
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Interview with Keith Waits for Artabella
www.artebelladaily.org/artebella/2024/8/29/artists-talk-with-lva-august-29-2024

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Huber
in case I return and you're gone

Sept. 6-29

reception with the artist 
Sunday Sept. 15, 6-8 pm
artist talk at 7 pm

Huber is a Mexican-American artist who calls Louisville home. He learned the basics of painting by assisting his uncle, mural artist Servando Vazquez, and began graffiti at age 15. Now at 22, he mixes his love for fine art, graffiti, and murals in multimedia works on large pieces of canvas, usually unstretched. in case I return and you’re gone [garner narrative, 2024] is the first exhibition of his paintings. Huber is also a musician, and performs original work locally. After losing a friend to gun violence Huber found peace and therapy through music, telling the stories of those he lost as well as his own trials and tribulations. His first full-length project, Sr.Tonto, came out in 2023.


interview with Isaac Barnett for Unbridled Spirits, Dec. 2023

Aaron Raymer
Between Boredom and Oblivion


Aug 29-Oct 26, 2024

Reception Sept. 14, 2-4 pm
Artist talk 3 pm
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Aaron Raymer [b. 1978, Louisville KY] earned a BFA in 2006 at University of Louisville, and a MFA in 2008 at New York University with full scholarship support at both institutions. He has shown in New York (Kate Werble Gallery), across the US Midwest and South, and in Santiago Chile in an exhibition curated by Sebastian Errazuriz. He has been interviewed and reviewed by the New York Times along with other publications. Raymer is a father, and has taught in the University of Louisville Hite Institute of Art + Design since 2017. 
He is represented by Garner Large and Garner Narrative in Louisville KY. 


The throughline with this body of work is ADHD. There are many upsides to having a brain function like mine: creativity, curiosity, wit, quick thinking in emergencies, nonlinear thinking. There are downsides as well. 

My curiosity leads to almost too many ideas and that can be overwhelming for an over-thinker. Problems with executive function make it hard to prioritize, leading to motivational paralysis. I don’t know where to start, so I feel stuck in a stage of analysis. Then comes the anxiety and depression, which again kills my motivation further. I feel I’m letting myself down for not getting all the stuff done I think I should be doing. So, it’s cyclical. 

Meanwhile I feel the need to be doing something all the time to quell the dreaded boredom and dopamine crashes associated with it. Boredom and dopamine drops lead to feelings of irritability, frustration, futility, and depression. 

Often people with ADHD turn to drugs and alcohol for self-medication, and I did. My formative years were in the 80’s and 90’s, and those decades were basically my advertisement for self-indulgence and party culture. 

ADHD also explains my multidisciplinary approach, the variety of techniques and materials. I’d get bored with one material and style, and I might as well be sitting in a factory just doing the same thing over and over which sounds like hell. Experimentation and variations stimulate that dopamine, and fulfill that curiosity.

Unsurprisingly Between Boredom and Oblivion was not conceived with any plan other than going into the studio and doing what I need to do. I was surprised the works came together with such a tight focus. This is a body of work about making work.

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garner LARGE 
1013 Bardstown Rd., alley entrance
Louisville, KY 40202
garnerlarge@gmail.com
(502) 303-7259
Thurs-Sat 1-5 and by appointment

Barry Simon

Rorschach's Kamasutra: An Algorithm of Sex and Gender

reception with the artist Sunday July 21, 2-4 pm

artist talk at 3 pm


Outsider artist and scientist Barry Simon explores the generation of human diversity—in 19 canvases that meticulously symbolize the complex workings of the human limbic system. While some visual influences are Piet Mondrian, Gustave Caillebotte, Wayne Thiebaud, and Hilma af Klint, his paintings come with notes and citations per his scientific background.

This new show at garner LARGE runs from July 21 through August 17, 2024. Gallery hours are Thurs-Sat 1-5, and by appointment.


Simon writes:

Rorschach’s Kamasutra is a presentation of aspects of the brain’s limbic system governed by genetics, developmental environment, reward and punishment, senses and modern-day culture. ...I believe everything human can be viewed as a “spectrum” of nature following the laws of thermodynamics. My choice to explore diversity as An Algorithm of Sex and Gender is based on my experience as a white American male of my age, gender and profession speaking and participating through art with what I know. This narrative is guided by my longstanding background in zoology, anatomy, reproductive veterinary medicine, and drug development. The current day scientific modalities to explore the subject are now astounding.
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Barry Simon (b. 1950) was born in Cedaredge CO and received his DVM from Colorado State University School of Veterinary Medicine in 1978. He moved to Lexington KY in 1982, specializing in broodmare and stallion reproduction. In 1998 he founded Thorn BioScience, developing controlled release peptide injectables for managing ovulation in horses and swine. 

Thorn BioScience received FDA approval for SucroMate Equine in 2010, manufactured at CreoSalus in Louisville. CreoSalus owned and operated Advanced Chem Tech (fine chemicals) and Occam Design (medical devices). Occam Design also developed the Tetras peptide synthesizer, leading to a 5 year development contract for the manufacture of personalized human peptide cancer vaccines. Simon continues to work as COO of CreoSalus. 



garner LARGE
1013 Bardstown Rd., alley entrance at orange door
Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays 1-5 and by appointment
(502) 303-7259 (text or voicemail)
garnerlarge@gmail.com
garnerlarge.com

above: lifeboat 84 x 60" oil 

Joyce Garner

6 paintings

July 3 - September 1

reception with the artist
Sunday July 14, 2-4 pm

artist talk at 3 pm


Joyce Garner's newest work, 6 paintings (2022-2024) take up grief, loss and change: wildfires and tornadoes, politics and anxiety. There is also tenderness, justice, connection and transformation. 

There is loss and grief yet wholeness. I’m not sure grief ever really passes but flowers and music and nature ease it.


Preview the show here.

Joyce Garner is a native Kentuckian, a longtime Louisville resident and narrative oil painter. She is the Kentucky South Arts 2021 State Fellow, with solo shows at the Thyen-Clark Cultural Center (IN); the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art (KY); the Carnegie (KY); Indiana University Southeast; the University of Evansville Melvin Peterson Gallery; the Archabbey Library Gallery at St. Meinrad; Germantown Performing Arts Centre (TN); Krempp Gallery of Jasper Arts Center (IN); the Gateway Regional Art Center (KY); Oakland City University (IN); the Headley-Whitney Museum (KY). In 2011 she co-founded garner narrative contemporary fine art with her daughter, Angie Reed Garner. She earned a B.S. from the University of Kentucky.
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For additional images or information, please contact:

Angie Reed Garner
(502)303-7259 (voicemail/text)
garnernarrative@gmail.com

garner narrative contemporary fine art
642 e. market st.
louisville, kentucky 40202
wed-sun 1-6, first fridays 1-8 and by appointment

Aleksandra Stone
Cowboy Inferno
paintings and poems

Friday May 24—Sunday June 29

reception & reading with the artist 
​Sunday May 26, 2-4 pm

In the radiant glow of neon's blaze,
There rides a bird cowboy, amidst the haze.
His plumage aglow with electric sheen,
A phoenix reborn, in life's vibrant scene. 

Atop his bronco, he grasps the reins,
Freed from confines, released from chains.
Through the mist of neon's gleam,
His spirit soars, with a radiant beam...


Aleksandra Stone is a Yugoslavian-born American photographer, painter, and multimedia artist now based in Dallas, Texas. 
Her art practice is about how changed perceptions of personal experience diminish and/or reinforce the key plot points in stories of self. 
Ancestry, immigration, trauma, and humor figure substantially, but in spacious and unpredictable ways.

In Cowboy Inferno Stone introduces a new protagonist, a bird-cowboy on an outlaw hero’s journey through the American Southwest. …exploring themes of resilience, longing, and the search for meaning in a world of endless horizons. 

Cowboy Inferno is Stone’s fourth solo show with garner narrative. She exhibits eleven paintings, with companion poems in an artist-produced zine. Stone will read as well as speak at her reception.


garner narrative contemporary fine art
642 E. Market St. Louisville KY 40202
garnernarrative.com Wed-Sun 1-6, First Fridays 1-8, and by appointment

For more about Stone’s work:
 https://www.aleksandrastone.com/
For additional images and information: Angie Reed Garner (502) 303-7259  garnernarrative@gmail.com 

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