Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Joshua Marsh: Paper Garden.
In the fall of 2016, Marsh spent two months at an artist residency in the mountains of Nikko, Japan. Aspects of a moss garden there date back centuries. Its rock walls, indigenous plants, stream and pond fostered the vocabulary for Marsh’s new graphite drawings.
Marsh walked daily the garden’s stone paths, observing and absorbing the phenomena of light and its effect on perception. The language of the garden yielded to a different language in the drawings: of floating text, punctuation marks, ciphers and suggestions of cartoon.
Questions of perception and depiction have long guided Marsh’s work. His earlier paintings reference still life, using the genre to probe interrelations of physical causality, perceptual inference, and the syntax of image construction. Influences range from color field painting to 17th century Dutch still life, from the cubist-pop of Stuart Davis to the 19th century trompe l’oeil painters William Harnett and John F. Peto. Their careful distinctions of shallow forms from a flat plane lay the groundwork for experiences whose significance lies as much in symbolic or iconographic meaning as in the attention paid to mundane objects.
In this new series of drawings, iconographic resonance is once again coupled with questions of depiction. Within a garden of mixed drawing conventions and appearances, Marsh’s attention dilates on a particular blur or tic of mark-making, breathing the suggestion of form into recognizable image, changing scale to set and reset the scene, following a line to the end of a thought.
A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
This is Joshua Marsh's (born 1973, Pennsylvania) fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Recent group exhibitions include Objecty at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (2016) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition (2015). Marsh’s work is included in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum. He received his BFA in 1995 from Washington University, St. Louis and his MFA in 1997 from Yale University, New Haven. Marsh lives and works in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Jeff Bailey Gallery is located at 127 Warren Street, Hudson, New York, 12534. Gallery hours are Thursday – Sunday, from 12-6 and by appointment. For further information or images, please contact the gallery at info@baileygallery.com or 518.828.6680.