Location: Galleri Urbane, 2277 Monitor Street, Dallas, Texas, 75207
Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce Stew in the Stomach, an upcoming solo exhibition by Norwich artist Joseph Carway. This marks the artist’s first solo show with the gallery following his successful inclusions at the Dallas Art Fair, Felix Fair Los Angeles, and the Survey Exhibition of Gallery Artists.
You must get close to Joseph Carway’s work to enter his world, which is ever so gently bewildering. The dimensions—often plywood the size of an A4 sheet of paper—lend themselves to such intimacy. A vestige from his earliest days of sketching out ideas as tattoo flash art, the size is also pragmatic formally. Within the bounds of its surface, Carway creates intimacy: like watching a tiny television set with your face one inch from the screen, or a condensed, private theater staged for an audience of one.
You may call it folk art, or art brut, or naive art if you would like to trace kinship. Carway does indeed cherish found objects and collect old folk pieces, finding them refreshingly simple, magical and unaffected. He treasures the rudimentary toy a parent makes for a child, its unskilled roughness paired with intuition. He appreciates that a tattoo can be read as folksy and avant garde in its own secret way— the way ink softens and spreads into ambiguous blurs fascinates him as much as the tattoo’s power to convey ideas from a small box of symbolic tricks. He esteems, too, the work of the French Nabi painter Edouard Vuillard: the flatness of pattern, the condensing of textures in a small space, just as Carway’s own work compresses a scene until there is no longer a difference between the figure and the field it stands in.
What the artist harbors in a limited space is, paradoxically, both intimacy and a reaching beyond. The fourth dimension is built into the process. Carway distresses his surfaces by hand, adding texture, until they look older than they are. Call it time-travel taken on faith, a manner of meeting the painting as though it had already lived. Underneath the work’s playfulness lies a wistfulness—a desire for a thing to already have a history, to be exempt from the risk of being new.
Across Carway’s body of work, figures tend to arrive in pairs. Two small companions, leaning toward or away from each other. Whether the encounter reads as embrace or conflict, it is a shape a viewer recognizes before naming it. They might be two illustrations that wandered loose from the same storybook and simply found each other on the page. Humor infuses these pairings, but never at the expense of what might lie underneath. “Life all means so much and it all means so little,” Carway has said. His pieces hold both—to be taken exactly as seriously as they deserve: completely and not at all.
They spin a moral tale if we choose to read it that way. To render the profound and simple requires clarity and confusion at once. Carway straddles both. Bewilderment runs through Carway’s account of his own process, and he holds it without apology. His work offers the sensation of standing at the edge of meaning and finding this edge to be a funny, absurd but ultimately livable place. This is the position of a child with a pen and a sheet of paper, who does not wait for the confusion to resolve before drawing the next line. Neither should we.
