Linda Lindroth: Trickster in Flatland

Garvey|Simon is pleased to present a solo exhibition of photographs by Linda Lindroth titled, Trickster in Flatland. The show will feature spatially transformative photographic work examining vivid ephemera produced during the height of domestic manufacturing in the United States. Although not dominant, the work intentionally possesses subtle environmental and political undertones. As the artist states: “… they hang as testimonies to a subservient industry, one now diminished as production moves to global markets only to return to us shrink-wrapped and encapsulated in plastic.”

Linda Lindroth began using found objects in her work in 1982. In Trickster in Flatland, simple cardboard containers are stripped of their original identity, enlarged to a vertigo-inducing scale, and portrayed shamelessly in various states of decay and disintegration. Saturated, jewel-tone colors, enigmatic history, and art-historical allusions are created by flattening three-dimensional items and observing them closely, as if specimens under magnification.

By removing their interior spaces, folding their sides and pristinely isolating these packages on white rag paper, these once small, everyday objects become large abstracted visual icons, often with tongue-in-cheek cultural and art-historical titles. Ironically, although now flattened to two-dimensions, the work reveals such palpable texture that they appear as trompe l’oeil collages, and dare the viewer to consider a new three-dimensional iteration. That is Lindroth’s Trickster at work. The title of the exhibition, Trickster in Flatland, is also inspired by the satirical novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott (1884) about a two-dimensional world occupied by geometric figures.

About the Artist

Linda Lindroth is the recipient of numerous grants and prizes including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New England Foundation for the Arts, Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, and the Architecture League of New York. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from Rutgers University and is an adjunct professor at Quinnipiac University. She lives and works in New Haven, CT.

Lindroth is included in the collections of numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of the City of New York; Yale University, New Haven, CT; Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ; High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Princeton University Art Museum, NJ; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; WestLicht_Schauplatz für Fotografie, Vienna; and the International Polaroid Collection to name a few. She has had over 100 solo and group shows worldwide. This is her first solo show with Garvey|Simon and her first solo show in New York City.

About Garvey|Simon

Established in 2010, Garvey|Simon is a contemporary boutique gallery and art advisory located in New York’s Chelsea district, co-founded and owned by Elizabeth K. Garvey. The gallery’s focus is on drawing, works on paper, design, and photography. Our art advisory service, founded in 1999 by Elizabeth K. Garvey, specializes in American, Modern, and Contemporary Art.