Upstate, Bird Room Welcomes Joe Garvey
The Cooks Falls studio and exhibition space was once a Pontiac dealership. Now, it welcomes and introduces emerging artists to the area.
By Byline Editors
Photos by Lauren Daccache
Published
2.5 hours north of NYC, in the hamlet of Cooks Falls, there’s an art gallery where you wouldn’t normally expect to find one – in an old Pontiac dealership, sitting on top of the Beaverkill River.
Bird Room, which gets its name from the aviary (yes, real birds) that used to live in the glass-walled room that now holds the main gallery, is housed in what was once a Pontiac dealership, built in 1929 by Ralph Rosa. The original owner lost the dealership during The Depression and eventually moved away with his family to the Cortland NY area. It sat vacant and unused for decades, until artist Robin Winters bought it in the 80’s.
For the past several decades, Winters used the space as a studio and at times his home. He then met his neighbor and fellow artist, Lauren Daccache, in 2022. Robin connected with her work and generously invited her to use the space as her studio. Soon after, art maven and friend Lauren Youngblood came to visit, and had the idea to show work in the space/open it up to the wider Catskills community. Together, with guidance from Robin, the Laurens opened the Space as Bird Room during Upstate art week in July.
Inside Bird Room
Bird Room’s second show opened last week, featuring Joe Garvey, who is also a Catskills resident. It was a warm gathering of the local arts community and the neighborhood, where like-minded individuals gathered to enjoy stew (yes, Bird Room has a kitchen), art, drawing, dogs (that's the thing about upstate galleries, people bring dogs), and music.
Below, Lauren Y., Lauren D., and Joe, talk about his work, turning tables and chairs upside down and on their sides, and how sometimes the best (and most honest) answer to a problem is the simplest one.
Artist Joe Garvey in Bird Room
LY: Joe, you’re back and forth between the city and your house upstate a lot, right? Where do you make most of your work?
JG: Yeah, I am back and forth a lot, I try to do Thursday night to Monday morning upstate and then Monday through Thursday in the city... Upstate and the city are really polar opposites in many ways, the silence versus the noise…both are useful.
LD: I used to dread that commute, but now I kinda love it because the back and forth lights up different parts of my brain. I use the car/drive for thinking time, the city for stimulation/information gathering, and upstate for a lot of the actual making. Part of it is having the physical space to make bigger things, but another part of it is being removed from the noise…
JG: I do a lot of small drawings and paintings on paper in the city, and then do the bigger & messier work upstate. You know, things like printing & carpentry. The ability to focus upstate is really beneficial. I feel really fortunate to have the space and time to make work up here.
ON MATERIALITY + SOURCE IMAGERY:
LY: Let’s get into the materials and HOW you actually make the work. When did you learn and start using this screen printing process?
LD: And we need to talk about that beautiful brown linen…
JG: I started using a raw Belgian linen almost 10 years ago and have continued to use it throughout more work. Something about that shade of brown really stuck with me. For these pieces I am using the most opaque water-based ink I could find. I managed a screen printing studio for 4 years so I have been in and around the process for a while. Screen printing is typically a process for replicating an image exactly, over and over. I don’t use it that way though – I set mine up knowing there will and should be variety, differences between each one. Taking a tool used for perfect replication and ‘breaking’ it a bit..
LD: What about the photos you made screens of? Do you start out with an idea or object in mind and then look for them? Or…?
JG: These particular chair photos are from old textbooks on furniture design, one of them has “Daniel Nickolich, New York City, November 2000” handwritten inside the cover. I’ve had these books for awhile, I’ve always been a fan of functional design and wanted to know more about the history and the individual pieces.
I look at A LOT of images (we all do) and have always been curious with the ones that catch our eye and/or invoke an emotional response, since we are kind of living in the age of the digital image, I like to look at tangible photos. The images I chose for the show are in books with literally thousands of images, so the selection is really an exploration of why these certain images resonate personally.
ON RECONTEXTUALIZATION:
LY: I love how you use these images and manipulate the scale and orientation to make it feel completely new. At some point when we were texting, you mentioned (Robert) Rauschenberg, (John) Baldessari, & (Wade) Guyton Garvey.. can you talk a little about how using found objects is important to your practice? And not just in this show.
JG: I have always been interested in appropriation and recontextualization. Early on when I discovered artists who use appropriation, like you mentioned, it really widened the scope of what I thought art was and especially what art could be.
When it comes to the context of found or sourced photos, I’ve always found it intriguing on why a certain image evokes an emotional reaction. For this show - it’s a textbook on furniture design - and using it in my own way that sits entirely outside of its initial purpose. Especially when it comes to screen printing these images, screen printing’s purpose is multiplicity, so taking an image that was initially reproduced in book form and continuing its reproduction journey.
LD: You had a table piece that I felt drawn to - because yes, it’s clean and minimal and big which is what initially makes me look. And then it’s like - well I’m used to seeing a table right side up, it’s not often I see an object of that size on its side or upside down. So it’s interesting to change the physical orientation of something that we’re so used to seeing in a very specific, singular way. And also, it’s fully removed from the context of the room… something about it being so isolated from its usual environment.
JG: I’ve been looking at a lot of Dieter Rams recently and just kept on coming back to how simple everything was from that era of design and wanted to make homages to these beautiful functional objects with interact with daily. The show almost serves as a poem to functional design.
As far as the orientation of certain work, sometimes it’s just a visual solution to a problem, i.e. cropping images into a new orientation. I also tend to overthink EVERYTHING, but as I get older, I am starting to realize that less is truly more. Ed Ruscha, famously said once “leave any information at the signal.”
ON INTERACTIVITY AND COMMUNITY:
LY: Let’s talk about what you made for workSHOP. That table!
LD: I suggested something interactive, and you really took it and ran with it in the most beautiful way.
JG: I think openings are boring, ESPECIALLY my own, so having something interactive is always much more interesting. For me especially, and I hope by extension, for others. I came to the space the next day {after the opening} and taped up all the drawings {made by viewers on opening night} on the wall and looked back and realized that it looked exactly how I envisioned it in my head. It’s a rare occurrence, but one of my favorite things when it does happen.
LD: There was a lot of sitting, a lot of slow looking, that was forced by that drawing table. It really made everything feel so warm and approachable. Lauren and I are obviously biased but I talked to a lot of people about how I haven’t felt that level of comfort or closeness at an opening in a long time.
JG: Modern life, especially in metropolitan areas, is SO hectic. Sometimes I feel like I never have time to sit and think about the what and why and purely operate from an aesthetic perspective. So even now as we talk about all of this, it feels really nice to have a moment to think.
LY: And to have a moment to bring a bunch of people together around this beautiful thing, and having your friends (Chef Sabrina De Sousa and Glen Goetze) cook and play music.
JG: Whenever I work on a project I kind of tend to think, ok, who else can I include in this. Sabrina and Glen are part of our life up here so it was just a natural extension. Everyone showed up for me, Kiki, Brent, Rina, Jackson, Emily, Ines, Lucky, Moose, Martin, Oonah, Maeve etc. !
ON HOW NOTHING IS THAT SERIOUS:
LY: When we were first putting the show together, we did it all via group text and it felt really casual, like we were planning a block party. Which I think is a great reflection of how your work brings people together in a low-pressure way.
LD: The mild chaos of coordinating everything over group text, combined with all of our aversions to taking anything (namely ourselves) too seriously really did create this feeling of like “whatever will be, will be” that was pretty wonderful.
JG: Oh yeah, like it’s not serious but it’s also very serious. I love the idea of not overthinking the work, or making it super thematic.
Like art is about god (or not god) and dreams etc but it’s also just… this.
‘household furniture’ is open at Bird Room until November 16th, Thurs-Mon by appointment only.
Find them at:
1004 Cooks Falls Road
Roscoe, NY 12776
-only 2.5 hours from the city
And online: