Georgia Diva McGovern
What on Earth
November

LAND is delighted to present the debut solo exhibition What on Earth by the Brooklyn-based artist Georgia Diva McGovern. The exhibition involves a series of new and recent paintings on canvas, paper, glass, and mixed media.

Rooted in drawing, McGovern’s practice is unconventionally attentuated to the material and objectness of her observational pictures of classical subject matter. Her treatment of these subjects is marked by assertive and defined brushwork - vividly colored landscapes, cityscapes, and still-lifes. Her brushwork more evokes her subjects than hyperrealistically depicts them. Spatial illusions here are tenuous and seem to be executed as immediately as if by a series of agile moves – as quick as a glance.

McGovern’s work reevaluates conventional lansdcape painting within a cultural condition whose experience of nature is erratic and also fetishized by brands like Outdoor Voices and influencers’ epic Instagram posts. McGovern’s own relationship to the natural and built world is one, instead, defiant in its sincereity and curiosity - founded through personal experience. She states:

I want to communicate a profound aesthetic experience like walking into a field of fireflies at night or getting lost in a deep fog - one that comes from extended hiking/climbing trips in the backcountry and then reinterpreted in a city dwelling.

The kind of experience that McGovern seeks is reminiscent of Alva Noë’s likening of the experience of viewing artwork to that of working one’s way through ‘a deep fog’ - allowing us to catch ourselves in the act of bringing the world into view for consciousness.

Georgia Diva McGovern (b. 1988, NY, NY) is a person who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from The New York Studio School and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Georgia has attended residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Canada), Boxo Projects (Joshua Tree, CA) And Tyrone Guthrie (Ireland). Recent exhibitions include Safe Gallery (Brooklyn, New York), Baba Yaga Gallery (Hudson, NY) Patrick Parrish Gallery (New York, NY). She also exhibited with Andrew Edlin Gallery at The 2017 Outsider Art Fair in New York, NY. Georgia is a recipient of the 2009 Roger Brown Fellowship granted by the School of the art Institute of Chicago. Georgia has a forthcoming curatorial project with Olympia Collective and an exhibition at Orgy Park in New York.

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