Halsey McKay Gallery is pleased to present Lock, Henry Glavin’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. In four new acrylic on panel paintings Glavin continues to render figureless spaces that flicker between photgraphic representation and dreamlike recollection. Glavin’s scenes lead us to the rural countryside of the American Northeast, a canal in Paris, and a commuter hub in Manhattan all with his signature touch of uncanny atmosphere built through precisionist depiction of raking light, dancing shadows and endemic details of nature and architecture.
I started thinking about this show when I was sitting in an old boat in the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. Water poured in through the metal gates as we slowly rose toward the next level. I was drawn to the waiting room-like quality of the lock- a transitional space I found both peaceful and eerie. It’s a strange experience to slowly rise in a river versus moving forward with the current. This space felt strangely personal despite being thousands of miles away from home and closely related to the architecture I often paint. I have always viewed architecture through the lens of a vessel- one that is filled up with the lives of those who inhabit it. In this show, I picked three places to pair with Canal Lock– each space activates, in different ways, the feeling I had on that river. Each space is a different container for elements of my lived experience.
Clover Street Stairs is a fictionalized version of my grandmother’s house in Rochester, New York. In it, an open front door looks out onto my childhood home – hundreds of miles away in reality, but transposed in this painting to her neighborhood. As little kids we would jump from the stairs, seeing how many steps high we could get before we were in danger of hitting our heads on the upper ledge. For the hordes of visiting grandchildren, this room was a transitional highway in the center of the house you had to cross to get anywhere else. My grandmother recently moved out of this house after 61 years and 9 kids.
Corinne’s House is a portrait of my fiancee’s childhood home. Located in Orange, Massachusetts and built in 1890, her house sits on a hill near the top of Pleasant Street. I am always drawn to the unique architectural details of the house when I visit – windows with four smaller panes on the top, a beautiful slate roof and chimney built by her father, and piles of wood ready for the woodburning stove in the kitchen. The entire house was scraped of lead paint from a different era and repainted by her parents. The house is loved and lived in, alive with Corinne’s history- offering a view into an earlier part of her life.
14th Street in New York is a purgatory-like section of the city. It’s a nexus of subway commuters and tourists – A place you pass through on your way to another. On the way to an appointment I found myself a few blocks from Union Square where I noticed a tree full of spring blossoms – fighting for primacy with nondescript brick buildings behind it. The light peered over the tall buildings and created a rectangular veil of illuminated buds. Overreaching branches behind me enclosed the container-like space from above. – Henry Glavin
