Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery is pleased to present MultiVerses, on view October 30 – December 13, 2014.

MultiVerses is a solo exhibition by Shea Hembrey presented as a group show. Particular to Hembrey’s style, he has created five fictional artists: Artemesia Adebayo, Pawnee Calhoun, Harvey Lee, Elgin Rivers, and Phyllia Stanhope who imagine the cosmos through paintings, sculpture, models, and other multi-media pieces.

Science and nature remain prominent themes in Hembrey’s work. As he demonstrated in his first solo show at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, Dark Matters, 2012, Hembrey questions what is real and the true structure of the universe. He provokes viewers to question what they are seeing and frequently uses trompe-l’oeil techniques in his series. While the artist’s work is rooted in science, the lyrical narrative of five fictional artists defines this exhibition.

Hembrey spent the past year living multiples lives with different studios and routines. He created the work in MultiVerses while at artist residencies in Wyoming, California, and New York as well as on his farm in Arkansas. With each new studio, he developed a new series of work.

In a climate where many artists provide concepts but unnamed others create the work for them, MultiVerses reverses that model. Hembrey, himself, is not the focus of his practice, but he, alone, is responsible for care-filled craftsmanship to imbue heart and spirit into each object. Ultimately, he is interested in contemporary culture focusing less on self and more on understanding our place in the cosmos.

Born in 1974 in Hickory Grove, Arkansas, Hembrey studied art at university for nine years and has an MFA from Cornell. In 2011, Hembrey’s acclaimed project SEEK debuted at TED and he was the subject of a feature profile in The New York Times Magazine. In 2012, he had his first solo show, Dark Matters, at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery.