Skye Gallery : First Light

October 10 -November 25

After a noteworthy seven-year journey in Aspen, CO, Skye Gallery is embarking on an exciting new chapter: Expanding their presence to New York City. The minds behind the Aspen location’s remarkable success are thrilled to announce First Light, the inaugural exhibition in Skye Gallery’s new Chelsea location at High Line Nine. 

First Light features a diverse slate of talented artists, including Rachel Collier, Jon Greene, Cary Hulbert, Michael Krueger, MarSha Yi Robinson (Strange Dirt), and Whitney Sharpe (Latch Key). All of these artists employ technical processes to venture into spatial realms, infusing their pieces with intricate detail and a dreamy color scheme. From muted subtlety to vibrant exuberance, they strike a balance between order and play, drawing inspiration from both architectural structure and the flow of nature. The works in Skye Gallery’s NYC debut are prismatic, lively, and capture the excitement of opening in a new city right before the colors of summer wane.

About the Artists

RACHEL COLLIER

Rachel Collier is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the release of internal visual language held in the emotional body. Her imagery is radically uplifting, riding the line between the mysterious and the familiar. The materials she employs are activated by a meditative and repetitive process, rooted in nonrepresentational painterly tradition. Rachel Collier has her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her recent solo shows include HAIR+NAILS Gallery (Minneapolis, MN), the Nemeth Art Center (Park Rapids, MN), Saint Kate’s Arts Hotel (Milwaukee, WI). Recent group shows include: Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY) and Rochester Art Center (Rochester, MN). Residencies: The Wassaic Project, Wassaic NY (2021, 2022); Anderson Center Jerome Emerging Artist Residency and Fellowship, Red Wing MN (2022); Nido Invitational Residency and Exhibition, Monte Castello di Vibio, Umbria, Italy (2022); and Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO (2022).

JON GREENE

Jon Greene is a visual artist and a professional printmaker whose work depicts architectural and environmental boundaries. He draws from research and personal experiences in psychoanalysis. Jon specializes in lithography, relief, and installation. He completed Tamarind Institute's Printer Training Program in 2019 and received an MFA from The University of Iowa in 2022. Jon has exhibited his work internationally, including at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Gallery, The Fig Bilbao International Printmaking Festival, and New York’s 2023 Art on Paper fair. This past year, Jon was a resident at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, he taught as a Visiting Professor at Colorado College and printed as a fine art lithographer at Petrichor Press. Jon will end his year in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as a resident at Proyecto’ace.

CARY HULBERT

Cary Hilbert is a multidisciplinary New York-based artist, educator, and curator. Hulbert received her MFA from Columbia University in 2016 and her BFA from Montserrat College of Art in 2007. She has taught printmaking and drawing at Columbia University and Mass Art. Currently, Hulbert is a Project Manager and Printer at Two Palms in SoHo, NYC. Select exhibition highlights include: Bronx Museum (NYC), Fisher Landau Center (NYC), The Jewish Museum (NYC), Ortega y Gasset Projects (NYC), IPCNY (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (Novi Sad), and Taimiao Art Gallery (Beijing) and the Liu Haisu Art Museum (Shanghai).

MICHAEL KRUEGER

Michael Krueger works in a variety of media including, painting, drawing, printmaking, animation, and ceramics. His grounding medium is drawing, which brings emotional acumen to his process. Through mark making and invented drawing languages he creates artworks that cultivate human connections. Michael additionally has a long relationship with printmaking and has adapted print processes in his approach to other media. For the past 10 years he has fostered ways to situate traditional printmaking techniques, such as pochoir, stencil-making and engraving in his unique works in painting and drawing. Michael’s artworks through the years have been connected to narrative, mythology, counterculture, the history of art, and personal memoir. Recent works have deepened a relationship with the landscape, storytelling and evoke an emotional awareness through nuanced image making, color, drawing and paint. Krueger’s artworks have been collected by numerous public and private collections, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO; Fogg Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Estonian National Museum of Art, Tallinn, Estonia; The Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Estate, Charlottesville, VA; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; New York Public Library, New York, NY; RISD Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Frans Masereel Centre, Kasterlee, Beligium; the Weisman Museum of American Art, Minneapolis, MN; Fidelity Investments, Boston, MA; Kansas City Collections, Kansas, City, MO; Progressive Insurance, Cleveland, OH; and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY.

MARSHA YI ROBINSON (Strange Dirt)

MarSha Yi Robinson is a self-taught artist whose work is highly distinctive with a unique flare for grace and symmetry. She creates full and elegant botanical imagery embraced by bold designs. Her compositions combine both organic and disciplined properties, allowing her work to possess a certain fluidity while still maintaining order and structure. "In my process I set the intention for healing through the potency of plants and the natural world. In setting these intentions I hope the imagery I create is transformed into a visual almost physical form of plant medicine. I want to see my work heal." Marsha continues to evolve as an artist and with every piece of work comes new transformation. She currently is living and working in Denver, Colorado.

WHITNEY SHARPE

Whitney Sharpe is an Oakland based ceramic artist. Utilizing clay as a conduit, Sharpe builds three dimensional forms that embody physical experience. Drawn to clay per its volatile yet mutable nature, her art practice explores the relational and ritual aspects of materiality by challenging the limitations of medium and skill. Sharpe’s relationship with clay has born an understanding of the medium as the art of impermanence. Clay is not consistent and as a result, Sharpe is in conversation with her medium, recognizing she has just as much control over it as it has over her. This conference is the foundation of Sharpe’s work.