Solo Exhibition: Rocket Science (Debs & Co.: April 12th-May 19th, 2001 ; series: 1998-2001)

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Rocket Science uses as its source material de-classified military documents. Some of this series were part of the solo show "Rocket Science" at Debs & Co. in May-June 2001. Catalogue available with essays by Bruce Sterling and Manuel DeLanda

April 4, 2001
For Immediate Release
JOY GARNETT:  Rocket Science
April 12th-May 19th, 2001
Opening reception Thursday, April 12th, from 6-8 p.m.

Debs & Co. is pleased to present Rocket Science, an exhibition of new paintings by Joy Garnett. Rocket Science is Ms. Garnett’s second solo exhibition with Debs & Co. The gallery will publish a catalogue with essays by Bruce Sterling and Manuel De Landa.

Rocket Science uses as its source material de-classified military documents and scientific illustrations. Ms. Garnett’s paintings describe the aesthetics of America’s gyroscopic lurch into hubris. They address the banal violence of the Military Industrial Complex, and the unhappy ways this devouring matrix operates within our former Republic’s history. Rocket Science identifies a national predilection for a techno-sublime which consists of de-populated landscapes and exploding mechanisms. The artist engages in a kind of mirror cryptography in her painting: her paintings from military infrared “night-vision” cameras, for example, re-represent phenomena which are invisible to the human eye, yet whose “look” is common currency.

The reification of such images is at the core of Ms. Garnett’s project. Indeed, Ms. Garnett’s paintings amplify the elegance of such events as the bombing of Baghdad or the explosions of the Challenger and the Concorde. It is not for nothing that the bombing of the Iraqi capital resembles a shower of falling stars or Independence Day fireworks, and Ms. Garnett’s creepily beautiful paintings sucker-punch the viewer into a consideration of the complicity of disenfranchised spectatorship.

Ms. Garnett has been included in group shows including The UFO Show at University of Illinois Galleries in Normal, Illinois, Dystopia and Identity in the Age of Global Communications at Tribes Gallery, New York City, N01se at Wellcome Gallery, London, and Kettles Yard, Cambridge, Ground Control at Lombard/Freid Fine Arts in New York City and Bioethics: Thresholds of Corporal Completeness at Side Street Projects in Santa Monica, CA. She studied painting at L’Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux Arts, Paris, and received her MFA from the City College of New York in 1991. Ms. Garnett’s work has been most recently reproduced in "Reinventing the Landscape," an article by Hilarie M. Sheets for ARTnews (March, 2001).