Review in TimeOut
Night (2007) 60 x 78 inches. Oil on canvas.
March 6-12, 2008 Issue 649
Winkleman Gallery, through Mar 15
Joy Garnett's exhibition consists of four large paintings: an urban vista in early morning, an explosion caught at midday, a seascape at dusk and a burning structure at night. Although these scenes look like they could be representing imaginary places, they are in fact based on news photos from the Internet. By charging her source material with Munch-like painterly intensity, the artist transforms impersonal images that ordinarily warrant a passing glance into scenes that rivet the eye.
The results throw into sharp relief the vast differences in "speed" between painting and photography: Between the time it takes to snap a picture and create a canvas, and the degree of contemplation required for looking at art as opposed to perusing pictures on the Web.
In Noon, a rainbow of colors explodes from some unnamed site, and indeed whatever events led to the violence in this image could have taken place almost anywhere at any time. Similarly, Night uses a simple palette of red, black and white to depict the smoldering aftermath of 9/11, but despite Garnett's evocation of glowing flames and structural remnants, one wouldn't necessarily know that this is the World Trade Center. In her hands, a pervasively familiar yet traumatic event becomes strangely anonymous.
Reducing complex events to fleeting impressions can run the risk of trivializing them. Yet by memorializing images like these, which have been the focus of global media attention, Garnett makes them symbolic -- and gives them a history outside of current events.
-- Jennifer Coates
Interview on NewArtTV.com
Posted: 03/02/08
Duration: 3:27 minutes
Producer: NewArtTV
[Link]
Joy Garnett gets painterly with photographs culled from the Internet.
Review in Artforum.com
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[Link] New York WINKLEMAN GALLERY |
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Scenes of the apocalypse and disasters both natural and man-made could now be considered New York–based artist Joy Garnett's signature subjects, yet they retain their capacity to frighten. In her latest works, which once again incongruously deploy sumptuously applied paint to render open-source images culled from the Internet, the artist depicts vistas from around the world taken at ostensibly the same moment. Although they verge on abstraction, the canvases provoke memories by drawing on the lingua franca of documentary news photographs. Garnett's talent is for simultaneously imbuing these sublime landscapes with a hushed vastness that nearly nullifies their perilous circumstances. The smog-filled serenity of the sun rising over a densely packed city and undulating horizon in Morning in China, 2007, is suffused with anticipation. Here Garnett's loose, impressionistic brushwork and colorful palette underscore the pace of China's rapid transformations, whether positive or negative--increasing population, burgeoning economic force, looming environmental concerns. This sense of bated breath gives way to trepidation in the twilight ambience of Harbor (2), 2008, in which a blaze of red paint seems to stretch from the land out into the water, signaling danger in an otherwise romantic seaside landscape reminiscent of Karen Kilimnik’s paintings. Though Garnett's new work may seem like a departure from her more recent themes of "strange weather" and global warming, perhaps these landscapes should be considered through another definition of weather--as an inquiry into how long we can withstand our current conditions. Right now, they seem like a forecast of things to come. |
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Solo Exhibition: Joy Garnett, New Paintings (Winkleman Gallery, Feb 15-Mar 15 2008)
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 25, 2008
Joy Garnett
New Paintings
February 15 – March 15, 2008
Opening: Thursday, February 21, 6-8 pm
Gallery Hours: Tues – Sat, 11 6 pm
Winkleman Gallery
637 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York artist Joy Garnett. In four large canvases Garnett continues her groundbreaking exploration of the malleability of instantly globalized images and how they have begun to replace written language as the markers of mankind's collective memory or consciousness.
Unlike her last three New York exhibitions, which centered on specific themes of conflict or violence, this grouping is united only by the loose suggestion of images possibly taken at precisely the same moment in very different locations around the world. Garnett circles the planet to underscore perhaps the unstoppable imperative of this new lingua franca. The images Garnett paints are culled from digital mass media outlets and then archived for sometimes months at a time, permitting their context to evaporate. Returning to the image with a fuzzy at best memory of what it reportedly documented, Garnett’s process highlights the role misremembering plays in this new dubious "reality."
The optimistic rising sun in Morning in China references the economic ascent of the Asian giant, even as its smoggy landscape hints at the potential environmental disaster such rapid expanse can bring. The explosion and chaos suggested in the bright daylight of Noon points to the inescapably volatile nature that defines the seemingly ubiquitous power grabs taking place around the globe or simply the natural consequences of so much movement all at once. The South American seascape at moonlit dusk seen in Harbor (2) belies a calm similar to the Chinese morning, even as the blood red reflections hint at something sinister. And the overwhelmingly dark and massive destruction conveyed in the rubble of the World Trade Center in Night reminds us that there remains the potential for as-yet unimaginable nightmares. The first painting Garnett has been able to paint of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks (despite it being the single most photographed event in human history), Night is a tour-de-force of expressionistic recollection visited upon its ubiquitous source image. It is also the only incident that's clearly identifiable among the exhibition's paintings, but as the event that only served to speed up an already insanely speedy world it has already taken on legendary status and become the central catalyst of the enhanced and panicked race to globalize.
Joy Garnett received her MFA from The City College of New York and studied painting at L'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her notable exhibitions include, Strange Weather at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC; Image War, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2006); When Artists Say We, Artists Space (2006); Visionary Anatomies, Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition (2004-2007); and Without Fear or Reproach, De Witte Zaal, Ghent, Belgium (2003).
For more information, please contact Edward Winkleman at 212.643.3152 or info@winkleman.com
Solo Exhibition: Scoundrel Time (Iona College Art Center, Feb 25-Apr 17, 2008)
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Solo exhibition of paintings and source imagery from 2000-2006, at Iona College Art Center. Illustrated brochure available on request.
February 25 - April 17, 2008
opening reception: Sunday, March 2, 1-3pm
Iona College
Brother Kenneth Chapman Gallery
715 North Avenue
New Rochelle, NY 10801
Lecture + panel discussion with Joy Garnett & activist lawyer Laura Quilter:
"Joywar: Intellectual Property & the Myth of Originality." Appropriation in the visual arts, the legal, aesthetic, moral and academic implications of the creative commons and fair use.
Wednesday, April 2, 7pm
The Christopher J. Murphy Auditorium
Solo Exhibition: Strange Weather (National Academy of Sciences: Jan - July 2007)
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Strange Weather. Catalog essay by Lucy Lippard
In a period when media-influenced imagery and digital mediums are ubiquitous in the mainstream art world, Joy Garnett has perversely gone in the other direction. As a self-described "information junkie," her sources are photographs from the news media in the five years since September 11th, 2001. But as an artist determined to control her own means of production, she makes good old-fashioned landscape paintings...with a twist.
Garnett sees her process in terms of Open Source Culture (OSC) -- the more-or-less public reservoir from which anyone can drink deeply of imagery initially intended for a sip at best. She describes this apparently new system, available for translation, transformation, or appropriation, as "really the longstanding operative principle for innovation... Nothing comes out of thin air." Thus her work parallels that of collagists and appropriators -- software hackers, DJ samplers and a number of artists. But these straightforward paintings are not visual collages so much as conceptual collages; the comments on art and technology are invisible, while the planetary/atmospheric ramifications take front stage.
"Strange Weather" is an astute understatement for what the world is undergoing. Equally strange is the apathy with which news of cataclysmic change is being received. Garnett's work reflects that change in a deceptively conventional manner. We have all seen a plethora of images -- from the news and from art photographers -- of the devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina. But when we see those images, usually perceived/received so fast they barely register, translated into independent works of art, they are less recognizable. Flood 3 becomes a majestic icon of destruction in the fall-of-empire genre.
First we are immersed in the great billows of paint -- smoke and clouds, shards of fire, bodies of land -- then we move on to the context. The apocalyptic nature of the events depicted is most evident in the skies. Some are operatically dramatic, others are eerily calming, color alone conveying the unusual. Art history is evoked only to be revoked. Evac is half sky, half land like many Dutch 17th-century canvases; Flood 5 and Plume 2 evoke the ominous sublime of monumental 19th-century landscapes. Devastation is understated in Live Oak, where the great old tree (many were victims of the storm) recalls early Mondrian. The rising waters appear peaceful and beneficent; they are in fact lethal.
Landscape painting contains its own paradoxes in these days of photographic ascendancy, when photographs have finally been recognized as no more "truthful" than any other medium. Curiously, the distance afforded by a painting permits a more intimate experience of the effects of Katrina than the fragmented, momentary blitz of media photography. By reinventing her photographic sources, Garnett gives us time to be there, in place, on solid ground, however terrifying that may be. Simultaneously, by merging political and physical phenomena, she pulls the rug out from under our previous sources of information, perhaps even making us nostalgic for the impersonal flashes of media imagery that allow us to avoid responsibility for the environmental and social catastrophes we face.
Solo Exhibition: Riot (Jan 15th - Feb 21st, 2004 at Debs & Co.)
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JOY GARNETT
RIOT
JANUARY 15TH - FEBRUARY 21ST, 2004
Debs & Co. is pleased to present Riot, a series of new paintings by Joy Garnett. Riot will be Ms. Garnett's third solo exhibition at Debs & Co.
These new paintings in Riot depict people in emotional distress, the figure in extremity. As in much of Ms. Garnett's previous work, the causes behind the explosive action are generally political in nature. The immediate sources for these acts and images are often taken from newspapers and other media. Her re-casting of these visuals plays with the history of history painting itself.
In Molotov, the artist has painted a monumental figure of a long haired youth in a black beret throwing a freshly lit molotov cocktail. The heroically-proportioned figure twists off the frame of the painting, his home-made bomb front and center, the recognizable logo of the cola bottle smeared into a not-so-funny red, white and blue, while his face is contorted into a sneer of pure hatred. Whatever background existed in the original image has been reduced to the blank grayish blue of smoke. The figure, in his moment of action, is removed from his surroundings; the context, cause, time and place, or justice of his actions are irrelevant and not portrayed. What is important to the painter is the extremity of the figure's emotions, not whether they are right or wrong.
[For information regarding the legal dispute that once surrounded this work, go to http://www.firstpulseprojects.com/joywar.html]
In Air Strip, Ms. Garnett portrays a man and woman in a deep embrace. The familiar looking couple stand in the center of the large horizontal canvas, their stance uncomfortably intimate and awkward. In this painting, the background, while abstracted, is recognizable as a desert air field, and the nose-cones behind the man's shoulder and his own Air Force fighter pilot uniform signal that this is a farewell taken from our current war. Nevertheless, Ms. Garnett depicts the two in a twister of baroque impasto which renders whatever political meaning originally intended for the image utterly banal, or even camp. The point here is passion, and the experience of it.
The notion of heightened emotion removed from cause is particularly evident in paintings such as Jump and Leap, in which young men jump through the fires lit during World Trade Organization protests. The riot is here exterior and interior: the young men risk life and limb for no particular purpose, other than the thrill of it. The ecstasy experienced has no real connection with the original intention of the protests; these boys have shown up after the fact to play with fire for the sake of playing with fire.
Ms. Garnett has recently appeared in Americana at SVA, curated by Anne Ellegood and Rachel Gugelberger and in The UFO Show at Illinois State University Galleries; in 2004 she will appear in For Real: War and the Contemporary Audience at Stony Brook University, and at other venues including the National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC. Ms. Garnett had her first solo exhibition at Debs & Co. in 1999 and her second in 2001. In 2002, she was the curator of Night Vision, a travelling exhibition which was shown at White Columns here in New York. She received her MFA from the City College of New York in 1991 and studied in Paris at L'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts from 1985 to 1987. She lives and works in New York City.
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).
Solo Exhibition: Buster-Jangle (Debs & Co.: May 6th - June 5th, 1999 ; series: 1997-1999)
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A selection from the series, some of which were in the exhibition (my first solo show):
"Buster-Jangle",
May 6th - June 5th, 1999
Debs & Co.
New York.
more info/press...
ART IN AMERICA
November 1999
REVIEW by Christopher Phillips
A painter whose works are often inspired by scientific imagery, Joy Garnett is also a conspicuous presence in the current on-line debate over art's role in an increasingly technological culture. Visitors to her studio during the past year have noticed, alongside her loosely brushed studies of ghostly solar prominences and the looping paths of subatomic particles, a disturbing new series taking shape. "Buster-Jangle," her first solo show, featured 13 of these recent oils on canvas, all devoted to the atomic explosions carried out in the 1940s and '50s at isolated sites in the American West and the Pacific.
In Garnett's paintings, the Luminist celebration of the transcendental landscape gives way to the 20th-century encounter with the apocalyptic sublime. A few works provide an almost naturalistic sense of locale. With its blurrily recognizable foreground cacti and hints of arid terrain, Buster-Jangle might be a relaxed impression of a southwestern vista, were it not for the yellow and white fireball that is burning a hole in the placid blue sky. Other works, while retaining a rudimentary horizon line, tend toward coloristic abstraction. Sugar Shot, for example, shows a sketchy mushroom cloud shooting up through the surrounding atmosphere, sending yellow flashes shading into scarlet and green and spreading a deep blue-violet hue that signals a lethal degree of radioactivity. Christmas Island zooms us into the heart of a detonation. Dominating the top half of the canvas is a bluish half-globe; inside it is a pulsing circle of brilliant white, and outside it a zone queasily tinged with creams and greenish yellows. Not all of Garnett's works employ such evocative color combinations, however; two of her most unnerving blast paintings consist of near monochromatic grays.
Seen as a group, these paintings inevitably recall the concluding chorus of explosions in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Is Garnett suggesting that we can stop worrying and learn to ironically love the bomb? Not quite. By means of their titles, her paintings single out the notorious A-bomb tests in which the U.S. military, eager to gauge the effects of human exposure to atomic radiation, purposely stationed thousands of unprotected U.S. soldiers nearby. The brochure accompanying the exhibition contains excerpts from Garnett's correspondence with one of these unwitting guinea pigs, who tersely describes the death of his newborn daughter from radiation-induced birth defects. In today's climate of high-tech euphoria, this exhibition offered a timely reminder that the forces unleashed by science are not always benign or controllable.
