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Joy Garnett: Christmas Day Interview, Figure/Ground

 

Posted on Christmas Day: artist Julia Schwartz recently interviewed me for the artist series she edits at Figure/Ground, where I come clean about a number of things including the existence of artists on the Egyptian side of the family, my thoughts on Virilio and inefficiency, painting as a radical gesture, the importance of locale, and my walking fetish --->

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Joy Garnett is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her paintings, based on news photographs, scientific imagery, and military documents she gathers from the Internet, locate instances of the apocalyptic sublime in mass media culture. Her social media projects examine the intersections of our digital and material worlds. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Her paintings have been reproduced on book covers and in numerous publications including Harper‘s, Perspecta: The Yale School of Architecture Journal and Cabinet magazine. Garnett serves as Arts Editor at Cultural Politics, a contemporary media theory journal published by Duke University Press. Her writing has appeared in the anthology Virilio Now (Polity 2011), and in the forthcoming Virilio & Visual Culture, The Virilio Dictionary (both with Edinburgh University Press 2013), and The Cultural Politics Reader (Duke University Press 2013).  She is currently working on a family memoir about politics and art set in Egypt’s Old Regime. She is represented by Winkleman Gallery, New York.

What attracted you to the arts? What were your earliest experiences of making art?

There is definitely an artistic tendency that runs in my family. There’s my mom, who was an artist and a freelance photographer. She was born in Alexandria, Egypt, into a family of illustrious poets and painters. I’ve been researching the family history on and off for years: they were all eccentric artists! Radicals! Utopians! My grandfather, Ahmed Zaky Abushady, was an influential Romantic poet and editor who published several high profile journals in the 1930s and 40s. The most radical was Apollo, a platform for experimental Arabic poetry that really pushed the envelope. He organized a salon called ‘Apollo’s Society,’ whose members included notable and emerging poets from around the Arab world.

My mom grew up around a pair of eccentric older cousins, the Wanly brothers Seif and Adham. They were famous painters of the period. There’s now a museum wing dedicated to them in Alexandria. I think they are the reason why my mom initially wanted to become a painter. I found her childhood sketchbooks — she had aspirations early on. On top of that, her mother, my grandmother, an Englishwoman, was descended from the famous Lancashire poet and labor organizer Samuel Bamford, and styled herself after the 19th century adventurer and author of Letters from Egypt, Lady Duff Gordon. So, my mother and her two siblings grew up in an atmosphere of creative and political cross-cultural ferment, in a milieu of avant-garde and politically rambunctious artists, when Egypt was negotiating a volatile mix of European Modernist influences and elements of Arab nationalism. For literature and the arts it was an exciting if difficult time, full of conflict. Her father was in the thick of it.

I was born in the suburbs less than an hour’s drive from New York City, which was my immediate source for art when I was a teenager. My mom had me drawing and painting when I was one or two years old. She was then dabbling in oil paint — she was a truly awful painter! She didn’t inherit the Wanly genes, unfortunately. But happily, she was already quite a good photographer. We would paint together in a small room at home that she had tricked out as a studio. Soon she dropped painting altogether and committed herself to photography — good move. She used to tease me that there was room for only one painter in the family. She went on to become quite accomplished. She was obsessive, really. Our house was one large darkroom and studio with storage for her work. She was never not working on her photographs. I wonder if this, along with my fraught, competitive relationship with her, has something to do with my need to make and remake the connections between painting and photography in my own work.

My dad too was in the habit of producing large numbers of photographs of a more technical nature. He is a scientist, and I grew up hanging around his lab and helping him with experiments. He had an additional home lab in the basement, adjacent to my mom’s darkroom. It was like an artist’s studio. He would attach a camera to the oculus of his microscope in order to document experiments, sometimes with Polaroids, sometimes with 35mm film. I remember having fun manipulating the microscope mirror in order to emphasize different details before photographing them. Among other things, this gave me a sense of the artful, constructed and interpretive nature of photographs, even when they are functioning as scientific evidence. Something I was to circle back to later as a painter. [....]

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Field Projects: 'Your Face is a Landscape' opens Thurs, Dec 13

Joy Garnett: 'Facture' (2012) oil on canvas. 30 x 26 inches

 

Show #10:
Your Face is a Landscape

Curated by
Sara Reisman & Reina Shibata

Dates: Dec 13th - Jan 26th
Opening: Thursday Dec 13th, 6-8pm

Field Projects
526 W 26th Street, #807
NY, NY  10001
www.fieldprojectsgallery.com
[email protected]

Artists:
Brian Scott Campbell
Evie Falci
Kentaro Fujioka
Joy Garnett
Daniel Gerwin
Hilary Irons
Catherine Lan
Diane Meyer
Christopher Roberson
Julia Schwadron
Elisabeth Smolarz
Anita Sto
Edra Soto
Malgorzata Szandala
Kirsten Kay Thoen
Lumin Wakoa


Join us Thursday, Dec 13th, for the opening of Field Projects Show #10: Your Face is a Landscape. The works in this exhibition were selected by guest curators Sara Reisman and Reina Shibata from our second international Open Call. Sixteen artists were selected for Show #10 based on themes that emerged in the process of reviewing more than 400 submissions.

As if under advisement by the Ouija, the curators were moved by several recurring symbols and themes in the pool of submissions that signify or document the human face and its absence, as well as surreal landscapes with unexpected layers of threading, pointillist dotting, and actual water. Between the face and the landscape, there are mirrors, masks, flowers, and the appearance of language-based and paranormal messages.  As when seen from an airplane, the landscape with its dunes, crevasses, slopes, and patches of green and brown can be perceived as being part of a larger, figurative whole, or the face of a spirit. In the words of Fleetwood Mac, “…I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills/ ‘Til the landslide brought me down.”

In addition to the artists chosen for Show #10: Your Face is a Landscape, thirteen runners-up were selected and highlighted on our website. These artists include: Stephen Barnwell, Oreen Cohen, Seth Cohen, Karen Lederer, Eric LoPresti, Jordan Kasey, Ramesh Pithiya, Justin Pollman, Ralph Pugay, Sausan Saulat, Denise Treizman, Bailey Scieszka, and Chris Victor.

Guest curators Sara Reisman and Reina Shibata are Director and Deputy Director (respectively) of New York City's Percent for Art program which commissions permanent artworks for City-owned public spaces throughout the five boroughs. Reisman is also an independent curator and writer who is the 2012-2013 guest curator at Forever & Today, Inc., and has organized nearly fifty exhibitions and projects in New York and elsewhere. Reina Shibata is a writer, researcher and curator who previously held positions at the RISD Museum, the Harvard Art Museum, and the Judd Foundation, where she pursued her interests in contemporary art and public access to art.

As an artist-run space, Field Projects is committed to opening the field and exhibition opportunities to other working artists through our semiannual Open Call to artists.  All of the submissions we receive are considered not only for a single group exhibition but also for shows throughout the year.  The theme of each Open Call is unscripted, allowing our guest curators free reign to choose the participants and thematic content of each unique show.