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Joy
Garnett
Boom and
Bust
October 15 – November 13,
2010
Opening Reception: Friday, October 15,
2010
 Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present “Boom and
Bust,” our second solo exhibition by New York artist Joy
Garnett. In six dazzling new paintings, Garnett continues her
investigation of sublime spectacle through works on canvas sourced from
photography of military events. For the “Boom and Bust” series, her
focus has shifted to the sky. Gone are the horizon lines or objects on the
ground used to convey a sense of scale in her other works. Instead,
Garnett’s explosive, phantasmagorical shapes evoke painterly tropes and
pop iconography. They also bring to mind the psychological, cultural, and
economic cycles of creation and
destruction.
Garnett continues to develop her methods of the past decade, pulling source
images from the Internet and other mass media outlets, where there is never any
shortage of spectacular and apocalyptic imagery. Acknowledging that news footage
and generic imagery of war, natural disasters and man-made catastrophes form
much of our common, day-to-day experience both directly and through their
derivatives in movies, gaming, television and entertainment culture,
Garnett’s work diverts such imagery yet again through the
“lens” of her painting, rendering it with a twist that is personal,
playful, and
moving.
Without a horizon line, the frame of both landscape and painting is suddenly
aloft, escaping the original narratives of their source imagery and
representations as we might come across them in vernacular settings. This
approach permits a direct exploration through specific traditions in painting,
as well as pop culture motifs. Hence, while presenting us with a central
explosive form, each painting draws upon a range of cultural tropes, from the
loose geometry of "O.P.P." and the evocative homage of "Rose," to the
cartoon-like whoosh of air in "Poof" [pictured above], and the cataclysmic but
no less compelling abyss of "Lost."
As Garnett has written about this work: “Perhaps perversely, the very
unctuous medium of paint is an excellent tool to turn on the dominant form of
the image today, which is electronic and photo-based. Paint offers us a real
counterpoint as a material and as a mode of communication, and it packs a
serious backlog of motifs, languages and genres that can be called into play
literally with the flick of a wrist. What’s important to me, from the
point of view of someone who makes paintings, is to allow the viewer to come to
any meanings – any interpretations of content – on their own. What
matters most is
contemplation.”
Joy Garnett's paintings, based on images she gathers from the Internet,
examine the apocalyptic sublime at the intersections of media, politics and
culture. Notable past exhibitions include”That Was Then...This Is
Now,” MoMA P.S.1 and “Image War,” Whitney
Museum of American Art. She is a
recipient of a grant from Anonymous Was a Woman, and serves as Arts Editor for
the scholarly journal Cultural Politics. Garnett lives and works in
New
York.
For more information, please contact Edward Winkleman at 212.643.3152 or
info@winkleman.com.
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