Everyone is Acting Like Everything is Okay
The power of words and the power of art are fused in the work of Camille Rose Garcia, a Los Angeles-based artist whose “narrative art” captivated me last week when I was in San Jose speaking at the Search Engine Strategies conference. I took a couple of hours off from the conference to visit the San Jose Museum of Art and was, as the expression would have it, blown away by Garcia’s work.
Each painting or series of paintings is preceded by Garcia’s own take on it, whether she was inspired by her own thoughts, as in Plan B (“I was already deep into thinking about the collapse of society, the degradation of the environment, and military catastrophe”), or what she observes, as in Operation Opticon (“I wanted to do a group of works that specifically addressed the war machine and all of its evil agendas”).
Garcia creates dreamlike landscapes through which charming beings sleepwalk, relying on antidepressants and the joys of 500-thread sheets to keep them from seeing where they are and what they are doing. Her colors are vivid and supplemented with bits of mica and glitter to make the destruction in them seem even more removed, magical, inevitable. Garcia grew up near Disneyland and contrasts that so-called perfect world in denial with the real world that surrounds it in ways that simply jump off the wall at the onlooker. I fervently hope that The Tragic Kingdom will be exhibited elsewhere, so that others can get a glimpse of Garcia’s genius, which unfortunately is not well captured on paper or on the web.
So what does this have to do with words? Plenty. There’s the narrative art dimension to her work that appeals to me, as a writer and someone who generally absorbs meaning through words; but there’s something deeper here, too, a fusion of the different arts to communicate a vision to the world.
And that puts her way … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Process Matters, Doing the Right Thing, Creativity, Etc., Words on August 27th, 2007