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Molotov, oil
on camvas, 70 x 60 inches.
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Joy Garnett
"Riot"
January 15 – February 21, 2004
Opening: Saturday January 17, 6 - 8 p.m.
Debs & Co.
525 West 26th Street
2nd floor
New York, NY 10001
contact the gallery for more info:
212 643-2070
info@debsandco.com
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FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JOY GARNETT
RIOT
January 15th - February 21st, 2004
opening reception: Saturday, January 17, 6 - 8pm
Debs & Co.
525 West 26th Street
2nd floor
New York, NY 10001
hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11am-6pm
for more information contact the gallery:
212 643-2070
info@debsandco.com
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
longhaired 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.
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 will exhibit concurrently at the Puffin Foundation in
Teaneck, NJ, in an exhibition called Shocked and Awed. The artist
has recently appeared in Without Fear or Reproach, curated by
Jerome Jacobs in Ghent, Belgium, 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 Atomica
at the Neues Kunstmuseum Luzern, Paradise Lost at Van Brunt
Gallery, For Real: War and the Contemporary Audience at Stony
Brook University, and at other venues including the National Academy of Sciences
and the Maxwell Art Gallery (UK).
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 traveling 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 at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris,
from 1985 to 1987. She lives and works in New York City.
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