New York artist Joy Garnett has introduced some interesting theories into the artworks that have made her popular, by reinventing photos and transforming them into explosive paintings. Although she uses paint and canvas like a traditional artist, her works are created from photographic images of explosions she sources from the Internet.
In her artist's statements on her website, Garnett explains, "My paintings are associated with the 'apocalyptic sublime,' a metaphysical condition of astonishment and awe. Culling my source images from the Internet while referencing painterly tropes that include Abstraction, Op Art and the Luminist landscapes of the 19th century, my work continues to develop its own pictorial engagement with the vertiginous information explosion that defines our 21st century Technological Sublime Age."
Using images of destruction and explosions, Garnett translates the images onto canvas for bright bold effects. For Boom and Bust, a solo show of six large paintings at the Winkleman Gallery, Garnett used military explosions set against dark night skies as her inspiration. Without physical groundings like horizon lines or objects on the ground, each image gives the viewer no concept of size or scale, the explosions are somehow even more intense.
Currently, Garnett is working on a visual memoir entitled "The Bee Keeper," a piece about her grandfather, A.Z. Abushady, poet, publisher and an innovative beekeeper in both Egypt and England during Egypt's Ancient Regime, when King Farouk was in power. In addition, Garnett has worked as the Arts Editor of the scholarly journal Cultural Politics and regularly publishes writings on arts, media and related subjects in various publications and on the web, including her blog NEWSgrist.
Garnett lives and works in New York City and her pieces have been shown in numerous galleries up and down the East Coast. She was most recently part of a group exhibition, The Tool at Hand, at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Visit FirstPulseProjects.com to see more.