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Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present Gabrielle Garland, an online show by NY-based artist Gabrielle Garland opening on September 7, 2022.
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"No more, thank ye; I’m better now –but I’m a deal too flustered to tell you - all I know is, something comes at me like a Jack-in-the-box, and up I goes like a skyrocket!”–Lizard Bill, Alice in WonderlandLooking at Gabrielle’s paintings of American homes, I feel like Lizard Bill (or Blizzard Ill as I like to call him). Bill is given the scary task to check upon the Rabbit’s house in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland after naughty Alice drinks from “the little bottle that stood near the looking glass” and grows so she does not fit through the door anymore. Bill comes down the chimney, like so many other classic intruders in children’s tales, think Big Bad Wolf or Santa Claus, to inspect this quite unexpected and puzzling situation. But as we can tell from his account he does not get too far. Alice gives him a “little kick” and Bill comes flying back out of the chimney. “There goes Bill” we hear the Rabbit say. There is an interior force that moves the buildings in Gabrielle’s paintings. One push of the elbow will warp the whole house.
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There is an interior force that moves the buildings in Gabrielle’s paintings. One push of the elbow will warp the whole house. It is a chain reaction, a nail removed and the architecture changes in dizzying ways. Gabrielle is there to document what she sees. It feels like a soft and slow dissection, she is feeling her way from corner to corner, and it seems that just a slight drop in temperature will change everything. There is a distinct difference between the interiors and the exteriors, it is not what one would expect, by that I mean it is not about blurring boundaries. It is about being mixed up. It is as if the apple is eating the worm. And it is what really draws me to the work. Just as in fairy tales, we are introduced to suspended disbelief when we look at Gabrielle’s building from the outside, but the spell is broken upon entering. When I see the interiors, I want to ask questions about personal choices. The exteriors feel like they can adjust, they have it in them to move and be moved, they are generous but with the interiors there is no escape, they are dark and closed off.
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I feel trapped by personal choices and want to figure out who lives in these places. It is confounding; am I in a suburban dream, am I in a stockbroker’s not lived in apartment, am I in a staged interior for a magazine and feel like I need to look for that knife that is hiding somewhere under a pillow and carve my way out of there. This back and forth between interior and exterior feels significant to me for just like Alice who is the size of a lizard goes inside a house that belongs to a rabbit, drinks his stuff, grows to human size and then kicks Bill with a foot that now is a manifold its size. It probably hurt and it is probably beyond the lizard’s reasoning, yet he feels the aftermath but “Well, I hardly know. –No more, thank ye; I’m better now” ...we adjust our minds. We are looking at this beautifully layered thing called a house, a thing that can easily outlive us, a thing that reflects so many personalities, reflects the time we live in as well as the times beforewe were alive, being embedded in a historical grid. A place that can give comfort and alienate us at the same time and seen through Gabrielle’s eyes we do not look into the looking glass, but we walk right through it and look at it from the side of the house.The machine for living is alive.
–Text written by Christina Forrer
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Gabrielle Garland (b. 1968) is a painter based in New York. Over the last decade she has been working on a series of images based in, on, and around architecture, portraits of apartments and houses featuring uniquely American interiors and exteriors. These paintings utilize a wide range of mark-making devices and an elastic perspective that draws out the specific personality of each domicile.
GABRIELLE GARLAND
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