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American Color: Richard Garrison
By Nadine Wasserman
(2009)
One of my favorite scenes in the movie Dude, Where’s My Car? is when the main characters try to order Chinese “fooood” at a drive-thru. The transaction, which begins rather prosaically, devolves into a yelling match between a disembodied voice repeating “and then?” after each item is ordered and a very frustrated customer. Even after Ashton Kutcher’s character rips the drive-thru monitor apart, it continues to taunt him with the same refrain as his car speeds away.
For me, this scene reveals the crassness of American culture. Not only do we love our cars so much that we like to eat in them, but the food we crave is bland and generic. Apparently we are comforted by sameness. We like to be surrounded by the familiar colors of our favorite chain and to know exactly what’s on offer.
Despite its insipidness, Richard Garrison manages to find beauty in the drive-thru experience. In his current exhibition, American Color, Garrison both celebrates and critiques the banal aspects of American culture. For him, commerce is source material that he systematically reformulates into transcendent abstractions. The color palettes of drive-thrus, advertisements, and product packaging are transformed into geometric grids and designs.
The six Drive-Thru Color Scheme paintings included in the exhibition represent Starbucks, Taco Bell/Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wendy’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, and Burger King. Each are identified by location and date. Garrison explains that to make the grids he photographs all the structural elements of the drive-thru—ordering, purchasing, pick-up. Then, working from the bottom left corner of the paper, he paints strips of color that match the structural elements. The result is a grid of columns “determined by the relationship and color of each structural element.” What becomes clear is that your expectations don’t entirely match up with reality. The Starbucks palette, while minimal, shows far less green than might be expected. And the McDonald’s, which would seem to be predominantly yellows, browns, and reds, has quite a bit of blue. Ultimately, the results are both alluring and perplexing.
Garrison’s Weekly Ad Color Scheme series offers similar insights. These six paintings are at once humorous and sobering. Whereas the drive-thru series relies purely on color, these graphs include text. Not only are the paintings identified by store, dates, and page numbers that correspond to a flyer, but each individual row is labeled with an item and price range. Instead of color strips, these grids are made up of circles of varying sizes. Garrison looked at advertisement flyers from Toys “R” Us, Walgreen’s, Joann Fabric and Craft Stores, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Office Max, and Kmart. He explains that “a grid of dots would be made to correspond with the scale and order of each advertised image.” The size of the dot corresponds to the relative scale of the item pictured. What emerges is a snapshot of the hierarchy of what is for sale, in what season, and for how much. Most revealing were the surprising array of colors for snacks, candy, and medicines, as compared to the relatively limited palate for sporting goods. The predominance of pastels in office products was remarkable, as was the fact that someone might need to buy “dog training pants.”
Garrison’s portrait of our commercial environment is enhanced by his more intimate works titled Product Packaging. For these, he collected the cardboard from items purchased over the course of three months, from December 2008 to March 2009, from his own household. From these packages he cut out squares ranging in size from 1/8 inch to 1 1/2 inches that show only solid color without lettering. Garrison’s collages function as both color field abstractions and pixilated portraits of personal consumption.
Garrison’s talent for transforming the banal into the poetic is echoed in his Spirograph drawings. Made by using the tools of a children’s toy and ordinary Bic pens, these demonstrate Garrison’s interest in the systematic and the repetitive. While Garrison may be discomfited by sameness, he is clearly compelled by it. In this exhibition he explores the tension between the comfort of the familiar and the ubiquity of monoculture.
There is something fitting about having this exhibition in Spencertown, given its location. If you don’t notice it on your way there, you will most certainly notice on your return that much of the route is blissfully free of fast food chains and big box stores.
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Circling Limits
(2004)
Using methods as diverse as satellite technology and a simple child's toy, Richard Garrison directly observes and interacts with altered and reconfigured landscapes. He surveys contemporary suburban sites, and creates paradoxes by transforming information gathered from prosaic sources into provocative abstract images and installations. This process of reflection and personal documentation creates works that are both vivid and poetic.
Influenced by Robert Smithson's study of the transformed and atrophied suburban landscape, and Ed Ruscha's documentation of the social landscape, Garrison gathers, plots, and monumentalizes similar thematic material. He uses these subjects as a metaphor to explore the contradictions that surround him. To this end, Garrison forms a structure to engage with the subject by setting up parameters, limiting choices, and eventually succumbing to the exploration and numbing sameness in the materials and tools he uses.
The parking lot is a rough, cold space that is barren even when filled. It is a site of convenience and expediency, and at the same time a place where crime and accidents may occur. It's also an area that was perhaps once beautiful yet altered to acquiese to the demands of a speed driven society. In Parking Lot Perimeters, a project based on the Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of department store parking lots, Garrison presents stacks of cut asphalt paper positioned on the floor so that their spatial relationships resonate with suburban sprawl; the blackness of the paper evocative of mystery, loss, and introspection; the odor slightly reminiscent of a finely poured tar. The cutouts, each specific to one parking lot, are bordered by the rigid pre-cut edges of paper, its uniformity summoning images of housing developments, all similar on the outside, but individualized on the inside. To determine what cuts to make, Garrison meticulously performed tedious tasks that involved gathering, measuring, recording, circling, and transforming, much like an architect redefining an area, or a census gatherer assembling information. The physicality of the maze that Garrison creates allows the viewer to navigate the perimeters and mimic the artist’s original walk.
To construct the drawings in the Spirograph series, Garrison uses a toy developed in the early 1960s by British engineer Denys Fisher, who happened across the design while researching a bomb detonator idea for NATO. The Spirograph controls the rotational drawing patterns within the confines of Garrison’s self-imposed rules (such as limiting the number and type of pens used, and never introducing new elements even to control errors). The horizontal black and green drawings are minimal in form and echo the elements of landscape. Some resemble dense brooding masses, while others are more lyrical and vigorous, but all are obsessively and repetitiously drawn. Even though the Spirographs were made with an exacting tool, they are not rendered perfectly; the broken cadence of marks records human imperfection.
Garrison is inextricably connected to the spaces he utilizes, and those associations illuminate complex psychological realities in the work. He invites the viewer on a symbolic journey and offers them a place of contemplation, all within sight of his carefully demarcated boundaries.
“I Space offers a daring, must-see group show” (excerpts)
By Alan G. Artner
The group exhibition in its last days at I Space Gallery shows both the independence and judgment that we always hope from curators of contemporary art museums.
It brings together essentially three complete solo exhibitions for artists who excel at making unconventional work that has not been seen before in
Richard Garrison, who teaches in upstate
Garrison’s installation is a project based on the Global Positioning System coordinates of department store parking lots translated into stacks of cut asphalt paper positioned on the floor. His many large, delicate drawings have been made with a Spirograph, a children’s toy from the 1960s. The goofball precision of their making accounts for only so much. Obsession takes them into a realm of visual poetry.