April
4, 2001
For
Immediate Release
In the
Project Room: John McLachlin, The Erotic Possibility of Melancholy
April
12th-May 19th, 2001
An
opening reception for the artists will be held on
Thursday,
April 12th, from 6-8 p.m.
Debs
& Co. is pleased to present Rocket Science,
an exhibition of new
paintings
by Joy Garnett. Rocket Science is Ms. Garnett’s second solo
exhibition
with Debs & Co. The gallery will publish a catalogue with essays
by
Bruce Sterling and Manuel De Landa.
Rocket
Science uses as its source material de-classified military documents
and
scientific illustrations. Ms. Garnett’s paintings describe the aesthetics
of
America’s gyroscopic lurch into hubris. They address the banal violence of
the
Military Industrial Complex, and the unhappy ways this devouring matrix
operates
within our former Republic’s history. Rocket Science identifies a
national predilection
for a techno-sublime which consists of de-populated
landscapes
and exploding mechanisms. The artist engages in a kind of mirror
cryptography
in her painting: her paintings from military infrared “night-vision”
cameras,
for example, re-represent phenomena which are invisible to the human
eye,
yet whose “look” is common currency.
The reification of such images is at the core of Ms. Garnett’s project. Indeed,
Ms. Garnett’s paintings amplify the elegance of
such events as the bombing of
Baghdad or the explosions of the Challenger and the Concorde. It is not for
nothing that the bombing of the Iraqi capital resembles a shower of falling stars
or Independence Day fireworks, and Ms. Garnett’s creepily beautiful paintings
sucker-punch the viewer into a consideration of the complicity of disenfranchised
spectatorship.
Ms.
Garnett has been included in group shows including The UFO Show at
University
of Illinois Galleries in Normal, Illinois, Dystopia and Identity
in
the Age of Global Communications at Tribes Gallery,
New York City, N01se
at
Wellcome Gallery, London, and Kettles Yard, Cambridge, Ground Control at
Lombard/Freid
Fine Arts in New York City and Bioethics: Thresholds of
Corporal
Completeness at Side Street Projects in Santa Monica, CA.
She
studied
painting at L’Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux Arts, Paris, and
received
her MFA from the City College of New York in 1991. Ms. Garnett’s
work
has been most recently reproduced in "Reinventing the Landscape," an
article
by Hilarie M. Sheets for ARTnews (March, 2001).
……..
In the Project Room:
John McLachlin, The
Erotic Possibility of Melancholy.
Mr.
McLachlin’s series of photographs depict the pastoral landscape of
certain
gay cruising areas in Toronto. These serene photographs call to the
fore
problems from Western cultural history, such as the notions of the
“natural”
and the “artificial,” the situation of sexuality within public and private
life,
and the role of land ownership and use in society. Referencing artists
as
seemingly divergent as Poussin and Tom of Finland, the photographs
are
at once meditations on Arcadia, seventies-style gay porn shoots stripped
of actors, and documentation of as-yet “unimproved” marginal land.
Mr.
McLachlin has exhibited recently in Substitute City at The Power Plant,
in
Instant Coffee, Urban Disco Trailer Project & Everyone, at the Art
Gallery
of
Ontario, Spring Break and Town & Country at Zsa Zsa, Real
Man at Paul
Petro
Contemporary Art, and Reviews 1-4 at Mercer Union, all in Toronto. He
has
had three solo exhibitions, also in Toronto. Mr. Mclachlin is a graduate
of
the Ontario College of Art. The Erotic Possibility of Melancholy is his
first
exhibition in New York City.
Debs & Co.
525 West 26th
Street, Second Floor
New York, NY 10001
(212) 643-2070
***