BLURBS (ART)

Garnett’s semi-abstract, narrative painting style is evident in series like New York’s Chelsea Art District on Fire (2004) and Paris Riots (2005). Despite their buoyant gestural marks, the viewer quickly picks up on a darker emotional narrative within each piece, solidified by each title’s reference to traumatic events.

~ McKenna Quatro Johnson, in Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years. Hirmer Verlag and Grey Art Museum NYU: 2025

Although they verge on abstraction, the canvases provoke memories by drawing on the lingua franca of documentary news photographs. Garnett’s talent is for simultaneously imbuing these sublime landscapes with a hushed vastness that nearly nullifies their perilous circumstances.

~ Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Artforum Critics’ Pick, Feb 2008. Review of solo show at Winkleman Gallery, NY

Joy Garnett continues her project of painting the contemporary political landscape, in this case in images derived from news reports of burning Paris immigrant neighborhoods.

~ Holland Cotter, The New York Times, Aug 2007. Review of group exhibition at Stellan Holm Gallery, NY

Thick paint and big brushstrokes obscure details from source photographs while preserving a sense of apocalyptic despair. Paradoxically, Garnett’s project immortalizes the ephemeral while riffing, too, on the false reality photographs present.

~ Jessica Dawson, The Washington Post, July 20, 2007. Review of Strange Weather, solo show at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), Washington, DC

Joy Garnett’s paintings of fiery, storm-swollen skies are about turbulence in a larger sense.

~ Holland Cotter, The New York Times, Art in Review, Aug 11, 2006. Review of group show at Sara Meltzer Gallery, NY

Garnett[‘s]… work parallels that of collagists and appropriators… But these straightforward paintings are not visual collages so much as conceptual collages; the comments on art and technology are invisible, while the planetary/ atmospheric ramifications take front stage.

~ Lucy R. Lippard, in Convergence: The Art Collection of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), Washington, DC; first published as a catalog essay for Strange Weather, NAS, 2006

Joy Garnett’s Kill Box (2001) recreates in paint one of the high-tech visual representations that defined the first Gulf War; palette and smear are carefully manipulated to approximate the surreal color and digital blur of night vision and remote targeting technologies. Painting’s unique qualities of surface and gesture allow a human element to enter a cold and remote digital image of destruction.

~ Murtaza Vali, Bidoun, Issue 8, 2006. Review of Image War: Contesting Images of Political Conflict, Whitney Museum of American Art at CUNY Graduate Center, NY

By recasting this technologized form of war and bodily destruction in the human hand with paint on canvas, Garnett uses the representational strategies of digital spectacle to reinsert the human in the destruction that spectacle hides.

~ Benjamin Godsill, from “Digital Detournements/(un)Reality Television,” in Image War, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2006 (exhibition catalog essay).

Perhaps the show’s most graphic moment comes from Joy Garnett’s “Death Penalty in Black and White,” which tabulates the racial imbalance between federal prosecutors and prisoners on death row.

~ Roberta Smith, The New York Times, Aug 2004. Review of group exhibition at Foxy Production, NY

Garnett’s brushy impasto pushes the verité elements of the images (which are derived from news photos) toward glam.

~ The New Yorker, 2004. Review of solo show at Debs & Co., NY

In Garnett’s paintings, the Luminist celebration of the transcendental landscape gives way to the 20th-century encounter with the apocalyptic sublime.

~ Christopher Phillips, Art in America, November 1999. Review of solo show at Debs & Co., NY

It’s in this paradoxical realm of terrible beauty that the canvases are most engaging, tying together the histories of the bomb and American landscape painting.

~ Tim Griffin, TimeOutNY, June 3-10, 1999. Review of solo show at Debs & Co., NY

The explosive impact of Abstract Expressionism, with its unprecedented scale and simplicity, has often been compared to that of atomic fission, but the two Manhattan Projects of the forties have seldom been linked as neatly as they are in this exhibition of Cold War flash cards, painted from declassified photographs of bomb tests.

~ The New Yorker, June 7, 1999. Review of solo show at Debs & Co., NY