Friday, February 17, 2012
Visual Art Girls with Animal Heads, Naked Guys with Poppers on Dirty Couches: Images from Last Night's Opening at Ovvio Arte
Posted by Laura Hutson on Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 12:09 PM
The parking lot was filled to capacity at Ovvio Arte last night, and a crowd of people spilled out of the gallery, smoking cigarettes by the entrance. The lights were low inside, and it felt more like a club than an art venue. The exhibition space was packed, and Makenzie and Jasmin from Birdcloud made a makeshift stage atop the gallery's bar.
Several of Garland's Polaroids were blown up, and others were organized into thematic groups (like girls dressed up in animal heads, naked guys playing with poppers on dirty couches, the various stages of love and loss, etc.) on matte black walls. Around the center of the space were some recreations of Garland's monolith, a backyard ode to the tall black obstructions that gave knowledge to Kubrick's apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I overheard people mentioning the archival, obsessive quality of Garland's output, as well as his capacity to shoot at just the right moment — with Polaroids, you can't just snap away like you can with digital, or even traditional film cameras. I however, could snap away (with my cell phone, no less. Ah, technology!), and I've posted some of those shots below.
The show is up at Ovvio through March 8. If you missed the opening, you can read more about Garland's exhibit in the article I wrote in this week's Scene.
