White Room: Christopher Garrett

In our second White Room we are proud to present the first New York solo exhibition by Christopher Garrett. Garrett’s installation includes a labyrinth created from fragments of thrift-store paintings, two sculptures, two drawings, and a recent text work created from ‘rubbings’ taken from individual letter forms found on gravestones. This text work serves as a kind of ‘introduction’ to Garrett’s larger aesthetic and sensibility. Derived from a Roxy Music lyric – the text reads “ As Destiny Wills It / So Seasons Will Change / Just Like You” and announces a sense of the ‘pop’ melancholia that pervades Garrett’s other works. Employing the figure of the romantic outsider (who often takes on the surrogate form of a skeleton) Garrett creates elusive, open-ended narratives that seem to gently undermine the morbid symbolism, and individualistic fatalism typically associated with such characters.

Christopher Garrett lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: “A Private Ocean”, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, Ill (2006); and “Melting Down”, Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco (2004). Recent group shows include: “Cabin Fever”, Rivington Arms, New York (forthcoming); “Having New Eyes”, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2006); “Lo-Gressive Living”, The Approach, London (2004); “We Are Electric”, Deitch Projects, New York (2003); “Black Rainbow”, Lucky Tackle, Oakland (2003); “Bay Area Now #3”, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2002); amongst others.