04-24-09 – On Saturday, April 18, art lovers gathered at the Spencertown Academy Arts Center gallery to view Richard Garrison’s exhibition American Color. Garrison creates his abstract work from color patterns found in such familiar elements of the American commercial landscape as supermarkets and fast-food restaurants.
Remember Faith Popcorn? She predicts color trends. Richard Garrison records the colors found in his surrounding landscape.
He collects the cardboard packaging purchased by his family, such as toys, food containers, and clothing tags. Then he cuts and pastes collage color studies of his family’s consumption.
I really liked his drive-through color scheme studies. He photographs his experience at Starbucks, Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s, and then makes very analytical painted color studies of his urban landscapes. The watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper studies are matched to the structural elements of the drive-through. The color impressions of the menu, ordering box, purchase and pick-up areas of the fast-food restaurants are recorded in separate color bars. I guess you might call him the fast-food Josef Albers.
Richard Garrison showed two large ballpoint pen drawings constructed by using a 1986 spirograph design toy. In another series, rows of color dots were systematically matched to a single item found on the pages of weekly flyers from Walgreens, Jo-Ann Fabrics & Crafts, Kmart, and Toys R Us.
Richard Garrison explains his art in this way: "My work involves collective, systematic processes that reflect personal observations and interactions with elements of suburbia. I create abstractions of the familiar, such as supermarkets, housing developments, parking lots, and fast-food restaurants. Sites are interpreted with various surveying methods including color matching, architectural measuring, photography, process drawing, and Global Positioning System (GPS) mapping. The collected data is structured to reflect personal and sometimes absurd perceptions of my environment. Materials and processes for each project are specifically selected to communicate visual, conceptual, and emotional aspects of the subject. Surrounded by consumerism, I have developed a critical yet tolerant perspective of the American 'big box' landscape. This sense of ambiguity is the core of my work, centered around objective yet intimate encounters with banality."
The exhibition, which was curated by Gwenn Mayers and Nancy Van Deren, will run through Many 24, 2009.
