RIK GARRETT
Opening reception Saturday October 18, 4 - 8 pm
receptions will also be held concurrently for the exhibitions
"William Mortensen: American Grotesque"
"Lu Zhang: All The Lost Souls"
"In Missa Interfectionis"
The Dance of Death, Hexes, Voodoo, Curses and Witchcraft.
September 30 2014, Brooklyn NY - Stephen Romano Gallery in Dumbo Brooklyn is very excited to announce a one person show of the photographic works of Chicago artist Rik Garrett. Garrett will be presenting selected works from his new publication from FULGUR entitled "Earth Magic"
Garrett uses the traditional wet plate collodion process, an all analog process which dates to approximately the Civil War era, and is labor intensive and involved. The result is a negative on a piece of glass which is then printed in the darkroom.
Garrett has created images of feminine enchantment that feel out of time and otherworldly. These pictures are haunting and sensual at once, giving intimate glimpses into his dark muses’ rituals, while managing to never lose their mystery. Using camera as scrying mirror, Garrett is a magician unto himself, bringing us visual messages from the beyond.
Rik Garrett was born and raised in Washington State. Against the grey skies and green foliage of the Pacific Northwest he spent his formative years combating the boredom of mundane daily life by creating artwork, writing stories and reading books about the fantastic and mysterious. Garrett was given his first camera at the age of six. He watched his mother study photography and eventually open her own portrait studio.
At the age of 14 he followed her lead and picked up his first real camera a Nikon that his grandmother had given his father. Lacking any overt religious or cultural traditions, he latched onto photography as a family heritage. Over the years he found the historical connections between his seemingly divergent interests: the medium of photography being married to esoteric studies throughout history via spirit photography, thoughtography, Radionics and Parapsychology.
Having grown up in Washington State, where the forest is all pervasive, it's a place where the trees are taken for granted because they are always a part of the backdrop. When he moved to Chicago 8 years ago, within a year Rik began having dreams where he spoke to rocks, ate dirt and crawled nude through the forest in the body of a wild woman. Within a few years he began working on Earth Magic, not tying the imagery together with the dreams until later.
The artist is also inspired in part by classic tales and witchcraft treaties such as the Malleus Maleficarum, which positioned the "witch" as a woman, outcast from society and in touch with nature. Someone to be feared. In these books, these are bad things - Rik had to wonder if they were not instead signs of power.
Drawing on the historical precedent of the apparently static realm of analog photography having been used to document the invisible, further studies caused him to dedicate himself to exploring the liminal realms between supposed opposites: documented reality and fantasy, science and the occult, visible and invisible, past and future. His explorations have taken many forms: photographs exhibited in the United States and Europe, long-range handmade book projects, mixed media pieces and explorations with Kirlian photography. Long-term fixations on the subjects of witchcraft, feminine archetypes and humankind’s relationship with nature led to the Earth Magic series, photographed with the wet plate collodion process. Garrett currently lives in Chicago, where he teaches in the photography department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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“With Earth Magic I’ve envisioned a matristic, nature-based world; a female-centric, ritualistic community completely apart from the rest of society. This is a history of “witchcraft” devoid of “witch hunts”, a race of women who draw their energy and inspiration from the Earth itself. What if there were a truth to the myths of Amazons and the books like Aradia, Gospel of the Witches? What if the fierce Maenads of Greek mythology still existed today, hidden from view? What if these truths were presented faithfully?”
Rik Garrett
Solo Exhibitions: 2012 Earth Magic,Resistance Gallery, London, Earth Magic,Morpho Gallery, Chicago IL, 2008 Intimate Alchemy, Edi’s Weinstube in association with the Museum of Porn in Art, Zurich, Switzerland, 2006 Rik Garrett, Edi's Weinstube in association with the Museum of Porn in Art, Zurich, Switzerland, Rik Garrett, Develop studios, Seattle, W 2004 Hymn to Babalon, The Mercury, Seattl,e WA 2003 Awakening, Aurafice Caf, Seattle, WA
Group Exhibitions 2012 Act II Fiction Brings it Closer curated group exhibition, LeRoy Neiman Center, Chicago IL, 2011 Shades of Grey auction curated by Danielle Ezzo, Daniel Cooney Gallery, New York, NY 2010 Dirty Show Chicago, invited artist, Viaduct Theater, Chicago IL, 2009 The Little Deaths, Shadow Space Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Curiosities, Robert Daniel Gallery, Tacoma, WA Seattle Erotic Art Festival, invited artist, Seattle Center Exhibition Hall, Seattle, WA 3 Feet High and Rising, Per Populus Gallery, Chicago, IL Dirty Show Zurich, Kino Roland in association with the Museum of Porn in Art, Zurich, Switzerland 2008 Steven Johnson Leyba and Rik Garrett, the Nineteen Hundred and One Gallery, Chicago, IL Weekend Fling, Rik Garrett, Sara Renae Jones and MD Woodward, ALLRiSE Gallery, Chicago, IL, Seattle Erotic Art Festival gala, invited artist via Art@Large, Seattle Center Exhibition Hall, Seattle
For further information and visuals, please contact
Stephen Romano Gallery
romanostephen@gmail.com or 646 709 4725
Stephen Romano Gallery is a new addition to the DUMBO arts community, having opened its doors in April of 2014. Prior to opening the current gallery, Stephen Romano was a private art dealer for 15 years specializing in masters of self-taught and visionary artists such as Henry Darger, Martin Ramirez, Charles Dellschau, Bill Traylor, Darcilio Lima, and many others. The Gallery's most recent exhibition "Mysterium Cosmographicum" was well received and reviewed.Stephen Romano has been a participant in many art fairs including PULSE and The Metro Show.
In 2013, Stephen Romano produced a seminal 330-page monograph on Texan visionary artist Charles Dellschau designed by Marquand Books and distributed by DAP. The book generated several positive reviews from a wide variety of publications such as Bookforum, Raw Vision Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, Antiques and the arts and Design Observer among many others. With an introduction by Stephen Romano, the book features the final published essay by renowned art writer Thomas McEvilley, as well as contributions from the founder of The Museum of Everything, James Brett, and the curator of Smithsonian Museum of Aerospace, Thomas Croutch. In the same year, Romano also published the first ever post-mortem retrospective catalog of works by Darcilio Lima and most recently a catalogue of a previously unknown photographic series from 1925 by William Mortensen "A Pictorial Compendium of Witchcraft," with an introduction by A.D. Coleman. Most recently, Stephen Romano Gallery had the honor of publishing a catalog of works by artist Pavel Kraus with an essay by David Ebony.
recent press .
ONE STOP INTO BROOKLYN
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