Oversight

Colector Gallery

January 28th, 2023 –  March 17th, 2023

Oversight, Garrard’s solo show at Colector Gallery, brings together drawings, paintings, sculptures, and a large-scale wall installation to the gallery’s Poniente location in Monterrey, Mexico.

In her multifaceted practice that integrates painting, sculpture, sound, and video, Rachel Garrard articulates a mystical view of reality in which the border between the physical and ephemeral is porous and evershifting. Through her gossamer fractal abstractions, Garrard plays with this inherent ambiguity as she charts internal energetic and psychic states. She seeks out the metaphysical that manifests itself in the physical plane, her work a channel between the seen and unseen worlds. 

Garrard’s symbolic language intimately connects the internal with the universal. Using a visual vocabulary that echoes sacred geometry and runic symbols, she distills complex scientific theories about the nature of reality and perception. Her diaphanous drawings and paintings reveal the inner structures of the things that surround us, while her sculptures, by contrast, possess a defined corporeality. Ascension (2022), one of the three steel sculptures on view, is a brutalist portal that frames the landscape around it – a slit in time and space. Another sculpture, titled Intersection (2022), resembles a three-dimensional ocular aperture, a visual representation of the passage of light through the human eye, as in a camera obscura.

Exploring the fundamental elements of nature, Garrard uses natural materials such as quartz, ash, and rocks that she collects during field research trips. The paintings included in the exhibition are created from a rock powder pigment that she carefully grinds and applies to raw linen canvases in translucent washes of color. The applied pigment becomes a physical register of place and of past experiences, a portal to the metaphysical landscape of memory.

Occupying the entirety of a gallery wall is Garrard’s Only in Time Will You Understand, an installation she initially created during her six-week residency at Casa Wabi. It includes ceramic sculptures, crafted from local clay and cooked in a traditional Oaxacan oven, intermixed with found objects such as seedpods, sticks, and coconuts shells. It is a merging of the manmade and the natural, with connotations of an ancient ritual whose veiled mystic purpose is known only to the artist. Taken in their entirety, the works on view constitute a ceremonial space for contemplation and meditation.