Bio
Devon Dewey Garcia (b. Los Angeles, California) is a multimedia artist living and working in Brunswick, ME and Pittsburgh, PA. She explores connection, suspension, and transit through printmaking, paint, illustration, and video and sculptural installation. She studied metal engraving and contemporary art theories in Valparaíso, Chile, and is currently in coastal Maine delving into installation art. Garcia has extended her creative practice and art knowledge to professional experiences as a short film production designer, art journal reviewer, theater writer, and gallery curator. She currently works in design, editing, and brand strategy. She will graduate with a degree in Hispanic Studies and Visual Arts from Bowdoin College.
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Artist Statement
I observe moments in suspension and in motion: tactile experiences, connection and estrangement, and human traces that emerge and linger. I am motivated by movement – contemporary dance, touch, improvisational jazz musings, hand gestures, the transit of people within and between spaces. My process is rooted in the rhythm of the line, or of copied movements and pieces, and the experimental agitation of such within a defined space. Decisive gestural markings and carefully defined detail hang in a balance in pencil, ink, paint, and print media. My work cares deeply about the line yet looks to minimally delineate.
I am curious about one’s positioning within the space of the room and the flat page and seek to understand the point at which the static and dynamic converge and converse. My work eschews a neatly observed repetition in favor of a deliberate collection of impulses and experimentations. I hope to capture the diverse emotional language of moving through and interacting with this world and our nonspecific yet familiar shared experiences.
Curatorial Statement
In paintings, drawings, and prints, Devon Garcia explores how traces of motion can show what might have been as much as what remains. Playing with perceptions of mark-making processes as evidence of action, Garcia sometimes creates raw material expressions, other times carefully fabricated illusions. Her panel paintings capture ephemeral movements in acrylic, ink, and graphite. Inspired by Surrealist automatism and the emotive forms of Robert Motherwell, this series of abstract works entitled Like This takes the fluid physical interactions of media as subject. Monochrome drips, smears, and smudges exhibit energetic emotion over swathes of muted colors. Garcia’s ink and graphite drawings also engage with the expressivity of gesture, depicting forms with deliberate but often incomplete lines. By creating absence in space, these works represent presences that cannot be fully seen but are still not imperceptible.
Let’s Make A Copy Of That probes similar questions of appearance and material, complicated by the processes of reproduction in photography and printed media. Radiating around an image of a photocopier printed across a grid of 8.5 x 11” pages, this installation features drawn, hand-printed and inkjet components disguised as each other. The multi-part assemblage of multi-layer images reveals actions of printing, invoking human presence much like Garcia’s drawings; fragmented representations of bodies suggest an unseen whole, while evidence of process points to the activity of a once-present body. As this collection of works examines how fixed marks can communicate gesture, it also provides a view of human experience as the poignant but tenuous perception of transient movements through time and space.
– Zac Wilson
