November 4 - December 17, 2022
Kapp Kapp is pleased to present Screaming in a Whisper, Brianne Garcia’s debut New York solo exhibition and her first exhibition with Kapp Kapp. Garcia’s body of 20+ new paintings and one new sculpture, spanning a range of scale, technique, and media, is born from the tension and paradox of language. At the heart of Garcia’s practice is a thirst for truth, a seemingly endless course which reverts to language as a resource for clarity. Garcia’s work taunts the fickleness of language, which more often than not, provides an unreliable narrative; Garcia finds inspiration in the absence of definition, seeking relation instead through color, gesture, and mark-making.
Through this body of work, Garcia’s play between the support and surfaces of her paintings becomes a visual metaphor for her relationship to language. Language, as Garcia sees it, is loaded with tension yet freely open to revision, much like the provisional materials composing her paintings. Take fertile ground, 2022, which is compounded of stitched patches of canvas, painted/dyed tangles of rope tracing the phrase ‘there’s only time,’ eventually this rope furling and knotting itself into the stem of a rose Garcia constructed from ribbon. Though we find the piece in a still conclusion the materials that constitute it traveled through many permutations before reaching finality. Just as language and definition can be revised, Garcia’s practice allows for the possibility of rearrangement and regeneration henceforth- an interrogation and response to language’s confines.
Concurrently, Garcia turns to paradox itself to further this interrogation. Screaming in a Whisper, the titular oxymoron, defines the investigatory path of Garcia’s making. Considering these two opposing forces, a scream and a whisper, Garcia finds irony in their shared origins, the voice. A scream can contain a whisper and, likewise, a whisper can contain a scream; their definitions rooted more in their context than their manifestation.
Using a similar logic, Garcia considers the imagery of weeds throughout this body of work as a repeating motif, creating many small canvases depicting common weeds, themselves a paradox defined by their context. Taxonomically, there is no botanical definition of a weed, they are simply an invader to a desired plant or crop, desire as the defining crux of their identity. Garcia toys with this reconciliation by placing small pieces of mirror within her weed paintings, metaphorically connecting these works to an understanding of self-identity. The mirrors, likewise, literally reflect the present, an everchanging component of these works, reminding us of their unsettled definitions- a cheeky and pensive callback to AR Ammon’s poem.
Garcia in her many writings and postulations on this body of work notes color’s ability to unlock subconscious histories, desires, and emotions. This body of work is filled both with deep and bright colors, moments of quiet and moments of fire. Color, as Garcia write, “carries us through a river of non-linear time,” an appropriate guide through paradox and a fastidious exploration of self.
Screaming in a Whisper will be on view at Kapp Kapp through December 17.
Brianne Garcia (b. 1987 St. Louis, MO) lives and works in New York. Garcia earned her BA in English from the University of Missouri and earned her MA in Journalism from CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. Recent exhibitions include Precarious Arrangements, Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami, Florida; Winter Solstice, Fortnite Institute, New York; and What’s Outside the Window, A Reading Room, Melbourne, Australia.