above: Angie Reed Garner "shoetree #1" (detail) 48 x 60"

Angie Reed Garner

recall (2000-2024)

reception and artist talk tba

Any sufficiently disruptive event prompts a reevaluation. What have I done? What am I doing? What do I want to do? I decided to hang some paintings from the past two dozen years and appraise the ground and canvas covered. 

It’s a thing to figure out what art needs to be in 2025. When I check in with other artists there is this shared sense of panic and dread and anger at how horrible things are happening every day to vulnerable people, increasingly including us. As a demographic we mostly don’t look away, though what we look at varies a whole lot. 

Making more art makes no sense. How will it help? But what else am I going to do. Other people tell us that art still matters and to keep on keeping on, and I feel that way about other artists: please don't stop. Things are horrible enough without losing art too. 

But I don’t want to be part of normalizing the horror. I am looking hard at resiliency vs. normalcy. The latter damages awareness.

For this show I dug old show cards out of boxes, trying to figure out the location and year a piece was painted. With this show I really wanted to reconstruct my life, because I don’t know it. When I guess at events in my own timeline, it’s after gaffe after gaffe. I try not to “remember” but to reconstruct from a few polished milestones: I was in Berlin for 9/11, watching the second tower come down on tv live; I was in Lahore eating leftover chocolate Christmas cake when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. I was in Abu Dhabi when Bin Laden was found/killed, and well settled and acting up in Louisville for Occupy Ice.

Why does it matter? There is this idea that you progress or mature as a painter, and also spiritually. I have to say I don’t see it, apart from accumulating more technical know-how. I used to care so much about painting the details just right, and now that’s almost funny. So I am more free, in a sense. But I am a little bothered that I am so out of control of my own story. I feel I should know where I was and when. But I don’t. 

This show consists of big pieces I still own, mostly because they are big. Included are Yes we both paint, a collaborative installation with Joyce Garner funded by a grant in 2000 from the Kentucky Foundation for Women; pink is for girls, exploring and rejecting foundational framings of masculinity and femininity via Hellenic myth/art; 2 multipanel installations painted in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates; Louisville paintings from Occupy Ice and the Uprising; and pandemic and post-pandemic era paintings invoking the landscape for resilience and renewal.

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