Gabrielle Garland

Gabrielle Garland looks at space as a place people live, not a box for objects. Rooms as theatres of relation; marks left behind; a shared heritage. Every gesture, she says, is a way of staying.

Garland’s artistic journey began early; as the child of artists who met at Herron School of Art and Design, she has been painting and creating since childhood, continuing through her teen years and into the present. She describes the structural theme of her work as a kind of virtual collage, allowing multiple systems of order to coexist in a single piece without using computers for preliminary images. Her process involves sculpting forms out of paint, employing a palette of intense colors to take control of color as she does with framing and structure. She explores urban and suburban landscapes from public domains, such as city streets and sidewalks, using spaces as her primary source material and photographs as secondary documentation to capture diverse viewpoints and details.

In her creative practice, memory plays a crucial role; photographs remind her of personal experiences within spaces, functioning like blueprints to help her imagine and grasp environments as a whole. She often reflects on Richard Serra’s insights on how people interact with spaces over time. Garland challenges traditional rules of perspective to express her subjective perception of space, emphasizing that human experience involves movement and changing focus rather than fixed viewpoints. Her works embrace ambiguity, showing that ideas of order and disorder are subjective, and she aims for audiences to imagine narratives freely without judgment.

A key series, Artists’ Spaces, highlights how art activates domestic environments, featuring living spaces of figures like Michelle Grabner, Mickalene Thomas, Peter Halley, Izhar Patkin, and Laura Letinsky. Throughout her work, Garland explores the ways we inhabit domestic space, with portraits that, though devoid of human forms, are marked by evidence of human presence and properties.