Details:

This painting, partly a response to a composition by the artist Mary Heilmann, depicts a night drive down an empty road as various views of the stars and the horizon appear. The artist used grommets to poke holes in the canvas, allowing light through the surface.
Unframed

① Artwork:

Oncoming, Ongoing

This painting depicts a night drive down an empty road as various views of the stars and horizon appear. For the artist, drives during the transition from day to night offer an experience similar to traversing an "expanding tunnel" of "infinite time"; night folds into day as an endless road extends ahead. As darkness narrows the field of vision, the only option presented to the driver is to continue moving toward a horizon that never fully arrives. This disorienting experience can be both suspenseful and comforting.

The artist used grommets to poke holes in the canvas, allowing light to stream through the surface. This approach is an adoption of formalist ideas from art history as a means to make "a functional material" part of an "apparently non-functional object." This composition also exemplifies the artist's intense relationship with color, which functions in her work as a "portal to pasts and futures as yet undiscovered."

Garcia says of this work: "Formally, and structurally, I now realize I was contending with Mary Heilmann’s diptych Surprise from 2012. This dark slick road on the bottom [of the] canvas lead[s] to this mountainous, messy, technicolor horizon that sits right on top of the road. Sky stacked on top of land . . . For Heilmann, her material interests often seemed to be the paint itself. I am preoccupied with materials that call to be incorporated into a painting."

Specs:

39 inches
38.5 inches

③ Artist:

Brianne Garcia

In her paintings, Brianne Garcia treats color as a portal to both the past and possible futures. The artist paints, dyes, cuts, glues, and otherwise creates her compositions to transform her personal existence into shareable objects and experiences. For Garcia, color is the ultimate paradox—something that remains deeply personal but is the embodiment of a universal language beyond words.

Brianne Garcia, a self-taught artist, has produced commissions for Coming Soon in New York City.

Exhibitions of the artist's work have taken place at Sugarlift in Brooklyn, New York; and A Reading Room in Melbourne, Australia.

Garcia lives and works in New York City.

Brianne Garcia:
Oncoming, Ongoing, 2021
Dye and acrylic on canvas; grommet; thread
38.5 × 39.0 inches /