Daughters and Saints - Christine Garvey
Daughters and Saints is a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist, Christine Garvey. Inspired by famous Renaissance paintings - Caravaggio’s Medusa, Parmigianino’s Madonna with the Long Neck, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes - Garvey’s colorful drawings re-interpret idealized images of femininity, beauty, and motherhood as inherited from classical painting. As a collection, Daughters and Saints presents a darker, more comical side to these ideals: bleeding breasts, misshapen wombs, self-severing heads, and the angry mouths of children. Through her work, the female body becomes something other than a vessel (The Madonna), a weapon (Judith) or a conquest (Medusa). Garvey presents the female body as powerful and imperfect, but more importantly, as having agency in its own pleasure, pain, and evolution.
Christine Garvey is based in Austin, TX.
On Friday, April 17, I [Ant] virtually sat down with artist Christine Garvey to talk about her Cube exhibition, Daughters and Saints, her process, and her inspirations. We started off by talking about the impact of COVID-19 on Raleigh, Austin TX (where she resides), and on the arts. Christine gave me a tour of her home studio and shared more about the influences behind her exhibition, which had only been open for one week before VAE had to indefinitely shut its doors to the public in the face of the pandemic. Throughout the interview, Christine and I explored and broke down the design of her exhibition, its feminist themes, and how concepts of ruin are addressed through her graphic, yet aesthetically captivating, mixed media drawings.
Interview accompanied by images courtesy of Christine Garvey
Christine So I forgot about all my work.
[shared laughter]
I was like, what is that show about? I forgot. I haven't seen the drawings in a while so I was like looking through the images like, oh yeah, that's what's there.
Ant Yeah, I had to read the gallery guide because I was like, at this point, everything was kind of happening so fast that now it's like, all right, next thing…You just opened your show, it had only been open for one week when we closed, whereas the artists that were in the show in the main gallery, they had been there since January. So for them, we were like, okay, if you need your work back, we'll ship it back to you now. We'll figure it out. But we were supposed to open a new show like a week ago? The first week in April, whenever that was.
C Yeah. So what are you guys gonna do about that? How is that working?
A We just pushed it back. We e-mailed all the artists pretty immediately after we closed and were like, hey sorry. This is the deal, this is what's happening, here is our plan. We're still moving forward with all of the exhibitions that we had planned for the year, maybe with just some minor tweaks or maybe combining a couple of concepts.
C Oh, yeah, no, it's wild times. I'm also part of a nonprofit gallery space here [Austin, TX] and we're trying to curate for the following year. We're like, how do we do this? It's kind of impossible to anticipate things.
A Yeah, it is. It definitely is. It's the anticipation part is pretty difficult. That's what we've been working around at VAE. But luckily, all of the ideas we had for exhibitions for later in the year were loose concepts and didn't have much meat to them yet. It's been really nice for Kyle and I to kind of be able to divide and conquer and do more research and be a little bit more prepared for things when we reopen. What were you working on for that space? What do you do there?
C It's called Mass Gallery, it's in Austin. It is members like...It's an artist collective! It's an artist collective gallery. I think there are like fifteen of us and we have a gallery space in town and we curate shows and we do like public programming and events and things. So before I was a member there, I had a show there and that's how I found out about them. It's a really great space. They bring artists from all over. And Austin has a similar scene to what I have gotten a vibe that Raleigh has, where it's like tight-knit community. It's a smaller city and there are not as many spaces as like New York or Chicago or something, but the spaces are really invested in putting quality stuff out.
A So what was happening there, and in Austin, right before everything shut down?
C We were curating a show. Oh, we had SXSW. SXSW was supposed to be happening.
A Oh yeah, yeah, yeah!
C Yeah! So all of that shut the city down and that had a huge effect on the economy of the city because a lot of money is brought in by SXSW. Now we're just improvising with the time we have. I think they're just going to push some of our exhibitions back and I think some of it's going to just be online.
A Yeah, I completely forgot that SXSW was supposed to be happening literally like right as all of this started. That was kind of one of the first big things, I feel like, to be shut down.
C True. I think we were all shocked, but it made sense because if they did not cancel it it would have brought so much potential spread of the virus to the city so it was a huge public health risk. So yeah…I thought an interview would be fun to do, especially with your background with curating and it sounds like you do so many different things, so I thought it would be kind of fun to talk about the show.
Installation shot of Christine Garvey’s exhibit Daughters and Saints
A I definitely am interested in your process…So I want to talk about the wall colors that you chose to paint the Cube (lavender and light green). I see some samples behind you. Are you in your own studio?
C I am! I feel very lucky to have my workspace in my house, that's been nice. Yes, it was my color testing for the show, which now I need to paint over. And it is funny to see this, the purple, because it does look like a big penis, weirdly.
A [laughs]
C I'm Skyping people and I'm like, I need to paint over that…
So I would say that I'm an image-maker, you know that is more how I might define myself. I was making sculptures last year and then kind of hit this wall where the feelings that I wanted to create and the installations that I wanted to create, which had a lot to do with the body and seeing the body as this thing that could come apart and put itself back together, how to experience the sense of ruin and the cause of pleasure in ruin, and I thought that feeling of ruin was going to be best experienced through materials. So I started making objects. I started using hair and using tar and spray paint and all of these really tactile things. That was a hugely generative work and time period for me.
This past Fall I had a lot of stuff going on and all I really wanted to do was to sit, and I wanted to draw, and I wanted to draw in one place, and I wanted to copy classic images or paintings that I had always really been drawn to. I have a long history with Italy, I studied abroad in Florence and studied Renaissance art. I did a Fulbright there in 2015 where I was looking at and studying Renaissance painting and working at these technology museums. And so I have collected all of these books of Renaissance painting and I just wanted to kind of like, sit with them. I wanted to observe how motherhood was being presented in these books, thinking about motherhood and like the expectations of motherhood and kind of that pathway of being a mother and what that might look like.
All I did in this process when I really needed to kind of get my footing and ground myself, was to copy these images. So I would sit and I would look at, you know, these Madonnas and Child and I would copy them, or I'd start to look at more grotesque images like Judith and Holofernes, which is really violent, and I would copy it. Or I would look at Parmigianino's Madonna With the Long Neck and I would copy it. And there is something, you know, in my creative process where through copying, I'm able to really internalize content and then make it my own and reinterpret it in a different way. It's really kind of fundamental process of how I learn.
So that was like the place of where the drawings came from. I often use color in a really funny way, kind of similarly to when you see these Renaissance images of Judith and Holofernes, or the Medusa…They’re images that are, when you look at them, they're really compelling because they're so well-made and you're like, wow, I just want to continue to look at that. It's so captivating, but the image itself is really troubling. The subject matter is really troubling or the violence of it is really troubling. And so as an artist I'm super compelled by that push and pull of the wanting to engage with something and in that process of being drawn in by something that might be really, you know, enticing, you're confronted with something that's also really problematic. I love the poles of that and the way that I engage with that is through color. When I make a work my color palette is really lively. It's really kind of sugary or fun, but oftentimes what I'm rendering is something that is troubling in some way. Because the color has a language of its own, it really undercuts that trouble in a way that I find really interesting. So a lot of times people will look at my work and they'll be like, “I would be so freaked out by this if it wasn't for the color. I would feel troubled by this if it wasn't for the color.” And that to me is really interesting because you don't exactly know where to place yourself. There's an element of joy and celebration in this topic of ruin, you know, or self severing or destruction, which is oftentimes what I am depicting, you know?
A Obviously, the colors of the gallery, I think, are very much so informed by the colors in the works themselves. The arch shapes that you chose to paint on the walls, they call upon Gothic architecture and architecture from the Renaissance and what we see in paintings from that time, too. So, would you say that the color scheme for the gallery walls was first informed by the colors in your paintings and then the shapes of the arches on the wall came from the more historical context of the works you were looking at?
C Yeah, and I wanted to create a temple of some kind. I think that kind of came from the images. The name of the show is Daughters and Saints, so it's like taking a look at these characters who I think are oftentimes flattened. When we think of Madonna and Child we don't think of it with any sense of specificity. It's like an archetype. So I'm taking that kind of archetype and presenting a more nuanced representation of it, whether that is making the Madonna seem kind of ghostly, or monstrous in some way, but also really ethereal and beautiful in her own right while also presenting kind of a tense relationship between the child and the mother. I took all of these images and I recreated them and I wanted to create a temple that could hold them in some way. So, when you walk into the space it doesn't have that anonymous feeling of like, a white gallery space where you distance yourself from the work. You are invited into an environment that feels in the spirit of the images themselves and the colors that are being used. It was really hard to choose colors in some ways because, if you think about it, you know, the arches, we get this feeling of it being a temple or a church or a place that has some type of pattern affiliated with it. But if I picked blue or if I picked red or if I picked any of these things, the associations we have with those colors can are really strong and that might pull us in one way or another. So I wanted to pick colors that synthesize the work and the range of the colors in the work, but also felt like you didn't have a direct connection to the Renaissance, like a navy blue or a pink. [Lavender and light green] are kind of unusual colors that you wouldn't see in a cathedral, right? So it has that kind of blend of cathedral and carnival, which is where my work kind of situates in a funny way. So that's how I thought about it. It also is the quantity of the color. So you'll see I had to paint the archway, or a version of it in my studio, to really understand what's going to be the impact of that color when it's painted in a space. How does that color feel in space? I was really happy with how it came out.
A Yeah, I really love the two colors you chose. They work beautifully together. I've seen that gallery painted a lot of different colors and I think that the two you painted are probably the best colors that I've seen in there. I think that gallery wall paint colors are a huge debate when it comes to the art world and a lot of people feel very strongly about the whole idea of the white cube.
C What do you think about that?
A I...I don't know. I kind of, I feel like I stand the no-man's-land because I've seen some shows, like yours, that are painted beautifully, but then I've seen some shows where the walls should have just been white. I saw this show not too long ago and they had painted the walls pink. It was the softest shade of like, baby girl pink you could imagine. But it just looked gray. When you put the gallery lights on it it just washed it out completely and turned to gray. Wasn't a great application. At the same museum there was a different exhibition on postwar art from Japan, which was a cool perspective because, you know, we spend so much time seeing American art from the postwar period, that’s what I study so I'm a little bit partial to it, but the show, they had dark gray walls and then all the pedestals had like these modernist steely objects on them. So everything was just like one shade of gray. It was a very fittingly modernist color palette, you know, but very hard to see the piece and take it in. That's the whole reason we love the white wall, it doesn't distract from the content and we can kind of view it objectively. Yeah. You know, I don't think there's anything wrong with one side or the other.
C It's risky! I had a show where I had a wall that was pink and the first shade of pink I painted I was like [screams]! That does not work! You freak out a little bit because what you imagine in your studio is always going to be different than the space. You're definitely taking a chance.
A Yes, definitely. And I think people expect to see white, you know? Whether they realize the historical context of the white gallery or not, it doesn't matter. But I think it's one of the things that people don't realize is there until it's changed, you know? Until they see a wall in a museum that isn't white, they're like, “oh, wait, that's an option! Wow. Why don't we see more of that,” you know? And I think that a lot of art that is in Renaissance galleries and museums, you know, we get those dark like reds and greens, which I love. Those colors are so passion filled to me, but when it comes to the contemporary art world, I think it can kind of go either way. And I think the strength of the work can help or hinder those decisions as well. So like in your case, where the colors are in the works themselves, I can say, oh, this green is right here in this drawing. I think that's a nice little connection. I like that because I like things to go together and, you know, for things to be cohesive! And your show is!
C And too, I still am like, was that green the right choice? I still think about it. But I think the whole point of having a show is that it's informative. To go back to what you were saying, I'm like, where to go next? Any time you put work out there the goal, or at least for me, is to get more information about it, about what it can do. So if I picked colors that I'd already worked with before, for me, that wouldn't have been the most useful. These felt like really risky colors, but I have much more information now to move forward and to kind of push myself to the next thing…And too, [the gallery at VAE] is an unusual space because it is a cube. So like you're moving around it, but that circulation is not really why. You're kind of spinning in place. The archways were another way to create that sense of movement, and to give you a sense of height. It really draws your eye up to look higher.
A Definitely! I mean, after all, it is called the Cube. Before, I know you talked about your study with materials and 3D and sculpture. Had you ever dealt with subject matter like this before in those media? Looking at Renaissance paintings, I mean. I know that you studied abroad and that is a huge part of this, obviously, but did the classic paintings ever come through in your work before in a different way?
C Not specifically. I think I've always been influenced by Renaissance painting and I've admired it, but in terms of directly referencing it, no. I think a lot of the themes in my work have dealt with ruin, and ruin is such a celebrated thing in Italy, like the celebration of history and destruction and living in that side-by-side in our current world. Kind of like basking in the possibility of ruin. I have always appreciated that about Italian culture and I have seen that theme kind of rise up in my work. This was a way for me to really not just directly digest these images that I admired, but to think specifically about these feminist themes that I wanted to touch upon. In my work before I was specifically working with self-portraiture and I started to copy and model my own body and my own image and I would take that thing apart and reanimate it. A lot of times when I do that in my process, it's kind of to come to terms with the idea that our bodies will inevitably fail us, and that is just a central piece of humanity that we all have to deal with, especially in these moments. When I deal with uncertainty the thing that I always try to think about, specifically with this pandemic especially, the thing that I always try to come back to is the truth that I know. I think when I reference the body and what it can do and what it can't do, and specifically the female body and how it's been represented as an instrument of other people. For example, Caravaggio's Medusa, and the legacy of Medusa and how her head was cut off and used as a weapon to destroying things. Or Judith and Holofernes, Judith was used as a weapon, an instrument of destruction. In all of these Madonnas and Child where the female body is like a vessel for somebody else to use... I think in drawing all of these images, I could claim that body back and I could make and have a sense of agency in its own destruction and its own pleasure and its own power. So, a lot of the times in my work, the body is being torn apart, but that severing seems like it's coming from within. Self severing versus something that is being forced or instrumented by a male force or an external force. Does that make sense?
A Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That was very beautifully put. The part when you were talking about the Madonna with Child, and you said "the female body is a vessel for somebody else to use," that made me feel a certain way…
C Yeah. I mean, what I think one of the things that I might start researching next is, I love the work of Artemisia Gentileschi. She's like one of the few female painters that came forward from [the Renaissance].
A Oh, she’s great!
C She presents a more complex representation of motherhood because she herself was a very reluctant mother. And her story is really troubling…She was the daughter of a painter, so she had a lot of like access to learning how to paint in the community. And then she was raped by her tutor and then put on trial and tortured when she was on trial, and then married off in order to legitimize and make it okay that she was raped. And then she was a very reluctant mother, at a young age. She has a really hard story. So, she has these images of motherhood where it's a mother breastfeeding and her breasts are bleeding and she's so disconnected from her child. And I think, where does that story fit into this? How can I bring some dimensionality to that story? Where does the violence, where does the disconnection, and where do the kind of troubling aspects of early motherhood, where does it sit in all of this? I'm looking for that in some way through the body and through how I draw or recreate these images.
A Yeah, absolutely. So…
[long pause]
A ...I just need to sit with that. That was a lot...
C Right now I’m looking at an image of Parmigianino's Madonna With the Long Neck. I love this image so much because that baby is so huge! But also everything is so elongated. So there's a sense of something else that I'm tapping into in a different way, the exaggeration of the body and the long hands, and the long childhood body, it was a way that [the artists] could show their mastery, their understanding of the body and making it work in a composition. But it's also so grotesque, that exaggeration, and I'm really compelled by that. I tried to tap into that in the piece where I recreate it with the really long fingers, the kind of monstrous baby, the disfigured breasts, and the sloppy head coming off of the neck. Yeah, I like to exaggerate that piece of it.
A Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's like you were saying, that it was all about mastery of the body and kind of retapping into those classical ideas. Then you get a painting like Parmigianino's, where we can really appreciate it and we love it and we see it, but you know, it's that little tweaked kind of sense of perfection that I think gets overlooked a lot. I definitely see that in your work, for sure. So, outside of these classical paintings and all of the Renaissance art that you've studied, what other artists do you look at as inspiration, in your work, and just in your life in general?
C Oh, man. I mean, it really changes from week to week.
[shared laughter]
C I've always loved Francis Bacon. He's like an early favorite.
A Oh, yeah.
C I think that he was the first artist I ever really loved. His use of color...and those with space and the body. I've always loved that. I love Kiki Smith as I move more into making images and then making objects. Kiki Smith's practice is so great because wherever the idea belongs she finds the right format, whether it's a sculpture or print. She is so free in where she lets the ideas live and I'm trying to learn how to do that more in my work.
I love David Altmejd. He is a Canadian sculptor based in New York and Montreal, I think. I just like the tactile quality, his use of color, his use of humor, and his pulling the body apart. He makes the body feel like silly putty in a way that's so funny, but troubling.
I love David Shrigley, his sense of humor and that he is not afraid of being silly and dark at the same time. I like people who can swing between, they don't see these things as different states. They see the darkness as enhancing the silliness and with silliness as enhancing the darkness. Art that I don't know exactly how to feel in front of, and that I can feel different every time I look at it, is the most compelling stuff. Art, that doesn't take itself overly seriously, too. I think that is the stuff that I feel most engaged with right now. I think we're in a culture where we take things way too seriously, I don't know if that's even what I want to say, but like it's like we're in this culture of "wokeness" that's just hard as a viewer sometimes to know where to sit and how to engage in a way where you're challenging yourself, but at the same time, being authentic to yourself.
A Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's easier to engage when you see those kind of polarities broken down, and I think it makes it easier to sit with the work and be with it. It's you know, it's less, I don't want to use the word aggressive. It's easier to approach, like you said.
C That's where I'm at right now. It's not to say that I don't want to be challenged, but there is a looseness in all of those artists’ work that I find very forgiving.
A That's a great point. Absolutely. Um, so...oh, I just found a typo in the gallery guide. I just caught it out of the corner of my eye.
[shared laughter]
A So you said the idea of the title, Daughters and Saints, comes directly from these paintings. Does that have any other sort of significance to you, or were there any meanings that the works kind of revealed to you while you were making them? Like, things you didn't expect to happen or things you didn't expect to kind of think about?
C Things that the work revealed that I wasn't expecting?
A Yeah.
C Yeah. I mean, like all the time.
A Yeah, I know that was kind of a loaded question.
C Yeah. No, it's a good question. I guess the way the show comes together for me is like you just follow a hunch…you follow a hunch and you do it with a sense of persistence enough and patience that you generate enough content that what is surprising reveals itself. And you get to know yourself better because you sit in front of this work and you're like, okay wow, I just copied all of these Renaissance paintings and their violence, but they're colorful and they are pulling the female body apart and they have kind of a disconnected relationship with other figures in the frame. Like what's happening there? When you've been making art for a long time, you're able to draw everything that has surfaced in connection with a longer thread of themes that have come up in your work again and again.
I think at this point for me and my work, what is interesting is where the drawing and the sculptures fit together, but also these more feminist themes that are emerging in my work. And also my relationship to religion…I was raised Catholic, but I never have thought about that as a part of my art practice or as having any significance there. I think as I kind of dig deeper into hierarchy and the things we revere, and patriarchal systems, and Italian culture, and depicting sainthood, and depicting motherhood, and depicting all these things, I think I'm starting to find where religion fits in all of this. I'm also thinking about how and what I want to subvert about those structures and how I want to separate them. Maybe a piece of that is with this temple that came about is having it be like, what is this as a place? What do we do in a place like this? What do we worship? What do we pay attention to? What is elevated and what is diminished and how? As an artist, I can control that and kind of draw connection to a holy space, and maybe subvert the conventions of that holy space through an installation. So that's a piece of it that's come up.
The title of the show itself, Daughters and Saints, is, I guess I like the word daughter because it implies that you are in relation to somebody else, you are somebody's daughter. You're not your own person, there's a sense of obligation or expectation, or “belongingness," in the word daughter that I feel in these images and looking at them as being like, they are women that are of other people. And then Saints, I guess I see that word as something that's more autonomous, or your power comes from within. I like that kind of the push/pull between those two words. It is what makes them different. You know, one is human and one is other worldly. And how do they coexist?
A No, I definitely have the same attraction to the title of that show for that reason. Yeah, that was another good answer. I'm glad that you touched a little bit on your relationship to religion because that was another thing that I was going to ask about. Your exhibition definitely has a very heavy Catholic feeling.
C Does it? Okay, interesting.
A Yeah. Well, I think so. I mean, I definitely identify more with the pieces that look at the Greek examples. I mean, obviously, all the paintings are Renaissance Italian paintings, but I love the ancient classical allusion, that's one thing I look at a lot in my own work. I spent a long time studying Hellenistic art and Greek sculpture, and spent a lot of time doing alt process photo work where I was kind of tuning into those personalities of heroes and legends in similar kind of ways in which you're mining in your own territory. So I am always interested in how we kind of latch on to these historical figures, whether they were real or not, and kind of self-identify with them a little bit.
C Yeah, totally! It's like an archetype that you get to reinterpret and every artist has their interpretation of that archetype, and I think that's so cool. So it's nice, it's kind of interesting to like participate in that through copying.
A Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So once the show closes and the walls are back to white where do you see the work developing after this?
C Yeah. Well you know, right now is a funny moment because I have been thinking a lot about, or at least I try to think a lot about, how what I'm making can be in service to where I'm at. It's a lot about feeling sane and grounded, and like dealing with the repetition of every day, it's kind of all like blending into the next day...
A Amen!
C One big mushy day. One of the ways that I have been dealing with that is through self-portraiture. I've been sitting and just drawing myself. There's something really cathartic about that repetition. I imagine that what might start to happen is that I might start embodying some of these themes through self portraiture. I don't want to speak too soon. Again, like I said earlier, all really successful creative periods for me are when I have a hunch, and I just persist on that hunch and then see what happens. So, right now I'm doing a lot of self-portraiture. I imagine that will blend in with some of the stuff I'm looking at, and then hopefully I will make some drawings that are big. We'll see what happens. And then, if I ever install them, they'll be in some type of installation format. So I like to mix it up so it's not just like a white cube.
A That sounds great! I look forward to seeing how the work develops. I love the installation aspect to all of your work, it’s definitely well thought out and executed.
C Awesome! Thank you so much. It's been so fun to chat with you!
A Absolutely! It’s been great. Thanks Christine, I hope that you have a good day!
C Thanks, Ant! Have a good day! See you later. Bye!
