Kim Garcia
I leave this standing stone to be a sign
March 16 - April 13, 2019
For her exhibition, I leave this standing stone to be a sign, Kim Garcia presented a new body of mixed-media works in sculpture and drawing. The exhibition uses fiction to confront the tension between ideas of collaboration, interpersonal relationships, and community. Materials and process converge to result in forms that are both familiar and foreign. Through a layered approach to objects and imagery, the artist asks us to consider the work’s past and the residual myth that remains.
My practice is committed to the investigation of social objects that are grouped to form a constellation built through forms and fictions. In this constellation, these disparate objects negotiate proximities and are always transitioning away from where they once were.
Fiction is used as a productive site for describing states of instability, where I rely on residue from social interactions as a catalyst for my practice. The work appears as vacated scenes where physical interdependencies and contradictions are exposed and stagnant. These scenes are within topics of interpersonal connection, community structures, and the fallibility of memory, where I dismantle and restructure their foundation through layered sculptural installations, leaving space in-between the objects as a passage for viewers to navigate through the work.
By altering the original foundation, sculpture and drawing are used to suspend the scene and create a space where questions can circulate within its atmosphere. Where do past sentiments go when looked at from the present? What future can be built from a forgotten past, and how can we move forward without dissolving ourselves? The sentiment of my practice is to give power to the absent; what isn’t visible, what may be powerless, and what cannot be easily defined.
Kim Garcia was born and raised in the Paradise Hills neighborhood of San Diego. She received an MFA from UC Irvine in 2018 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
