CRG Book by ryandidonato

Published By L A S T GA SP PU BLISH IN G & G R AN D CEN T R A L P RE S S

The Saddest Place on Earth T H E A RT

CA MI LLE RO SE GA RCI A “After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say, ‘I want to see the Manager.” – William S. Burroughs –

This book is dedicated to Grandpa Niesen,who never lost his sense of enchantment.

C ONTENTS

PREAMBLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE EVIDENT CHARM OF CAMILLE ROSE GARCIA by MIKE MCGEE . . . . . . . . Page 09 LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND by LYNN ZELEVANSKY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 11 THE DARK WEIRD STUFF by CHON NORIEGA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 13

THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 17 THE SOFT MACHINE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 23 CREEPCAKES BAKERY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 34

RETREAT SYNDROME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 39

SLEEPWALKERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 48 WHO’S AFFRAID OF THE PEPPERMINT MAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 50

OPERATION OPTICON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 63 DOOMSDAY ANIMALS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 79 PHARMACEUTICOOLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 81

ULTRAVIOLENCELAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 89 I MUST NOT THINK BAD THOUGHTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 110 SUBTERRANIAN ORPHANS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 114

DREAMTIME ESCAPE PLAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 117 CODICIL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

BIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 131 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 132 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 133 SPECIAL THANKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 134

THE EVIDENT CHARM OF CAMILLE ROSE GARCIA By

M ik e M c G e e

amille Rose Garcia’s art might lead one to think it is from a distant time and place. The surfaces of her paintings are fatigued and suggest layers that have been worn and repeatedly painted over; her patterns and motifs allude to an array of eras from the Middle Ages to the 1950s—with heavy leanings toward the 50s; and her figures are remote cousins of classic fairytale and earlytwentieth-century cartoon and animation characters. Yet Garcia is very much an artist of and about our time. The late playwright Arthur Miller told several interviewers during his lifetime that what motivated him to write was a burning desire to critique the society in which he lived. Garcia has a similar passion to create inventive characters and imaginary worlds that function on a gamut of levels but most pointedly to assess and comment upon the twenty-first century world in which she lives. As she told an interviewer, “Things that make me mad motivate me.”i

Garcia’s motivation may come from a personal sense of discontentment, but her work never comes across as angry. The dark and macabre fictions exude a cuteness that is distinctly feminine while avoiding overt sentimentality. A scene may portray blood and puke and murder but it is highlighted with glitter and presented on seductively shiny surfaces, and its characters are adorable, even the villains. Garcia always offers a delectable mix of the repulsive and the attractive. Growing up in the shadow of Disneyland, a place she often visited in her youth and adolescence, Garcia witnessed the dark side of the developerutopia that is Orange County and became aware of characteristics of the idyllic community that are not addressed in the Chamber of Commerce brochures: adolescent alienation, social marginalization, and destructive indulgences. She felt as though “everyone I knew was either a thief or a drug addict.”ii Now she considers maladies on a broader scale: environmental abuse, globalization, American military tactics, intolerance, overindulgence, loss of innocence, greed, oppression. In the prevalently conservative era we are experiencing in the United States, marked by President Bush’s proclamation, “…you’re either with me or against me,” counterculture isn’t what it used to be. The term “antiestablishment” seems quaint. Yet Garcia has managed to strike a chord of dissent that resonates with her contemporary audience. One of the most remarkable aspects of her art is the amount of attention it has generated in the five years since she entered the public arena. In a period when consensus seems inconceivable and competition for publicity is keenly intense, she has drawn notice from diverse sources.

In a 2003 article for the British magazine Modern Painter, in which he was asked to identify the twenty-four hottest artists in Los Angeles, artworld pundit and Coagula magazine founder Mat Gleason wrote that Garcia is “the most interesting acolyte of the Juxtapoz magazine art movement.”iii She has received considerable coverage by the press, lauded by mainstream and alternative critics alike. One Los Angeles Times critic wrote, “Garcia’s paintings have a dark, dark charm.”iv In a cover story for Los Angeles Times Magazine about Chicano art today, another writer observed, “Her experiences and work perfectly reflect the crossroads at which this new generation of [Chicano] artists has arrived.”v Yet her most enthusiastic audience is the bands of young, alternative-minded discontents who clamor for the best and latest assaults on the status quo and propagate the buzz within their social spheres via instant messages and the Internet. It is difficult to imagine a college art department in America today where Camille Rose Garcia’s name has not been bandied about by students, even though their professors may not know who she is. Among the dynamics that make Garcia’s work so engaging are her seemingly boundless capacity to incorporate a vast variety of titillating allusions in her art and the intellectual richness of her sources. A less than exhaustive list of individuals whose influences can be located in her work includes: visionary and self-taught artist and inventor of the adventures of the Vivan Girls, Henry Darger; Los Angeles illustrators turned “lowbrow” painters, the Clayton Brothers; art world superstar and master of the bizarre, Matthew Barney; art student turned graffiti tagger-cum-international-art-world-favorite, Twist (aka Barry McGee); alternative artist extraordinaire, painter Mark Ryden; Los Angeles artist (by way of Texas and New York) known for her pop-culture-influenced paintings about her personal history, Georganne Deen; Los Angeles art scene darling, painter Lari Pittman; San Francisco underground painter, rocker, and filmmaker, Dame Darcy; alternative comix artist turned highart-circuit standout, Chris Ware; very underground latter-day comix creator, Al Columbia; internationally celebrated artist known for his overthe-top performances and installations involving outrageous characters, Paul McCarthy; Philippine-born confrontational painter Manuel Ocampo; nineteenth-century illustrator Aubrey Beardsley; Theodor (“Ted”) Geisel aka Dr. Seuss; illustrator of humorous-and-dark children’s books, Edward Gorey; recently deceased contemporary mural/installation artist (and Barry McGee’s late wife), Margaret Kilgallen; artist turned filmmaker Tim Burton; legendary underground polyartist and Pee Wee Herman set designer, Gary Panter; Beat-genera-

tion painter, writer, sound poet, lyricist, and performance artist, Brion Gysin; macabre circa-1950s cartoonist and inspiration for the Addams Family TV series, Charles Addams; underground comix icon R. Crumb; British writer and provocateur of the absurd, J.G. Ballard; godfather of late-twentieth-century counterculture, William S. Burroughs; and science fiction guru Philip K. Dick (whose personal archive is housed in the Cal State Fullerton library). A short list of broader influences includes: wallpaper designs; Japanese culture in general and traditional wood block prints and contemporary pop culture in particular; graffiti; cinema; children’s books; advertising; television; and punk rock, particularly The Clash and Dead Kennedys. Although Garcia has a pronounced appetite for the iconoclastic, she mixes and matches the influences in her work with an egalitarianism that ignores distinctions between “high” and popular culture. Her art may be ostensibly visual, but she has a penchant for narrative themes. Like her literary heroes Philip Dick and William Burroughs, she engages outrageous fantasy to examine and comment upon a culture gone awry. Dick referred to himself as “a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.” He also said, “The core of my writing is not about art but about truth.” And of course Burroughs, who gave us “Language is a virus,” was famous for his colorful enigmatic quips. He said, “The truth is irrelevant, there’s nothing close to the truth, it’s all in your mind.” Garcia strives for a truth beyond our everyday experience, truth that is arrived at via flights of imagination. Her fantastic world is parallel to ours yet distant enough to accommodate a perspective that can yield useful insights, but not so didactic as to offer pat solutions. Although she uses plenty of black in her paintings, prints, and installations, there is little that is black or white in her message. Even her villains have redeeming qualities, and the only characters in her narratives that seem truly innocent are the animals, which often have been slaughtered. Garcia has deep roots in punk culture—she played for two years in the short-lived band the Real Minx. It is interesting to note that one of her favorite bands, the Dead Kennedys, used a Medieval Gothic typeface on the cover of their first album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (1980), similar to the signature typeface Garcia uses for her name. Gothic typefaces are used in a variety of counterculture subsets. For Garcia and others, such references represent a bittersweet longing for a past that probably never existed but also acknowledge the fact that the promise of progress has not delivered humankind from the faults that have haunted it since the beginning of civilization. Much of Garica’s appeal hinges on the extent to which her narratives and themes reverberate between the past and the present. The violence in her art may seem to conflict with our notion of the children’s stories her work references, but we have a tendency to forget that traditional fairytales also could be violent. “Then she began to howl quite horribly, but Gretel ran away, and the godless witch was miserably burnt to

death,” wrote the brothers Grimm in early nineteenth century. In 1726, Jonathan Swift published his fantastical Gulliver’s Travels, which lampooned the British aristocracy. Three years later he wrote the inflammatory essay “A Modest Proposal” in which he suggested that the British Crown’s problem of poverty in Ireland could be solved by raising Irish children for food and using their hides to make gloves and other luxuries for the wealthy. One of the Dead Kennedys’ songs is titled “Kill the Poor.” The lyrics to another of their songs, “We Kill Children,” read: “I kill children / I love to see them die…Feed ’em poison candy.” Garcia’s Peppermint Man helps solve overpopulation by gathering all the “bad” children into his “pastry” factory and boiling them up into food to be served in his chain of buffet restaurants. Like her heroes Dick and Burroughs, Garcia often confronts the dilemma of capitalism. In The Clash’s sardonic send-up of capitalism, “Koka Kola,” they sing, “I get good advice from the advertising world/Treat me nice says the party girl/Koke adds life where there isn’t any…,” at once an indictment of and a resignation about capitalism’s prevalence. Garcia harbors similar ambivalence. She has plans to start her own company, Pitco Prosthetic Industries Toy Company, to manufacture and distribute dolls of her characters. But she broods over the materials and labor that would be used in the manufacturing, not wanting to violate her personal ideals about how business should be done. At the core of her art are a belief in the value of the handmade object and a conviction that the power of imagination can overcome our foibles. Mike McGee is the gallery director for Cal State Fullerton University and founder of the Grand Central Art Center. He has organized dozens of exhibitions and written extensively on contemporary art with an emphasis on art in Southern California. His most recent projects include 100 Artists See Satan (2004) and As Above So Below, Art as Political and Cosmological Space: Lita Albuquerque and Mitchell De Jarnett (2005). i Megan O’Grady, “Sugar & Spice,” Nylon, Dec/Jan 2003, 70. ii Mandana Towhidy, “Camille Rose Garcia,” Anthem Magazine, Spring 2004, 28. iii Mat Gleason, “24 Hot Tickets for the LA Scene,” Modern Painters, Spring 2003, 72.

iv Leah Ollman, “Watercolors, Sculptures That Say Something,” Los Angeles Times, 21 July 2000, 20. v Josh Kun, “The New Chicano Movement,” Los Angeles Times Magazine (cover story), 9 January 2005, I-12.

LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND By

Ly n n Ze le v a n s k y

he paintings from Camille Rose Garcia’s 2005 series Dreamtime Escape Plan are set in a dark and dangerous environment largely submerged in an unidentifiable liquid that only partially resembles water. As always in her paintings, the characters are cartoon figures gone awry and every object has the potential to become animate. In Blue Flood Patrol a lithe female has a long body that curves and twists like Olive Oyl’s. She has an abnormally elongated neck, elfin ears, and spaghetti-thin arms, and wears a sailor hat and a skirt with buttons like those found on sailor pants. Her dark eyelids are almost closed, as if she is semiconscious. She stands in a swan-shaped boat, her gondolier’s oar stuck in the muck that surrounds her.

In Aquamarine Slumber from the same series, the swan boat is alive but asleep, as is a nearby elephant afloat on a bed. Only black lids and long eyelashes show. These are mutant Disneylike characters caught in a nightmare in which destruction is the norm. Above the elephant floats a head that is half devil, half cat, dripping with blood. Black ooze falls from the sky onto a polluted and dying landscape. In this place, houses cry out and sweat, black mice cavort. In a world clearly divided into good guys and bad guys, everyone worthwhile is trying to escape. Here, Garcia simultaneously reflects upheavals in contemporary society and explores the nature of dreams and the subconscious, finding that floods are “symbolic of the runaway overload of fear and malaise infecting…our minds.”i Garcia usually works in series, each one defining what she calls a “mindscape,” a place of the imagination.ii On the surface it seems easy to understand from where her imagery comes: She grew up in Orange County, going to Disneyland every weekend; she calls her parents “ecohippies,” and her works evidence a strong concern with the environment and the largely unchecked power of the military industrial complex; she learned to paint working with her mother, who produced commercial murals. (For a 2004 installation, The Blood Suckers, Garcia went back to the mural form). Perhaps because of these experiences, figuration has been an essential aspect of her art. She believes it has greater potential than abstraction to engage a public outside the art world. However, Garcia’s work cannot be explained simply by her biography. For one thing, it exploits multiple dimensions of popular culture, making reference to mass media through cartoons, comics, and a fashionable “gothic” look, but also harnessing the power of ancient popular forms such as myths and folk fairy tales.iii In fairy tales, life’s difficulties play out in stark black and white – evil has as important a role as virtue, and characters are absolutely good or bad; there is no ambiguity.iv In addi-

tion, girls or women are often the protagonists of these mythic narratives, as they are in Garcia’s paintings. (Although they may seem familiar, almost all Garcia’s characters are invented. In one very rare instance, Mary Read and Her Mermaid Army (2002), Garcia takes a historical figure, the famed pirate, as her hero.v) For women, this female focus may have an emotional resonance with childhood, when such stories, often proffered, gave shape to one’s fantasies. The series Ultraviolenceland is Garcia’s critique of the state of U.S. culture, circa 2004. It depicts a locale where violence is glorified. In Black Kraken Highjack from that series, a young woman is taken aloft by a large white bird, possibly a swan. Below, her castle is in the clutches of an enormous black octopus. Headless creatures spouting black blood dot the landscape. The image of a beautiful woman in thrall to a swan inevitably recalls the myth of Leda and the Swan, in which Zeus takes the form of the bird and makes love to Leda. In Garcia’s version, the young woman’s long, deformed body ends in two large balloon-like shapes, creating an overtly phallic form. Her eyes are half closed and her tongue hangs from her mouth. The bird is covered in grey drops. The princess appears to be suffering but could be in the throes of orgiastic ecstasy. Garcia also has myriad contemporary sources for her work, among them the extremely violent Anthony Burgess book and Stanley Kubrick film, A Clockwork Orange, which inspired Ultraviolenceland. Also of importance are the writers William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, and punk rock. In San Francisco after college, she became involved with the underground comics scene and for two years did no painting. Garcia mentions R. Crumb and the Clayton Brothers as influences and continues to publish in Juxtapoz, the magazine founded by Los Angeles underground cartoonist and painter Robert Williams. She also remembers the appearance of graffiti artists Barry McGee (who could really draw) and Margaret Killgallen (who evoked folk forms) as significant to the San Francisco art scene. These influences testify to Garcia’s interest in alternative modes of artmaking and distribution. While Disneyland may have been her initial entry point into the worlds she creates, her dark vision is diametrically opposed to the homogenized culture epitomized by today’s Walt Disney Company.vi In fact, although the values promoted by the corporation have changed gradually with the times, by 1931 Mickey Mouse’s success had already forced Disney to sanitize his productions. (Mickey could no longer “smoke, drink, or tease the stock in the barnyard.”vii) For this reason, Garcia’s work seems equally related to the productions of Max

Fleischer’s Brooklyn-based Out of the Inkwell Films, Inc., which included the sexy Clara Bow-like Betty Boop and Koko the Clown, who would materialize out of the artist’s inkwell or penpoint to wreak havoc on his creator. (Garcia’s Bear Witch of 2004 recalls Koko). In her graphic work, her figures have the stark, black-and-white simplicity of animated characters from the days of silent films, for example Felix the Cat. Despite the violence and despair that underlie her work, Garcia’s art has real appeal; it is simultaneously funny and macabre, pretty and violent, fashionable and politically charged. Her themes are topical, but her works have reverberations beyond the current global situation. Like Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and his cohorts, she uses humor and the raw edginess of commercial animation to arrive at deeper issues of the human psyche. Lynn Zelevansky is a Curator and Department Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.

i “The Saddest Place on Earth: The Work of Camille Rose Garcia,” unpublished synopsis of projects by Camille Rose Garcia. ii Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Camille Garcia are from notes from an interview with the author in October 2004. iii Bruno Bettelheim’s term. See Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1975, 1976), 5 iv Bettelheim, 9 v There were few women pirates (sea robbers) because seamen believed women were unlucky aboard ship. The two most famous women pirates were Mary Read and

Anne Bonney. They were captured in 1720 and put on trial in Jamaica. Both escaped execution because they were pregnant. Mary Read died of fever a few months after the trial. www.royalnavalmuseum.org/museum/htm. Information Sheet #80, “Piracy.” vi Even when Garcia was growing up, Disneyland touted itself as “the happiest place on earth.” Garcia, “The Saddest Place on Earth” vii Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons (New York: Plume, 1987), 37

THE DARK WEIRD STUFF By

Ch o n A. No r i e g a

The violence should be depicted as decorative, almost abstract, because violence we don't see is really such an abstract concept, not a concrete one. Something leaking through the veneer of order & perfection – the souls of all the dead & dying.

hese phrases can be found among Camille Rose Garcia’s numerous pre-sketches for her Ultraviolenceland exhibition in 2004. The sketches themselves are done quickly, repetitively, almost compulsively, until they leave a residue of imagery – visual memories – from which the artist then paints. In her sketchbooks, Garcia also jots down words, phrases, poems, and even a laundry list of symbols to be used in a painting series.

For Garcia, art should comment on the culture within which the artist lives or it should speak for the disenfranchised: “I couldn’t really think of any other reason to make art. To make something just to be beautiful seemed elitist and fascist.” But once she begins painting, contingency takes over. Garcia revels in mistakes, dripping paint, and the unexpected as she paints layer upon layer. She refers to the writing, the symbolic code, the pre-sketches as “the first layer that no one really ever sees.” The resulting works are narrative but by no means polemical, let alone transparent; they are, as she says, “something I could not have thought of before.” Herein lies the paradox at the heart of her work: Garcia is motivated by a strong sense of political purpose as an artist, one that is central to her extensive planning for each painting series; and yet the art itself is notable for its dark humor, narrative ambiguity, and a tactile layering of imagery. One can see this paradox as an ongoing and productive struggle, both in her art and in her effort or desire to attach an explanation through artist statements and sketches pinned beside a painting. But it also manifests itself across the visual media in which she works: drawing, painting, and printmaking. (Garcia does installations as well, but here I focus on her two-dimensional work.) Drawing, her favorite medium, allows for a stripped-down and immediate engagement with the figures that haunt and fascinate her. Painting is the most open-ended medium, allowing for an ongoing process in which the work is constantly changing, but also for the imperfections that are crucial to her aesthetic project of combining the political with the unconscious. Printmaking is the most constrained medium, requiring a linear procedure and collaboration, and to that extent it also requires a more conscious effort, one

that Garcia finds frustrating, although it yields some of her most powerful narratives. *****

The paradox central to her work developed out of the experiences of her childhood and her formal training in art school, but it did not fully develop into a visual language or style until the late 1990s when she stopped painting and reconnected with earlier influences in her creative life.

Garcia’s parents were both artists. Her father, David Garcia, produced one of the touchstone films of the Chicano civil rights movement, Requiem-29 (1971), the year after she was born. The film is a cinema-verité documentary of an anti-Vietnam war rally in East Los Angeles during which police attacked the marchers, killing three people, including journalist Ruben Salazar. Her mother, of French and German descent, was a muralist from a Northern California family of “eco-hippies, anarchists, artists, and outcasts.” Her parents met in art school and then served in the Peace Corps in Latin America. By the time she was one year old, Garcia’s parents had divorced and she and her older sister were raised by their mother. In 1975 Garcia’s mother moved them to Huntington Beach, an “alien world of suburbia,” where Garcia eventually gravitated to the absurd and subversive aspect of classic cartoons and the darker side of Disneyland, but also to other outcasts: punk rockers and drug addicts. She would learn about painting by working with her mother on her murals, which alternated between political work in the style of the Mexican muralists and commercial assignments for Mexican restaurants.

Garcia received her formal training at Otis Art Institute and then the University of California, Davis. At Otis she learned artistic technique, cultural theory, and an appreciation of her own “dark weird stuff” through teachers Benjamin Weissman, Paul McCarthy, and Simeon Wade. At UC Davis she found the geographical and social isolation to focus on her own work, but also encountered a curricu-

lum that stressed theoretical reading and political debate over the traditional art practices of drawing and painting. Garcia graduated as an earnest political artist, wanting nothing more than never to talk about art again. She soon joined a punk rock band as a singer and bassist and, unable to find a gallery that would enable her to support herself as an artist, went to work full time doing graphic design for magazines, leaving her little time to make any artwork. One of her mainstay jobs involved touch-up work for popular magazines, where she would circle the “unsightly” parts of photographs – “wrinkles, hair, various things” – so that these could be shipped to Indonesia or other parts of the world to be airbrushed.Eventually, she found herself gravitating toward illustration, where she could make extra money. Over the next two years, Garcia learned to do illustration “really fast,” sometimes creating five or six illustrations per week for a publication, and was soon able to earn her living as a freelancer. By now, working at home, she began to return to the vintage cartoon characters and humor that had been central to her obsession with animation as well as her own compulsive drawing as a preteen: animals, girls, and demonic figures. The various aspects of Garcia’s life had coalesced into a visual language with which she could explore social commentary through the “dark weird stuff” – wherein the problems of the modern world exist not as external phenomena to be solved, but as something that haunts and structures the deepest sense of self. Here, in ironic contrast to her previous day jobs, she could give artistic expression to all the “unsightly” things that are airbrushed out of our mass media. This exhibition brings together the outpouring of work that followed over the next five years and places the artist at a new turning point in her career. ***** Camille Rose Garcia’s work has been identified with a West Coast movement of narrative painting rooted in popular culture as well as underground and outsider subcultures. Starting in the 1970s – and influenced by the works of Robert Williams and Gary Panter – this movement has been characterized as producing a “pathetic aesthetic” expressive of alienation, nihilism, and marginality. While various names have been used to define this work, “lowbrow art” and “pop surrealism” have had perhaps the widest currency, although neither quite captures the range of work included in this category, let alone its fissures and divergent tendencies. Generally, the artists divide into two groups: those who embrace “lowbrow art” as a term for an anti-elite, subversive or subcultural activity and those who distance themselves from this label in favor of participation in the art world. While presented in political terms – anti-elite versus art world – this division functions somewhat contrary to expectation. In their artwork, the latter group often presents a more explicit social critique, whereas the former group sometimes indulges in a kitsch

fetish of the female nude (and hot rod). Interestingly, these two positions are often marked by formal distinctions evident within the artwork itself. Those who embrace “lowbrow art” tend more toward comix-inspired paintings, while those who reject it incorporate a wider range of stylistic influences. But there is a more significant difference, one that speaks to the specific ways in which the art addresses its audience. While both groups work in narrative painting, the comix-inspired works tend to be portraits with an implied narrative and in which the subjects are oriented toward or even looking at the viewer. In this way, the viewer is drawn into or implicated in the painting itself. The other paintings – those more aligned with the art world – present a field of action rather than a more stylized portrait or tableau. While these paintings are still organized around a central focal point, there is usually no attempt to break down the formal barrier between the viewer and the artwork. The viewer remains outside the narrative so that his or her relationship to that narrative requires a series of conscious, and even ethical, choices. Examples of this dichotomy can be seen in the work of two artists: Robert Williams (not to mention other comix-inspired painters such as Anthony Ausgang, Gary Panter, and the Pizz) and Manuel Ocampo (whose painterly works blend colonial baroque with high-art and massmedia references, styles, and thematics). Although Williams was born a generation before Ocampo and is widely-recognized as a pioneer of “lowbrow” art in the 1970s, one can find a point of convergence for these artists in the Zero One Gallery (founded in 1980), where both artists showed their work. The space, initially an after-hours bar for the punk crowd, served as a key venue for “lowbrow” art over the next fifteen years. In the 1980s, works by Williams and Ocampo were featured in a series of exhibitions that helped to consolidate the idea of “lowbrow” art as a regional movement: Western Exterminators and Best of the West at Zero One, as well as group and solo shows at the Tamara Bane Gallery, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, and the Onyx Cafe. These culminated in the controversial 1992 Helter Skelter exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which, among other things, brought Ocampo to international attention. While I have emphasized a split within “lowbrow” art, it is important to note that both tendencies have roots in – or find an audience with the emergence of – punk culture in the 1970s. There is also an insistence among these artists on similar artistic influences (Dadaism, Surrealism, Outsider Art), pop-culture influences (animation, comic books, pulp fiction, pinup magazines, B movies, TV), a focus on the California myth and its underside (Beatniks, car culture, Disneyland, graffiti, street culture), and lowart origins (illustration, underground comix). Garcia’s work is often placed in a genealogy with Williams, but it is in fact more in line with the direction suggested by Ocampo’s work (an early influence), in which cultural references and artistic styles intermingle. To this extent she shares affinities with others of her generational cohorts

working in this vein: Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, the Clayton Brothers, Liz McGrath, and Mark Ryden. Since 2000 this work has moved in two directions: gaining greater recognition within the mainstream art world, as exemplified in its major rite of passage, i.e., exhibition in New York galleries; and entering into the commercial pop-culture circuits from which it drew its inspiration, source material, and angst. The shock value that defined the first wave of this movement became incorporated into both ends of the commodity system: mass culture (posters, T-shirts, magazine covers) and high art (limited edition prints, paintings). ***** In 2005 Garcia has reached a “transitional point” in her career and is taking a break from a five-year period of constantly working on projects. She has developed a visual language that is particular to her life and also representative of a West Coast movement based on a similar idiom and set of artistic and cultural influences. She has produced a significant body of work that puts this language to use through a series of topical issues. In the next phase, Garcia faces the challenge of her own paradox: either continue applying her distinctive visual language, or style, to the new “big situation” of the day (for there will always be abuses of power and a need to speak up for the disenfranchised and the environment), or set aside the comforts, the efficacy, and the “branding” of such a move and jump back into the “dark weird stuff” that does not yet have a shape, a style, or a voice. Chon A. Noriega is Professor in the UCLA Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media, and Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. He has published ten books on Latino media, performance, and visual art. In 2005, he launched a new book series – A Ver: Revisioning Art History – on Latino and Latina artists. He is currently Adjunct Curator of Chicano and Latino art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Bibliographic Note: Quotes of Camille Rose Garcia were taken from an interview with the author on April 21, 2005. The author is indebted to Matt Dukes Jordan’s Weirdo Deluxe: The Wild World of Pop Surrealism and Lowbrow Art (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2005) for its historical overview of “lowbrow” art as a movement. For more on this movement as well as on Manuel Ocampo, see: Kirsten Anderson, ed., Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art (San Francisco: Ignition Publishing/Last Gasp, 2004); Catherine Gudis, ed., Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992); and Pilar Perez, ed., Manuel Ocampo: Heridas de la Lengua (Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 1997).

his was my first show at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles.

The show title is a reference to Disneyland, which is advertised as “The

Happiest Place on Earth,” because you could leave all the horrors of your

life, job, and family and retreat into this fantasy world full of amusements and

distractions. I grew up in the suburbs near Disneyland, and it was more like “The Saddest Place on Earth,” full of drug addiction, broken families, and the general relentless boredom of living in suburbia. The paintings for this show try to capture that contradiction of

living in a fairytale world that is actually an evil, narcissistic wasteland. I have always been horrified by the fake promises of capitalism and by all of the greedy, awful things that

corporations and the government do to support our hedonistic lifestyle. The challenge is to depict these everyday horrors in a way that is likable and agonizingly cute.

“We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.”

- No a m Ch o m s k y -

Creepcake Annihilation Plan, 2000 Acrylic and glitter on wood 30”x 60”

Burden, 2000 Acrylic and glitter on wood 30”x 36”

Cherrygirls vs. Contaminatron, 2000 Acrylic and glitter on wood 30”x 60”

he title of this show comes from a novel by William Burroughs, one of my

favorite writers. I was thinking a lot about people giving in to the great

machine of capitalism, and how the evil empire is using more subversive

tactics to enslave people. The title, “The Soft Machine,” conjures up a very

nice, velvety kind of thing, maybe like a cat or a sea anemone, something that people are relaxed by. They won’t know or care that they are being enslaved or that their lives are

being ruined, because it all happens so gently and feels nice. I was also playing with the idea of a “broken narrative,” which William Burroughs does in his cut-up writings. A bro-

ken narrative in painting means to abstract the space or the linear motion in order to arrive at things you couldn’t have thought of before. I was interested in laying abstract and real

space together in the same painting to create a kind of dreamlike landscape with multiple layers of meaning, not just a literal interpretation of space.

“Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane”

- Ph i lip K. Dic k -

(Previous page) Meat Cake, 2001 Acrylic, oil and glitter on wood 48”x 48”

You Won’t Be Sick Long, 2001 Acrylic and glitter on wood 35”x 48”

Dream Factory Escape Pod, 2001 Acrylic, oil and glitter on wood 72”x 96”

Parasite Eradication Squad, 2001 Acrylic, oil and glitter on wood 35”x 48”

Clone Refuse Transport Unit, 2001 Acrylic, oil and glitter on wood 35”x 48”

Buttercup Farm Blowup, 2001 Acrylic, oil and glitter on wood 48”x 48”

Creepcake’s Bakery, 2001 Giclee with silkscreen flocking Folio series of 9 images 11”x 14” each

his show was made right after 9/11. A lot of people began to believe all the fear

propaganda generated by the Republican War Machine, and started hunkering

down, building their bomb shelters, and retreating. Gas masks were bought,

escape plans were made, and people started taking more pills for anxiety.

The title, “Retreat Syndrome,” is taken from a Philip K. Dick short story in which the main character undergoes a traumatic event, then creates a parallel universe in his mind in which

everything works out fine. Eventually, his false world starts to break down and he realizes it was all a lie: he is still living in a hellish world, not the false one he created in his mind. I

thought this was a really good metaphor for what people were going through at the time (being bombarded in the media by constant and unstoppable horror), with everyone creating their own safe little parallel universes complete with antidepressants and 500 thread-count sheets.

“‘Why my delusional system?’ He felt cold fright rise up inside him; unable to stifle it he felt it enter his chest, invade his heart. ‘Who imposed it on me?’ No one imposed it on you. It was a self-induced retreat syndrome due to your

sense of guilt.... You tried suicide and that failed, so instead you withdrew psychologically into this fantasy world.”

– Fr om R e tr e at S y nd r om e , by Ph i lip K. Dic k –

Retreat Syndrome, 2002 Acrylic, oil and glitter on wood 48”x 60”

Night Factory, 2002 Acrylic and glitter on wood 24”x 36”

Blue Forest, 2002 Acrylic and glitter on wood 24”x 36”

Audrey’s Dollhouse, 2002 Acrylic, oil and glitter on wood 24”x 36”

Please Hurry, 2002 Acrylic, oil and glitter on wood 12”x 12”

Sleepwalker Series, 2002 Giclee with glitter on paper 14”x 10” each

ltraviolenceland (2004)

Lulu’s Escape Plan, 2002 Acrylic and glitter on wood 36”x 48”

Who’s Afraid of the Peppermint Man, 2002 Acrylic, oil and glitter on wood 32”x 48”

Red Octopus, 2002 Acrylic, oil and glitter on wood 16”x 20”

Subaquatic Bomb Shelter, 2002 Acrylic and glitter on wood 36”x 48”

Blue Diver, 2002 Acrylic and glitter on wood 36”x 48”

wanted to do a show that specifically addressed the War Machine and all of its evil

agendas. The Iraq War was starting, and despite everyone’s protests, the

Republican War Machine was rolling ahead with its plan. Also, the Patriot Act was

just signed, and people gladly gave the government more control to spy on them. So

I devised the idea for this show as a military operation, “Operation Opticon” (“opticon” stands for optical-control).

As part of its worldwide information-gathering agenda, the military starts a toy company and imbeds all of its products with surveillance equipment. The company becomes very pop-

ular, and the toys distract people from the general horror of things. More and more factories

need to be built to accommodate the demand. Forests are cleared, profits are made, and the military agenda of monitoring every individual in the world is finally realized. The plan is working perfectly until, of course, some thing starts to go terribly wrong...

“Under these militarized conditions, the human condition becomes one of continuous alarm and preparation for the final moment of collective mortality.”

– f r om F le sh Ma ch i ne , by Cr itica l Ar t En se m ble, Au t on o m e di a –

The Plan, 2003 Acrylic and glitter on wood 36”x 48”

Pitco Production Plant, 2003 Acrylic and glitter on wood 36”x 48”

They Emerged From a Long Slumber, 2003 Acrylic and glitter on wood 48”x 60”

The Fall, 2003 Acrylic and glitter on wood 46”x 78”

Mobile Reconditioning Unit, 2003 Acrylic and glitter on paper 18â&#x20AC;?x 24â&#x20AC;?

Aerial Forces, 2003 Acrylic and glitter on paper 20.5”x 12”

Uranium 238 Comes To Town, 2003 Acrylic and glitter on wood 24”x 36”

Installation, 2004 Mixed media Merry Karnowsky Gallery Los Angeles, California

The Gallery of Sick Children, 2003 Acrylic and glitter on paper Varied between 6.5”x 4”and 9”x 7”

Domestic Surveillance Program, 2003 Acrylic and glitter on wood 24”x 36”

Doomsday Animals, 2003 Selected images from folio Letterpress prints 12”x 20” each

Title, Year Media Dimentions

(Gatefold) Pharmaceuticools, 2002 Acrylic and watercolor on paper 14â&#x20AC;?x 84â&#x20AC;?

was so tired of the general state of things in America at this point. The war

machine was still going strong, pictures of beheadings became a daily occur-

rence, yet it still seemed like we were all trapped in some kind of weird fanta-

sy world of denial. The word “ultraviolence” is from the movie and book A

Clockwork Orange and is used to describe recreational violence, which is exactly what “Shock

and Awe” (the bombing campaign that started the invasion of Iraq) was all about. I had this idea that Ultraviolenceland would be a city surrounded by woodlands, and it would be a very rich and excessive city that celebrates violence. The castles are an obvious symbol of Empire or the

ruling class, and the bloodsucking vampires are like a parasitical army that feeds on violence and destruction. The dark forests surrounding Ultraviolenceland symbolize the subconscious, fear, things we can’t control. Inside the city, princesses trapped in giant dresses slash wrists and down pills, not entirely happy with their pristine yet ultraviolent world.

T h e No v a Po lic e The basic nova technique is very simple: Always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts - This is done by

dumping on the same planet life forms cwith incompatible conditions of existence... Their conditions of life are basically incompatible in present time form and it is precisely the work of the nova mob to see that they remain in present time form, to create and aggravate the conflicts that lead to the explosion of a planet...”

- Fr om T h e T ic k e t T ha t Ex pl o de d , by Willi am S. Bu r r ou gh s , 1962 -

(Previous page) The Emerald Queen, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 48”x 48”

White Rabbit Spring, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 36”x 48”

The Deconstructionist Army, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 24”x 32”

Night Greed, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 32”x 24”

Gold Factory Princess, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 11”x 19”

Suicide Princess, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 22”x 15”

Shine Your Teeth Till Meaningless, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 15”x 22”

Black Kraken Hijack, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 48”x 48”

Princess Vomette, 2004 Wall painting 120”x 133.5”x 158”

Bloodsucker Hijack, 2004 Mixed media sculpture 72”x 48”x 69”

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(Previous page) Sleep and Destroy, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 24”x 48”

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More Blood for the Castle, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 16”x 24”

Chocolate Owl Overload, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 24”x 32”

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Dirty Kingdom, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 48”x 70”

Zoloft Pill Bottle, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 10”x 6.25”

Wellbutrin Pill Bottle, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 8”x 6”

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Hippo Baby Blood Storm, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 24”x 33”

The Painkiller of Nightlandia, 2004 Acrylic and glitter on wood 24”x 24”

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I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, 2004 Installation Miami, Florida

Sad Shack, 2004 by Camille Rose Garcia, Richard Colman, and Becca. Miami, Florida

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(Previous page) Subterranian Orphans, 2004 Panel 1 Acrylic and ink on paper 13”x 26”

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Subterranian Orphans, 2004 Panel 2 Acrylic and ink on paper 13”x 13”

reamtime Escape Plan was made right after the Giant Tsunami that devas-

tated parts of Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In Los Angeles at the

same time, it was the rainiest season on record, homes sliding off hills, peo-

ple getting swept away and buried in mudslides. The tsunami was a blunt

reminder of the awesome force of nature and also a good metaphor for a world caving in on itself. In Dreamtime Escape Plan, where disaster is an everyday occurrence, the char-

acters take pills, sleep a lot, and plan escapes from the quagmires imploding around them. Using narrative painting and symbolism, this show explores the power of the subconscious mind to deal with the horrors of the modern world and depicts our sense of helplessness

when it comes to natural and man-made disasters. I was also interested in exploring ideas of dreams and the subconscious, floods as symbolic of the runaway overload of fear and malaise infecting all of our minds.

“America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontanious happening and therefore dangerous to a controlsystem set up by the non-dreamers.”

– Willi am S. Bu r r ou gh s –

(Previous page) Dreamtime Escape Plan, 2005 Acrylic and glitter on wood 40”x 40”

Aquamarine Slumber, 2005 Acrylic and glitter on wood 12”x 18”

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Boy With Bottle, 2005 Acrylic and watercolor on paper 5 1/2”x 7 1/2”

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Owl Pile, 2005 Acrylic and watercolor on paper 3”x 3”

White Elephant, 2005 Acrylic and watercolor on paper 3”x 3”

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White Swan Deluge, 2005 Acrylic and glitter on wood 24”x 24”

Blue Sailor, 2005 Acrylic and glitter on wood 12”x 18”

Don’t Worry, 2005 Acrylic and watercolor on paper 2”x 3”

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Black Owl Holiday, 2005 Acrylic and watercolor on paper 5 1/2”x 8”

Squidley’s Escape, 2005 Acrylic and glitter on wood 22”x 33”

Camille Rose Garcia, May 2005 Photograph by Edward Colver

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BIO GRAPHY

amille Rose Garcia was born in 1970 in Los Angeles, California and grew up in the generic sub-

urbs of Orange County, visiting Disneyland and going to punk shows with the other dissenchanted

youth of that era. Her paintings of creepy cartoon children living in wasteland fairy tales are critical commentaries on the failures of capitalist utopias. Creative influences include Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs,

Henry Darger, Walt Disney, as well as politically aware bands like The Clash and Dead Kennedys. Her recent solo show, Ultraviolenceland, explored ideas of violence and empire, and the environmental ecocide generat-

ed by the Americal capitalist machine. Her work has appeared in Flaunt Magazine, Rolling Stone, Juxtapoz, and Paper Magazine, among others. Her art has been exhibited internationally in Spain, Germany, France and Italy, as well as in Los Angeles and New York. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Camille can be reached through her website, www.camillerosegarcia.com, or through the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles.

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SELECTED EXHIBITONS SOLO 2005

The Saddest Place on Earth, CSUF Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, CA

2005

Dreamtime Escape Plan, Vacio 9 Gallery, Madrid, Spain

2005 2004 2004 2003 2002 2001

Cavern of Sorrows, Mondo Bizarro Gallery, Rome, Italy Works on Paper, OX-OP Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

Ultraviolenceland, Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Operation:Opticon, Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Retreat Syndrome, Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA The Soft Machine, Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

GROUP 2005 2004

California Tendency, Galerie Magda Danysz, Paris, France Zivilgeneratur, Papirossa Gallery, Berlin, Germany

2003

Recent Works, Roq La Rue Gallery, Seattle, WA

2004 2003 2002

Cruel and Unusual, Sixspace Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Juxtapoz 8th Anniversary Show, Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2002

Decipher, 450 Broadway Gallery, New York, NY

2000

Uncommercial work by Commercial Artists, La Luz De Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2000 1999 1998 1997 1995 1995 1995 1995 1994

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Spinning Yarns, Riviera Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

The Happiest Place On Earth, Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Los Cartoonists, Self Help Graphics, Los Angeles, CA Cheap Thrills, The Lab, San Francisco, CA

Girls Girls Girls, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA

Millenium Coming: The New Degenerate Art, The Lab, San Francisco, CA Radical Ink, Spaces, Cleveland, OH

X-Sightings, Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, NY

These Fantasies Are Normal, HERE art, New York, NY Re:Drawing, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA

BIBLIO GRAPHY 2005

Los Angeles Times Magazine, The New Chicano Movement. January, 2005

2004

Anthem Magazine, Review. February, 2004

2003

Juxtapoz. Review, September, 2003

2004 2003 2003 2002 2002

Flaunt Magazine, cover. June, 2004

Modern Painters, Art Angelinos. Spring, 2003 Nylon, Feature. January, 2003

Paper Magazine, 50 Most Beautiful People. April, 2002 Metropop, Feature. July, 2002

2001

Aztlan Journal of Chicano Studies, Cover. Fall, 2001

2001

Juxtapoz Magazine, Feature. March, 2001

2001 1999 1996

Los Angeles Times, Review. June, 2001 Glue Magazine, Review. August, 1999

Art Issues, Review. Millenium Coming: The New Degenerate Art Show. January, 1996

EDUCATION 1994

1992-1994 1988-1992

Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Summer residency

Master of Fine Arts Degree, University of California, Davis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree, Otis/Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles, CA

AWARDS 1994

Payson’s Governors’ Fellowship, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture

1992

U.C. Regents Fellowship Award, UC Davis, CA

1993 1992

U.C. Regents Fellowship Award, UC Davis, CA

Juried Artist’s Award Exhibition, New Genres, Main Gallery, Otis/Parsons, Los Angeles, CA

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THE A RTIST WOULD LIKE

THANK

Mom, Jeremy, my family, Merry Karnowsky, and Akiko Hibiya

For their generous support: The Merry Karnowsky Gallery, La Luz De Jesus, Juxtapoz Magazine, Galerie Magna Danysz, Jonathan Levine Gallery, Mondo Bizarro Gallery, Vacio 9 Gallery, Roq La Rue Gallery, Kirstin Anderson, Ox-Op and Tom Hazelmeyer, Buzz, Richard Duardo, All the folks at LACMA, the MOCA Bookstore, Monte Beauchamp and BLAB! Magazine, Fantagraphics, Greg Escalante, Last Gasp, Ron and Colin Turner, Grand Central Press, California State University Fullerton, Lynn Zelevansky, Chon Noriega, Mike McGee, Edward Colver, Andrea Lee Harris, Ryan Di Donato, Brad Keech and Pressure Printing, Long Gone John and Sympathy for the Record Industry, Michael Stipe and R.E.M., Jello Biafra and The Melvins, Marilyn Manson, All the awesome collectors and fans !!! For endless inspiration and friendship: Mark Ryden, The Clayton Brothers, Tim Biskup and Seonna Hong, Gary Baseman, Todd and Kathy Schorr, Richard Colman, Georgeanne Deen, Ali Taylor, Mark Brooks, Dominic and Tina DiSulio, Janet Ginsburg, Monique Ramos, Liz McGrath, Travis Millard, Marcel Dzama, Sue Coe, Eric White, Shepherd and Amanda Fairey, Miss Van, Jeff Soto, Robert Williams and Suzanne Williams

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C ALIFORNIA S TATE U NIVERSITY F ULLERTON G RAND C ENTRAL A RT C ENTER

Andrea Lee Harris, Dennis Cubbage, Alyssa Wiens, Zachary Kleyn, Amy Caterina, Eric Jones, Scott Stodder, Tracy Duran, and Julie Perlin-Lee

GRAND CENTRAL ART FORUM

Greg Escalante, Steve Jones, Shelley Liberto, Mitchell De Jarnett, Marcus Bastida, Teri Brudnack, Lisa Calderone, Jon Gothold, John Gunnin, Mary Ellen Houseal, Dennis Lluy, Mike McGee, and Advisory members: Peter Alexander, Rose Apodaca Jones, Kristine Escalante, Mike Salisbury, Anton Segerstrom, Stuart Spence and Paul Zaloom

CAL STATE UNIVERSITY FULLERTON

President Milton Gordon, Jerry Samuelson, Marilyn Moore and Bill Dickerson

EXHIBITION DESIGN STUDENTS

April E. Anglin, Janice Christmas, Karen Crews, Dennis Cubbage, Emily Dermenstein, Maria-Lisa Flemington, Sarah Grear, Carlota Haider, Solyi Han, Lori Kameya, Solange K. Ledwith, Milka Marinov, Henry Martinez, Christina Morgan, Michel Oren, Julie Perlin, Cheryl Schriefer, Beth Solomon, Danielle Susalla, Hiromi Takizawa, Ying-su Tang, Diane Winiecki and Chih-zer Yee. This book was published by Last Gasp Publishing of San Francisco and California State University Fullerton Grand Central Art Center and the Grand Central Press. This book has been published in conjunction with the exhibition The Saddest Place on Earth: The Art of Camille Rose Garcia for the Grand Central Art Center Gallery, Santa Ana, California, where it was presented 1 October – 18 December, 2005 Editor: Sue Henger Designers: Ryan Di Donato and Andrea Lee Harris in collaboration with Camille Rose Garcia Photographers: Scott Lindgren and Artworks Fine Art Publishing Digital Archiving: Easter and Olivia at Pro Photo, Irvine, CA Printed by: Prolong Press Ltd., Hong Kong First Printing September 2005 All Artwork © Camille Rose Garcia Book © 2005 Last Gasp and Grand Central Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher and artist.

LAST GASP PUBLISHING

777 Florida Street San Francisco, California 94110 415-824-6636 www.lastgasp.com

GRAND CENTRAL PRESS CSUF Grand Central Art Center 125 N. Broadway Santa Ana, California 92701 714-567-7233 714-567-7234 www.grandcentralartcenter.com

International Standard Book Number: 0-86719-639-4

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