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explore the ways that her blackness, woman -ness, and beauty move her throughout society. Some of her latest work, for example confronts slavery. More specifically, the work addresses the grisly experiments that Dr. J. Marion Sims conducted on slave women through-out the nineteenth century, and, the fact that his reputation as “the Father of Modern Gynecology” rests on a practice that is now widelyconsidered to be ethically disastrous. Sims’ victims were chosen because of their blackness and femaleness; arbitrarymeanings were assigned to these attributes, and those meanings took on such social import that the women’s essential thingness was ignored. Whether viewers are descended from or entirely removed from this history, Garner’s combines of distressed, disembodied flesh unite viewers around the non-negotiableness of Sims’ victim’s corporeality; she restores their humanity with a gruesome poignance. Ultimately, Garner’s work succeeds because it contributes in fresh, authentic, and daring ways to a number of critical cultural and art historical conversations. Her work is the offspring of those whose careers were defined by poignant explorations of abjection like Thek, Gober, Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, and Kara Walker, but it is just as closely related to sculptors who have mastered the combination of craft materials, found materials, and form like Petah Coyne and Rachel Harrison. Even the work’s dark, graphic salaciousness has its roots in works and performance by Marilyn Minter, Lynda Benglis, and Cheryl Donegan. While Garner carefully mines and minds these histories, her forms remain undeniably original, allowing her to continue these threads in meaningful ways.
Essay by Kendra Jayne Patrick For more information visit: www.doreengarner.com http://soa.gmu.edu/fine-arts-gallery
An appreciation for the universality of the corporeal experience compels Doreen Garner to incorporate body parts into each of her sculptures, performances, and videos. By exploiting the aesthetic potential of our flesh, hair, sex organs, and insides, Garner viscerally tethers her audience to her explorations of the social contexts in which they exist. She uses silicone, crystals, housing insulation, anatomy books, and very much more to make complexities expose our own -- and thus our society’s -- fetishes, vanities, and tendencies toward tribalism and destruction. Attracted to the rawest and least-convenient truths, Doreen Garner makes work that rattles our understandings of self.
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The work rests on the way that she both approaches and handles the body-asobject. Objectification has a principal role here: in her sculptural work, it is a literal action wherein she combines craft materials into indeterminable, abject objects. Garner’s strategy of objectification reminds of an observation that a young Paul Thek made in 1967. Addressing the cognitively dissonant way that humans tend to understand their humanness, Thek said, “we accept our thingness intellectually, but the emotional acceptance of it can be quite a joy.” These words resound throughout Garner’s body of work, where bluntly presented corporeality provides many an opportunity to engage in this existential sort of reckoning. And although this is certainly one of Garner’s aims, it is more important that her work open space for meaningful engagement with the social and psychic experiences from which our bodies can exempt us and to which our bodies might avail us. Thus, as Paul Thek and Robert Gober illuminated human thingness to address their sexuality and mortality, as Louise Bourgeois used it to explore her own Freudian impulses, Garner also personalizes her conceptualization of thingness, using it to
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