Pippa Garner

After a yearlong hiatus, Jeffrey Stark returns with an exhibition by Long Beach, CA based artist Pippa Garner.

Latest findings show:

The human mind has an organic form, with components assigned to specific intellectual tasks. Emotions and processes of thought — such as creativity — are recognized through the analysis of minute twitches, throbs, pulses, vibrations, and other visible signs. The ability to understand the workings of the human mind in objective terms is a long-sought-after scientific breakthrough. As the technology evolves, AI will become increasingly sentient and unpredictable, emulating human thought.

Art critic: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’

Artist: ‘The sh#t just pops into my head.’

Of all earth’s creatures, human beings have the unique ability to think beyond survival and amusement — to delve into the unknown. Over time, man has created a world of his own, alien to nature, as a kind of overlay on the planet. Science and technology are evolving, inevitably, toward a final work: the post-human being.

‘The Bowels of the Mind’ represents the actual moment of inspiration — the Brainstorm — gleaned from microscopic observation and enlarged many times, to gallery scale, for the enjoyment and education of the general public.

—Pippa Garner, 2021

Pippa Garner (b. 1943, Evanston, Illinois) lives and works in Long Beach, CA. Her work has been exhibited at MOCA, Los Angeles; O-Town House, Los Angeles; ICA, Los Angeles and Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles among others.

Garner is a trans-disciplinary artist whose work comprises a large body of visionary queer alternatives to design, taking the form of sculptures, drawings, performance and photographic documentation. Based in Long Beach, California, Garner embraced the youth culture of her time, which influenced her desire to work collaboratively and engage popular culture, bridging the art realm with an expanded sociocultural field. Idealistic, nonhierarchical, and culturally underground, her uncompromising approach to life and practice engaged the worlds of illustration, editorial, television, and art without ever quite becoming beholden to them.

Pippa (then Phil) Garner studied in the 1960s as a member of the highly regarded Transportation Design department at Art Center, California and initially planned to become a car stylist. The era of Muscle Cars and the rise of the automobile served as the backdrop for her development, and found Garner pushing the limits of this world of design and transportation innovation to its absurdity. Vehicles were being designed to appeal to our most basic desires for sex and safety, and as such overcompensated with weight and size. Meanwhile Garner replied with sculpture that reflects our prosthetic and cybernetic present, portraying the inevitable result of this car romance: half-human half-car.