Julia Garcia

Gaa Gallery is pleased to present Slow Burn, a solo exhibition of new works by Julia Garcia. The exhibition features a series of paintings and works on paper that examine the power structures of nostalgia and desire. Slow Burn is Garcia’s first solo show with the gallery and in New York City. In this suite of paintings by Julia Garcia, the American Dream seems to be wavering in and out of focus. The images hum with a peculiar familiarity, invoking the ubiquitous stock photography of advertisements which underpin idyllic traditional interactions and values. There is something ulterior emerging from the paintings however, as questions of power and authority arise from the dynamics between figures, and from the motivations of these constructed fantasies. In Slow Burn, Garcia embraces the gradual reveal and opacity of time, evoking the many layers of meaning contained within visual ephemera.

The images in Slow Burn feel simultaneously of and distinctly not of this time. The past lingers within the universality of Garcia’s images, offering the guise of another time. This ambiguous moment in time offers an escape to a simpler era seemingly outside of ours, and it’s also a trap. Garcia’s work bears witness to the past and its intersections with contemporary life by reworking and making contact with images mediated through both the individual in the form of domestic snapshots as well as larger entities and power structures of advertising, entertainment, and consumerism. Garcia’s work prompts a novel framework where a new system of meanings is applied to familiar images, offering a second look at idealism, tradition, and systems of value.

Julia Garcia (b. 1992, Born in Pompano Beach, FL, USA) received her BFA from the School of Visual Art in 2014 and her MFA in 2016 from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art. Garcia had her first institutional solo exhibition in 2023 at NW9 in Cologne, Germany. Other solo exhibitions have been held at Night Club Gallery, St.Paul, MN; King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia; Lazarus Center, Baltimore, MD; Galerie Fran Reus, Palma de Mallorca, Spain; and Gaa Gallery, New York, NY. Garcia has been included in recent group exhibitions at Hair + Nails, Minneapolis, MN; Gaa Gallery, New York, NY; Night Club Gallery, Minneapolis, MN; and O’Flaherty’s, New York, NY.