Artist Reception: Fri. May 30, 2014: 5 – 7

LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Joe Ramiro Garcia: Transference. With his remarkable ability to draw grown-up meanings from childhood objects, Joe Ramiro Garcia has created a body of new paintings that arouse deeply personal memories from simple though culturally significant references. Opening May 30 with an Artist Reception from 5 – 7 pm, and on view through June 29, 2014, Transference, Garcia’s latest solo exhibition at LewAllen Galleries, recalls two meanings – one of the unconscious redirection of feelings, often developed in childhood, and the other of the actual physical transference of paint to canvas.

Garcia’s childlike imagery recalls strong nostalgic memories in an attempt to shake them loose and analyze why they stuck. His technical approach relies on print-making skills, palette knives, brushes, and scrapers to transfer these graphic images while maintaining the physicality of the paint, which he believes makes a bigger statement.

Garcia’s work attempts to mine the fringe elements of emotion through the unconscious, drawing up repressed feelings and reactions. Citing the Dada “cut-up” technique, popularized by William S. Burroughs, as an important source with which to bring chance into the work, Garcia develops odd juxtapositions of familiar imagery to spark an evolution in our relationship with these objects. He attempts to break the imagery of its loaded meanings, thereby allowing it to become something else entirely. “I hope to displace the familiar just enough to encourage re-familiarization,” says Garcia.

The interactive nature of Garcia’s paintings make them uniquely engaging. The more time spent with each work, the more associations develop or fall away, and the more our interpretations of meaning and narrative change.

Born in Houston, Texas, Garcia attended Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts before studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was honored in 2005 with a Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Exhibited in museums and private institutions internationally, his works are featured in several books on Southwestern art.