Gabrielle Garland’s House Portraits Illuminate Daily Life, Individuality, and the ‘Fabric of Society’

Gabrielle Garland may not depict people in her square-format, mixed-media paintings, yet the works might as well be described as portraits. From mailboxes and landscape choices to colorful stoops and glowing interior lights, her vibrant depictions of houses seem to come alive with saturated color and almost palpable feeling.

Distorted, even cartoonish, Garland’s homes portray a range of American vernacular styles, from ranches to bungalows to Queen Annes. Often, neighborhood happenings enter the scene, like the shoulder of an adjacent house, power lines, trees, or planes flying overhead.

A new solo exhibition of Garland’s work opens at Miles McEnery Gallery next month, titled I’ll Get You, My Pretty, and Your Little Dog Too. Her titles typically reference quotes from films, ranging in tone and topic as much as her homes also appear to do.

“Stairs, flower boxes, and mailboxes swell or shrink disproportionately, revealing the distortions of the artist’s memory (that murky area where structural logic intermingles with emotional noise),” says a gallery statement. Whether depicted at night, during fireworks displays, in a storm, or in the blazing sun, the details of each house converge with out-of-context sentiments from movies that draw us into their unique characteristics and quirks while also affording a playful insight into the artist’s frame of mind.

Garland takes inspiration from everyday observations around her home in New York and beyond. She often works from her own photographs, sometimes using found images. “My body of work might be interpreted as an investigation of the physical fabric of society,” Garland told Dovetail. “I believe it documents the constantly shifting balance between our desire for independence and interconnection, between the comfort and familiarity we seek and the strangely disorienting spaces we create.”

I’ll Get You, My Pretty, and Your Little Dog Too opens on September 4 and continues through October 25 in New York City. Find more on Garland’s website and Instagram.

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