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Camille Rose Garcia Imagines Gothic-psychedelic Nature in New Exhibit

Camille Rose Garcia once described her role as a fine artist as a person who gets to create worlds that don't exist. Featured in a special sketchbook insert in Hi-Fructose Vol. 30 and on the cover of Hi-Fructose Vol. 8, looking at her art is like looking through the looking glass into a warped, dark fairytale. It's a place full of dripping scenery, bejeweled forests with elegant swans, deer, serpents, and skulls, and her signature women with bold eyelashes and running mascara, empowered versions of the folkloric and cartoon princesses that inspired them.

Camille Rose Garcia once described her role as a fine artist as a person who gets to create worlds that don’t exist. Featured in a special sketchbook insert in Hi-Fructose Vol. 30 and on the cover of Hi-Fructose Vol. 8, looking at her art is like looking through the looking glass into a warped, dark fairytale. It’s a place full of dripping scenery, bejeweled forests with elegant swans, deer, serpents, and skulls, and her signature women with bold eyelashes and running mascara, empowered versions of the folkloric and cartoon princesses that inspired them.

Garcia dreams up a fanciful “gothic-psychedelic nature” in new paintings and drawings for her upcoming solo exhibition, “Animus Chrysalis Mortis”. Opening March 3rd at Roq La Rue gallery in Seattle, the exhibit features images that teeter between the beauty of creation and decay, conjuring the spirit of Rock ‘n’ Roll in David Bowie’s Starman and naughty, vampiric girls. “For this body of work I was inspired by the surrealist and deeply symbolic films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jungian archetypes, and Greek mythology. I created a personal language of symbols, then made a card set and selected at random a different set for each new painting,” she explains.

“From these subconscious suggestions I created a lush and layered symbolic world that explores the realm of childhood, memory and longing. Ghosts and gardens, snakes and skulls frame fever-dream scenes of wounded goddesses slayed open, fecund gardens growing from their wounds. Vibrant strange gardens populated with insects and dream imagery portray a psychedelic dance between life and death.”

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Justin Lovato

An upcoming group exhibition at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art showcases artists who craft both abstract and surreal interpretations of natural landscapes. "Surreal Sublime I,” opening on June 23, “celebrates the wonder of nature and suggests scenes from an apocalyptic and synthetic future.”
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Jeff Soto (HF Vol. 18) celebrated his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since 2009 on Saturday night with "Nightgardens" at KP Projects/MKG. We recently discussed the exhibition with Soto in our studio visit here, where Soto shared his continued interest in landscapes: "Nightgardens" is an exploration of the magic and mystery in life coupled very loosely with the tradition of landscape painting. For this show I am using the concept of "nighttime" as a symbol of the unknown. I'm working on creating an imaginary world of magic, monsters and daydreams that exists in a different time and place, yet alludes to issues in our chaotic modern world."

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