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.”
