Camille Rose Garcia

Royal Disorder Poison Party, 2005.

Camille Rose Garcia (born November 18, 1970)^[1] is a Los Angeles-based lowbrow artist. She produces paintings, prints and sculpture in a gothic, "creepy" cartoon style. She cites as influences Walt Disney and Philip K. Dick.^[2]

Biography

Garcia's parents met in music school. Her father was a film producer and anti-Vietnam activist, and her mother was a muralist from Northern California. Garcia's parents had divorced when she was young and her mother raised her and her sister, within close proximity to Disneyland.

Camille Rose Garcia received her Master of Fine Arts degree at University of California at Davis in 1994 and her BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 1992. Six years of art school left her disillusioned and bitter, so she decided to move back home to Huntington Beach, California, and started a band, The Real Minx.

Garcia's work has appeared in Modern Painters, Juxtapoz, Rolling Stone, Flaunt, and BLAB! magazines. She also contributed work to ohGr's second album, SunnyPsyOp.

She has published three books, The Saddest Place on Earth, (Last Gasp, 2006), The Magic Bottle: A BLAB! Storybook, (Fantagraphics, 2006) and Tragic Kingdom (Last Gasp, 2007) .

She illustrated a version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in 2010. "The original illustrations by John Tenniel have always been some of my favorites,^[3]" said Garcia in a recent interview when asked about the book. "I have three copies of the book here because I collect children's stories. That's one of my favorite stories because it's actually a real dark story. She falls down the hole and no one is really nice to her at all. Pretty much every character she encounters, they're not really on her side. So re-reading it I realized I could do a little bit darker of an interpretation than the original illustrations."

Her work also appears in the permanent collections of LACMA and the San Jose Museum of Art.

On November 2, 2013, Garcia was part of a four woman show in Los Angeles called "Black Moon" with fellow female artists, Jessicka Addams, Elizabeth McGrath and Marion Peck.^[4]

Critical reception

Paula Rogers, a KQED art critic and self-styled fan of Camille Rose Garcia, reviewed Garcia’s mid-career retrospective, Tragic Kingdom: The Art of Camille Rose Garcia at the San Jose Museum of Art:

“Garcia’s pretty pictures (lack) specific meaning and specific context…their insistent vagueness, smugness, blanket pronouncements, lack of nuance and grating self-righteousness add up to a static portrait / shallow response to something complex: I get it; things are bad. It's disappointing to find out that the impetus for these works isn't skillful.”^[5]

Exhibitions

2000 - The Happiest Place on Earth - Merry Karnowsky Gallery

2001 - The Soft Machine - Merry Karnowsky Gallery

2002 - Retreat Syndrome - Merry Karnowsky Gallery

2003 - Operation:Opticon - Merry Karnowsky Gallery

2004 - Ultraviolence Land - Merry Karnowsky Gallery

2005 - Plan B - Merry Karnowsky Gallery

2005 - Dreamtime Escape Plan - Merry Karnowsky Gallery

2006 - Subterranean Death Clash - Jonathan LeVine Gallery

2007 - Doomcave Daydreams -Merry Karnowsky Gallery

2008 - Ambien Somnambulants - Jonathan LeVine Gallery

2009 - Down the Rabbit Hole - Merry Karnowsky Gallery

2010 - The Hydra of Babylon - Merry Karnowsky Gallery

2011 - Sneewittenhen und die Schwarze Lagune - Michael Kohn Gallery

2013 - Down the Rabbit Hole - The Walt Disney Family Museum

2013 - Black Moon - Sloan Fine Arts

2014 - Black Moon NYC - Sloan Fine Arts

Sources

• "Camille Rose Garcia at Grand Central Art Center" Exhibition Review in Artweek, December 2005/January 2006, pp. 17–18.
• Marisa Solis, "Army of Darkness: Camille Rose Garcia Fights the Forces of Evil," Juxtapoz #62, March 2006.
• Manuel Bello, 2006 Interview

References

External links

• Camille Rose Garcia's web site
• Exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art Review of SJMA Exhibition: